“It doesn’t appear that he was shot here,” our uncle commented, and I joined him in scanning the grass-choked path through the arches.
A drop of color at the base of the stone caught my eye. “Bring the lantern closer,” I urged. Stepping through the doorway, I cautiously pivoted to the right. “Here. See the blood?” I pointed to the splatter on the stone arches just inside the door, and then backed away, circling wide of the path. “Dodd must have been coming through the doorway when he was shot.”
The men followed my gaze to the spot where Dodd must have been standing. It fit well with what we knew so far. The old caretaker must have come inside the abbey ruins to find out what the source of the light was. I wondered if Dodd had seen the man who shot him or if a lookout had been positioned near the door and stepped out to kill Dodd before he could ask questions. There were shadows deep enough to conceal a man here. And if a group of grave robbers had been working here, and they were any bit as organized as the gangs of body snatchers who plied their trade in Edinburgh and London, they would most certainly have had at least one sentry.
I turned around once again to survey the darkened ruins of the abbey church and the trees and cemetery encroaching on it to the left. At the edge of our lantern light I could see a pile of stones that had once been the base of one of the pillars, but beyond that everything was illumed only by moonlight. About a hundred feet in front of us, the hulk of the remnants of the north transept and presbytery were visible only because they towered above everything else, an island unto itself, separated from the south transept and the remainder of the standing abbey by the loss of the roof and walls that had once connected them. However, even that was only a mass of pale arches and craggy shadows.
Trevor moved forward to stand beside me, his breath condensing in the cold air around us as he sighed. “Willie, where is this grave Dodd pointed you to?” he asked, following the same bent of my thoughts.
Willie shuffled across the grass and pointed toward the ruins of the north transept. “O’er there. Near St. Mary’s Aisle.”
I glanced over my shoulder at Lord Buchan. His face was creased in a troubled frown, his thin lips almost disappearing. “That’s what my uncle always called it,” he explained, and then moved forward, his urgent stride lengthening with each step.
I shared a look with Trevor, suspecting the earl knew exactly who was buried in that prime location of the ruins. The rest of us hurried to catch up with him, dodging the bits of stone still remaining on the abbey floor. We heard him gasp a sigh of relief as he got closer to the transept.
“My Elizabeth,” he explained, standing before an undisturbed grave near the ruins, a hand pressed to his chest as he tried to catch his breath.
From the gravestone I could see that his wife had not been dead long, only since 1828, but still longer than twenty months.
I was about to ask after his uncle when at the edge of the lantern light I saw it. The mound of dirt. And beyond it the yawing hole of a grave.
Lord Buchan followed my gaze and gave another gasp, though this one was horrified. “My uncle.” He stumbled forward and then halted abruptly, as if he wasn’t certain he wanted to peer down inside the empty tomb.
I could sympathize. I felt a fluttering in my stomach at the same thought. It seemed rather like tempting fate.
Willie did not have similar qualms. Or perhaps he’d already faced them earlier. His foot sank into the loose soil, releasing the pungent scent of the earth into the night air, as he looked down into the grave. Feeling silly that this young man, barely out of boyhood, was braver than the rest of us, I moved closer, and the other gentlemen followed suit.
I’m not sure what I expected to find. A fully dressed corpse? A ghost? A vampire like Lord Ruthven in Polidori’s story? I was not normally given over to fancy. And I knew that in twenty months the body would have decayed so significantly as to be not much more than bone.
But when I looked down into the grave and into the open coffin and saw only a pile of discarded clothing, I was momentarily shocked speechless.
The effect on my uncle was much the opposite. “What the devil!” he spluttered in outrage and then turned to glare at me. “They took his body, but not his clothing. Who does such a thing?”