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the undeveloped plate.
    Like Malcolm.
    Taffy flushed with a sudden surge of emotion the name brought and slowed her pedaling. It would not do to have an accident and arrive at Duntrune in a muddied state or unbecomingly flushed.
    It was not amazing, she assured herself as the sound of pipes grew louder, that she had dreamt of Malcolm the night before, given the thoughts she had taken to bed with her. His story was a colorful one, and though skeletal remains were a fairly regular occurrence in her life, they were usually very old, partial skeletal remains, and hardly resembled people anymore.
    But these things, even in conjunction, could not account for the content of her dream. She had seen a virtual re-creation of yesterday’s events, except that at the moment when she went to expose her plate, an unusually tall man with dark hair and the palest gray eyes had knelt down beside the grave.
    He had been dressed in the old manner wearinga belted plaid, secured at the waist with a wide belt and then wrapped over the shoulder where it was pinned with a silver broach. He had hand-stitched brogues that came up well over his ankles, and beside him on the stone floor were a set of pipes and a severed boar’s head.
    At the last instant, he had looked up from the bones to stare at her, surprise—and longing—written clearly on his weathered face.
    There had been something else, too, something very strange. Her own ears were the tiniest bit pointed at the upper tips, but the piper’s had been very pointed. In fact, he very nearly matched the locals’ description of a faerie. Yet this man could not be the infamous still-folk patriarch Tomas Rimer; that great faerie appeared to mortals only as an old man.
    Taffy pushed the thought aside. Her mind was filled with rubbish this morning! But she would develop that other plate as soon as she returned from the castle. She hadn’t believed any of her friends’ spiritualist nonsense when the craze swept through London last winter, but there had been some remarkable photographs of supposed apparitions caught on film, and she was willing to see if perhaps she had encountered such a—a “technical flaw” with her own equipment. It might be that she would be able to finally lay to rest all the silly rumors about ghosts and faeries appearing on film.
    Taffy dismounted her velocipede at the castle gates and leaned it against the rough gray wall. She removed her cycling cloak, and then smoothed her skirt back into neatness before walking boldly up the long drive to the castle’s entrance.
    On the top step she looked about once, sensing that she was being observed, but seeing no one and hearing no stirring from within, she reached out a nervous hand and let the ugly door-knocker—a hideous tusked boar with mean, little eyes—fall on its iron plate
    After a time, a drowsy housemaid answered the summons and took Taffy through a great hall, where there hung a large banner with yet another boar’s head emblazoned on it—this swine in profile and having a forked tongue as well as dagger-length tusks—into a parlor which, judging from the accumulated books and folios resting upon every flat surface, was serving as the bishop’s study while repairs were being carried out in his home.
    Bishop Mapleton took some time in joining her and looked as though he had hurried through his toiletries. But he welcomed Taffy politely, even though he was clearly surprised at her early arrival and so distracted by the ongoing renovations that he spent most of his time peering out of his study window and jumping nervously at every sharp sound. Even a workman’s tuneless whistling seemed to irritate his tender nerves.
    Perhaps it was her velocipede that had put him off; many people did not care for the whimsical design of the bentwood hickory frame, she thought, noticing that it was resting within plain view of the window. Taffy frowned. Or maybe he did not like that a female was riding it. She had been rejected