Written in Stone, page 1
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For Charlie, my ride or die, my other half, and the guy who is always there for my questions that begin with, “What’s that word…?”
CHAPTER ONE
As the sprinkle of rain threatened to rev up to a late spring downpour, Tom and I increased our pace.
“I can’t believe it’s been almost a whole year.” I sighed.
“It seems like yesterday,” he replied.
“And forever. In a good way.”
“Aye.”
Tom had just asked me what I’d like to do for our one-year anniversary. It was still a couple months away, but time flew so quickly and he didn’t want the date to pass by without planning something special.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Something quiet would work just fine.”
“Well, I don’t disagree, but I think I’d like to mark the occasion with something less quiet.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m thinking. Let me know if something comes to you, something you’d really like to do, a place you’d like to see.”
“Surprise me,” I said.
“Aye?” he said doubtfully.
“Sure. Why not?”
“I’m a wee bit clueless when it comes to such things. I would hate to disappoint you.”
I laughed. “Not possible.”
“I guess we’ll see.” He slowed his steps, so I did too. “I think we’re here.”
The rain wasn’t going to cease anytime soon, so we hurried down the close and counted doors.
We looked up at the building, at its medieval architecture, something I’d become used to seeing all around Edinburgh. “I guess this is it?”
“I think so.”
We looked back at the door we’d stopped in front of. “It’s not much to go on, but it seems to fit,” I said.
The majority of the Hidden Door Festival was being held in an old, much larger, long unused building on Dalkeith Road. But this event was a special, invitation-only offsite experience. The “auxiliary annex,” as it was described in the festival’s program, belonged to artist Ryory Bennigan, and I had been intrigued since first reading about it.
Ryory, an elusive man who was often discussed amid Edinburgh artist circles—well, lots of different Edinburgh circles—didn’t like to show his work.
While that might seem counterintuitive, Ryory himself had explained—
I admit that I am compulsive and have enough money not to care what anyone thinks about my life’s obsession. I shall continue to immerse myself in my art, which is, frankly, where I live, not what I do.
His mysterious ways, along with how he used his body as a canvas, had been the building blocks of his reputation as a local celebrity, more than just an elusive man rarely seen in public. No one really knew where his money came from, and his ancestry was frequently the subject of speculation. Even my boss, the well-connected Edwin MacAlister, didn’t know much about Ryory’s history, and he was keyed in to almost everyone in Scotland, especially in Edinburgh. He made the history of the place he loved, as well as its people, his business.
When Ryory was spotted walking the streets of the city, maybe once or twice a year, cameras couldn’t be opened fast enough. Pictures tagged with #ryorybennigan quickly became viral, unbeknownst to him because he was, as he claimed, “not a user of social media.” Everyone wanted to see what Ryory looked like now—how he’d changed. Could they spot the differences?
The Hidden Door Festival was a yearly pop-up artistic event, always held in a place that had been left empty for whatever reason. Much of the event was musical, giving local singers and bands opportunities to introduce their music. Some of the festival was literary, filled with essayists and poets; some were exhibits—paintings, sculptures, any sort of artistic creation, really.
I’d attended my first Hidden Door Festival a year earlier and hadn’t been able to get enough. I’d downloaded music from a few bands and still listened to them, watched as their popularity continued to rise. One of the paintings I’d purchased had been put on the wall above Tom’s and my sofa in our blue house by the sea. He loved it as much as I did.
Though the subject of the painting was also a blue house by the sea, it wasn’t our home being portrayed. Nevertheless, it seemed perfect and neither of us had been able to resist it.
This year, the big news of the event was that Ryory had decided to open his studio to a limited number of visitors. He’d asked those who wanted to see his place to snail mail him a request. If you were chosen, you would receive a confirmation with directions and a specific time and date of your slot. There was no option to reschedule. I’d received my confirmation two days earlier. Tom and I had moved around some less-than-crucial calendar events to make our assigned time slot work. Even if it turned out to be boring, it would be more than worth it. How could it possibly turn out to be boring, though?
It was Ryory Bennigan, after all.
His art was carved stone. He took what had become Scottish historical intrigue regarding a lost population, the Picts, and reproduced what they’d left behind, with some artistic license thrown in, of course.
The Pictish people had populated Scotland a long time ago, from about 300 to 900 CE, a short six hundred years. Their historical record is scant and artistically intriguing, though not very clear, which gives them an air of mystery. Their existence is marked only by the stones they left behind, carved with a variety of symbols—some animals, some geometric, and others that historians assume were just of everyday items they used. Though again, no one is sure about much of anything when it comes to the Picts.
However, what we do know is that tattoos were a traditional part of the Picts’ lives, which, some say, is where the later carved symbols originated. The name Pict comes from picti, a Latin word meaning painted people. They were warriors, many of them covering their entire bodies in tattoos, possibly to make themselves more intimidating.
The Picts used an indigo ink to create their body art. Most likely, it was dyer’s woad, a plant whose flowers are yellow but turn blue green after being dried, powdered, and fermented. Woad also has antiseptic properties that might have assisted with healing injuries or preventing infection. Ochre and soot might also have been used to add other pigments or create other designs. We can guess about some of the designs that covered their bodies based on the standing stones they left behind throughout Scotland, mostly in the northeastern part of the country.
Ryory not only carved stones like the Picts had, but he also used his own body as a canvas for the blue symbols. He was quite a sight to behold, though nothing like a warrior. In fact, his mysterious reputation included lots of positive attributes—I’d heard he was kind, helpful, a great tipper. From all accounts, he was a good, if elusive, guy.
And rumor was that he’d taught himself the art of tattooing and had done many of his own tattoos himself. It was another point of speculation, and a question I hoped to ask him. If he was up to answering questions, that was.
He was almost as much of an enigma as the Picts were. No one really knows with certainty what the symbols mean, where the tattoo ink came from, what the Picts were really like. And no one knows what happened to them. They just disappeared from all historical records and never came back.
The Picts fought many battles during their time on the planet. There is no real record of them dying out or migrating. It’s likely that they just melded into the other Scottish communities, though we don’t know how any of that happened.
Though I found their sparse history fascinating, my favorite part of the Picts’ story was their hair. Apparently, many of those in the original tribes were notably topped off by the reddest of red hair, a trait that I also carried, most of the time proudly, and much of the time with a frizz that couldn’t be tamed, more pronounced than ever since I’d moved to rainy Scotland.
My hair had been one of the things that originally prompted me to take a deep dive into the Picts, led by a discussion that I’d had months ago with my boss, Edwin, the man who owned The Cracked Spine, the bookshop where I worked. He’d also told me about Ryory Bennigan at the same time.
Edwin had, in his words, “been so bold” as to invite the artist out for dinner or perhaps a get-together at the bookshop. Apparently, Ryory had shopped at The Cracked Spine, but the only person who’d ever been in when he was there was my grandmotherly coworker, Rosie. She’d try to contact Edwin as Ryory shopped, but the artist wasn’t a lingering browser. He was in and out quickly, finding a book, paying for it as he and Rosie exchanged pleasantries, and then leaving, sometimes before Rosie could even manage a quick text to Edwin.
Rosie had said, “I’ve done my best trying to chat that man up, but as friendly as he is, he clearly doesnae like small talk. We’ll just have to hope he stops by one day when Edwin is in.”
He still hadn’t.
When I got the invitation, Tom, knowing Edwin’s intrigue, had insisted that I first invite my boss on this sojourn. But Edwin had declined, telling me he had other plans, even though I was sure he didn’t. He was just stepping aside so Tom and I might enjoy the event together. I appreciated it, and Tom was having fun too, though he wasn’t as intrigued by Ryory Bennigan as either I or Edwin.
The directions to the studio had been mostly clear. “Third building down the Friar’s Close. The one with the interesting door.”
Looking up the location of the close was easy enough. Tom and I had taken a bus from Grassmarket and then walked a short block to reach it. We found three doors on each side of an unadorned alleyway flanked by a four-story, stone medieval building on each side.
We glanced at the third door of each building. At first, neither door had seemed more interesting than the other one until we looked very closely. The only real difference was a small carved symbol in the darkly stained wood above an old brass knob on the southerly building. The symbol, a bird, was a crude representation of a Pict symbol: a disc shape atop a rectangle. Many speculated that this symbol represented the sun. Though he didn’t show his work publicly, pictures of it somehow surfaced, and then he dodged the social media that shared it with great skill. I had looked at the pictures on the internet; Ryory had carved lots of symbols over the years, but this one didn’t represent his skill. He was very good at his art.
The symbol on the door might have been scratched with a dull knife, but, still, it was a symbol, and the other door was plain. It seemed like an obvious clue.
“Should we knock or just go in?” I said.
“I would probably knock first if the invitation doesn’t mention differently.”
“Right.”
As I lifted my fist, though, the door pushed open with surprising gusto. A woman exited in a hurry.
At once the three of us recognized each other.
“Delaney? Tom?” Bridget asked.
“Bridget?” Tom and I said simultaneously.
Bridget McBride, one of Tom’s old girlfriends, had come through the door, her long blond curls bouncing, her big blue eyes shiny and determined, which was her normal state of being.
“What…?” I began.
A knowing smile spread over Bridget’s pretty face. “You are here to see the art.”
I nodded. “Yes. You too?”
“Well, I have an open invite.” If anyone was good at smug, it was Bridget. But somehow, whenever I witnessed that, I didn’t like her any less.
Our friendship was not something anyone could have predicted. She’d held a long grudge over the way Tom had ended their relationship, and things were icy at first, but for whatever reason she and I found a way to get along. We were friends, and it seemed that’s what we both wanted. Tom had remained neutral regarding my time with Bridget, but I thought even he was doing okay with it.
For a time, I thought I only wanted us to get along because I sometimes needed her assistance as a local newspaper reporter with access to archived articles. I’d felt guilty about my disingenuousness, but it hadn’t been long before I realized I actually liked her. She was a little snotty sometimes, but I’d come to find even that endearing.
“Oh?” I used an inquiring tone. It was clear she was dying to tell us more.
“Well, aye.” She nodded back toward the door. “Ryory is an old friend. I did a piece about him years ago. He liked that I was honest, didn’t hide his strange ways but didn’t make fun of him either. Plus, I gave him final approval of the printed piece, which I rarely do.”
“You’re very good at what you do,” I said after a slightly too long beat. “And that’s pretty darn cool.”
“Aye,” Tom agreed.
Bridget sometimes pretended that she was still angry at Tom, but not today. Today her smile transformed into something humbler, and she nodded. “I agree. He’s a lovely man.”
But then, as quickly as it had appeared, the smile dropped away. “Particularly when his assistant isn’t around. She’s up there today, though. Don’t expect a lot of … fun.”
“You know her too?” I stated the obvious.
Bridget shrugged and offered up “Well, not as well as I know Ry.”
Ry. I hadn’t heard him referred to in that way.
“Oh.” I rummaged around in my bag for the invitation as something had occurred to me. I held it up. “Are you responsible for me getting this?”
She shook her head right away. “No, I’m not. I didn’t even know you’d applied for an invite, though … Oh.”
Tom and I shared a look.
“What?” I asked her.
“Ry’s assistant is named Ani, with one n and one i. Though she and I haven’t had any deep conversations, I’ve heard that she loves your bookshop. She probably knew who you were when you applied.”
“Ani? I don’t think I know the name.”
“You might recognize her.” She paused and seemed to fall into thought. “And, I think Ry has mentioned the shop a time or two. Maybe. I’m not sure. Anyway, you might have had an in with the bookshop.” She shrugged. “Nothing wrong with that.”
I nodded, but I didn’t mention his times in the shop with Rosie. I might like my friendship with Bridget, but she was still a reporter first, and it wasn’t wise to share much of anything with her, especially a secret that could be publicized in one of her articles.
“No, nothing at all,” I said.
“Maybe it was just luck of the draw. I don’t know how Ani and Ry determined the winners. Ask them. She wasn’t thrilled by the idea of doing the showings. She only agreed because Ry wanted it.”
“We’re just happy to be here,” I said. “And very excited to see the studio.”
“It’s impressive, there’s no doubt.” She paused. “There’s a gentleman up there right now. It wouldn’t be like Ani to double-book. What’s the time on your invite?”
“Two p.m.”
“You’re only a few minutes early. Ry was talking to the man like he knew him, sort of. Maybe a friend just stopped by.” She fell into thought again. She was always searching for an angle. Her eyes snapped back to mine. “Maybe I’ll call you for a quote or something about your time up there.”
I nodded immediately. “Of course.”
“Well, head on up. I know you’ll have a good time. I can’t wait to hear about it. Lunch in the next couple weeks?”
“I would love that. Text me.”
“I will.” She remembered the icy shoulder she liked to extend to Tom and sent him a forced glare. “Just us girls.”
“I would never want to interfere,” Tom said.
“Right.” In a way I had become familiar with, she turned on her toes and walked away toward the road, her long blond curls bouncing as she went. She waved backward over her shoulder. “Later.”
“Later, Bridget,” I called.
Once she was out of sight, I turned to Tom. “I think she’s warming to you.”
We laughed.
“Shall we?” He reached for the doorknob just as heavier rain began to fall.
“Let’s.”
CHAPTER TWO
We stepped into a mostly dark stairway, lit only by a small wall sconce at the top of ten steps. A musty smell tickled my nose, and I held back a sneeze. We heard no noise, voices or otherwise. I didn’t feel any moisture on the walls when I touched them, but there was a distinct heaviness of humidity in the air, as if it’d rained inside too.
I smoothed my hair. It was probably a waste of time, but it was a habit I’d had even before moving to Scotland.
“Want me to lead the way?” Tom asked.
“Yes, please.”
I took his hand as we climbed the flight of stairs, only to find another flight around a wall at the top. We took it and then two others before we came upon another door.
“We should probably knock on this one.” Tom rapped his knuckles in a friendly beat.
I nodded as we waited.
No sound announced that anyone was on the other side before the door swung open.
