“There’s not much left,” said Peter, gazing down at the ruins. “But Mrs. Muggoch told us that there wasn’t much there in the first place. It was never a wealthy priory, like Lindesfarne in Northumberland. It didn’t last long enough to become well endowed and powerful. It was an outpost that failed.”
Wandering sheep acted as the ruins’ groundskeepers, cropping the grass as neatly and far more quietly than any lawnmower. The short grass made it easy to see the layout of the little community, outlined in crumbling stone. Six nave pillars and a few paving slabs were all that remained of the church, and the cloister was marked by the stumps of broken arches.
A dark stream cut a trough in the turf as it tumbled downhill from a spring some twenty yards south of the monastery, and the terraces below might once have been divided into garden plots. The monks, it seemed to me, had chosen their site wisely. It offered them fresh water, arable land, and protection from the winter gales that blew in from the west. It had not, however, saved them from the Vikings.
I looked to my left and saw the distant specks of Stoneywell’s tidy houses gleaming white in the morning sun. The marauding Norsemen had swept through the village like flames. They’d poured into the valley to plunder the farms, then moved up the terraced hillside to slaughter the monks, loot the monastery of its humble treasures, and burn it to the ground. From the Vikings’ point of view, it had been a good day.
“The monks must have seen what was coming,” I said, half to myself. “Why didn’t they run and hide?”
“We’ll never know,” said Damian. “The answers to some questions are buried too deeply in the past. We can never resurrect them.”
“On the other hand,” Peter piped up, “some answers are buried mere inches beneath the surface. It takes only a bit of scratching to uncover them. I’ll show you. Come along.”
We zigzagged down the slope to the highest terrace, then headed for its southernmost edge, stopping on the way to look into the ruined church. The cracked and pitted paving slabs led to an oblong block of stone that lay near the church’s east end, the spot where the altar had stood.
The block of stone appeared to be a memorial tablet, similar to the one marking the old laird’s grave on Cieran’s Chapel, but far older. The passage of time had long since erased the name of the man who’d been buried there, but the tablet’s incised decoration could still be discerned—a diamond-patterned border, bold in its simplicity.
“Only the head of the order would have been buried so near the altar,” Peter commented, nodding at the tablet.
“Poor man,” I said. “I wonder if he screams along with his fellow monks?”
“Screaming monks?” Peter’s face came alive with interest. “Mrs. Muggoch hasn’t mentioned a word to us about screaming monks. Are you making it up?”
“No, but Sir Percy might have been,” Damian answered dryly. “He likes to embellish legends.”
I smiled, then turned to Peter. “Sir Percy told us that if you stand inside the monastery ruins on certain nights, when the moon and stars are just so, you can hear the screams of the massacred monks.”
“Fantastic,” said Peter, gazing eagerly at the tablet. “I wonder if Mrs. Muggoch can give me the proper coordinates for the moon and stars?”
“Peter,” Cassie scolded, “you’re being revoltingly insensitive, and you’re allowing yourself to be distracted. Shall we move on?”
We moved on, jumping over the tumbling stream and walking to the edge of the terrace, where a half-buried boulder served as a convenient bench. When we’d taken our seats, Peter pointed toward a cluster of farm buildings not far from the foot of the hill. A long, graveled drive connected them to the road that crossed the valley from north to south.
“MacAllen’s croft,” he said. “Look at it through your binoculars and tell me what you see.”
I raised the binoculars to my eyes and focused them on the farmhouse. After a short time, I moved on to the outbuildings, the pens, and the walled fields. I could tell by Damian’s movements that he was subjecting the croft to an examination that was far more minute than mine. Finally I lowered the binoculars.
“It’s a farm,” I said. “Or, as they say in Scotland, a croft. It has a farmhouse and farm buildings and farmyards filled with sheep, which qualify as farm animals.” I shrugged. “It’s a farm.”
Damian, who had yet to lower his binoculars, said thoughtfully, “It’s rather a nice farm, though.”
“Exactly.” Peter nodded enthusiastically, as though Damian were his star pupil.
“Look again, Lori,” Cassie said, taking note of my perplexity. “The MacAllens have a satellite dish. They’ve roofed their house with costly tiles and fitted it with insulated windows. They’ve added at least six rooms to the original four-room structure.”
“The sheep interest me,” said Damian.
“They should,” said Peter, unable to restrain himself. “Those are North Ronaldsay sheep. They’re an endangered breed. At last count there were fewer than three hundred ewes on the mainland.”