Basically the same story with a brand new look, Cover Art by Karen Gillmore.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Skillfully cross-stitching history, mystery and old-time urban legend… tension mounts steadily . … an artful work. —Publisher's Weekly The Lady in the Loch by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
When a woman’s bones are found in the icy dregs of the noxious Nor’ Loch, newly appointed sheriff of Edinburgh, Walter Scott, is called upon. Are these the remains of a drowned witch or religious heretic, or are they perhaps linked to something more recent and sinister? For although Edinburgh is known to be the center of literature, science, and medicine, it is also the haunt of body snatchers who prey upon the living and the dead alike, selling their victims for study by the student physicians at the medical school.
When a band of Travelling People is forced to winter near the city, two young women are taken, one from her bed while she sleeps near her family. Justice from the settled people is rarely accorded to gypsies and the Travellers fear they will be murdered one by one by the ghouls stalking their people.
A young gypsy named Midge Margret is sure that Scott will care. He befriended her family before and once more he promises to help find the murderer who prowls the snowy forest in a black coach. When a patchwork woman with supernatural strength begins hunting the streets as well, Scott and Midge Margret know the crimes are rooted in bloody dark magic. In order to catch the killer, the butchered victims themselves must testify.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Elizabeth Ann Scarborough was born in Kansas City, KS. She served as a nurse in the U.S. Army for five years, including a year in Viet Nam. Her interests include weaving and spinning, beading and playing the guitar and dulcimer.
Scarborough is the author of more than 24 solo fantasy and science fiction novels, including the 1989 Nebula award winning Healer’s War, loosely based on her service as an Army Nurse in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. She collaborated on 16 novels with Anne McCaffrey, six in the bestselling Petaybee series and eight in the YA bestselling Acorna series, and most recently, the Tales of the Barque Cat series, Catalyst and Catacombs (from Del Rey). Recently she has converted all of her previously published solo novels to eBooks with the assistance of Gypsy Shadow Publishing, under her own Fortune imprint. Spam Vs. the Vampire was her first exclusive novel for eBook and print on demand publication, followed by Father Christmas (a Spam the Cat Christmas novella) and The Tour Bus of Doom.
EXCERPT:
Available soon in PRINT!
The mother of the corpse wore solid
black as she danced round and round the room to the lamenting
coronach of the pipes. With her danced the father of the corpse,
also in black. The attire of both showed signs of having been
recently, hastily dyed for the occasion. Phantoms of the plaid
fabric swam beneath the dye of the mother's gown. The mother
wept as she danced and the father scowled. The corpse lay in the
middle of the room, her claes deid, her funeral garments,
concealing the thirty stab wounds in her chest and the dishonor
her killer had subjected her body to before she died. All around
the coffin, her brothers and sisters-in-law, her sisters and
brothers-in-law, her fiance and her grandmother, all of them
weeping, shuffled in their own awkward dancing. The neighbors
danced and wept as well. And close by the coffin, the bound and
gagged tinkler man was weeping too, less for the murdered lassie
than for himself, he who was the accused.
The time was one minute until midnight by the
grand-father clock standing in the candle-cast shadows draping
the walls, festooning the ceiling and carpeting the floors. The
flickering of these same candles lent astonishing expressions to
the corpse's face and deepened the dread on the faces of the
other celebrants, dancing, singing, eating, drinking, and
weeping for the dead lass.
A danse macabre if ever there was one, Walter Scott
mused from his chair in the center of the room, close to the
girl's open coffin. Scott was excused from the dancing both
because of his semi-official status in the investigation and
because of his lame leg. In a way, it was quite thrilling, this
lyke-wake, for it was the first he had attended. Lowlanders and
Borderers such as himself, people raised in the strictness of
the Kirk, did not practice such rituals, but the girl's family,
the MacRitchies, were transplanted Highlanders. So on the one
hand, this gave Scott a wonderful opportunity to observe a
ritual of which he had previously only read. But on the other
hand, there was the girl in the coffin, and though he had never
known her, never heard her name, she was touchingly young,
younger even than his own eighteen years. She should have been
beautiful too, an Ophelia, a Lily Lady of Shalot, but she was
actually rather ordinary-looking, robust even in death, the
freckles standing out like blemishes on the waxiness of her
skin, her eyes, at present, closed with coins, her red hair too
festive for her own funeral.
The sheriff-depute of Selkirk, Scott's old friend Adam
Plummer, stood beside him, both of them shivering, for the room
was chill for more common reasons than the eldritch atmosphere
that gripped it. The fireplace was cold, as it must be until the
body was removed, and the door was still wide open for the
moment.
As the clock gonged the first of its twelve notes for
midnight, the dancing wound to a shuffling halt and the piped
lament died a wheezing death. Plummer crossed the makeshift
dance floor in two long strides and closed the door so that it
was barely ajar. The mourners hushed, except for one man who
continued, unheeding, to gnaw on the drumstick of a goose. As
Plummer returned to the corpse's side, the clock struck its
second gong. The mother, Mrs. MacRitchie, let loose with her
eerie keening cry, the hullulu, as the Irish so accurately
termed it, for that was the way it sounded, a long mourning-dove
yell.
The MacRitchies' large, pleasant stone farmhouse was
wrapped in the boughs of the Ettrick Forest, and both forest and
farmhouse kitchen could be entered from the kitchen door. The
house was not too far from that of Scott's old friend James
Hogg, and his mother. Hogg had been with the search party that
discovered the lass's poor body and also with the party that had
flushed the tinklers from their camp in the woods and chased the
young man through the trees. The murdered girl's fiance and her
brothers had assumed, as had all the neighbors, that the tinkler
lad, since he was in the area, was of course the perpetrator of
the crime. Had it been left only to them, the young man would by
now be hanged. But Hogg, who had some connections with and
sympathy for the tinklers, told the accusers that if they
proceeded, the current laws of this district would call them
murderers as well, that it was best to send for the
sheriff-depute and allow him to conduct a proper investigation.
Recalcitrant as the younger laddies were, the elder MacRitchies
prevailed and allowed Hogg to send a servant with a message to
the home of Scott's aunt Janet in Sandy Knowe. Scott was
visiting his aunt and uncle for the summer, far away from his
studies at the university in Edinburgh. He and Plummer had been
whiling away the early afternoon playing chess when the
MacRitchies' servant knocked on Aunt Janet's door and told him
of the lass's death (never calling her by name. One never called
the deceased by name unless in court or kirk or on one other
occasion, as the sheriff was soon to demonstrate). Plummer
evidently was acquainted with the family, however, and had some
idea that the lyke-wake was in order. He told Scott that this
might prove a more interesting experience than most and urged
the younger man to accompany him.
Riding hard, they had reached the farmhouse shortly
after sunset, when the forest shadows gave way to the mist
rising from the creeks and ponds, and that was joined by the
smoke from the kitchen chimney, blowing a solemn ring around the
house.
Plummer questioned Mrs. MacRitchie, who had laid her
daughter out, about the girl's wounds. Scott was relieved his
friend had felt no need to remove the funeral linens to see the
wounds for himself, but he wondered why. Plummer questioned the
tinkler lad as well, but the man refused to say anything except
that he had done nothing wrong, and to shake his head
stubbornly. The brothers and the girl's fiance, one Robert
Douglas, the son of an even more successful farmer than the
girl's father, wanted to "bate the truth oot o' the knacker,"
and in fact, it looked as if they had already made progress
toward that goal before Plummer and Scott arrived. Hogg too bore
a couple of visible bruises, although no apparent malice toward
those who had inflicted them.
The clock gonged for the fourth time. Plummer began,
"By the power vested in me by the Sheriff of Selkirk and through
him the King, I will noo commence interrogatin' the victim of
this heinous crime."
"What does he mean, interrogate the victim?" Scott
asked Hogg, who had drawn near.
Hogg shrugged. "Used to be done whenever there was foul
play, according to Mither," he whispered back. "Nowadays nane
but the law know the way."
"Why's that?" Scott asked, but just then, one of the
men screamed.
"No! Let her rest in peace! We hae Ma—my bride-to-be's
murderer there. We should hang him and be done wi' it!"
"Haud yer tongue, man," Plummer commanded. "Let nane
speak but her whose foremost business it is, the last witness to
this crime. In the pursuit of this investigation, once more I
invoke thy name, Mary MacRitchie," he said, in appropriately
sonorous tones. "Rise up, lass, and accuse thy slayer."
Though he had never seen such a thing before, Scott had
read of the dead accusing their slayers, but had thought it only
superstition. He, with the other occupants of the room, held his
breath, waiting, to see what would happen, what, if the victim
indeed rose up, she would say.
Even the gnawer of the goose bone had finished all the
flesh and, putting away his bone, realized that the room was now
completely still except for his ever-more-cautious chewing and
the echo of Plummer's invocation, and the heartbeats and
expirations of all of those who were not now allowed to speak.
The first sound other than those was a slight slipping, like
jewels against a lady's velvet dress, and then a hollow clink as
the coins fell from the girl's eyes and dropped into her coffin
as if it were a wishing well.
Even the tinkler was still, as with a sussuration of
the claes deid and a long, pain-wracked groan, the body raised
itself, hands still bound across its chest, to a sitting
position.
With the raising, Scott caught the stench of corruption
emanating from her, washed and freshly dressed as she was. On
such a warm summer day as this had been, her body had already
begun to decay.
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