My Lady of the Bog Read Online Free Page A

looked disappointed, then paused and conceded, “Well, no harm in it, I suppose . . .”
    In his dream, the coroner had been standing at the top of a long and winding marble stairwell. In the air there was an uneasy feeling, like that low-pressure heaviness preceding a storm. That’s when he’d heard a visitor enter and footsteps slowly ascending the stairs. And though he couldn’t see her yet, he knew from the sound of her step it was a woman.
    Then he was looking at the phone book from his village. His visitor’s name was circled in ink and when he’d read it, he had found himself terrified beyond description!
    “What was it?”
    “. . . Alba Marla . Or maybe, Albemarle . Odd . . . doesn’t seem so frightening now.”
    “And who was the woman ascending the stairs? Did you see her?”
    “No. All I saw was her bloody name . Albemarle .” He frowned. “Now tell me why that should scare me witless?”

Chapter 4
    I couldn’t say. Only that the mystery surrounding my Lady seemed to have stirred something deep within us both. A moment later, we went our separate ways: I, to revisit my Lady, and Strugnell, to locate the key to the cage that housed the treasure.
    I opened the door to the room where she lay. “Good morning,” I told her, “I hope you slept well. Actually, you’re looking bloody marvelous this morning.” And she was. Before I’d left her for the night, I’d covered her with a sheet, tucking it in just beneath her chin so that she looked like a woman asleep beneath covers—though the stakes disfigured the drape of the cloth, and her blind eyes continued to disturb me.
    I studied her face and, as I did, I had the most vivid sense of her presence. This was a person —even if dead.
    But our silent communion was rudely interrupted by the coroner throwing open the door so hard it banged against the wall. “Sod it!” he said. “Can’t find the key.”
    “What does it matter? You could open that cage with a screwdriver and a hammer. Look,” I said, pointing at the stakes, “let’s pull these, shall we? They’re getting on my nerves.”
    The coroner shrugged and approached my Lady. I removed the sheet. He examined the stick forking her right knee. “Hello! There’s some sort of writing on it.” He squinted at the characters carved in the wood. “Well, it’s not English.”
    “And how do you know that?”
    “Just look at it, man!”
    “I am. And, offhand, I don’t see how you can tell it’s not English.”
    He was getting bothered. “Because there are no bloody English letters, are there?”
    I looked at him. “There are no such things as bloody ‘English letters.’ What you mean, I suppose, is they’re not Roman—a, b, c, d . . . . But a language can be written in any alphabet. Look at om . Or shalom . You could write Churchill’s speeches using Arabic characters. I don’t mean translating them into Arabic—I mean writing Arabic in such a way that when it’s pronounced it sounds like Churchillian English!”
    He looked confounded.
    “Now this,” I continued, eyeing the markings, “could be futhark .”
    “What . . . ?”
    “Runes . However, the language of the runes might be Middle English or Gothic, Norse or Norwegian. Who knows?”
    “Who does ?”
    “Someone who can translate them. Not me. Ready?” We gripped the first stake. It came out with a sigh as the wet peat released. In a similar fashion, we removed the three others. I tagged each, indicating its position on the limb it had pinned. Then we tried to remove the blind. But I couldn’t undo the knot (it was cruelly tight) and I didn’t want to force it, fearing I would damage her face in the process, so I made do with moving it an inch above her eyes.
    Unexpectedly, they were open; undeniably, they were blue; unbelievably, they were lifelike in the extreme—full of hurt and terror and some far-reaching ruined hope.
    “My God,” the coroner said, stepping back a pace. For with her blue eyes open and the