If she didn’t have the Erskine letter, she could at least study Mary’s needlework, letters from contemporaries, and Rizzio’s guitar with its odd harmonic of memory. Her dissertation wasn’t on the letter specifically, after all, but on the Queen of Scots’ role in 16th century politics. And yet she needed bells and whistles, like the proof of King James’s ancestry one way or the other. Michael was sitting cross-legged on the carpet in the large fourth floor bedroom, leafing through a photograph album. The shorter strands of his hair framed his face that in contemplation seemed less sharply angled; the longer strands lay with deceptive softness over the neckband of his shirt. Dorothy was in the fifth floor bedroom fluffing the haunted pillow so forcefully she must’ve been trying to exorcise the impression of Elspeth’s body. On the sixth floor Phil was replacing a bit of wood paneling that had shrunk away from the bricks of the fireplace. “I’ll paint it tomorrow,” he told Rebecca.
