Outlander / Чужестранка (by Diana Gabaldon, 2006) - аудиокнига на английском

Outlander Prologue People disappear all the time. Ask any policeman. Better yet, ask a journalist. Disappearances are bread-and-butter to journalists. Young girls run away from home. Young children stray from their parents and are never seen again. Housewives reach the end or their tether and take the grocery money and a taxi to the station. International financiers change their names and vanish into the smoke of imported cigars. Many of the lost will be found, eventually, dead or alive. Disappearances, after all, have explanations. Usually. 1 A New Beginning It wasn't very likely place for disappearances, at least at first glance. Mrs. Baird's was like a thousand other Highland bed-and-breakfast establishments in 1945; clean and quiet, with fading floral wallpaper, gleaming floors, and a coin-operated hot-water geyser in the lavatory. Mrs. Baird herself was squat and easygoing, and made no objection to Frank lining her tiny rose-sprigged parlor with the dozens of books and papers with which he always traveled. I met Mrs. Baird in the front hall on my way out. She stopped me with a pudgy hand on my arm and patted at my hair. "Dear me, Mrs. Randall, ye canna go out like that! Here, just let me tuck that bit in for ye. There! That's better. Ye know, my cousin was tellin' me about a new perm she tried, comes out beautiful and holds like a dream; perhaps ye should try that kind next time." I hadn't the heart to tell her that the waywardness of my light brown curls was strictly the fault of nature, and not due to any dereliction on the part of the permanent wave manufacturers. Her own tightly marceled waves suffered from no such perversity. "Yes, I'll do that, Mrs. Baird," I lied. "I'm just going down to the village to meet Frank. We'll be back for tea." I ducked out the door and down the path before she could detect any further defects in my undisciplined appearance. After four years as a Royal Army nurse, I was enjoying the escape from uniforms and rationing by indulging in brightly printed light cotton dresses, totally unsuited for rough walking through the heather. Not that I had originally planned to do a lot of that; my thoughts ran more on the lines of sleeping late in the mornings, and long, lazy afternoons in bed with Frank, not sleeping. However, it was difficult to maintain the proper mood of languorous romance with Mrs. Baird industriously Hoovering away outside our door. "That must be the dirtiest bit of carpet in the entire Scottish Highlands," Frank had observed that morning as we lay in bed listening to the ferocious roar of the vacuum in the hallway. "Nearly as dirty as our landlady's mind," I agreed. "Perhaps we should have gone to Brighton after all." We had chosen the Highlands as a place to holiday before Frank took up his appointment as a history professor at Oxford, on the grounds that Scotland had been somewhat less touched by the physical horrors of war than the rest of Britain, and was less susceptible to the frenetic postwar gaiety that infected more popular vacation spots. And without discussing it, I think we both felt that it was a symbolic place to reestablish our marriage; we had been married and spent a two-day honeymoon in the Highlands, shortly before the outbreak of war seven years before. A peaceful refuge in which to rediscover each other, we thought, not realizing that, while golf and fishing are Scotland's most popular outdoor sports, gossip is the most popular indoor sport. And when it rains as much as it does in Scotland, people spend a lot of time indoors. "Where are you going?" I asked, as Frank swung his feet out of bed. "I'd hate the dear old thing to be disappointed in us," he answered. Sitting up on the side of the ancient bed, he bounced gently up and down, creating a piercing rhythmic squeak. The Hoovering in the hall stopped abruptly. After a minute or two of bouncing, he gave a loud, theatrical groan and collapsed backward with a twang of protesting springs. I giggled helplessly into a pillow, so as not to disturb the breathless silence outside. Frank waggled his eyebrows at me. "You're supposed to moan ecstatically, not giggle," he admonished in a whisper. "She'll think I'm not a good lover." "You'll have to keep it up for longer than that, if you expect ecstatic moans," I answered. "Two minutes doesn't deserve any more than a giggle." "Inconsiderate little wench. I came here for a rest, remember?" "Lazybones. You'll never manage the next branch on your family tree unless you show a bit more industry than that." Frank's passion for genealogy was yet another reason for choosing the Highlands. According to one of the filthy scraps of paper he lugged to and fro, some tiresome ancestor of his had had something to do with something or other in this region back in the middle of the eighteenth—or was it seventeenth?—century. "If I end as a childless stub on my family tree, it will undoubtedly be the fault of our untiring hostess out there. After all, we've been married almost eight years. Little Frank Jr. will be quite legitimate without being conceived in the presence of a witness." "If he's conceived at all," I said pessimistically. We had been disappointed yet again the week before leaving for our Highland retreat. "With all this bracing fresh air and healthy diet? How could we help but manage here?" Dinner the night before had been herring, fried. Lunch had been herring, pickled. And the pungent scent now wafting up the stairwell strongly intimated that breakfast was to be herring, kippered. "Unless you're contemplating an encore performance for the edification of Mrs. Baird," I suggested, "you'd better get dressed. Aren't you meeting that parson at ten?" The Rev. Dr. Reginald Wakefield, vicar of the local parish, was to provide some rivetingly fascinating baptismal registers for Frank's inspection, not to mention the glittering prospect that he might have unearthed some moldering army dispatches or somesuch that mentioned the notorious ancestor. "What's the name of that great-great-great-great-grandfather of yours again?" I asked. "The one that mucked about here during one of the Risings? I can't remember if it was Willy or Walter." "Actually, it was Jonathan." Frank took my complete disinterest in family history placidly, but remained always on guard, ready to seize the slightest expression of inquisitiveness as an excuse for telling me all facts known to date about the early Randalls and their connections. His eyes assumed the fervid gleam of the fanatic lecturer as he buttoned his shirt. "Jonathan Wolverton Randall—Wolverton for his mother's uncle, a minor knight from Sussex. He was, however, known by the rather dashing nickname of 'Black Jack,' something he acquired in the army, probably during the time he was stationed here." I flopped facedown on the bed and affected to snore. Ignoring me, Frank went on with his scholarly exegesis. "He bought his commission in the mid-thirties—1730s, that is—and served as a captain of dragoons. According to those old letters Cousin May sent me, he did quite well in the army. Good choice for a second son, you know; his younger brother followed tradition as well by becoming a curate, but I haven't found out much about him yet. Anyway, Jack Randall was highly commended by the Duke of Sandringham for his activities before and during the '45—the second—Jacobite Rising, you know," he amplified for the benefit of the ignorant amongst his audience, namely me. "You know, Bonnie Prince Charlie and that lot?" "I'm not entirely sure the Scots realize they lost that one," I interrupted, sitting up and trying to subdue my hair. "I distinctly heard the barman at that pub last night refer to us as Sassenachs." "Well, why not?" said Frank equably. "It only means 'Englishman,' after all, or at worst, 'outlander,' and we're all of that." "I know what it means. It was the tone I objected to." Frank searched through the bureau drawer for a belt. "He was just annoyed because I told him the ale was weak. I told him the true Highland brew requires an old boot to be added to the vat, and the final product to be strained through a well-worn undergarment." "Ah, that accounts for the amount of the bill." "Well, I phrased it a little more tactfully than that, but only because the Gaelic language hasn't got a specific word for drawers." I reached for a pair of my own, intrigued. "Why not? Did the ancient Gaels not wear undergarments?" Frank leered. "You've never heard that old song about what a Scotsman wears beneath his kilts?" "Presumably not gents' knee-length step-ins," I said dryly. "Perhaps I'll go out in search of a local kilt-wearer whilst you're cavorting with vicars and ask him." "Well, do try not to get arrested, Claire. The dean of St. Giles College wouldn't like it at all." In the event, there were no kilt-wearers loitering about the town square or patronizing the shops that surrounded it. There were a number of other people there, though, mostly housewives of the Mrs Baird type, doing their daily shopping. They were garrulous and gossipy, and their solid, print-clad presences filled the shops with a cozy warmth; a buttress against the cold mist of the morning outdoors. With as yet no house of my own to keep, I had little that needed buying, but enjoyed myself in browsing among the newly replenished shelves, for the pure joy of seeing lots of things for sale again. It had been a long time of rationing, of doing without the simple things like soap and eggs, and even longer without the minor luxuries of life, like L'Heure Bleu cologne My gaze lingered on a shop window filled with household goods—embroidered tea cloths and cozies, pitchers and glasses, a stack of quite homely pie tins, and a set of three vases. I had never owned a vase in my life. During the war years, I had, of course, lived in the nurses' quarters, first at Pembroke Hospital, later at the field station in France. But even before that, we had lived nowhere long enough to justify the purchase of such an item. Had I had such a thing, I reflected, Uncle Lamb would have filled it with potsherds long before I could have got near it with a bunch of daisies. Quentin Lambert Beauchamp. "Q" to his archaeological students and his friends. "Dr. Beauchamp" to the scholarly circles in which he moved and lectured and had his being. But always Uncle Lamb to me. My father's only brother, and my only living relative at the time, he had been landed with me, aged five, when my parents were killed in a car crash. Poised for a trip to the Middle East at the time, he had paused in his preparations long enough to make the funeral arrangements, dispose of my parents' estates, and enroll me in a proper girls' boarding school. Which I had flatly refused to attend. Faced with the necessity of prying my chubby fingers off the car's door handle and dragging me by the heels up the steps of the school, Uncle Lamb, who hated personal conflict of any kind, had sighed in exasperation, then finally shrugged and tossed his better judgment out the window along with my newly purchased round straw boater. "Ruddy thing," he muttered, seeing it rolling merrily away in the rearview mirror as we roared down the drive in high gear. "Always loathed hats on women, anyway." He had glanced down at me, fixing me with a fierce glare. "One thing," he said, in awful tones. "You are not to play dolls with my Persian grave figurines. Anything else, but not that. Got it?" I had nodded, content. And had gone with him to the Middle East, to South America, to dozens of study sites throughout the world. Had learned to read and write from the drafts of journal articles, to dig latrines and boil water, and to do a number of other things not suitable for a young lady of gentle birth—until I had met the handsome, dark-haired historian who came to consult Uncle Lamb on a point of French philosophy as it related to Egyptian religious practice. Even after our marriage, Frank and I led the nomadic life of junior faculty, divided between continental conferences and temporary flats, until the outbreak of war had sent him to Officers Training and the Intelligence Unit at MI6, and me to nurses training. Though we had been married nearly eight years, the new house in Oxford would be our first real home. Tucking my handbag firmly under my arm, I marched into the shop and bought the vases. I met Frank at the crossing of the High Street and the Gereside Road and we turned up it together. He raised his eyebrows at my purchases. "Vases?" He smiled. "Wonderful. Perhaps now you'll stop putting flowers in my books." "They aren't flowers, they're specimens. And it was you who suggested I take up botany. To occupy my mind, now that I've not got nursing to do," I reminded him. "True." He nodded good-humoredly. "But I didn't realize I'd have bits of greenery dropping out into my lap every time I opened a reference. What was that horrible crumbly brown stuff you put in Tuscum and Banks?" "Groutweed. Good for hemorrhoids." "Preparing for my imminent old age, are you? Well, how very thoughtful of you, Claire." We pushed through the gate, laughing, and Frank stood back to let me go first up the narrow front steps. Suddenly he caught my arm. "Look out! You don't want to step in it." I lifted my foot gingerly over a large brownish-red stain on the top step. "How odd," I said. "Mrs. Baird scrubs the steps down every morning; I've seen her. What do you suppose that can be?" Frank leaned over the step, sniffing delicately. "Offhand, I should say that it's blood." "Blood!" I took a step back into the entryway. "Whose?" I glanced nervously into the house. "Do you suppose Mrs. Baird's had an accident of some kind?" I couldn't imagine our immaculate landlady leaving bloodstains to dry on her doorstep unless some major catastrophe had occurred, and wondered just for a moment whether the parlor might be harboring a crazed ax-murderer, even now preparing to spring out on us with a spine-chilling shriek. Frank shook his head. He stood on tiptoe to peer over the hedge into the next garden. "I shouldn't think so. There's a stain like it on the Collinses' doorstep as well." "Really?" I drew closer to Frank, both to see over the hedge and for moral support. The Highlands hardly seemed a likely spot for a mass murderer, but then I doubted such persons used any sort of logical criteria when picking their sites. "That's rather… disagreeable," I observed. There was no sign of life from the next residence. "What do you suppose has happened?" Frank frowned, thinking, then slapped his hand briefly against his trouser leg in inspiration. "I think I know! Wait here a moment." He darted out to the gate and set off down the road at a trot, leaving me stranded on the edge of the doorstep. He was back shortly, beaming with confirmation. "Yes, that's it, it must be. Every house in the row has had it." "Had what? A visit from a homicidal maniac?" I spoke a bit sharply, still nervous at having been abruptly abandoned with nothing but a large bloodstain for company. Frank laughed. "No, a ritual sacrifice. Fascinating!" He was down on his hands and knees in the grass, peering interestedly at the stain. This hardly sounded better than a homicidal maniac. I squatted beside him, wrinkling my nose at the smell. It was early for flies, but a couple of the big, slow-moving Highland midges circled the stain. "What do you mean, 'ritual sacrifice'?" I demanded. "Mrs. Baird's a good church-goer, and so are all the neighbors. This isn't Druid's Hill or anything, you know." He stood, brushing grass-ends from his trousers. "That's all you know, my girl," he said. "There's no place on earth with more of the old superstitions and magic mixed into its daily life than the Scottish Highlands. Church or no church, Mrs. Baird believes in the Old Folk, and so do all the neighbors." He pointed at the stain with one neatly polished toe. "The blood of a black cock," he explained, looking pleased. "The houses are new, you see. Pre-fabs." I looked at him coldly. "If you are under the impression that that explains everything, think again. What difference does it make how old the houses are? And where on earth is everybody?" "Down the pub, I should expect. Let's go along and see, shall we?". Taking my arm, he steered me out the gate and we set off down the Gereside Road. "In the old days," he explained as we went, "and not so long ago, either, when a house was built, it was customary to kill something and bury it under the foundation, as a propitiation to the local earth spirits. You know, 'He shall lay the foundations thereof in his firstborn and in his youngest son shall he set up the gates of it.' Old as the hills." I shuddered at the quotation. "In that case, I suppose it's quite modern and enlightened of them to be using chickens instead. You mean, since the houses are fairly new, nothing was buried under them, and the inhabitants are now remedying the omission." "Yes, exactly." Frank seemed pleased with my progress, and patted me on the back. "According to the vicar, many of the local folk thought the War was due in part to people turning away from their roots and omitting to take proper precautions, such as burying a sacrifice under the foundation, that is, or burning fishes' bones on the hearth—except haddocks, of course," he added, happily distracted. "You never burn a haddock's bones—did you know?—or you'll never catch another. Always bury the bones of a haddock instead." "I'll bear it in mind," I said. "Tell me what you do in order never to see another herring, and I'll do it forthwith." He shook his head, absorbed in one of his feats of memory, those brief periods of scholastic rapture where he lost touch with the world around him, absorbed completely in conjuring up knowledge from all its sources. "I don't know about herring," he said absently. "For mice, though, you hang bunches of Trembling Jock about—'Trembling Jock i' the hoose, and ye'll ne'er see a moose,' you know. Bodies under the foundation, though—that's where a lot of the local ghosts come from. You know Mountgerald, the big house at the end of the High Street? There's a ghost there, a workman on the house who was killed as a sacrifice for the foundation. In the eighteenth century sometime; that's really fairly recent," he added thoughtfully. "The story goes that by order of the house's owner, one wall was built up first, then a stone block was dropped from the top of it onto one of the workmen—presumably a dislikable fellow was chosen for the sacrifice—and he was buried then in the cellar and the rest of the house built up over him. He haunts the cellar where he was killed, except on the anniversary of his death and the four Old Days." "Old Days?" "The ancient feasts," he explained, still lost in his mental notes. "Hogmanay, that's New Year's, Midsummer Day, Beltane and All Hallows'. Druids, Beaker Folk, early Picts, everybody kept the sun feasts and the fire feasts, so far as we know. Anyway, ghosts are freed on the holy days, and can wander about at will, to do harm or good as they please." He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "It's getting on for Beltane—close to the spring equinox. Best keep an eye out, next time you pass the kirkyard." His eyes twinkled, and I realized the trance had ended. I laughed. "Are there a number of famous local ghosts, then?" He shrugged. "Don't know. We'll ask the Vicar, shall we, next time we see him?" We saw the Vicar quite shortly, in fact. He, along with most of the other inhabitants of the village, was down in the pub, having a lager-and-light in celebration of the houses' new sanctification. He seemed rather embarrassed at being caught in the act of condoning acts of paganism, as it were, but brushed it off as merely a local observance with historical color, like the Wearing of the Green. "Really rather fascinating, you know," he confided, and I recognized, with an internal sigh, the song of the scholar, as identifying a sound as the terr-whit! of a thrush. Harking to the call of a kindred spirit, Frank at once settled down to the mating dance of academe, and they were soon neck-deep in archetypes and the parallels between ancient superstitions and modern religions. I shrugged and made my own way through the crowd to the bar and back, a large brandy-and-splash in each hand. Knowing from experience how difficult it was to distract Frank's attention from this sort of discussion, I simply picked up his hand, wrapped his fingers about the stem of the glass and left him to his own devices. I found Mrs. Baird on a deep bench near the window, sharing a companionable pint of bitter with an elderly man whom she introduced to me as Mr. Crook. "This is the man I tell't ye about, Mrs. Randall," she said, eyes bright with the stimulation of alcohol and company. "The one as knows about plants of all sorts. "Mrs. Randall's verra much interested in the wee plants," she confided to her companion, who inclined his head in a combination of politeness and deafness. "Presses them in books and such." "Do ye, indeed?" Mr. Crook asked, one tufted white brow raised in interest. "I've some presses—the real ones, mind—for plants and such. Had them from my nephew, when he come up from university over his holiday. He brought them for me, and I'd not the heart to tell him I never uses such things. Hangin's what's wanted for herbs, ye ken, or maybe to be dried on a frame and put in a bit o' gauze bag or a jar, but whyever you'd be after squashing the wee things flat, I've no idea." "Well, to look at, maybe," Mrs. Baird interjected kindly. "Mrs. Randall's made some lovely bits out of mallow blossoms, and violets, same as you could put in a frame and hang on the wall, like." "Mmmphm " Mr. Crook's seamed face seemed to be admitting a dubious possibility to this suggestion. "Weel, if they're of any use to ye, Missus, you can have the presses, and welcome. I didna wish to be throwing them awa', but I must say I've no use for them." I assured Mr Crook that I would be delighted to make use of the plant presses, and still more delighted if he would show me where some of the rarer plants in the area could be found. He eyed me sharply for a moment, head to one side like an elderly kestrel, but appeared finally to decide that my interest was genuine, and we fixed it up that I should meet him in the morning for a tour of the local shrubbery. Frank, I knew, meant to go into Inverness for the day to consult some records in the town hall there, and I was pleased to have an excuse not to accompany him. One record was much like another, so far as I was concerned. Soon after this, Frank pried himself away from the Vicar, and we walked home in company with Mrs. Baird. I was reluctant to mention the cock's blood on the doorstep, myself, but Frank suffered from no such reticence, and questioned her eagerly as to the background of the custom. "I suppose it's quite old, then?" he asked, swishing a stick along through the roadside weeds. Lamb's-quarters and cinquefoil were already blooming, and I could see the buds of sweet broom swelling; another week and they'd be in flower. "Och, aye." Mrs. Baird waddled along at a brisk pace, asking no quarter from our younger limbs. "Older than anyone knows, Mr. Randall. Even back before the days of the giants." "Giants?" I asked. "Aye. Fionn and the Feinn, ye ken." "Gaelic folktales," Frank remarked with interest. "Heroes, you know. Probably from Norse roots. There's a lot of the Norse influence round here, and all the way up the coast to the West. Some of the place names are Norse, you know, not Gaelic at all." I rolled my eyes, sensing another outburst, but Mrs. Baird' smiled kindly and encouraged him, saying that was true, then, she'd been up to the north, and seen the Two Brothers stone, and that was Norse, wasn't it? "The Norsemen came down on that coast hundreds times between a.d. 500 and 1300 or so," Frank said, looking dreamily at the horizon, seeing dragon-ships in the windswept cloud. "Vikings, you know. And they brought a lot of their own myths along. It's a good country for myths. Things seem to take root here." This I could believe. Twilight was coming on, and so was a storm. In the eerie light beneath the clouds, even the thoroughly modern houses along the road looked as ancient and as sinister as the weathered Pictish stone that stood a hundred-feet away, guarding the crossroads it had marked for a thousand years. It seemed a good night to be inside with the shutters fastened. Rather than staying cozily in Mrs. Baird's parlor to be entertained by stereopticon views of Perth Harbor, though, Frank chose to keep his appointment for sherry with Mr. Bainbridge, a solicitor with an interest in local historical records. Bearing in mind my earlier encounter with Mr. Bainbridge, I elected to stay at home with Perth Harbor. "Try to come back before the storm breaks," I said, kissing Frank goodbye. "And give my regards to Mr. Bainbridge." "Umm, yes. Yes, of course." Carefully not meeting my eye, Frank shrugged into his overcoat and left, collecting an umbrella from the stand by the door. I closed the door after him, but left it on the latch so he could get back in. I wandered back toward the parlor, reflecting that Frank would doubtless pretend that he didn't have a wife—a pretense in which Mr. Bainbridge would cheerfully join. Not that I could blame him, particularly. At first, everything had gone quite well on our visit to Mr. Bainbridge's home the afternoon before. I had been demure, genteel, intelligent but self-effacing, well groomed, and quietly dressed—everything the Perfect Don's Wife should be. Until the tea was served. I now turned my right hand over, ruefully examining the large blister that ran across the bases of all four fingers. After all, it was not my fault that Mr. Bainbridge, a widower, made do with a cheap tin teapot instead of a proper crockery one. Nor that the solicitor, seeking to be polite, had asked me to pour out. Nor that the potholder he provided had a worn patch that allowed the red-hot handle of the teapot to come into direct contact with my hand when I picked it up. No, I decided. Dropping the teapot was a perfectly normal reaction. Dropping it into Mr. Bainbridge's lap was merely an accident of placement; I had to drop it somewhere. It was my exclaiming "Bloody fucking hell!" in a voice that topped Mr. Bainbridge's heartcry that had made Frank glare at me across the scones. Once he recovered from the shock, Mr. Bainbridge had been quite gallant, fussing about my hand and ignoring Frank's attempts to excuse my language on grounds that I had been stationed in a field hospital for the better part of two years. "I'm afraid my wife picked up a number of, er, colorful expressions from the Yanks and such," Frank offered, with a nervous smile. "True," I said, gritting my teeth as I wrapped a water-soaked napkin about my hand. "Men tend to be very 'colorful' when you're picking shrapnel out of them." Mr. Bainbridge had tactfully tried to distract the conversation onto neutral historical ground by saying that he had always been interested in the variations of what was considered profane speech through the ages. There was "Gorblimey," for example, a recent corruption of the oath "God blind me." "Yes, of course," said Frank, gratefully accepting the diversion. "No sugar, thank you, Claire. What about 'Gadzooks'? The 'Gad' part is quite clear, of course, but the 'zook'…" "Well, you know," the solicitor interjected, "I've sometimes thought it might be a corruption of an old Scots word, in fact—'yeuk.' Means 'itch.' That would make sense, wouldn't it?" Frank nodded, letting his unscholarly forelock fall across his forehead. He pushed it back automatically. "Interesting," he said, "the whole evolution of profanity." "Yes, and it's still going on," I said, carefully picking up a lump of sugar with the tongs. "Oh?" said Mr. Bainbridge politely. "Did you encounter some interesting variations during your, er, war experience?" "Oh, yes," I said. "My favorite was one I picked up from a Yank. Man named Williamson, from New York, I believe. He said it every time I changed his dressing." "What was it?" " 'Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,' " I said, and dropped the sugar lump neatly into Frank's tea. After a peaceful and not unpleasant sit with Mrs. Baird, I made my way upstairs, to ready myself before Frank came home. I knew his limit with sherry was two glasses, so I expected him back soon. The wind was rising, and the very air of the bedroom was prickly with electricity. I drew the brush through my hair, making the curls snap with static and spring into knots and furious tangles. My hair would have to do without its hundred strokes tonight, I decided. I would settle for brushing my teeth, in this sort of weather. Strands of hair adhered stickily to my cheeks, clinging stubbornly as I tried to smooth them back. No water in the ewer; Frank had used it, tidying himself before setting out for his meeting with Mr. Bainbridge, and I had not bothered to refill it from the lavatory tap. I picked up the bottle of L'Heure Bleu and poured a generous puddle into the palm of my hand. Rubbing my hands briskly together before the scent could evaporate, I smoothed them rapidly through my hair. I poured another dollop onto my hairbrush and swept the curls back behind my ears with it. Well. That was rather better, I thought, turning my head from side to side to examine the results in the speckled looking glass. The moisture had dissipated the static electricity in my hair, so that it floated in heavy, shining waves about my face. And the evaporating alcohol had left behind a very pleasant scent. Frank would like that, I thought. L'Heure Bleu was his favorite. There was a sudden flash close at hand, with the crash of thunder following close on its heels, and all the lights went out. Cursing under my breath, I groped in the drawers. Somewhere I had seen candles and matches; power failure was so frequent an occurrence in the Highlands that candles were a necessary furnishing for all inn and hotel rooms. I had seen them even in the most elegant hotels, where they were scented with honeysuckle, and presented in frosted glass holders with shimmering pendants. Mrs. Baird's candles were far more utilitarian—plain white plumber's candles—but there were a lot of them, and three folders of matches as well. I was not inclined to be picky over style at a time like this. I fitted a candle to the blue ceramic holder on the dressing table by the light of the next flash, then moved about the room, lighting others, 'til the whole room was filled with a soft, wavering radiance. Very romantic, I thought, and with some presence of mind, I pressed down the light switch, so that a sudden return of power shouldn't ruin the mood at some inopportune moment. The candles had burned no more than a half-inch when the door opened and Frank blew in. Literally, for the draft that followed him up the stairs extinguished three of the candles. The door closed behind him with a bang that blew out two more, and he peered into the sudden gloom, pushing a hand through his disheveled hair. I got up and relit the candles, making mild remarks about his abrupt methods of entering rooms. It was only when I had finished and turned to ask him whether he'd like a drink, that I saw he was looking rather white and unsettled. "What's the matter?" I said. "Seen a ghost?" "Well, you know," he said slowly, "I'm not at all sure that I haven't." Absentmindedly, he picked up my hairbrush and raised it to tidy his hair. When a sudden whiff of L'Heure Bleu reached his nostrils, he wrinkled his nose and set it down again, settling for the attentions of his pocket comb instead. I glanced through the window, where the elm trees were lashing to and fro like flails. A loose shutter was banging somewhere on the other side of the house, and it occurred to me that we ought perhaps to close our own, though the carry-on outside was rather exciting to watch. "Bit blustery for a ghost, I'd think," I said. "Don't they like quiet, misty evenings in graveyards?" Frank laughed a bit sheepishly. "Well, I daresay it's only Bainbridge's stories, plus a bit more of his sherry than I really meant to have. Nothing at all, likely." Now I was curious. "What exactly did you see?" I asked, settling myself on the dressing-table seat. I motioned to the whisky bottle with a half-lifted brow, and Frank went at once to pour a couple of drinks. "Well, only a man, really," he began, measuring out a jigger for himself and two for me. "Standing down in the road outside." "What, outside this house?" I laughed. "Must have been a ghost, then; I can't feature any living person standing about on a night like this." Frank tilted the ewer over his glass, then looked accusingly at me when no water came out. "Don't look at me," I said. "You used up all the water. I don't mind it neat, though." I took a sip in illustration. Frank looked as though he were tempted to nip down to the lavatory for water, but abandoned the idea and went on with his story, sipping cautiously as though his glass contained vitriol, rather than the best Glenfiddich single malt whisky. "Yes, he was down at the edge of the garden on this side, standing by the fence. I thought"—he hesitated, looking down into his glass—"I rather thought he was looking up at your window." "My window? How extraordinary!" I couldn't repress a mild shiver, and went across to fasten the shutters, though it seemed a bit late for that. Frank followed me across the room, still talking. "Yes, I could see you myself from below. You were brushing your hair and cursing a bit because it was standing on end." "In that case, the fellow was probably enjoying a good laugh," I said tardy. Frank shook his head, though he smiled and smoothed his hands over my hair. "No, he wasn't laughing. In fact, he seemed terribly unhappy about something. Not that I could see his face well; just something about the way he stood. I came up behind him, and when he didn't move, I asked politely if I could help him with something. He acted at first as though he didn't hear me, and I thought perhaps he didn't, over the noise of the wind, so I repeated myself, and I reached out to tap his shoulder, to get his attention, you know. But before I could touch him, he whirled suddenly round and pushed past me and walked off down the road." "Sounds a bit rude, but not very ghostly," I observed, draining my glass. "What did he look like?" "Big chap," said Frank, frowning in recollection. "And a Scot, in complete Highland rig-out, complete to sporran and the most beautiful running-stag brooch on his plaid. I wanted to ask where he'd got it from, but he was off before I could." I went to the bureau and poured another drink. "Well, not so unusual an appearance for these parts, surely? I've seen men dressed like that in the village now and then." "Nooo …" Frank sounded doubtful. "No, it wasn't his dress that was odd. But when he pushed past me, I could swear he was close enough that I should have felt him brush my sleeve—but I didn't. And I was intrigued enough to turn round and watch him as he walked away. He walked down the Gereside Road, but when he'd almost reached the corner, he… disappeared. That's when I began to feel a bit cold down the backbone." "Perhaps your attention was distracted for a second, and he just stepped aside into the shadows," I suggested. "There are a lot of trees down near that corner." "I could swear I didn't take my eyes off him for a moment," muttered Frank. He looked up suddenly. "I know! I remember now why I thought he was so odd, though I didn't realize it at the time." "What?" I was getting a bit tired of the ghost, and wanted to go on to more interesting matters, such as bed. "The wind was cutting up like billy-o, but his drapes—his kilts and his plaid, you know—they didn't move at all, except to the stir of his walking." We stared at each other. "Well," I said finally, "that is a bit spooky." Frank shrugged and smiled suddenly, dismissing it. "At least I'll have something to tell the Vicar next time I see him. Perhaps it's a well-known local ghost, and he can give me its gory history." He glanced at his watch. "But now I'd say it's bedtime." "So it is," I murmured. I watched him in the mirror as he removed his shirt and reached for a hanger. Suddenly he paused in mid-button. "Did you have many Scots in your charge, Claire?" he asked abruptly. "At the field hospital, or at Pembroke?" "Of course," I replied, somewhat puzzled. "There were quite a few of the Seaforths and Camerons through the field hospital at Amiens, and then a bit later, after Caen, we had a lot of the Gordons. Nice chaps, most of them. Very stoic about things generally, but terrible cowards about injections." I smiled, remembering one in particular. "We had one—rather a crusty old thing really, a piper from the Third Seaforths—who couldn't stand being stuck, especially not in the hip. He'd go for hours in the most awful discomfort before he'd let anyone near him with a needle, and even then he'd try to get us to give him the injection in the arm, though it's meant to be intramuscular." I laughed at the memory of Corporal Chisholm. "He told me, 'If I'm goin' to lie on my face wi' my buttocks bared, I want the lass under me, not behind me wi' a hatpin!'" Frank smiled, but looked a trifle uneasy, as he often did about my less delicate war stories. "Don't worry," I assured him, seeing the look, "I won't tell that one at tea in the Senior Common Room." The smile lightened and he came forward to stand behind me as I sat at the dressing table. He pressed a kiss on the top of my head. "Don't worry," he said. "The Senior Common Room will love you, no matter what stories you tell. Mmmm. Your hair smells wonderful." "Do you like it then?" His hands slid forward over my shoulders in answer, cupping my breasts in the thin nightdress. I could see his head above mine in the mirror, his chin resting on top of my head. "I like everything about you," he said huskily. "You look wonderful by candlelight, you know. Your eyes are like sherry in crystal, and your skin glows like ivory. A candlelight witch, you are. Perhaps I should disconnect the lamps permanently." "Make it hard to read in bed," I said, my heart beginning to speed up. "I could think of better things to do in bed," he murmured. "Could you, indeed?" I said, rising and turning to put my arms about his neck. "Like what?" Sometime later, cuddled close behind bolted shutters, I lifted my head from his shoulder and said, "Why did you ask me that earlier? About whether I'd had to do with any Scots, I mean—you must know I had, there are all sorts of men through those hospitals." He stirred and ran a hand softly down my back. "Mmm. Oh, nothing, really. Just, when I saw that chap outside, it occurred to me he might be"—he hesitated, tightening his hold a bit—"er, you know, that he might have been someone you'd nursed, perhaps… maybe heard you were staying here, and came along to see… something like that." "In that case," I said practically, "why wouldn't he come in and ask to see me?" "Well," Frank's voice was very casual, "maybe he didn't want particularly to run into me." I pushed up onto one elbow, staring at him. We had left one candle burning, and I could see him well enough. He had turned his head, and was looking oh-so-casually off toward the chromolithograph of Bonnie Prince Charlie with which Mrs. Baird had seen fit to decorate our wall. I grabbed his chin and turned his head to face me. He widened his eyes in simulated surprise. "Are you implying," I demanded, "that the man you saw outside was some sort of, of…"I hesitated, looking for the proper word. "Liaison?" he suggested helpfully. "Romantic interest of mine?" I finished. "No, no, certainly not," he said unconvincingly. He took my hands away from his face, and tried to kiss me, but now it was my turn for head-turning. He settled for pressing me back down to lie beside him. "It's only…" he began. "Well, you know, Claire, it was six years. And we saw each other only three times, and only just for the day that last time. It wouldn't be unusual if… I mean, everyone knows doctors and nurses are under tremendous stress during emergencies, and… well, I… it's just that… well, I'd understand, you know, if anything, er, of a spontaneous nature…" I interrupted this rambling by jerking free and exploding out of bed. "Do you think I've been unfaithful to you?" I demanded. "Do you? Because if so, you can leave this room this instant. Leave the house altogether! How dare you imply such a thing?" I was seething, and Frank, sitting up, reached out to try to soothe me. "Don't you touch me!" I snapped. "Just tell me—do you think, on the evidence of a strange man happening to glance up at my window, that I've had some flaming affair with one of my patients?" Frank got out of bed and wrapped his arms around me. I stayed stiff as Lot's wife, but he persisted, caressing my hair and rubbing my shoulders in the way he knew I liked. "No, I don't think any such thing," he said firmly. He pulled me closer, and I relaxed slightly, though not enough to put my arms around him. After a long time, he murmured into my hair, "No, I know you'd never do such a thing. I only meant to say that even if you ever did… Claire, it would make no difference to me. I love you so. Nothing you ever did could stop my loving you." He took my face between his hands—only four inches taller than I, he could look directly into my eyes without trouble—and said softly, "Forgive me?" His breath, barely scented with the tang of Glenfiddich, was warm on my face, and his lips, full and inviting, were disturbingly close. Another flash from outside heralded the sudden breaking of the storm, and a thundering rain smashed down on the slates of the roof. I slowly put my arms around his waist. " 'The quality of mercy is not strained,' " I quoted. " 'It droppeth as the gentle dew from heaven…' " Frank laughed and looked upward; the overlapping stains on the ceiling boded ill for the prospects of our sleeping dry all night. "If that's a sample of your mercy," he said, "I'd hate to see your vengeance." The thunder went off like a mortar attack, as though in answer to his words, and we both laughed, at ease again. It was only later, listening to his regular deep breathing beside me, that I began to wonder. As I had said, there was no evidence whatsoever to imply unfaithfulness on my part. My part. But six years, as he'd said, was a long time. 2 Standing Stones Mr. Crook called for me, as arranged, promptly at seven the next morning. "So as we'll catch the dew on the buttercups, eh, lass?" he said, twinkling with elderly gallantry. He had brought a motorcycle of his own approximate vintage, on which to transport us into the countryside. The plant presses were tidily strapped to the sides of this enormous machine, like bumpers on a tugboat. It was a leisurely ramble through the quiet countryside, made all the more quiet by contrast with the thunderous roar of Mr. Crook's cycle, suddenly throttled into silence. The old man did indeed know a lot about the local plants, I discovered. Not only where they were to be found but their medicinal uses, and how to prepare them. I wished I had brought a notebook to get it all down, but listened intently to the cracked old voice, and did my best to commit the information to memory as I stowed our specimens in the heavy plant presses. We stopped for a packed luncheon near the base of a curious flat-topped hill. Green as most of its neighbors, with the same rocky juts and crags, it had something different: a well-worn path leading up one side and disappearing abruptly behind a granite outcrop. "What's up there?" I asked, gesturing with a ham sandwich. "It seems a difficult place for picnicking." "Ah." Mr. Crook glanced at the hill. "That's Craigh na Dun, lass. I'd meant to show ye after our meal." "Really? Is there something special about it?" "Oh, aye," he answered, but refused to elaborate further, merely saying that I'd see when I saw. I had some fears about his ability to climb such a steep path, but these evaporated as I found myself panting in his wake. At last, Mr. Crook extended a gnarled hand and pulled me up over the rim of the hill. "There 'tis." He waved a hand with a sort of proprietorial gesture. "Why, it's a henge!" I said, delighted. "A miniature henge!" Because of the war, it had been several years since I had last visited Salisbury Plain, but Frank and I had seen Stonehenge soon after we were married. Like the other tourists wandering awed among the huge standing stones, we had gaped at the Altar Stone ('w'ere ancient Druid priests performed their dreadful 'uman sacrifices,' announced the sonorous Cockney tour guide accompanying a busload of Italian tourists, who all dutifully took photographs of the rather ordinary-looking stone block). Out of the same passion for exactness that made Frank adjust his ties on the hanger so that the ends hung precisely even, we had even trekked around the circumference of the circle, pacing off the distance between the Z holes and the Y holes, and counting the lintels in the Sarsen Circle, the outermost ring of monstrous uprights. Three hours later, we knew how many Y and Z holes there were (fifty-nine, if you care; I didn't), but had no more clue to the purpose of the structure than had the dozens of amateur and professional archaeologists who had crawled over the site for the last five hundred years. No lack of opinions, of course. Life among academics had taught me that a well-expressed opinion is usually better than a badly expressed fact, so far as professional advancement goes. A temple. A burial ground. An astronomical observatory. A place of execution (hence the inaptly named "Slaughter Stone" that lies to one side, half sunk in its own pit). An open-air market. I liked this last suggestion, visualizing Megalithic housewives strolling between the lintels, baskets on their arms, critically judging the glaze on the latest shipment of red-clay beakers and listening skeptically to the claims of stone-age bakers and vendors of deer-bone shovels and amber beads. The only thing I could see against that hypothesis was the presence of bodies under the Altar Stone and cremated remains in the Z holes. Unless these were the hapless remains of merchants accused of short-weighting the customers, it seemed a bit unsanitary to be burying people in the marketplace. There were no signs of burial in the miniature henge atop the hill. By "miniature," I mean only that the circle of standing stones was smaller than Stonehenge; each stone was still twice my own height, and massive in proportion. I had heard from another tour-guide at Stonehenge that these stone circles occur all over Britain and Europe—some in better repair than others, some differing slightly in orientation or form, all of purpose and origin unknown. Mr. Crook stood smiling benignly as I prowled among the stones, pausing now and then to touch one gently, as though my touch could make an impression on the monumental boulders. Some of the standing stones were brindled, striped with dim colors. Others were speckled with flakes of mica that caught the morning sun with a cheerful shimmer. All of them were remarkably different from the clumps of native stone that thrust out of the bracken all around. Whoever built the stone circles, and for whatever purpose, thought it important enough to have quarried, shaped, and transported special stone blocks for the erection of their testimonial. Shaped—how? Transported—how, and from what unimaginable distance? "My husband would be fascinated," I told Mr. Crook, stopping to thank him for showing me the place and the plants. "I'll bring him up to see it later." The gnarled old man gallantly offered me an arm at the top of the trail. I took it, deciding after one look down the precipitous decline that in spite of his age, he was likely steadier on his pins than I was. I swung down the road that afternoon toward the village, to fetch Frank from the vicarage. I happily breathed in that heady Highland mix of heather, sage, and broom, spiced here and there with chimney smoke and the tang of fried herring, as I passed the scattered cottages. The village lay nestled in a small declivity at the foot of one of those soaring crags that rise so steeply from the Highland moors. Those cottages near the road were nice. The bloom of postwar prosperity had spread as far as a new coat of paint, and even the manse, which must be at least a hundred years old, sported bright yellow trim around its sagging windowframes. The vicar's housekeeper answered the door, a tall, stringy woman with three strands of artificial pearls round her neck. Hearing who I was, she welcomed me in and towed me down a long, narrow, dark hallway, lined with sepia engravings of people who may have been famous personages of their time,or cherished relatives of the present vicar, but might as well have been the Royal Family, for all I could see of their features in the gloom. By contrast, the vicar's study was bunding with light from the enormous windows that ran nearly from ceiling to floor in one wall. An easel near the fireplace, bearing a half-finished oil of black cliffs against the evening sky, showed the reason for the windows, which must have been added long after the house was built. Frank and a short, tubby man with a clerical dog-collar were cozily poring over a mass of tattered paper on the desk by the far wall. Frank barely looked up in greeting, but the vicar politely left off his explanations and hurried over to clasp my hand, his round face beaming with sociable delight. "Mrs. Randall!" he said, pumping my hand heartily. "How nice to see you again. And you've come just in time to hear the news!" "News?" Casting an eye on the grubbiness and typeface of the papers on the desk, I calculated the date of the news in question as being likely around 1750. Not precisely stop-the-presses, then. "Yes, indeed. We've been tracing your husband's ancestor, Jack Randall, through the army dispatches of the period." The vicar leaned close, speaking out of the side of his mouth like a gangster in an American film. "I've, er, 'borrowed' the original dispatches from the local Historical Society files. You'll be careful not to tell anyone?" Amused, I agreed that I would not reveal his deadly secret, and looked about for a comfortable chair in which to receive the latest revelations from the eighteenth century. The wing chair nearest the windows looked suitable, but as I reached to turn it toward the desk, I discovered that it was already occupied. The inhabitant, a small boy with a shock of glossy black hair, was curled up in the depths of the chair, sound asleep. "Roger!" The vicar, coming to assist me, was as surprised as I. The boy, startled out of sleep, shot bolt upright, wide eyes the color of moss. "Now what are you up to in here, you young scamp?" The vicar was scolding affectionately. "Oh, fell asleep reading the comic papers again?" He scooped up the brightly colored pages and handed them to the lad. "Run along now, Roger, I have business with the Randalls. Oh, wait, I've forgotten to introduce you—Mrs. Randall, this is my son, Roger." I was a bit surprised. If ever I'd seen a confirmed bachelor, I would have thought the Reverend Wakefield was it. Still, I took the politely proffered paw and shook it warmly, resisting the urge to wipe a certain residual stickiness on my skirt. The Reverend Wakefield looked fondly after the boy as he trooped off toward the kitchen. "My niece's son, really," he confided. "Father shot down over the Channel, and mother killed in the Blitz, though, so I've taken him." "How kind of you," I murmured, thinking of Uncle Lamb. He, too, had died in the Blitz, killed by a hit to the auditorium of the British Museum, where he had been lecturing. Knowing him, I thought his main feeling would have been gratification that the wing of Persian antiquities next door had escaped. "Not at all, not at all." The vicar flapped a hand in embarrassment. "Nice to have a bit of young life about the house. Now, do have a seat." Frank began talking even before I had set my handbag down. "The most amazing luck, Claire," he enthused, thumbing through the dog-eared pile. "The vicar's located a whole series of military dispatches that mention Jonathan Randall." "Well, a good deal of the prominence seems to have been Captain Randall's own doing," the vicar observed, taking some of the papers from Frank. "He was in command of the garrison at Fort William for four years or so, but he seems to have spent quite a bit of his time harassing the Scottish countryside above the Border on behalf of the Crown. This lot"—he gingerly separated a stack of papers and laid them on the desk—"is reports of complaints lodged against the Captain by various families and estate holders, claiming everything from interference with their maidservants by the soldiers of the garrison to outright theft of horses, not to mention assorted instances of 'insult,' unspecified." I was amused. "So you have the proverbial horse thief in your family tree?" I said to Frank. He shrugged, unperturbed. "He was what he was, and nothing I can do about it. I only want to find out. The complaints aren't all that odd, for that particular time period; the English in general, and the army in particular, were rather notably unpopular throughout the Highlands. No, what's odd is that nothing ever seems to have come of the complaints, even the serious ones." The vicar, unable to keep still for long, broke in. "That's right. Not that officers then were held to anything like modern standards; they could do very much as they liked in minor matters. But this is odd. It's not that the complaints are investigated and dismissed; they're just never mentioned again. You know what I suspect, Randall? Your ancestor must have had a patron. Someone who could protect him from the censure of his superiors." Frank scratched his head, squinting at the dispatches. "You could be right. Had to have been someone quite powerful, though. High up in the army hierarchy, perhaps, or maybe a member of the nobility." "Yes, or possibly—" The vicar was interrupted in his theories by the entrance of the housekeeper, Mrs. Graham. "I've brought ye a wee bit of refreshment, gentlemen," she announced, setting the tea tray firmly in the center of the desk, from which the vicar rescued his precious dispatches in the nick of time. She looked me over with a shrewd eye, assessing the twitching limbs and faint glaze over the eyeballs. "I've brought but the two cups, for I thought perhaps Mrs. Randall would care to join me in the kitchen. I've a bit of—" I didn't wait for the conclusion of her invitation, but leapt to my feet with alacrity. I could hear the theories breaking out again behind me as we pushed through the swinging door that led to the manse's kitchen. The tea was green, hot and fragrant, with bits of leaf swirling through the liquid. "Mmm," I said, setting the cup down. "It's been a long time since I tasted oolong." Mrs. Graham nodded, beaming at my pleasure in her refreshments. She had clearly gone to some trouble, laying out handmade lace mats beneath the eggshell cups and providing thick clotted cream with the scones. "Aye, I couldna get it during the War, ye know. It's the best for the readings, though. Had a terrible time with that Earl Grey. The leaves fall apart so fast, it's hard to tell anything at all." "Oh, you read tea leaves?" I asked, mildly amused. Nothing could be farther from the popular conception of the gypsy fortune-teller than Mrs. Graham, with her short, iron-grey perm and triple-stranded pearl choker. A swallow of tea ran visibly down the long, stringy neck and disappeared beneath the gleaming beads. "Why, certainly I do, my dear. Just as my grandmother taught me, and her grandmother before her. Drink up your cup, and I'll see what you have there." She was silent for a long time, once in a while tilting the cup to catch the light, or rolling it slowly between lean palms to get a different angle. She set the cup down carefully, as though afraid it might blow up in her face. The grooves on either side of her mouth had deepened, and her brows pressed together in what looked like puzzlement. "Well," she said finally. "That's one of the stranger ones I've seen." "Oh?" I was still amused, but beginning to be curious. "Am I going to meet a tall dark stranger, or journey across the sea?" "Could be." Mrs. Graham had caught my ironic tone, and echoed it, smiling slightly. "And could not. That's what's odd about your cup, my dear. Everything in it's contradictory. There's the curved leaf for a journey, but it's crossed by the broken one that means staying put. And strangers there are, to be sure, several of them. And one of them's your husband, if I read the leaves aright." My amusement dissipated somewhat. After six years apart, and six months together, my husband was still something of a stranger. Though I failed to see how a tea leaf could know it. Mrs. Graham's brow was still furrowed. "Let me see your hand, child," she said. The hand holding mine was bony, but surprisingly warm. A scent of lavender water emanated from the neat part of the grizzled head bent over my palm. She stared into my hand for quite a long time, now and then tracing one of the lines with a finger, as though following a map whose roads all petered out in sandy washes and deserted wastes. "Well, what is it?" I asked, trying to maintain a light air. "Or is my fate too horrible to be revealed?" Mrs. Graham raised quizzical eyes and looked thoughtfully at my face, but retained her hold on my hand. She shook her head, pursing her lips. "Oh, no, my dear. It's not your fate is in your hand. Only the seed of it." The birdlike head cocked to one side, considering. "The lines in your hand change, ye know. At another point in your life, they may be quite different than they are now." "I didn't know that. I thought you were born with them, and that was that." I was repressing an urge to jerk my hand away. "What's the point of palm reading, then?" I didn't wish to sound rude, but I found this scrutiny a bit unsettling, especially following on the heels of that tea-leaf reading. Mrs. Graham smiled unexpectedly, and folded my fingers closed over my palm. "Why, the lines of your palm show what ye are, dear. That's why they change—or should. They don't, in some people; those unlucky enough never to change in themselves, but there are few like that." She gave my folded hand a squeeze and patted it. "I doubt that you're one of those. Your hand shows quite a lot of change already, for one so young. That would likely be the War, of course," she said, as though to herself. I was curious again, and opened my palm voluntarily. "What am I, then, according to my hand?" Mrs. Graham frowned, but did not pick up my hand again. "I canna just say. It's odd, for most hands have a likeness to them. Mind, I'd no just say that it's 'see one, you've seen them all,' but it's often like that—there are patterns, you know." She smiled suddenly, an oddly engaging grin, displaying very white and patently false teeth. "That's how a fortune-teller works, you know. I do it for the church fete every year—or did, before the War; suppose I'll do it again now. But a girl comes into the tent—and there am I, done up in a turban with a peacock feather borrowed from Mr. Donaldson, and 'robes of oriental splendor'—that's the vicar's dressing gown, all over peacocks it is and yellow as the sun—anyway, I look her over while I pretend to be watching her hand, and I see she's got her blouse cut down to her breakfast, cheap scent, and earrings down to her shoulders. I needn't have a crystal ball to be tellin' her she'll have a child before the next year's fete." Mrs. Graham, paused, grey eyes alight with mischief. "Though if the hand you're holding is bare, it's tactful to predict first that she'll marry soon." I laughed, and so did she. "So you don't look at their hands at all, then?" I asked. "Except to check for rings?" She looked surprised. "Oh, of course you do. It's just that you know ahead of time what you'll see. Generally." She nodded at my open hand. "But that is not a pattern I've seen before. The large thumb, now"—she did lean forward then and touch it lightly—"that wouldn't change much. Means you're strong-minded, and have a will not easily crossed." She twinkled at me. "Reckon your husband could have told ye that. Likewise about that one." She pointed to the fleshy mound at the base of the thumb. "What is it?" "The Mount of Venus, it's called." She pursed her thin lips primly together, though the corners turned irrepressibly up. "In a man, ye'd say it means he likes the lasses. For a woman, 'tis a bit different. To be polite about it, I'll make a bit of a prediction for you, and say your husband isna like to stray far from your bed." She gave a surprisingly deep and bawdy chuckle, and I blushed slightly. The elderly housekeeper pored over my hand again, stabbing a pointed forefinger here and there to mark her words. "Now, there, a well-marked lifeline; you're in good health, and likely to stay so. The lifeline's interrupted, meaning your life's changed markedly—well, that's true of us all, is it not? But yours is more chopped-up, like, than I usually see; all bits and pieces. And your marriage-line, now"—she shook her head again—"it's divided; that's not unusual, means two marriages…" My reaction was slight, and immediately suppressed, but she caught the flicker and looked up at once. I thought she probably was quite a shrewd fortune-teller, at that. The grey head shook reassuringly at me. "No, no, lass. It doesna mean anything's like to happen to your good man. It's only that if it did," she emphasized the "if" with a slight squeeze of my hand, "you'd not be one to pine away and waste the rest of your life in mourning. What it means is, you're one of those can love again if your first love's lost." She squinted nearsightedly at my palm, running a short, ridged nail gently down the deep marriage line. "But most divided lines are broken—yours is forked." She looked up with a roguish smile. "Sure you're not a bigamist, on the quiet, like?" I shook my head, laughing. "No. When would I have the time?" Then I turned my hand, showing the outer edge. "I've heard that small marks on the side of the hand indicate how many children you'll have?" My tone was casual, I hoped. The edge of my palm was disappointingly smooth. Mrs. Graham flicked a scornful hand at this idea. "Pah! After ye've had a bairn or two, ye might show lines there. More like you'd have them on your face. Proves nothing at all beforehand." "Oh, it doesn't?" I was foolishly relieved to hear this. I was going to ask whether the deep lines across the base of my wrist meant anything (a potential for suicide?), but we were interrupted at that point by the Reverend Wakefield coming into the kitchen bearing the empty tea cups. He set them on the drainboard and began a loud and clumsy fumbling through the cupboard, obviously in hopes of provoking help. Mrs. Graham sprang to her feet to defend the sanctity of her kitchen, and pushing the Reverend adroitly to one side, set about assembling tea things on a tray for the study. He drew me to one side, safely out of the way. "Why don't you come to the study and have another cup of tea with me and your husband, Mrs. Randall? We've made really a most gratifying discovery." I could see that in spite of outward composure, he was bursting with the glee of whatever they had found, like a small boy with a toad in his pocket. Plainly I was going to have to go and read Captain Jonathan Randall's laundry bill, his receipt for boot repairs, or some document of similar fascination. Frank was so absorbed in the tattered documents that he scarcely looked up when I entered the study. He reluctantly surrendered them to the vicar's podgy hands, and came round to stand behind the Reverend Wakefield and peer over his shoulder, as though he could not bear to let the papers out of his sight for a moment. "Yes?" I said politely, fingering the dirty bits of paper. "Ummm, yes, very interesting." In fact, the spidery handwriting was so faded and so ornate that it hardly seemed worth the trouble of deciphering it. One sheet, better preserved than the rest, had some sort of crest at the top. "The Duke of… Sandringham, is it?" I asked, peering at the crest, with its faded leopard couchant, and the printing below, more legible than the handwriting. "Yes, indeed," the vicar said, beaming even more. "An extinct title, now, you know." I didn't, but nodded intelligently, being no stranger to historians in the manic grip of discovery. It was seldom necessary to do more than nod periodically, saying "Oh, really?" or "How perfectly fascinating!" at appropriate intervals. After a certain amount of deferring back and forth between Frank and the vicar, the latter won the honor of telling me about their discovery. Evidently, all this rubbish made it appear that Frank's ancestor, the notorious Black Jack Randall, had not been merely a gallant soldier for the Crown, but a trusted—and secret—agent of the Duke of Sandringham. "Almost an agent provocateur, wouldn't you say, Dr. Randall?" The vicar graciously handed the ball back to Frank, who seized it and ran. "Yes, indeed. The language is very guarded, of course…" He turned the pages gently with a scrubbed forefinger. "Oh, really?" I said. "But it seems from this that Jonathan Randall was entrusted with the job of stirring up Jacobite sentiments, if any existed, among the prominent Scottish families in his area. The point being to smoke out any baronets and clan chieftains who might be harboring secret sympathies in that direction. But that's odd. Wasn't Sandringham a suspected Jacobite himself?" Frank turned to the vicar, a frown of inquiry on his face. The vicar's smooth, bald head creased in an identical frown. "Why, yes, I believe you're right. But wait, let's check in Cameron"—he made a dive for the bookshelf, crammed with calf-bound volumes—"he's sure to mention Sandringham." "How perfectly fascinating," I murmured, allowing my attention to wander to the huge corkboard that covered one wall of the study from floor to ceiling. It was covered with an amazing assortment of things; mostly papers of one sort or another, gas bills, correspondence, notices from the Diocesan Council, loose pages of novels, notes in the vicar's own hand, but also small items like keys, bottle caps, and what appeared to be small car parts, attached with tacks and string. I browsed idly through the miscellanea, keeping half an ear tuned to the argument going on behind me. (The Duke of Sandringham probably was a Jacobite, they decided.) My attention was caught by a genealogical chart, tacked up with special care in a spot by itself, using four tacks, one to a corner. The top of the chart included names dated in the early seventeenth century. But it was the name at the bottom of the chart that had caught my eye: "Roger W. (MacKenzie) Wakefield," it read. "Excuse me," I said, interrupting a final sputter of dispute as to whether the leopard in the Duke's crest had a lily in its paw, or was it meant to be a crocus? "Is this your son's chart?" "Eh? Oh, why, yes, yes it is." Distracted, the vicar hurried over, beaming once more. He detached the chart tenderly from the wall and laid it on the table in front of me. "I didn't want him to forget his own family, you see," he explained. "It's quite an old lineage, back to the sixteen hundreds." His stubby forefinger traced the line of descent almost reverently. "I gave him my own name because it seemed more suitable, as he lives here, but I didn't want him to forget where he came from." He made an apologetic grimace. "I'm afraid my own family is nothing to boast of, genealogically. Vicars and curates, with the occasional bookseller thrown in for variety, and only traceable back to 1762 or so. Rather poor record-keeping, you know," he said, wagging his head remorsefully over the lethargy of his ancestors. It was growing late by the time we finally left the vicarage, with the vicar promising to take the letters to town for copying first thing in the morning. Frank babbled happily of spies and Jacobites most of the way back to Mrs. Baird's. Finally, though, he noticed my quietness. What is it, love?" he asked, taking my arm solicitously. "Not feeling well?" This was asked with a mingled tone of concern and hope. "No, I'm quite well. I was only thinking…"I hesitated, because we had discussed this matter before. "I was thinking about Roger." "Roger?" I gave a sigh of impatience. "Really, Frank! You can be so… oblivious! Roger, the Reverend Wakefield's son." "Oh. Yes, of course," he said vaguely. "Charming child. What about him?" "Well… only that there are a lot of children like that. Orphaned, you know." He gave me a sharp look, and shook his head. "No, Claire. Really, I'd like to, but I've told you how I feel about adoption. It's just… I couldn't feel properly toward a child that's not… well, not of my blood. No doubt that's ridiculous and selfish of me, but there it is. Maybe I'll change my mind in time, but now…" We walked a few steps in a barbed silence. Suddenly he stopped and turned to me, gripping my hands. "Claire," he said huskily, "I want our child. You're the most important thing in the world to me. I want you to be happy, above all else, but I want… well, I want to keep you to myself. I'm afraid a child from outside, one we had no real relationship with, would seem an intruder, and I'd resent it. But to be able to give you a child, see it grow in you, see it born… then I'd feel as though it were more an… extension of you, perhaps. And me. A real part of the family." His eyes were wide, pleading. "Yes, all right. I understand." I was willing to abandon the topic—for now. I turned to go on walking, but he reached out and took me in his arms. "Claire. I love you." The tenderness in his voice was overwhelming, and I leaned my head against his jacket, feeling his warmth and the strength of his arms around me. "I love you too." We stood locked together for a moment, swaying slightly in the wind that swept down the road. Suddenly Frank drew back a bit, smiling down at me. "Besides," he said softly, smoothing the wind-blown hair back from my face, "we haven't given up yet, have we?" I smiled back. "No." He took my hand, tucking it snugly beneath his elbow, and we turned toward our lodgings. "Game for another try?" "Yes. Why not?" We strolled, hand in hand, back toward the Gereside Road. It was the sight of the Baragh Mhor, die Pictish stone that stands at the corner of the road there, that made me remember things ancient. "I forgot!" I exclaimed. "I have something exciting to show you." Frank looked down at me and pulled me closer. He squeezed my hand. "So have I," he said, grinning. "You can show me yours tomorrow." When tomorrow came, though, we had other things to do. I had forgotten that we had planned a day trip to the Great Glen of Loch Ness. It was a long drive through the Glen, and we left early in the morning, before sunup. After the hurry to the waiting car through the freezing dawn, it was cozy to relax under the rug and feel the warmth stealing back into my hands and feet. Along with it came a most delicious drowsiness, and I fell blissfully asleep against Frank's shoulder, my last conscious sight the driver's head in red-rimmed silhouette against the dawning sky. It was after nine when we arrived, and the guide Frank had called for was awaiting us on the edge of the loch with a small sailing skiff. "An' it suits ye, sir, I thought we'd take a wee sail down the loch-side to Urquhart Castle. Perhaps we'll sup a bit there, before goin' on." The guide, a dour-looking little man in weather-beaten cotton shirt and twill trousers, stowed the picnic hamper tidily beneath the seat, and offered me a callused hand down into the well of the boat. It was a beautiful day, with the burgeoning greenery of the steep banks blurring in the ruffled surface of the loch. Our guide, despite his dour appearance, was knowledgeable and talkative, pointing out the islands, castles, and ruins that rimmed the long, narrow loch. "Yonder, that's Urquhart Castle." He pointed to a smooth-faced wall of stone, barely visible through the trees. "Or what's left of it. 'Twas cursed by the witches of the Glen, and saw one unhappiness after another." He told us the story of Mary Grant, daughter of the laird of Urquhart Castle, and her lover, Donald Donn, poet son of MacDonald of Bohuntin. Forbidden to meet because of her father's objection to the latter's habits of "lifting" any cattle he came across (an old and honorable Highland profession, the guide assured us), they met anyway. The father got wind of it, Donald was lured to a false rendezvous and thus taken. Condemned to die, he begged to be beheaded like a gentleman, rather than hanged as a felon. This request was granted, and the young man led to the block, repeating "The Devil will take the Laird of Grant out of his shoes, and Donald Donn shall not be hanged." He wasn't, and legend reports' that as his severed head rolled from the block, it spoke, saying, "Mary, lift ye my head." I shuddered, and Frank put an arm around me. "There's a bit of one of his poems left," he said quietly. "Donald Donn's. It goes: "Tomorrow I shall be on a bill, without a head. Have you no compassion for my sorrowful maiden, My Mary, the fair and tender-eyed?" I took his hand and squeezed it lightly. As story after story of treachery, murder, and violence were recounted, it seemed as though the loch had earned its sinister reputation. "What about the monster?" I asked, peering over the side into the murky depths. It seemed entirely appropriate to such a setting. Our guide shrugged and spat into the water. "Weel, the loch's queer, and no mistake. There's stories, to be sure, of something old and evil that once lived in the depths. Sacrifices were made to it—kine, and sometimes even wee bairns, flung into the water in withy baskets." He spat again. "And some say the loch's bottomless—got a hole in the center deeper than anything else in Scotland. On the other hand"—the guide's crinkled eyes crinkled a bit more—" 'twas a family here from Lancashire a few years ago, cam' rushin' to the police station in Invermoriston, screamin' as they'd seen the monster come out o' the water and hide in the bracken. Said 'twas a terrible creature, covered wi' red hair and fearsome horns, and chewin' something, wi' the blood all dripping from its mouth " He held up a hand, stemming my horrified exclamation "The constable they sent to see cam' back and said, weel, bar the drippin' blood, 'twas a verra accurate description"—he paused for effect—"of a nice Highland cow, chewin' her cud in the bracken!" We sailed down half the length of the loch before disembarking for a late lunch. We met the car there and motored back through the Glen, observing nothing more sinister than a red fox in the road, who looked up startled, a small animal of some sort hanging limp in its jaws, as we zoomed around a curve. He leapt for the side of the road and swarmed up the bank, swift as a shadow. It was very late indeed when we finally staggered up the path to Mrs. Baird's, but we clung together on the doorstep as Frank groped for the key, still laughing over the events of the day. It wasn't until we were undressing for bed that I remembered to mention the miniature henge on Craigh na Dun to Frank. His fatigue vanished at once. "Really? And you know where it is? How marvelous, Claire!" He beamed and began rattling through his suitcase. "What are you looking for?" "The alarm clock," he replied, hauling it out. "Whatever for?" I asked in astonishment. "I want to be up in time to see them." "Who?" "The witches." "Witches? Who told you there are witches?" "The vicar," Frank answered, clearly enjoying the joke. "His housekeeper's one of them." I thought of the dignified Mrs. Graham and snorted derisively. "Don't be ridiculous!" "Well, not witches, actually. There have been witches all over Scotland for hundreds of years—they burnt them 'til well into the eighteenth century—but this lot is really meant to be Druids, or something of the sort. I don't suppose it's actually a coven—not devil-worship, I don't mean. But the vicar said there was a local group that still observes rituals on the old sun-feast days. He can't afford to take too much interest in such goings-on, you see, because of his position, but he's much too curious a man to ignore it altogether, either. He didn't know where the ceremonies took place, but if there's a stone circle nearby, that must be it." He rubbed his hands together in anticipation. "What luck!" Getting up once in the dark to go adventuring is a lark. Twice in two days smacks of masochism. No nice warm car with rugs and thermoses this time, either. I stumbled sleepily up the hill behind Frank, tripping over roots and stubbing my toes on stones. It was cold and misty, and I dug my hands deeper into the pockets of my cardigan. One final push up over the crest of the hill, and the henge was before us, the stones barely visible in the somber light of predawn. Frank stood stock-still, admiring them, while I subsided onto a convenient rock, panting. "Beautiful," he murmured. He crept silently to the outer edge of the ring, his shadowy figure disappearing among the larger shadows of the stones. Beautiful they were, and bloody eerie too. I shivered, and not entirely from the cold. If whoever had made them had meant them to impress, they'd known what they were doing. Frank was back in a moment. "No one here yet," he whispered suddenly from behind me, making me jump. "Come on, I've found a place we can watch from." The light was coming up from the east now, just a tinge of paler grey on the horizon, but enough to keep me from stumbling as Frank led me through a gap he had found in some alder bushes near the top of the path. There was a tiny clearing inside the clump of bushes, barely enough for the two of us to stand shoulder to shoulder. The path was clearly visible, though, and so was the interior of the stone circle, no more than twenty feet away. Not for the first time, I wondered just what kind of work Frank had done during the War. He certainly seemed to know a lot about maneuvering soundlessly in the dark. Drowsy as I was, I wanted nothing more than to curl up under a cozy bush and go back to sleep. There wasn't room for that, though, so I continued to stand, peering down the steep path in search of oncoming Druids. I was getting a crick in my back, and my feet ached, but it couldn't take long; the streak of light in the east had turned a pale pink, and I supposed it was less than half an hour 'til dawn. The first one moved almost as silently as Frank. There was only the faintest of rattles as her feet dislodged a pebble near the crest of the hill, and then the neat grey head rose silently into sight. Mrs. Graham. So it was true, then. The vicar's housekeeper was sensibly dressed in tweed skirt and woolly coat, with a white bundle under one arm. She disappeared behind one of the standing stones, quiet as a ghost. They came quite quickly after that, in ones and twos and threes, with subdued giggles and whispers on the path that were quickly shushed as they came into sight of the circle. I recognized a few. Here came Mrs. Buchanan, the village postmistress, blond hair freshly permed and the scent of Evening in Paris wafting strongly from its waves. I suppressed a laugh. So this was a modern-day Druid! There were fifteen in all, and all women, ranging in age from Mrs. Graham's sixty-odd years to a young woman in her early twenties, whom I had seen pushing a pram round the shops two days before. All of them were dressed for rough walking, with bundles beneath their arms. With a minimum of chat, they disappeared behind stones or bushes, emerging empty-handed and bare-armed, completely clad in white. I caught the scent of laundry soap as one brushed by our clump of bushes, and recognized the garments as bedsheets, wrapped about the body and knotted at the shoulder. They assembled outside the ring of stones, in a line from eldest to youngest, and stood in silence, waiting. The light in the east grew stronger. As the sun edged its way above the horizon, the line of women began to move, walking slowly between two of the stones. The leader took them directly to the center of the circle, and led them round and round, still moving slowly, stately as swans in a circular procession. The leader suddenly stopped, raised her arms, and stepped into the center of the circle. Raising her face toward the pair of easternmost stones, she called out in a high voice. Not loud, but clear enough to be heard throughout the circle. The still mist caught the words and made them echo, as though they came from all around, from the stones themselves. Whatever the call was, it was echoed again by the dancers. For dancers they now became. Not touching, but with arms outstretched toward each other, they bobbed and weaved, stillmoving in a circle. Suddenly the circle split in half. Seven of the dancers moved clockwise, still in a circular motion. The others moved in the opposite direction. The two semicircles passed each other at increasing speeds, sometimes forming a complete circle, sometimes a double line. And in the center, the leader stood stock-still, giving again and again that mournful high-pitched call, in a language long since dead. They should have been ridiculous, and perhaps they were. A collection of women in bedsheets, many of them stout and far from agile, parading in circles on top of a hill. But the hair prickled on the back of my neck at the sound of their call. They stopped as one, and turned to face the rising sun, standing in the form of two semicircles, with a path lying clear between the halves of the circle thus formed. As the sun rose above the horizon, its light flooded between the eastern stones, knifed between the halves of the circle, and struck the great split stone on the opposite side of the henge. The dancers stood for a moment, frozen in the shadows to either side of the beam of light. Then Mrs. Graham said something, in the same strange language, but this time in a speaking voice. She pivoted and walked, back straight, iron-grey waves glinting in the sun, along the path of light. Without a word, the dancers fell in step behind her. They passed one by one through the cleft in the main stone and disappeared in silence. We crouched in the alders until the women, now laughing and chatting normally, had retrieved their clothes and set off in a group down the hill, headed for coffee at the vicarage. "Goodness!" I stretched, trying to get the kinks out of my legs and back. "That was quite a sight, wasn't it?" "Wonderful!" enthused Frank. "I wouldn't have missed it for the world." He slipped out of the bush like a snake, leaving me to disentangle myself while he cast about the interior of the circle, nose to the ground like a bloodhound. "Whatever are you looking for?" I asked. I entered the circle with some hesitation, but day was fully come, and the stones, while still impressive, had lost a good deal of the brooding menace of dawn light. "Marks," he replied, crawling about on hands and knees, eyes intent on the short turf. "How did they know where to start and stop?" "Good question. I don't see anything." Casting an eye over the ground, though, I did see an interesting plant growing near the base of one of the tall stones. Myosotis? No, probably not; this had orange centers to the deep blue flowers. Intrigued, I started toward it. Frank, with keener hearing than I, leapt to his feet and seized my arm, hurrying me out of the circle a moment before one of the morning's dancers entered from the other side. It was Miss Grant, the tubby little woman who, suitably enough in view of her figure, ran the sweets and pastries shop in the town's High Street. She peered nearsightedly around, then fumbled in her pocket for her spectacles. Jamming these on her nose, she strolled about the circle, at last pouncing on the lost hair-dip for which she had returned. Having restored it to its place in her thick, glossy locks, she seemed in no hurry to return to business. Instead, she seated herself on a boulder, leaned back against one of the stone giants in comradely fashion and lighted a leisurely cigarette. Frank gave a muted sigh of exasperation beside me. "Well," he said, resigned, "we'd best go. She could sit there all morning, by the looks of her. And I didn't see any obvious markings in any case." "Perhaps we could come back later," I suggested, still curious about the blue-flowered vine. "Yes, all right." But he had plainly lost interest in the circle itself, being now absorbed in the details of the ceremony. He quizzed me relentlessly on the way down the path, urging me to remember as closely as I could the exact wording of the calls, and the timing of the dance. "Norse," he said at last, with satisfaction. "The root words are Ancient Norse, I'm almost sure of it. But the dance," he shook his head, pondering. "No, the dance is very much older. Not that there aren't Viking circle dances," he said, raising his brows censoriously, as though I had suggested there weren't. "But that shifting pattern with the double-line business, that's… hmm, it's like… well, some of the patterns on the Beaker Folk glazeware show a pattern rather like that, but then again… hmm." He dropped into one of his scholarly trances, muttering to himself from time to time. The trance was broken only when he stumbled unexpectedly over an obstacle near the bottom of the hill. He flung his arms out with a startled cry as his feet went out from under him and he rolled untidily down the last few feet of the path, fetching up in a clump of cow parsley. I dashed down the hill after him, but found him already sitting up among the quivering stems by the time I reached the bottom. "Are you all right?" I asked, though I could see that he was. "I think so." He passed a hand dazedly over his brow, smoothing back the dark hair. "What did I trip over?" "This." I held up a sardine tin, discarded by some earlier visitor. "One of the menaces of civilization." "Ah." He took it from me, peered inside, then tossed it over one shoulder. "Pity it's empty. I'm feeling rather hungry after that excursion. Shall we see what Mrs. Baird can provide in the way of a late breakfast?" "We might," I said, smoothing the last strands of hair for him. "And then again, we might make it an early lunch instead." My eyes met his. "Ah," he said again, with a completely different tone. He ran a hand slowly up my arm and up the side of my neck, his thumb gently tickling the lobe of my ear. "So we might." "If you aren't too hungry," I said. The other hand found its way behind my back. Palm spread, it pressed me gently toward him, fingers stroking lower and lower. His mouth opened slightly and he breathed, ever so lightly, down the neck of my dress, his warm breath tickling the tops of my breasts. He laid me carefully back in the grass, the feathery blossoms of the cow parsley seeming to float in the air around his head. He bent forward and kissed me, softly, and kept on kissing me as he unbuttoned my dress, one button at a time, teasing, pausing to reach a hand inside and play with the swelling tips of my breasts. At last he had the dress laid open from neck to waist. "Ah," he said again, in yet another tone. "Like white velvet." He spoke hoarsely, and his hair had fallen forward again, but he made no attempt to brush it back. He sprang the clasp of my brassiere with one accomplished flick of the thumb, and bent to pay a skilled homage to my breasts. Then he drew back, and cupping my breasts with both hands, drew his palms slowly down to meet between the rising mounds, and without stopping, drew them softly outward again, tracing the line of my rib cage clear to the back. Up and again, down and around, until I moaned and turned toward him. He sank his lips onto mine, and pressed me toward him until our hips fitted tightly together. He bent his head to mine, nibbling softly around the rim of my ear. The hand stroking my back slipped lower and lower, stopping suddenly in surprise. It felt again, then Frank raised his head and looked down at me, grinning. "What's all this, then?" he asked, in imitation of a village bobby "Or rather, what's not all this?" "Just being prepared," I said primly. "Nurses are taught to anticipate contingencies." "Really, Claire," he murmured, sliding his hand under my skirt and up my thigh to the soft, unprotected warmth between my legs, "you are the most terrifyingly practical person I have ever known." Frank came up behind me as I sat in the parlor chair that evening, a large book spread out on my lap. "What are you doing?" he asked. His hands rested gently on my shoulders. "Looking for that plant," I answered, sticking a finger between the pages to mind my place. "The one I saw in the stone circle. See…" I flipped the book open. "It could be in the Campanulaceae, or the Gentianaceae, the Polemoniaceae, the Boraginaceae—that's most likely, I think, forget-me-nots—but it could even be a variant of this one, the Anemone patens." I pointed out a full color illustration of a pasqueflower. "I don't think it was a gentian of any kind; the petals weren't really rounded, but—" "Well, why not go back and get it?" he suggested. "Mr. Crook would lend you his old banger, perhaps, or—no, I've a better idea. Borrow Mrs. Baird's car, it's safer. It's a short walk from the road to the foot of the hill." "And then about a thousand yards, straight up," I said. "Why are you so interested in that plant?" I swiveled around to look up at him. The parlor lamp outlined his head with a thin gold line, like a medieval engraving of a saint. "It's not the plant I care about. But if you're going up there anyway, I wish you'd have a quick look around the outside of the stone circle." "All right," I said obligingly. "What for?" "Traces of fire," he said. "In all the things I've been able to read about Beltane, fire is always mentioned in the rituals, yet the women we saw this morning weren't using any. I wondered if perhaps they'd set the Beltane fire the night before, then come back in the morning for the dance. Though historically it's the cow herds who were supposed to set the fire. There wasn't any trace of fire inside the circle," he added "But we left before I thought of checking the outside." "All right," I said again, and yawned. Two early risings in two days were taking their toll. I shut the book and stood up. "Provided I don't have to get up before nine." It was in fact nearly eleven before I reached the stone circle. It was drizzling, and I was soaked through, not having thought to bring a mac. I made a cursory examination of the outside of the circle, but if there had ever been a fire there, someone had taken pains to remove its traces. The plant was easier to find. It was where I remembered it, near the foot of the tallest stone. I took several clippings of the vine and stowed them temporarily in my handkerchief, meaning to deal with them properly when I got back to Mrs. Baird's tiny car, where I had left the heavy plant presses. The tallest stone of the circle was cleft, with a vertical split dividing the two massive pieces. Oddly, the pieces had been drawn apart by some means. Though you could see that the facing surfaces matched, they were separated by a gap of two or three feet. There was a deep humming noise coming from somewhere near at hand. I thought there might be a beehive lodged in some crevice of the rock, and placed a hand on the stone in order to lean into the cleft. The stone screamed. I backed away as fast as I could, moving so quickly that I tripped on the short turf and sat down hard. I stared at the stone, sweating. I had never heard such a sound from anything living. There is no way to describe it, except to say that it was the sort of scream you might expect from a stone. It was horrible. The other stones began to shout. There was a noise of battle, and the cries of dying men and shattered horses. I shook my head violently to clear it, but the noise went on. I stumbled to my feet and staggered toward the edge of the circle. The sounds were all around me, making my teeth ache and my head spin. My vision began to blur. I do not know now whether I went toward the cleft in the main stone, or whether it was accidental, a blind drifting through the fog of noise. Once, traveling at night, I fell asleep in the passenger seat of a moving car, lulled by the noise and motion into an illusion of serene weightlessness. The driver of the car took a bridge too fast and lost control, and I woke from my floating dream straight into the glare of headlights and the sickening sensation of falling at high speed. That abrupt transition is as close as I can come to describing the feeling I experienced, but it falls woefully short. I could say that my field of vision contracted to a single dark spot, then disappeared altogether, leaving not darkness, but a bright void. I could say that I felt as though I were spinning, or as though I were being pulled inside out. All these things are true, yet none of them conveys the sense I had of complete disruption, of being slammed very hard against something that wasn't there. The truth is that nothing moved, nothing changed, nothing whatever appeared to happen and yet I experienced a feeling of elemental terror so great that I lost all sense of who, or what, or where I was. I was in the heart of chaos, and no power of mind or body was of use against it. I cannot really say I lost consciousness, but I was certainly not aware of myself for some time. I "woke," if that's the word, when I stumbled on a rock near the bottom of the hill. I half slid the remaining few feet and fetched up on the thick tufted grass at the foot. I felt sick and dizzy. I crawled toward a stand of oak saplings and leaned against one to steady myself. There was a confused noise of shouting nearby, which reminded me of the sounds I had heard, and felt, in the stone circle. The ring of inhuman violence was lacking, though; this was the normal sound of human conflict, and I turned toward it. 3 The Man in the Wood The men were some distance away when I saw them. Two or three, dressed in kilts, running like the dickens across a small clearing. There was a far-off banging noise that I rather dazedly identified as gunshots. I was quite sure I was still hallucinating when the sound of shots was followed by the appearance of five or six men dressed in red coats and knee breeches, waving muskets. I blinked and stared. I moved my hand before my face and held up two fingers. I saw two fingers, all present and correct. No blurring of vision. I sniffed the air cautiously. The pungent odor of trees in spring and a faint whiff of clover from a clump near my feet. No olfactory delusions. I felt my head. No soreness anywhere. Concussion unlikely then. Pulse a little fast, but steady. The sound of distant yelling changed abruptly. There was a thunder of hooves, and several horses came charging in my direction, kilted Scots atop them, yodeling in Gaelic. I dodged out of the way with an agility that seemed to prove I had not been physically damaged, whatever my mental state. And then it came to me, as one of the redcoats, knocked flat by a fleeing Scot, rose and shook his fist theatrically after the horses. Of course. A film! I shook my head at my own slowness. They were shooting a costume drama of some sort, that was all. One of those Bonnie-Prince-in-the-heather sorts of things, no doubt. Well. Regardless of artistic merit, the film crew wouldn't thank me for introducing a note of historic inauthenticity into their shots. I doubled back into the wood, meaning to make a wide circle around the clearing and come out on the road where I had left the car. The going was more difficult than I had expected, though. The wood was a young one, and dense with underbrush that snagged my clothes. I had to go carefully through the spindly saplings, disentangling my skirts from the brambles as I went. Had he been a snake, I would have stepped on him. He stood so quietly among the saplings as almost to have been one of them, and I did not see him until a hand shot out and gripped me by the arm. Its companion clapped over my mouth as I was dragged backward into the oak grove, thrashing wildly in panic. My captor, whoever he was, seemed not much taller than I, but rather noticeably strong in the forearms. I smelled a faint flowery scent, as of lavender water, and something more spicy, mingled with the sharper reek of male perspiration. As the leaves whipped back into place in the path of our passage, though, I noticed something familiar about the hand and forearm clasped about my waist. I shook my head free of the restraint over my mouth. "Frank!" I burst out. "What in heaven's name are you playing at?" I was torn between relief at finding him here and irritation at the horseplay. Unsettled as I was by my experience among the stones, I was in no mood for rough games. The hands released me, but even as I turned to him, I sensed something wrong. It was not only the unfamiliar cologne, but something more subtle. I stood stock-still, feeling the hair prickle on my neck. "You aren't Frank," I whispered. "I am not," he agreed, surveying me with considerable interest. "Though I've a cousin of that name. I doubt, though, that it's he you have confused me with, madam. We do not resemble one another greatly." Whatever this man's cousin looked like, the man himself might have been Frank's brother. There was the same lithe, spare build and fine-drawn bones; the same chiseled lines of the face; the level brows and wide hazel eyes; and the same dark hair, curved smooth across the brow. But this man's hair was long, tied back from his face with a leather thong. And the gypsy skin showed the deep-baked tan of months, no, years, of exposure to the weather, not the light golden color Frank's had attained during our Scottish holiday. "Just who are you?" I demanded, feeling most uneasy. While Frank had numerous relatives and connections, I thought I knew all the British branch of the family. Certainly, there was no one who looked like this man among them. And surely Frank would have mentioned any near relative living in the Highlands? Not only mentioned him but insisted upon visiting him as well, armed with the usual collection of genealogical charts and notebooks, eager for any tidbits of family history about the famous Black Jack Randall. The stranger raised his brows at my question. "Who am I? I might ask the same question, madam, and with considerably more justification." His eyes raked me slowly from head to toe, traveling with a sort of insolent appreciation over the thin peony-sprigged cotton dress I wore, and lingering with an odd look of amusement on my legs. I did not at all understand the look, but it made me extremely nervous, and I backed up a step or two, until I was brought up sharp by bumping into a tree. The man finally removed his gaze and turned aside. It was as though he had taken a constraining hand off me, and I let out my breath in relief, not realizing until then that I had been holding it. He had turned to pick up his coat, thrown across the lowest branch of an oak sapling. He brushed some scattered leaves from it and began to put it on. I must have gasped, because he looked up again. The coat was a deep scarlet, long-tailed and without lapels, frogged down the front. The buff linings of the turned-back cuffs extended a good six inches up the sleeve, and a small coil of gold braid gleamed from one epaulet. It was a dragoon's coat, an officer's coat. Then it occurred to me—of course, he was an actor, from the company I had seen on the other side of the wood. Though the short sword he proceeded to strap on seemed remarkably more realistic than any prop I had ever seen. I pressed myself against the bark of the tree behind me, and found it reassuringly solid. I crossed my arms protectively in front of me. "Who the bloody hell are you?" I demanded again. The question this time came out in a croak that sounded frightened even to my ears. As though not hearing me, he ignored the question, taking his time in the fastening of the frogs down the front of his coat. Only when he finished did he turn his attention to me once more. He bowed sardonically, hand over his heart. "I am, madam, Jonathan Randall, Esquire, Captain of His Majesty's Eighth Dragoons. At your service, madam." I broke and ran. My breath rasped in my chest as I tore through the screen of oak and alder, ignoring brambles, nettles, stones, fallen logs, everything in my path. I heard a shout behind me, but was much too panicked to determine its direction. I fled blindly, branches scratching my face and arms, ankles turning as I stepped in holes and stumbled on rocks. I had no room in my mind for any form of rational thought; I wanted only to get away from him. A heavy weight struck me hard in the lower back and I pitched forward at full length, landing with a thud that knocked the wind out of me. Rough hands flipped me onto my back, and Captain Jonathan Randall rose to his knees above me. He was breathing heavily and had lost his sword in the chase. He looked disheveled, dirty, and thoroughly annoyed. "What the devil do you mean by running away like that?" he demanded. A thick lock of dark-brown hair had come loose and curved across his brow, making him look even more disconcertingly like Frank. He leaned down and grasped me by the arms. Still gasping for breath, I struggled to get free, but succeeded only in dragging him down on top of me. He lost his balance and collapsed at full length on me, flattening me once more. Surprisingly enough, this seemed to make his annoyance vanish. "Oh, like that, is it?" he said, with a chuckle. "Well, I'd be most willing to oblige you, Chuckie, but it happens you've chosen a rather inopportune moment." His weight pressed my hips to the ground, and a small rock was digging painfully into the small of my back. I squirmed to dislodge it. He ground his hips hard against mine, and his hands pinned my shoulders to the earth. My mouth fell open in outrage. "What do you…" I began, but he ducked his head and kissed me, cutting short my expostulations. His tongue thrust into my mouth and explored me with a bold familiarity, roving and plunging, retreating and lunging again. Then, just as suddenly as he had begun, he pulled back. He patted my cheek. "Quite nice, Chuck. Perhaps later, when I've the leisure to attend to you properly." I had by this time recovered my breath, and I used it. I screamed directly into his earhole, and he jerked as though I had run a hot wire into it. I took advantage of the movement to get my knee up, and jabbed it into his exposed side, sending him sprawling into the leaf mold. I scrambled awkwardly to my feet. He rolled expertly, and came up alongside me. I glanced wildly around, looking for a way out, but we were flush up against the foot of one of those towering granite cliffs that jut so abruptly from the soil of the Scottish Highlands. He had caught me at a point where the rock face broke inward, forming a shallow stony box. He blocked the entrance to the declivity, arms spread and braced between the rock walls, an expression of mingled anger and curiosity on his handsome dark face. "Who were you with?" he demanded. "Frank, whoever he is? I've no man by that name among my company. Or is it some man who lives nearby?" He smiled derisively. "You haven't the smell of dung on your skin, so you haven't been with a cottar. For that matter, you look a bit more expensive than the local farmers could afford." I clenched my fists and set my chin. Whatever this joker had in mind, I was having none of it. "I haven't the faintest idea what you are talking about, and I'll thank you to let me pass at once!" I said, adopting my very best ward-sister's tone. This generally had a good effect on recalcitrant orderlies and young interns, but appeared merely to amuse Captain Randall. I was resolutely repressing the feelings of fear and disorientation that were flapping under my ribs like a panicked flock of hens. He shook his head slowly, examining me once more in detail. "Not just at present, Chuckie. I'm asking myself," he said, conversationally, "just why a whore abroad in her shift would be wearing her shoes? And quite fine ones, at that," he added, glancing at my plain brown loafers. "A what!" I exclaimed. He ignored me completely. His gaze had returned to my face, and he suddenly stepped forward and gripped my chin in his hand. I grabbed his wrist and yanked. "Let go of me!" He had fingers like steel. Disregarding my efforts to free myself, he turned my face from one side to the other, so the fading afternoon light shone on it. "The skin of a lady, I'll swear," he murmured to himself. He leaned forward and sniffed. "And a French scent in your hair." He let go then, and I rubbed my jaw indignantly, as though to erase the touch I still felt on my skin. "The rest might be managed with money from your patron," he mused, "but you've the speech of a lady too." "Thanks so much!" I snapped. "Get out of my way. My husband is expecting me; if I'm not back in ten minutes, he'll come looking for me." "Oh, your husband?" The derisively admiring expression retreated somewhat, but did not disappear completely. "And what is your husband's name, pray? Where is he? And why does he allow his wife to wander alone through deserted woods in a state of undress?" I had been throttling that part of my brain that was beating itself to pieces trying to make sense of the whole afternoon. It now managed to break through long enough to tell me that however absurd I thought its conjectures, giving this man Frank's name, the same as his own, was only likely to lead to further trouble. Disdaining therefore to answer him, I made to push past him. He blocked my passage with a muscular arm, and reached for me with his other hand. There was a sudden whoosh from above, followed immediately by a blur before my eyes and a dull thud. Captain Randall was on the ground at my feet, under a heaving mass that looked like a bundle of old plaid rags. A brown, rocklike fist rose out of the mass and descended with considerable force, meeting decisively with some bony protuberance, by the sound of the resultant crack. The Captain's struggling legs, shiny in tall brown boots, relaxed quite suddenly. I found myself staring into a pair of sharp black eyes. The sinewy hand that had temporarily distracted the Captain's unwelcome attentions was attached like a limpet to my forearm. "And who the hell are you?" I said in astonishment. My rescuer, if I cared to call him that, was some inches shorter than I and sparely built, but the bare arms protruding from the ragged shirt were knotted with muscle and his whole frame gave the impression of being made of some resilient material such as bedsprings. No beauty, either, with a pockmarked skin, low brow, and narrow jaw. "This way " He jerked on my arm, and I, stupefied by the rush of recent events, obediently followed. My new companion pushed his way rapidly through a scrim of alder, made an abrupt turn around a large rock, and suddenly we were on a path. Overgrown with gorse and heather, and zigzagging so that it was never visible for more than six feet ahead, it was still unmistakably a path, leading steeply up toward the crest of a hill. Not until we were picking our way cautiously down the far side of the hill did I gather breath and wit enough to ask where we were going. Receiving no answer from my companion, I repeated "Where on earth are we going?" in a louder tone. To my considerable surprise, he rounded on me, face contorted, and pushed me off the path. As I opened my mouth to protest, he clapped a hand over it and dragged me to the ground, rolling on top of me. Not again! I thought, and was heaving desperately to and fro to free myself when I heard what he had heard, and suddenly lay still. Voices called back and forth, accompanied by trampling and splashing sounds. They were unmistakably English voices. I struggled violently to get my mouth free. I sank my teeth into his hand, and had time only to register the fact that he had been eating pickled herring with his fingers, before something crashed against the back of my skull, and everything went dark. The stone cottage loomed up suddenly through a haze of night mist. The shutters were bolted tight, showing no more than a thread of light. Having no idea how long I had been unconscious, I couldn't tell how far this place was from the hill of Craigh na Dun or the town of Inverness. We were on horseback, myself mounted before my captor, with hands tied to the pommel, but there was no road, so progress was still rather slow. I thought I had not been out for long; I showed no symptoms of concussion or other ill effects from the blow, save a sore patch on the base of my skull. My captor, a man of few words, had responded to my questions, demands and acerbic remarks alike with the all-purpose Scottish noise that can best be rendered phonetically as "Mmmmphm." Had I been in any doubt as to his nationality, that sound alone would have been sufficient to remove it. My eyes had gradually adapted to the dwindling light outside as the horse stumbled through the stones and gorse, so it was a shock to step from near-dark into what seemed a blaze of light inside. As the dazzle receded, I could see that in fact the single room was lit only by a fire, several candlesticks, and a dangerously old-fashioned-looking oil lamp. "What is it ye have there, Murtagh?" The weasel-faced man grabbed me by the arm and urged me blinking into the firelight. "A Sassenach wench, Dougal, by her speech." There were several men in the room, all apparently staring at me, some in curiosity, some with unmistakable leers. My dress had been torn in various spots during the afternoon's activities, and I hastily took stock of the damage. Looking down, I could see the curve of one breast clearly through a rip, and I was sure the assembled men could too. I decided that making an attempt to pull the torn edges together would only draw farther attention to the prospect; instead I chose a face at random and stared boldly at him, in hopes of distracting either the man or myself. "Eh, a bonny one, Sassenach or no," said the man, a fat, greasy-looking sort, seated by the fire. He was holding a chunk of bread and didn't bother to set it down as he rose and came over to me. He pushed my chin up with the back of his hand, shoving the hair out of my face. A few breadcrumbs fell down the neck of my dress. The other men clustered close around, a mass of plaid and whiskers, smelling strongly of sweat and alcohol. It was only then that I saw they were all kilted odd, even for this part of the Highlands. Had I stumbled into the meeting of a clan society, or perhaps a regimental reunion? "C'mere, lass." A large, dark-bearded man remained seated at the table by the window as he beckoned me. By his air of command, he seemed to be the leader of this pack. The men parted reluctantly as Murtagh pulled me forward, apparently respecting his rights as captor. The dark man looked me over carefully, no expression on his face. He was good-looking, I thought, and not unfriendly. There were lines of strain between his brows, though, and it wasn't a face one would willingly cross. "What's your name, lass?" His voice was light for a man of his size, not the deep bass I would have expected from the barrel chest. "Claire… Claire Beauchamp," I said, deciding on the spur of the moment to use my maiden name. If it was ransom they had in mind, I didn't want to help them by giving a name that could lead to Frank. And I wasn't sure I wanted these rough-looking men to know who I was, before I found out who they were. "And just what do you think you're—" The dark man ignored me, establishing a pattern that I was to grow tired of very quickly. "Beauchamp?" The heavy brows lifted and the general company stirred in surprise. "A French name, it is, surely?" He had in fact pronounced the name in correct French, though I had given it the common English pronunciation of "Beecham." "Yes, that's right," I answered, in some surprise. "Where did ye find this lass?" Dougal demanded, swinging round on Murtagh, who was refreshing himself from a leather flask. The swarthy little man shrugged. "At the foot o' Craigh na Dun. She was havin' words with a certain captain of dragoons wi' whom I chanced to be acquent'," he added, with a significant lift of his eyebrows. "There seemed to be some question as to whether the lady was or was not a whore." Dougal looked me over carefully once more, taking in every detail of cotton print dress and walking shoes. "I see. And what was the lady's position in this discussion?" he inquired, with a sarcastic emphasis on the word "lady" that I didn't particularly care for. I noticed that while his Scots was less pronounced than that of the man called Murtagh, his accent was still broad enough that the word was almost, though not quite, "leddy." Murtagh seemed grimly amused; at least one corner of the thin mouth turned up. "She said she wasna. The captain himself appeared to be of two minds on the matter, but inclined to put the question to the test." "We could do the same, come to that." The fat, black-bearded man stepped toward me grinning, hands tugging at his belt. I backed up hastily as far as I could, which was not nearly far enough, given the dimensions of the cottage. "That will do, Rupert." Dougal was still scowling at me, but his voice held the ring of authority, and Rupert stopped his advances, making a comical face of disappointment. "I don't hold wi' rape, and we've not the time for it, anyway." I was pleased to hear this statement of policy, dubious as its moral underpinning might be, but remained a bit nervous in the face of the openly lascivious looks on some of the other faces. I felt absurdly as though I had appeared in public in my undergarments. And while I had no idea who or what these Highland bandits were up to, they seemed bloody dangerous. I bit my tongue, repressing a number of more or less injudicious remarks that were bubbling toward the surface. "What d'ye say, Murtagh?" Dougal demanded of my captor. "She doesna appear to care for Rupert, at least." "That's no proof," objected a short, balding man. "He didna offer her any siller. Ye canna expect any woman to take on something like Rupert without substantial payment—in advance," he added, to the considerable hilarity of his companions. Dougal stilled the racket with an abrupt gesture, though, and jerked his head toward the door. The balding man, still grinning, obediently slid out into the darkness. Murtagh, who had not joined in the laughter, was frowning as he looked me over. He shook his head, making the lank fringe across his forehead sway. "Nay," he said definitely. "I've no idea what she might be—or who—but I'll stake my best shirt she's no a whore." I hoped in that case that his best was not the one he was wearing, which scarcely looked worth the wagering. "Weel, ye'd know, Murtagh, ye've seen enough o' them," jibed Rupert, but was gruffly hushed by Dougal. "We'll puzzle it out later," said Dougal brusquely. "We've a good distance to go tonight, and we mun' do something for Jamie first; he canna ride like that." I shrank back into the shadows near the fireplace, hoping to avoid notice. The man called Murtagh had untied my hands before leading me in here. Perhaps I could slip away while they were busy elsewhere. The men's attention had shifted to a young man crouched on a stool in the corner. He had barely looked up through my appearance and interrogation, but kept his head bent, hand clutching the opposite shoulder, rocking slightly back and forth in pain. Dougal gently pushed the clutching hand away. One of the men pulled back the young man's plaid, revealing a dirt-smeared linen shirt blotched with blood. A small man with a thick mustache came up behind the lad with a single-bladed knife, and holding the shirt at the collar, slit it across the breast and down the sleeve, so that it fell away from the shoulder I gasped, as did several of the men. The shoulder had been wounded; there was a deep, ragged furrow across the top, and blood was running freely down the young man's breast. But more shocking was the shoulder joint itself. A dreadful hump rose on that side, and the arm hung at an impossible angle. Dougal grunted. "Mmph. Out o' joint, poor bugger." The young man looked up for the first time. Though drawn with pain and stubbled with red beard, it was a strong, good-humored face. "Fell wi' my hand out, when the musket ball knocked me off my saddle. I landed with all my weight on the hand, and crunch!, there it went." "Crunch is right." The mustached man, a Scot, and educated, to judge by his accent, was probing the shoulder, making the lad grimace in pain. "The wound's no trouble. The ball went right through, and it's clean—the blood's runnin' free enough." The man picked up a wad of grimy cloth from the table and used it to blot the blood. "I don't know quite what to do about the disjointure, though. We'd need a chirurgeon to put it back in place properly. You canna ride with it that way, can you, Jamie lad?" Musket ball? I thought blankly. Chirurgeon? The young man shook his head, white-faced. "Hurts bad enough sitting still. I couldna manage a horse." He squeezed his eyes shut and set his teeth hard in his lower lip. Murtagh spoke impatiently. "Well, we canna leave him behind noo, can we? The lobsterbacks are no great shakes trackin' in the dark, but they'll find this place sooner or later, shutters or no. And Jamie can hardly pass for an innocent cottar, wi' yon great hole in 'im." "Dinna worrit yourself," Dougal said shortly. "I don't mean to be leaving him behind." The mustached man sighed. "No help for it, then. We'll have to try and force the joint back. Murtagh, you and Rupert hold him; I'll give it a try." I watched in sympathy as he picked up the young man's arm by wrist and elbow and began forcing it upward. The angle was quite wrong; it must be causing agonizing pain. Sweat poured down the young man's face, but he made no sound beyond a soft groan. Suddenly he slumped forward, kept from falling on the floor only by the grip of the men holding him. One unstoppered a leather flask and pressed it to his lips. The reek of the raw spirit reached me where I stood. The young man coughed and gagged, but swallowed nonetheless, dribbling the amber liquid onto the remains of his shirt. "All right for another go, lad?" the bald man asked. "Or maybe Rupert should have a try," he suggested, turning to the squat, black-bearded ruffian. Rupert, so invited, flexed his hands as though about to toss a caber, and picked up the young man's wrist, plainly intending to put the joint back by main force; an operation, it was clear, which was likely to snap the arm like a broomstick. "Don't you dare to do that!" All thought of escape submerged in professional outrage, I started forward, oblivious to the startled looks of the men around me. "What do you mean?" snapped the bald man, clearly irritated by my intrusion. "I mean that you'll break his arm if you do it like that," I snapped back. "Stand out of the way, please." I elbowed Rupert back and took hold of the patient's wrist myself. The patient looked as surprised as the rest, but didn't resist. His skin was very warm, but not feverish, I judged. "You have to get the bone of the upper arm at the proper angle before it will slip back into its joint," I said, grunting as I pulled the wrist up and the elbow in. The young man was sizable; his arm was heavy as lead. "This is the worst part," I warned the patient. I cupped the elbow, ready to whip it upward and in. His mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "It canna hurt much worse than it does. Get on wi' it." Sweat was popping out on my own face by now. Resetting a shoulder joint is hard work at the best of times. Done on a large man who had gone hours since the dislocation, his muscles now swollen and pulling on the joint, the job was taking all the strength I had. The fire was dangerously close; I hoped we wouldn't both topple in, if the joint went back with a jerk. Suddenly the shoulder gave a soft, crunching pop! and the joint was back in place. The patient looked amazed. He put an unbelieving hand up to explore. "It doesna hurt anymore!" A broad grin of delighted relief spread across his face, and the men broke out in exclamations and applause. "It will." I was sweating from the exertion, but smugly pleased with the results. "It will be tender for several days. You mustn't extend the joint at all for two or three days; when you do use it again, go very slowly at first. Stop at once if it begins to hurt, and use warm compresses on it daily." I became aware, in the midst of this advice, that while the patient was listening respectfully, the other men were eyeing me with looks ranging from wonder to outright suspicion. "I'm a nurse, you see," I explained, feeling somehow defensive. Dougal's eyes, and Rupert's as well, dropped to my bosom and fastened there with a sort of horrified fascination. They exchanged glances, then Dougal looked back at my face. "Be that as it may," he said, raising his brows at me. "For a wet nurse, you'd seem to have some skill at healing. Can ye stanch the lad's wound, well enough for him to sit a horse?" "I can dress the wound, yes," I said with considerable asperity. "Provided you've anything to dress it with. But just what do you mean 'wet nurse'? And why do you suppose I'd want to help you, anyway?" I was ignored as Dougal turned and spoke in a tongue I dimly recognized as Gaelic to a woman who cowered in the corner. Surrounded by the mass of men, I had not noticed her before. She was dressed oddly, I thought, in a long, ragged skirt and a long-sleeved blouse half-covered by a sort of bodice or jerkin. Everything was rather on the grubby side, including her face. Glancing around, though, I could see that the cottage lacked not only electrification but also indoor plumbing; perhaps there was some excuse for the dirt. The woman bobbed a quick curtsy, and scuttling past Rupert and Murtagh, she began digging in a painted wooden chest by the hearth, emerging finally with a pile of ratty cloths. "No, that won't do," I said, fingering them gingerly. "The wound needs to be disinfected first, then bandaged with a clean cloth, if there are no sterile bandages." Eyebrows rose all around. "Disinfected?" said the small man, carefully. "Yes, indeed," I said firmly, thinking him a bit simple-minded, in spite of his educated accent. "All dirt must be removed from the wound and it must be treated with a compound to discourage germs and promote healing." "Such as?" "Such as iodine," I said. Seeing no comprehension on the faces before me, I tried again. "Merthiolate? Dilute carbolic?" I suggested. "Or perhaps even just alcohol?" Looks of relief. At last I had found a word they appeared to recognize. Murtagh thrust the leather flask into my hands. I sighed with impatience. I knew the Highlands were primitive, but this was nearly unbelievable. "Look," I said, as patiently as I could. "Why don't you just take him down into the town? It can't be far, and I'm sure there's a doctor there who could see to him." The woman gawped at me. "What town?" The big man called Dougal was ignoring this discussion, peering cautiously into the darkness around the curtain's edge. He let it fall back into place and stepped quietly to the door. The men fell quiet as he vanished into the night. In a moment he was back, bringing the bald man and the cold, sharp scent of dark pines with him. He shook his head in answer to the men's questioning looks. "Nay, nothing close. We'll go at once, while it's safe." Catching sight of me, he stopped for a moment, thinking. Suddenly he nodded at me, decision made. "She'll come with us," he said. He rummaged in the pile of cloths on the table and came up with a tattered rag; it looked like a neckcloth that had seen better days. The mustached man seemed disinclined to have me along, wherever they were going. "Why do ye no just leave her here?" Dougal cast him an impatient glance, but left it to Murtagh to explain. "Wherever the redcoats are now, they'll be here by dawn, which is no so far off, considering. If this woman's an English spy, we canna risk leaving her here to tell them which way we've gone. And if she should not be on good terms wi' them"—he looked dubiously at me—"we certainly canna leave a lone woman here in her shift," He brightened a bit, fingering the fabric of my skirt. "She might be worth a bit in the way of ransom, at that; little as she has on, it's fine stuff." "Besides," Dougal added, interrupting, "she may be useful on the way; she seems to know a bit about doctoring. But we've no time for that now. I'm afraid ye'll have to go without bein' 'disinfected', Jamie," he said, clapping the younger man on the back. "Can ye ride one-handed?" "Aye." "Good lad. Here," he said, tossing the greasy rag at me. "Bind up his wound, quickly. We'll be leaving directly. Do you two get the horses," he said, turning to weasel-face and the fat one called Rupert. I turned the rag around distastefully, "I can't use this," I complained. "It's filthy." Without seeing him move, I found the big man gripping my shoulder, his dark eyes an inch from mine. "Do it," he said. Freeing me with a push, he strode to the door and disappeared after his two henchmen. Feeling more than a little shaken, I turned to the task of bandaging the bullet wound as best I could. The thought of using the grimy neckrag was something my medical training wouldn't let me contemplate. I tried to bury my confusion and terror in the task of trying to find something more suitable, and, after a quick and futile search through the pile of rags, finally settled on strips of rayon torn from the hem of my slip. While hardly sterile, it was by far the cleanest material at hand. The linen of my patient's shirt was old and worn, but still surprisingly tough. With a bit of a struggle, I ripped the rest of the sleeve open and used it to improvise a sling. I stepped back to survey the results of my impromptu field dressing, and backed straight into the big man, who had come in quietly to watch. He looked approvingly at my handiwork. "Good job, lass. Come on, we're ready." Dougal handed a coin to the woman and hustled me out of the cottage, followed more slowly by Jamie, still a bit white-faced. Unfolded from the low stool, my patient proved to be quite tall; he stood several inches over Dougal, himself a tall man. The black-bearded Rupert and Murtagh were holding six horses outside, muttering soft Gaelic endearments to them in the dark. It was a moonless night, but the starlight caught the metal bits of the harness in flashes of quicksilver. I looked up and almost gasped in wonder; the night sky was thick with a glory of stars such as I had never seen. Glancing round at the surrounding forest, I understood. With no nearby city to veil the sky with light, the stars here held undisputed dominion over the night. And then I stopped dead, feeling much colder than the night chill justified. No city lights. "What town?" the woman inside had asked. Accustomed as I was to blackouts and air raids from the war years, the lack of light had not at first disturbed me. But this was peacetime, and the lights of Inverness should have been visible for miles. The men were shapeless masses in the dark. I thought of trying to slip away into the trees, but Dougal, apparently divining my thought, grabbed my elbow and pulled me toward the horses. "Jamie, get yourself up," he called. "The lass will ride wi' you." He squeezed my elbow. "You can hold the reins, if Jamie canna manage one-handed, but do ye take care to keep close wi' the rest of us. Should ye try anythin' else, I shall cut your throat. D'ye understand me?" I nodded, throat too dry to answer. His voice was not particularly threatening, but I believed every word. I was the less tempted to "try anythin'," in that I had no idea what to try. I didn't know where I was, who my companions were, why we were leaving with such urgency, or where we were going, but I lacked any reasonable alternatives to going with them. I was worried about Frank, who must long since have started looking for me, but this didn't seem the time to mention him. Dougal must have sensed my nod, for he let go of my arm and stooped suddenly beside me. I stood stupidly staring down at him until he hissed, "Your foot, lass! Give me your foot! Your left foot," he added disgustedly. I hastily took my misplaced right foot out of his hand and stepped up with my left. With a slight grunt, he boosted me into the saddle in front of Jamie, who gathered me in closely with his good arm. In spite of the general awkwardness of my situation, I was grateful for the young Scot's warmth. He smelt strongly of woodsmoke, blood, and unwashed male, but the night chill bit through my thin dress and I was happy enough to lean back against him. With no more than a faint chinking of bridles, we moved off into the starlit night. There was no conversation among the men, only a general wary watchfulness. The horses broke into a trot as soon as we reached the road, and I was jostled too uncomfortably to want to talk myself, even assuming that anyone was willing to listen. My companion seemed to be having little trouble, in spite of being unable to use his right hand. I could feel his thighs behind mine, shifting and pressing occasionally to guide the horse. I clutched the edge of the short saddle in order to stay seated; I had been on horses before, but was by no means the horseman this Jamie was. After a time, we reached a crossroads, where we stopped a moment while the bald man and the leader conferred in low tones. Jamie dropped the reins over the horse's neck and let it wander to the verge to crop grass, while he began twisting and turning behind me. "Careful!" I said. "Don't twist like that, or your dressing will come off! What are you trying to do?" "Get my plaid loose to cover you," he replied. "You're shivering. But I canna do it one-handed. Can ye reach the clasp of my brooch for me?" With a good deal of tugging and awkward shifting, we got the plaid loosened. With a surprisingly dexterous swirl, he twirled the cloth out and let it settle, shawllike, around his shoulders. He then put the ends over my shoulders and tucked them neatly under the saddle edge, so that we were both warmly wrapped. "There!" he said. "We dinna want ye to freeze before we get there." "Thank you," I said, grateful for the shelter. "But where are we going?" I couldn't see his face, behind and above me, but he paused a moment before answering. At last he laughed shortly. "Tell ye the truth, lassie, I don't know. Reckon we'll both find out when we get there, eh?" Something seemed faintly familiar about the section of countryside through which we were passing. Surely I knew that large rock formation ahead, the one shaped like a rooster's tail? "Cocknammon Rock!" I exclaimed. "Aye, reckon," said my escort, unexcited by this revelation. "Didn't the English use it for ambushes?" I asked, trying to remember the dreary details of local history Frank had spent hours regaling me with over the last week. "If there is an English patrol in the neighborhood…" I hesitated. If there was an English patrol in the neighborhood, perhaps I was wrong to draw attention to it. And yet, in case of an ambush, I would be quite indistinguishable from my companion, shrouded as we were in one plaid. And I thought again of Captain Jonathan Randall, and shuddered involuntarily. Everything I had seen since I had stepped through the cleft stone pointed toward the completely irrational conclusion that the man I had met in the wood was in fact Frank's six-times-great-grandfather. I fought stubbornly against this conclusion, but was unable to formulate another that met the facts. I had at first imagined that I was merely dreaming more vividly than usual, but Randall's kiss, rudely familiar and immediately physical, had dispelled that impression. Neither did I imagine that I had dreamed being knocked on the head by Murtagh; the soreness on my scalp was being matched by a chafing of my inner thighs against the saddle, which seemed most undreamlike. And the blood; yes, I was familiar enough with blood to have dreamed of it before. But never had I dreamed the scent of blood; that warm, coppery tang that I could still smell on the man behind me. "Tck." He clucked to our horse and urged it up alongside the leader's, engaging the burly shadow in quiet Gaelic conversation. The horses slowed to a walk. At a signal from the leader, Jamie, Murtagh, and the small bald man dropped back, while the other two spurred up and galloped toward the rock, a quarter mile ahead to the right. A half-moon had come up, and the light was bright enough to pick out the leaves of the mallow plants growing on the roadside, but the shadows in the clefts of the rock could hide anything. Just as the galloping shapes passed the rock, a flash of musket fire sparked from a hollow. There was a bloodcurdling shriek from directly behind me, and the horse leapt forward as though jabbed with a sharp stick. We were suddenly racing toward the rock across the heather, Murtagh and the other man alongside, hair-raising screams and bellows splitting the night air. I hung on to the pommel for dear life. Suddenly reining up next to a large gorse bush, Jamie grabbed me round the waist and unceremoniously dumped me into it. The horse whirled sharply and sprinted off again, circling the rock to come along the south side. I could see the rider crouching low in the saddle as the horse vanished into the rock's shadow. When it emerged, still galloping, the saddle was empty. The rock surfaces were cratered with shadow; I could hear shouts and occasional musket shots, but couldn't tell if the movements I saw were those of men, or only the shades of the stunted oaks that sprouted from cracks in the rock. I extricated myself from the bush with some difficulty, picking bits of prickly gorse from my skirt and hair. I licked a scratch on my hand, wondering what on earth I was to do now. I could wait for the battle at the rock to be decided. If the Scots won, or at least survived, I supposed they would come back looking for me. If they did not, I could approach the English, who might well assume that if I was traveling with the Scots I was in league with them. In league to do what, I had no idea, but it was quite plain from the men's behavior at the cottage that they were up to something which they expected the English strongly to disapprove of. Perhaps it would be better to avoid both sides in this conflict. After all, now that I knew where I was, I stood some chance of getting back to a town or village that I knew, even if I had to walk all the way. I set off with decision toward the road, tripping over innumerable lumps of granite, the bastard offspring of Cocknammon Rock. The moonlight made walking deceptive; though I could see every detail of the ground, I had no depth perception; flat plants and jagged stones looked the same height, causing me to lift my feet absurdly high over nonexistent obstacles and stub my toes on protruding rocks. I walked as fast as I could, listening for sounds of pursuit behind me. The noises of battle had faded by the time I reached the road. I realized that I was too visible on the road itself, but I needed to follow it, if I was to find my way to a town. I had no sense of direction in the dark, and had never learned from Frank his trick of navigation by the stars. Thinking of Frank made me want to cry, so I tried to distract myself by trying to make sense of the afternoon's events. It seemed inconceivable, but all appearances pointed to my being someplace where the customs and politics of the late eighteenth century still held sway. I would have thought the whole thing a fancy-dress show of some type, had it not been for the injuries of the young man they called Jamie. That wound had indeed been made by something very like a musket ball, judging from the evidence it left behind. The behavior of the men in the cottage was not consistent with any sort of play-acting, either. They were serious men, and the dirks and swords were real. Could it be some secluded enclave, perhaps, where the villagers reenacted part of their history periodically? I had heard of such things in Germany, though never in Scotland. You've never heard of the actors shooting each other with muskets, either, have you? jeered the uncomfortably rational part of my mind. I looked back at the rock to check my position, then ahead to the skyline, and my blood ran cold. There was nothing there but the feathered needles of pine trees, impenetrably black against the spread of stars. Where were the lights of Inverness? If that was Cocknammon Rock behind me, as I knew it was, then Inverness must be less than three miles to the southwest. At this distance, I should be able to see the glow of the town against the sky. If it was there. I shook myself irritably, hugging my elbows against the chill. Even admitting for a moment the completely implausible idea that I was in another time than my own, Inverness had stood in its present location for some six hundred years. It was there. But, apparently, it had no lights. Under the circumstances, this strongly suggested that there were no electric lights to be had. Yet another piece of evidence, if I needed it. But evidence of what, exactly? A shape stepped out of the dark so close in front of me that I nearly bumped into it. Stifling a scream, I turned to run, but a large hand gripped my arm, preventing escape. "Dinna worry, lass. 'Tis me." "That's what I was afraid of," I said crossly, though in fact I was relieved that it was Jamie. I was not so afraid of him as of the other men, though he looked just as dangerous. Still, he was young, even younger than I, I judged. And it was difficult for me to be afraid of someone I had so recently treated as a patient. "I hope you haven't been misusing that shoulder," I said in the rebuking voice of a hospital Matron. If I could establish a sufficient tone of authority, perhaps I could persuade him into letting me go. "Yon wee stramash didna do it any good," he admitted, massaging the shoulder with his free hand. Just then, he moved into a patch of moonlight, and I saw the huge spread of blood on his shirtfront. Arterial bleeding, I thought at once; but then, why is he still standing? "You're hurt!" I exclaimed. "Have you broken open your shoulder wound, or is it fresh? Sit down and let me see" I pushed him toward a pile of boulders, rapidly reviewing procedures for emergency field treatment. No supplies to hand, save what I was wearing. I was reaching for the remains of my slip, intending to use it to stanch the flow, when he laughed. "Nay, pay it no mind, lass. This lot isna my blood. Not much of it, anyway," he added, plucking the soaked fabric gingerly away from his body. I swallowed, feeling a bit queasy. "Oh," I said weakly. "Dougal and the others will be waiting by the road. Let's go " He took me by the arm, less as a gallant gesture than a means of forcing me to accompany him. I decided to take a chance and dug in my heels "No! I'm not going with you!" He stopped, surprised at my resistance. "Yes, you are." He didn't seem upset by my refusal; in fact, he seemed slightly amused that I had any objection to being kidnapped again. "And what if I won't? Are you going to cut my throat?" I demanded, forcing the issue. He considered the alternatives and answered calmly. "Why, no. You don't look heavy. If ye won't walk, I shall pick you up and sling ye over my shoulder. Do ye want me to do that?" He took a step toward me, and I hastily retreated. I hadn't the slightest doubt he would do it, injury or no. "No! You can't do that; you'll damage your shoulder again." His features were indistinct, but the moonlight caught the gleam of teeth as he grinned. "Well then, since ye don't want me to hurt myself, I suppose that means as you're comin' with me?" I struggled for an answer, but failed to find one in time. He took my arm again, firmly, and we set off toward the road. Jamie kept a tight hold on my arm, hauling me upright when I stumbled over rocks and plants. He himself walked as though the stubbled heath were a paved road in broad daylight. He has cat blood, I reflected sourly, no doubt that was how he managed to sneak up on me in the darkness. The other men were, as advertised, waiting with the horses at no great distance; apparently there had been no losses or injuries, for they were all present. Scrambling up in an undignified scuffle, I plopped down in the saddle again. My head gave Jamie's bad shoulder an unintentional thump, and he drew in his breath with a hiss. I tried to cover my resentment at being recaptured and my remorse at having hurt him with an air of bullying officiousness. "Serves you right, brawling round the countryside and chasing through bushes and rocks. I told you not to move that joint; now you've probably got torn muscles as well as bruises." He seemed amused by my scolding. "Well, it wasna much of a choice. If I'd not moved my shoulder, I wouldna have ever moved anything else again. I can handle a single redcoat wi' one hand—maybe even two of them," he said, a bit boastfully, "but not three." "Besides," he said, drawing me against his blood-encrusted shirt, "ye can fix it for me again when we get where we're going." "That's what you think," I said coldly, squirming away from the sticky fabric. He clucked to the horse, and we set off again. The men were in ferocious good spirits after the fight, and there was a good deal of laughter and joking. My minor part in thwarting the ambush was much praised, and toasts were drunk in my honor from the flasks that several of the men carried. I was offered some of the contents, but declined at first on grounds that I found it hard enough to stay in the saddle sober. From the men's discussion, I gathered it had been a small patrol of some ten English soldiers, armed with muskets and sabers. Someone passed a flask to Jamie, and I could smell the hot, burnt-smelling liquor as he drank. I wasn't at all thirsty, but the faint scent of honey reminded me that I was starving, and had been for some time. My stomach gave an embarrassingly loud growl, protesting my neglect. "Hey, then, Jamie-lad! Hungry, are ye? Or have ye a set of bagpipes with ye?" shouted Rupert, mistaking the source of the noise. "Hungry enough to eat a set of pipes, I reckon," called Jamie, gallantly assuming the blame. A moment later, a hand with a flask came around in front of me again. "Better have a wee nip," he whispered to me. "It willna fill your belly, but it will make ye forget you're hungry." And a number of other things as well, I hoped. I tilted the flask and swallowed. My escort had been correct; the whisky built a small, warm fire that burned comfortably in my stomach, obscuring the hunger pangs. We managed without incident for several miles, taking turns with both reins and whisky flask. Near a ruined cottage, though, the breathing of my escort gradually changed to a ragged gasping. Our precarious balance, heretofore contained in a staid wobble, suddenly became much more erratic. I was confused; if I wasn't drunk, it seemed rather unlikely that he was. "Stop! Help!" I yelled. "He's going over!" I remembered my last unrehearsed descent and had no inclination to repeat it. Dark shapes swirled and crowded around us, with a confused muttering of voices. Jamie slid off headfirst like a sack of stones, luckily landing in someone's arms. The rest of the men were off their horses and had him laid in a field by the time I had scrambled down. "He's breathin'," said one. "Well, how very helpful," I snapped, groping frantically for a pulse in the blackness. I found one at last, rapid but fairly strong. Putting a hand on his chest and an ear to his mouth, I could feel a regular rise and fall, with less of that gasping note. I straightened up. "I think he's just fainted," I said. "Put a saddlebag under his feet and if there's water, bring me some." I was surprised to find that my orders were instantly obeyed. Apparently the young man was important to them. He groaned and opened his eyes, black holes in the starlight. In the faint light his face looked like a skull, white skin stretched tight over the angled bones around the orbits. "I'm all right," he said, trying to sit up. "Just a bit dizzy is all." I put a hand on his chest and pushed him flat. "Lie still," I ordered. I carried out a rapid inspection by touch, then rose on my knees and turned to a looming shape that I deduced from its size to be the leader, Dougal. "The gunshot wound has been bleeding again, and the idiot's been knifed as well. I think it's not serious, but he's lost quite a lot of blood. His shirt is soaked through, but I don't know how much of it is his. He needs rest and quiet; we should camp here at least until morning." The shape made a negative motion. "Nay. We're farther than the garrison will venture, but there's still the Watch to be mindful of. We've a good fifteen miles yet to go." The featureless head tilted back, gauging the movement of the stars. "Five hours, at the least, and more likely seven. We can stay long enough for ye to stop the bleeding and dress the wound again; no much more than that." I set to work, muttering to myself, while Dougal, with a soft word, dispatched one of the other shadows to stand guard with the horses by the road. The other men relaxed for the moment, drinking from flasks and chatting in low voices. The ferret-faced Murtagh helped me, tearing strips of linen, fetching more water, and lifting the patient up to have the dressing tied on, Jamie being strictly forbidden to move himself, despite his grumbling that he was perfectly all right. "You are not all right, and it's no wonder," I snapped, venting my fear and irritation. "What sort of idiot gets himself knifed and doesn't even stop to take care of it? Couldn't you tell how badly you were bleeding? You're lucky you're not dead, tearing around the countryside all night, brawling and fighting and throwing yourself off horses… hold still, you bloody fool." The rayon and linen strips I was working with were irritatingly elusive in the dark. They slipped away, eluding my grasp, like fish darting away into the depths with a mocking flash of white bellies. Despite the chill, sweat sprang out on my neck. I finally finished tying one end and reached for another, which persisted in slithering away behind the patient's back. "Comeback here, you… oh, you god-damned bloody bastard!" Jamie had moved and the original end had come untied. There was a moment of shocked silence. "Christ," said the fat man named Rupert. "I've ne'er heard a woman use such language in me life." "Then ye've ne'er met my auntie Grisel," said another voice, to laughter. "Your husband should tan ye, woman," said an austere voice from the blackness under a tree. "St. Paul says 'Let a woman be silent, and—' " "You can mind your own bloody business," I snarled, sweat ripping behind my ears, "and so can St. Paul." I wiped my frehead with my sleeve. "Turn him to the left. And if you," adressing my patient, "move so much as one single muscle wile I'm tying this bandage, I'll throttle you." "Och, aye," he answered meekly. I pulled too hard on the last bandage, and the entire dressing scooted, off. "Goddamn it all to hell!" I bellowed, striking my hand on the ground in frustration. There was a moment of shocked silence, then, as I fumbled in the dark for the loose ends of the bandages, further comment on my unwomanly language. "Perhaps we should send her to Ste. Anne, Dougal," offered one of the blank-faced figures squatting by the road. "I've not heard Jamie swear once since we left the coast, and he used to have a mouth on him would put a sailor to shame. Four months in a monastery must have had some effect. You do not even take the name of the Lord in vain anymore, do ye, lad?" "You wouldna do so either, if you'd been made to do penance for it by lying for three hours at midnight on the stone floor of a chapel in February, wearing nothin' but your shirt," answered my patient. The men all laughed, as he continued. "The penance was only for two hours, but it took another to get myself up off the floor afterward; I thought my… er, I thought I'd frozen to the flags, but it turned out just to be stiffness." Apparently he was feeling better. I smiled, despite myself, but spoke firmly nonetheless. "You be quiet," I said, "or I'll hurt you." He gingerly touched the dressing, and I slapped his hand away. "Oh, threats, is it?" he asked impudently. "And after I shared my drink with ye too!" The flask completed the circle of men. Kneeling down next to me, Dougal tilted it carefully for the patient to drink. The pungent, burnt smell of very raw whisky floated up, and I put a restraining hand on the flask. "No more spirits," I said. "He needs tea, or at worst, water. Not alcohol." Dougal pulled the flask from my hand, completely disregarding me, and poured a sizable slug of the hot-smelling liquid down the throat of my patient, making him cough. Waiting only long enough for the man on the ground to catch his breath, he reapplied the flask. "Stop that!" I reached for the whisky again. "Do you want him so drunk he can't stand up? I was rudely elbowed aside. "Feisty wee bitch, is she no?" said my patient, sounding amused. "Tend to your business, woman," Dougal ordered. "We've a good way to go yet tonight, and he'll need whatever strength the drink can give him." The instant the bandages were tied, the patient tried to up. I pushed him flat and put a knee on his chest to keep him there. "You are not to move," I said fiercely. I grabbed the hem of Dougal's kilt and jerked it roughly, urging him back down on his knees next to me. "Look at that," I ordered, in my best ward-sister voice. plopped the sopping mass of the discarded shirt into his hand. He dropped it with an exclamation of disgust. I took his hand and put it on the patient's shoulder. "And look there. He's had a blade of some kind right through the trapezius muscle." "A bayonet," put in the patient helpfully. "A bayonet!" I exclaimed. "And why didn't you tell me?" He shrugged, and stopped short with a mild grunt of pain. "I felt it go in, but I couldna tell how bad it was; it didna hurt that much." "Is it hurting now?" "It is," he said, shortly. "Good," I said, completely provoked. "You deserve it. Maybe that will teach you to go haring round the countryside kidnapping young women and k-killing people, and…" I felt myself ridiculously close to tears and stopped, fighting for control. Dougal was growing impatient with this conversation. "Well, can ye keep one foot on each side of the horse, man?" "He can't go anywhere!" I protested indignantly. "He ought to be in hospital! Certainly he can't—" My protests, as usual, went completely ignored. "Can ye ride?" Dougal repeated. "Aye, if ye'll take the lassie off my chest and fetch me a clean shirt." 4 I Come to the Castle The rest of the journey passed uneventfully, if you consider it uneventful to ride fifteen miles on horseback through rough country at night, frequently without benefit of roads, in company with kilted men armed to the teeth, and sharing a horse with a wounded man. At least we were not set upon by highwaymen, we encountered no wild beasts, and it didn't rain. By the standards I was becoming used to, it was quite dull. Dawn was coming up in streaks and slashes over the foggy moor. Our destination loomed ahead, a huge bulk of dark stone outlined by the grey light. The surroundings were no longer quiet and deserted. There was a trickle of rudely dressed people, heading toward the castle. They moved to the side of the narrow road to let the horses trot past, gawking at what they plainly thought my outlandish garb. Not surprisingly, it was misting heavily, but there was enough light to show a stone bridge, arching over a small stream that ran past the front of the castle, down to a dully gleaming loch a quarter mile away. The castle itself was blunt and solid. No fanciful turrets or toothed battlements. This was more like an enormous fortified house, with thick stone walls and high, slitted windows. A number of chimney pots smoked over the slick tiles of the roof, adding to the general impression of greyness. The gated entrance of the castle was wide enough to accommodate two wagons side by side. I say this without fear of contradiction, because it was doing exactly that as we crossed the bridge. One ox-drawn wagon was loaded with barrels, the other with hay. Our little cavalcade huddled on the bridge, waiting impatiently for the wagons to complete their laborious entry. I risked a question as the horses picked their way over the slippery stones of the wet courtyard. I hadn't spoken to my escort since hastily re-dressing his shoulder by the roadside. He had been silent, too, aside from an occasional grunt of discomfort when a misstep by the horse jolted him. "Where are we?" I croaked, my voice hoarse from cold and disuse. "The keep of Leoch," he answered shortly. Castle Leoch. Well, at least now I knew where I was. When I had known it, Castle Leoch was a picturesque ruin, some thirty miles north of Bargrennan. It was considerably more picturesque now, what with the pigs rooting under the walls of the keep and the pervasive smell of raw sewage. I was beginning to accept the impossible idea that I was, most likely, somewhere in the eighteenth century. I was sure that such filth and chaos existed nowhere in the Scotland of 1945, bomb craters or no. And we were definitely in Scotland; the accents of the people in the courtyard left no doubt of that. "Ay, Dougal!" shouted a tattered hostler, running up to grab the halter of the lead horse. "You're early, man; we hadna thought to see ye before the Gathering!" The leader of our little group swung down from the saddle, leaving the reins to the grubby youth. "Aye, well, we've had some luck, both good and bad. I'm off to see my brother. Will ye summon Mrs. Fitz to feed the lads? They'll need their breakfasts and their beds." He beckoned Murtagh and Rupert down to accompany him, and together they disappeared under a pointed archway. The rest of us dismounted and stood steaming in the wet courtyard for another ten minutes before Mrs. Fitz, whoever she might be, consented to show herself. A cluster of curious children gathered around us, speculating on my possible origins and function. The bolder ones had just begun to get up enough courage to pluck at my skirt when a large, stout lady in dark brown linen and homespun bustled out and shooed them away. "Willy, my dear!" she cried. "How good to see ye! And Neddie!" She gave the small balding man a hearty buss of welcome that nearly knocked him over. "Ye'll be needin' breakfast, I reckon. Plenty in the kitchen; do ye go and feed yerselves." Turning to me and Jamie, she started back as though bitten by a snake. She looked openmouthed at me, then turned to Jamie for an explanation of this apparition. "Claire," he said, with a brief tilt of his head toward me "And Mistress FitzGibbons," he added, with a tilt the other way. "Murtagh found her yesterday, and Dougal said we must bring her along wi' us," he added, making it clear it was no good blaming him. Mistress FitzGibbons closed her mouth and looked me up and down with an air of shrewd evaluation. Apparently she decided that I looked harmless enough, despite my odd and scandalous appearance, for she smiled—kindly, despite several missing teeth—and took me by the arm. "Well then, Claire. Welcome to ye. Come wi' me and we shall find ye somethin' a bit more… mmm." She looked over my short skirt and inadequate shoes, shaking her head. She was leading me firmly away when I remembered my patient. "Oh, wait, please! I forgot Jamie!" Mistress FitzGibbons was surprised. "Why, Jamie can fend for himself. He knows where to get food and someone will find him a bed." "But he's hurt. He was shot yesterday and stabbed last night. I bandaged the wound for riding, but I didn't have time to clean or dress it properly. I must care for it now, before it gets infected." "Infected?" "Yes, that is, I mean, inflamed, you know, with pus and swelling and fever." "Oh, aye, I know what ye mean. But do ye mean to say as ye know what to do for that? Are ye a charmer then? A Beaton?" "Something like that." I had no notion what a Beaton might be, nor any wish to go into my medical qualifications, standing out in the chilly drizzle that had set in. Mistress FitzGibbons seemed of a like mind, for she called back Jamie, who was making off in the opposite direction, and taking him also by an arm, towed us both into the castle. After a long trip through cold narrow corridors, dimly lit by slitted windows, we came to a fairly large room furnished with a bed, a couple of stools, and most importantly, a fire. I ignored my patient temporarily in favor of thawing my hands. Mistress FitzGibbons, presumably immune to cold, sat Jamie on a stool by the fire and gently got the remains of his tattered shirt off, replacing it with a warm quilt from the bed. She clucked at the shoulder, which was bruised and swollen, and poked at my clumsy dressing. I turned from the fire. "I think it will need to be soaked off, and then the wound cleansed with a solution for… for preventing fevers." Mistress FitzGibbons would have made an admirable nurse. "What will ye be needin'?" she asked simply. I thought hard. What in the name of God had people used for preventing infection before the advent of antibiotics? And of those limited compounds, which might be available to me in a primitive Scottish castle just after dawn? "Garlic!" I said in triumph. "Garlic, and if you have it, witch hazel. Also I'll need several clean rags and a kettle of water for boiling." "Aye, well, I think we can manage that; perhaps a bit of comfrey as well. What about a bit o' boneset tea, or chamomile? T'lad looks as though it's been a long night." The young man was in fact swaying with weariness, too tired to protest our discussing him as though he were an inanimate object. Mrs. FitzGibbons was soon back, with an apron full of garlic bulbs, gauze bags of dried herbs, and torn strips of old linen. A small black iron kettle hung from one meaty arm, and she held a large demijohn of water as though it were so much goosedown. "Now then, m' dear, what would ye have me do?" she said cheerfully. I set her to boiling water and peeling the cloves of garlic while I inspected the contents of the herb packets. There was the witch hazel I had asked for, boneset and comfrey for tea, and something I tentatively identified as cherry bark. "Painkiller," I muttered happily, recollecting Mr. Crook explaining the uses of the barks and herbs we found. Good, we'd need that. I threw several cloves of peeled garlic into the boiling water with some of the witch hazel, then added the cloth strips to the mixture. The boneset, comfrey, and cherry bark were steeping in a small pan of hot water set by the fire. The preparations had steadied me a bit. If I didn't know for certain where I was, or why I was there, at least I knew what to do for the next quarter of an hour. "Thank you… ah, Mrs. FitzGibbons," I said respectfully. "I can manage now, if you have things to do." The giant dame laughed, breasts heaving. "Ah, lass! There aye be things for me to do! I'll send a bit o' broth up for ye. Do ye call oot if ye need anything else." She waddled to the door with surprising speed and disappeared on her rounds. I pulled the bandages off as carefully as I could. Still, the rayon pad stuck to the flesh, coming away with a soft crackling of dried blood. Droplets of fresh blood oozed around the edges of the wound, and I apologized for hurting him, though he hadn't moved or made a sound. He smiled slightly, with a hint perhaps of flirtation. "No worry, lass. I've been hurt much worse, and by people much less pretty." He bent forward for me to wash the wound with the boiled garlic decoction, and the quilt slipped from his shoulder. I saw at once that, whether meant as a compliment or not, his remark was a statement of plain fact; he had been hurt much worse. His upper back was covered with a criss-cross of faded white lines. He had been savagely flogged, and more than once. There were small lines of silvery scar tissue in some spots, where the welts had crossed, and irregular patches where several blows had struck the same spot, flaying off skin and gouging the muscle beneath. I had, of course, seen a great variety of wounds and injuries, doing combat nursing, but there was something about these scars that seemed shockingly brutal. I must have drawn in my breath at the sight, for he turned his head and caught me staring. He shrugged his good shoulder. "Lobsterbacks. Flogged me twice, in the space of a week. They'd ha' done it twice the same day, I expect, were they not afraid of killing me. No joy in flogging a dead man." I tried to keep my voice steady while I sponged. "I shouldn't think anyone would do such a thing for joy." "No? You should ha' seen him." "Who?" "The redcoat captain that skinned my back for me. If he was not precisely joyous, he was at least verra pleased with himself. More nor I was," he added wryly. "Randall was the name." "Randall!" I couldn't keep the shock from my voice. Cold blue eyes fixed on mine. "You're familiar with the man?" The voice was suddenly suspicious. "No, no! I used to know a family of that name, a long time, uh, a long time ago." In my nervousness, I dropped the sponge cloth. "Drat, now that will have to be boiled again." I scooped it off the floor and bustled to the fireplace, trying to hide my confusion in busyness. Could this Captain Randall possibly be Frank's ancestor, the soldier with the sterling record, gallant on the field of battle, recipient of commendations from dukes? And if so, could someone related to my sweet gentle Frank possibly be capable of inflicting the horrifying marks on this lad's back? I busied myself at the fire, dropping in a few more handfuls of witch hazel and garlic, setting more cloths to soak. When I thought I could control my voice and face, I came back to Jamie, sponge in hand. "Why were you flogged?" I asked abruptly. It was hardly tactful, but I badly wanted to know, and was too tired to phrase it more gently. He sighed, moving his shoulder uneasily under my ministrations. He was tired, too, and I was undoubtedly hurting him, gentle as I tried to be. "The first time was escape, and the second was theft—or at least that's what the charge-sheet read." "What were you escaping from?" "The English," he said, with an ironic lift of his brow: "If ye mean where, Fort William." "I gathered it was the English," I said, matching the dryness of his tone. "What were you doing in Fort William in the first place?" He rubbed his brow with his free hand. "Oh, that. I think that was obstruction." "Obstruction, escape, and theft. You sound a right dangerous character," I said lightly, hoping to distract him from what I was doing. It worked at least slightly; one corner of the wide mouth turned up, and one dark blue eye glinted back over his shoulder at me. "Oh, I am that," he said. "A wonder you think yourself safe in the same room wi' me, and you an English lassie." "Well, you look harmless enough at the moment." This was entirely untrue; shirtless, scarred and blood-smeared, with stubbled cheeks and reddened eyelids from the long night ride, he looked thoroughly disreputable. And tired or not, he looked entirely capable of further mayhem, should the need arise. He laughed, a surprisingly deep, infectious sound. "Harmless as a setting dove," he agreed. "I'm too hungry to be a threat to anything but breakfast. Let a stray bannock come within reach, though, and I'll no answer for the consequences. Ooh!" "Sorry," I muttered. "The stab wound's deep, and it's dirty." "It's all right." But he had gone pale beneath the coppery stubble of his beard. I tried to lead him back into conversation. "What exactly is obstruction?" I asked casually. "I must say it doesn't sound a major crime." He took a deep breath, fixing his eyes resolutely on the carved bedpost as I swabbed deeper. "Ah. Well, I suppose it's whatever the English say it is. In my case, it meant defending my family and my property, and getting myself half killed in the process." He pressed his lips together, as if to say no more, but after a moment went on, as though seeking to focus his attention on anything other than his shoulder. "It was near to four years ago. There was a levy put on the manors near Fort William—food for the garrison, horses for transport, and suchlike. I wouldna say many liked it, but most would yield what they had to. Small parties of soldiers would go round with an officer and a wagon or two, collecting the bits of food and things. And one day in October, yon Captain Randall came along to L—" he caught himself quickly, with a glance at me, "to our place." I nodded encouragingly, eyes on my work. "We'd thought they'd not come so far; the place is a good distance from the fort, and not easy to get to. But they did." He closed his eyes briefly. "My father was away—gone to a funeral at the next farm. And I was up in the fields wi' most of the men, for it was close to harvest, and a lot to be done. So my sister was alone in the house, except for two or three of the women servants, and they all rushed upstairs to hide their heads under the bedclothes when they saw the red coats. Thought the soldiers were sent by the devil—and I'll no just say they were wrong." I laid down my cloth. The nasty part was done; now all we needed was a poultice of some kind—lacking iodine or penicillin, it was the best I could do for infection—and a good tight dressing. Eyes still dosed, the young man did not appear to notice. "I came down toward the house from behind, meaning to fetch a piece of harness from the barn, and heard the shouting and my sister screaming inside the house." "Oh?" I tried to make my voice as quiet and unintrusive as I could. I wanted very much to know about this Captain Randall; so far, this story had done little to dispel my original impression of him. "I went in through the kitchen and found two of 'em riflin' the pantry, stuffin' their sacks wi' flour and bacon. I punched one of them in the head, and threw the other out the window, sack and all. Then I burst into the parlor, where I found two of the redcoats with my sister, Jenny. Her dress was torn a bit, and one of them had a scratched face." He opened his eyes and smiled, a bit grimly. "I didna stop to ask questions. We were going round and about, and I wasna doing too poorly, for all there were two of them, when Randall came in." Randall had stopped the fight by the simple expedient of holding a pistol to Jenny's head. Forced to surrender, Jamie had quickly been seized and bound by the two soldiers. Randall had smiled charmingly at his captive and said, "Well, well. Two spitfire scratchcats here, have we? A taste of hard labor'll cure your temper, I trow, and if it doesn't, well, there's another cat you'll meet, name of nine-tails. But there's other cures for other cats, aren't there, my sweet pussy?" Jamie stopped for a moment, jaw working. "He was holdin' Jenny's arm behind her back, but he let go then, to bring his hand round and put it down her dress, round her breast, like." Remembering the scene, he smiled unexpectedly. "So," he resumed, "Jenny stamped down on his foot and gave him her elbow deep in the belly. And as he was bent over choking, she whirled round and gave him a good root in the stones wi' her knee." He snorted briefly with amusement. "Weel, at that he dropped the pistol, and she went for it, but one of the dragoons holding me got to it first." I had finished the bandaging and stood quiet behind him, a hand resting on his good shoulder. It seemed important he should tell me everything, but I was afraid he would stop if he were reminded of my presence. "When he'd got back enough breath to talk with, Randall had his men haul us both outside. They stripped off my shirt, bound me to the wagon tongue, and Randall beat me across the back with the flat of his saber. He was in a black fury, but a wee bit the worse for wear, ye might say. It stung me a bit, but he couldna keep it up for long." The brief spurt of amusement had vanished now, and the shoulder under my hand was hard with tension. "When he stopped, he turned to Jenny—one of the dragoons had hold of her—and asked her did she want to see more, or would she rather go into the house with him, and offer him better entertainment?" The shoulder twitched uneasily. "I couldna move much, but I shouted to her that I wasna hurt—and I wasn't, too much—and that she was not to go with him, not if they cut my throat before her eyes." "They were holding her behind me, so I couldna see, but from the sound of it, she spat in his face. She must have done, because next thing I knew, he'd grabbed a handful of my hair, pulled my head back, and set his knife against my throat." "I've a mind to take you at your suggestion," Randall had said through his teeth, and dug the point just beneath the skin, far enough to draw blood. "I could see the dagger close to my face," Jamie said, "and the pattern of spots my blood was making in the dust under the wagon." His tone was almost dreamy, and I realized that, from fatigue and pain, he had lapsed into something like a hypnotic state. He might not even remember that I was there. "I made to call out to my sister, to tell her that I'd much prefer to die than have her dishonor herself wi' such scum. Randall took the dagger from my throat, though, and thrust the blade betwixt my teeth, so I couldna call out." He rubbed at his mouth, as though still tasting bitter steel. He stopped talking, staring straight ahead. "But what happened then?" I shouldn't have spoken, but I had to know. He shook himself, like a man rousing from sleep, and rubbed a large hand tiredly across the back of his neck. "She went with him," he said abruptly. "She thought he would kill me, and perhaps she was right. After that, I dinna ken what happened. One of the dragoons hit me in the head wi' the stock of his musket. When I woke, I was trussed up in the wagon wi' the chickens, jolting down the road toward Fort William." "I see," I said quietly. "I'm sorry. It must have been terrible for you." He smiled suddenly, the haze of fatigue gone. "Oh, aye. Chickens are verra poor company, especially on a long journey." Realizing that the dressing was completed, he hunched the shoulder experimentally, wincing as he did so. "Don't do that!" I said in alarm. "You really mustn't move it. In fact," I glanced at the table, to be sure there were some strips of dry fabric left. "I'm going to strap that arm to your side. Hold still." He didn't speak further, but relaxed a bit under my hands when he realized that it wasn't going to hurt. I felt an odd sense of intimacy with this young Scottish stranger, due in part, I thought, to the dreadful story he had just told me, and in part to our long ride through the dark, pressed together in drowsy silence. I had not slept with many men other than my husband, but I had noticed before that to sleep, actually sleep with someone did give this sense of intimacy, as though your dreams had flowed out of you to mingle with his and fold you both in a blanket of unconscious knowing. A throwback of some kind, I thought. In older, more primitive times (like these? asked another part of my mind), it was an act of trust to sleep in the presence of another person. If the trust was mutual, simple sleep could bring you closer together than the joining of bodies. The strapping finished, I helped him on with the rough linen shirt, easing it over the bad shoulder. He stood up to tuck it one-handed into his kilt, and smiled down at me. "I thank ye, Claire. You've a good touch." His hand reached out as though to touch my face, but he seemed to think better of it; the hand wavered and dropped to his side. Apparently he had felt that odd surge of intimacy too. I looked hastily away, flipping a hand in a think-nothing-of-it gesture. My gaze traveled around the room, taking in the smokeblacked fireplace, the narrow, unglazed windows, and the solid oak furnishings. No electrical fittings. No carpeting. No shiny brass knobs on the bedstead. It looked, in fact, like an eighteenth-century castle. But what about Frank? The man I had met in the wood looked disturbingly like him, but Jamie's description of Captain Randall was completely foreign to everything I knew about my gentle, peace-loving husband. But then, if it were true—and I was beginning to admit, even to myself, that it might be—then he could in fact be almost anything. A man I knew only from a genealogical chart was not necessarily bound to resemble his descendants in conduct. But it was Frank himself I was concerned with at the moment. If I was, in fact, in the eighteenth century, where was he? What would he do when I failed to return to Mrs. Baird's? Would I ever see him again? Thinking about Frank was the last straw. Since the moment I stepped into the rock and ordinary life ceased to exist, I had been assaulted, threatened, kidnapped and jostled. I had not eaten or slept properly for more than twenty-four hours. I tried to control myself, but my lip wobbled and my eyes filled in spite of myself. I turned to the fire to hide my face, but too late. Jamie took my hand, asking in a gentle voice what was wrong. The firelight glinted on my gold wedding band, and I began to sniffle in earnest. "Oh, I'll… I'll be all right, it's all right, really, it's… just my … my husband… I don't—" "Ah lass, are ye widowed, then?" His voice was so full of sympathetic concern that I lost control entirely. "No … yes… I mean, I don't… yes, I suppose I am!" Overcome with emotion and tiredness, I collapsed against him, sobbing hysterically. The lad had nice feelings. Instead of calling for help or retreating in confusion, he sat down, gathered me firmly onto his lap with his good arm and sat rocking me gently, muttering soft Gaelic in my ear and smoothing my hair with one hand. I wept bitterly, surrendering momentarily to my fear and heartbroken confusion, but slowly I began to quiet a bit, as Jamie stroked my neck and back, offering me the comfort of his broad, warm chest. My sobs lessened and I began to calm myself, leaning tiredly into the curve of his shoulder. No wonder he was so good with horses, I thought blearily, feeling his fingers rubbing gently behind my ears, listening to the soothing, incomprehensible speech. If I were a horse, I'd let him ride me anywhere. This absurd thought coincided unfortunately with my dawning realization that the young man was not completely exhausted after all. In fact, it was becoming embarrassingly obvious to both of us. I coughed and cleared my throat, wiping my eyes with my sleeve as I slid off his lap. "I'm so sorry… that is, I mean, thank you for…but I…"I was babbling, backing away from him with my face flaming. He was a bit flushed, too, but not disconcerted. He reached for my hand and pulled me back. Careful not to touch me otherwise, he put a hand under my chin and forced my head up to face him. "Ye need not be scairt of me," he said softly. "Nor of anyone here, so long as I'm with ye." He let go and turned to the fire. "You need somethin' hot, lass," he said matter-of-factly, "and a bit to eat as well. Something in your belly will help more than anything." I laughed shakily at his attempts to pour broth one-handed, and went to help. He was right; food did help. We sipped broth and ate bread in a companionable silence, sharing the growing comfort of warmth and fullness. Finally, he stood up, picking up the fallen quilt from the floor. He dropped it back on the bed, and motioned me toward it. "Do ye sleep a bit, Claire. You're worn out, and likely someone will want to talk wi' ye before too long." This was a sinister reminder of my precarious position but I was too exhausted to care much. I uttered no more than a pro forma protest at taking the bed; I had never seen anything so enticing. Jamie assured me that he could find a bed elsewhere. I fell headfirst into the pile of quilts and was asleep before he reached the door. 5 The Mackenzie I woke in a state of complete confusion. I vaguely remembered that something was very wrong, but couldn't remember what. In fact, I had been sleeping so soundly that I couldn't remember for a moment who I was, much less where. I was warm, and the surrounding room was piercingly cold. I tried to burrow back into my cocoon of quilts, but the voice that had wakened me was still nagging. "Come then, lass! Come now, ye must get up!" The voice was deep and genially hectoring, like the barking of a sheepdog. I pried one reluctant eye open far enough to see the mountain of brown homespun. Mistress FitzGibbons! The sight of her shocked me back to full consciousness, and memory returned. It was still true, then. Wrapping a blanket about me against the chill, I staggered out of bed and headed for the fire as fast as possible. Mistress FitzGibbons had a cup of hot broth waiting; I sipped it, feeling like the survivor of some major bombing raid, as she laid out a pile of garments on the bed. There was a long yellowish linen chemise, with a thin edging of lace, a petticoat of fine cotton, two overskirts in shades of brown, and a pale lemon-yellow bodice. Brown-striped stockings of wool and a pair of yellow slippers completed the ensemble. Brooking no protests, the dame bustled me out of my inadequate garments and oversaw my dressing from the skin out. She stood back, surveying her handiwork with satisfaction. "The yellow suits ye, lass; I thought it would. Goes well wi' that brown hair, and it brings out the gold in your eyes. Stay, though, ye'll need a wee bit o' ribbon." Turning out a pocket like a gunnysack, she produced a handful of ribbons and bits of jewelry. Too stunned to resist, I allowed her to dress my hair, tying back the sidelocks with primrose ribbon, clucking over the unfeminine unbecomingness of my shoulder-length bob. "Goodness, me dear, whatever were ye thinkin', to cut your hair so short? Were ye in disguise, like? I've heard o' some lasses doin' so, to hide their sex when travelin', same as to be safe from the dratted redcoats. 'Tis a fine day, says I, when leddies canna travel the roads in safety." She ran on, patting me here and there, tucking in a curl or arranging a fold. Finally I was arrayed to her satisfaction. "Weel now, that's verra gude. Now, ye've just time for a wee bite, then I must take you to himself." "Himself?" I said. I didn't care for the sound of this. Whoever Himself was, he was likely to ask difficult questions. "Why, the MacKenzie to be sure. Whoever else?" Who else indeed? Castle Leoch, I dimly recalled, was in the middle of the clan MacKenzie lands. Plainly the clan chieftain was still the MacKenzie. I began to understand why our little band of horsemen had ridden through the night to reach the castle; this would be a place of impregnable safely to men pursued by the Crown's men. No English officer with a grain of sense would lead his men so deeply into the clan lands. To do so was to risk death by ambush at the first clump of trees. And only a good-sized army would come as far as the castle gates. I was trying to remember whether in fact the English army ever had come so far, when I suddenly realized that the eventual fate of the castle was much less relevant than my immediate future. I had no appetite for the bannocks and parritch that Mrs. FitzGibbons had brought for my breakfast, but crumbled a bit and pretended to eat, in order to gain some time for thought. By the time Mrs. Fitz came back to conduct me to the MacKenzie, I had cobbled together a rough plan. The laird received me in a room at the top of a flight of stone steps. It was a tower room, round, and rich with paintings and tapestries hung against the sloping walls. While the rest of the castle seemed comfortable enough, if somewhat bare, this room was luxuriously crowded, crammed with furniture, bristling with ornaments, and warmly lit by fire and candle against the drizzle of the day outside. While the outer walls of the castle had only the high slit windows suited to resisting attack, this inner wall had been more recently furnished with long casement windows that let in what daylight there was. As I entered, my attention was drawn at once by an enormous metal cage, cleverly engineered to fit the curve of the wall from floor to ceiling, filled with dozens of tiny birds: finches, buntings, tits, and several kinds of warblers. Drawing near, my eye was filled with plump smooth bodies and bead-bright eyes, set like jewels in a background of velvet green, darting among the leaves of oak, elm, and chestnut, carefully tended trees rooted in mulched pots set on the floor of the cage. The cheerful racket of conversing birds was punctuated by the whir of wings and rustle of leaves as the inhabitants flitted and hopped about their business. "Busy wee things, are they no?" A deep, pleasant voice spoke from behind me, and I turned with a smile that froze on my face. Colum MacKenzie shared the broad planes and high forehead of his brother Dougal, though the vital force that gave Dougal an air of intimidation was here mellowed into something more welcoming, though no less vibrant. Darker, with dove-grey rather than hazel eyes, Colum gave that same impression of intensity, of standing just slightly closer to you than was quite comfortable. At the moment, though, my discomfort arose from the fact that the beautifully modeled head and long torso ended in shockingly bowed and stumpy legs. The man who should have topped six feet came barely to my shoulder. He kept his eyes on the birds, tactfully allowing me a muchneeded moment to gain control of my features. Of course, he must be used to the reactions of people meeting him for the first time. It occurred to me, glancing around the room, to wonder how often he did meet new people. This was clearly a sanctuary; the self-constructed world of a man to whom the outer world was unwelcome—or unavailable. "I welcome ye, mistress," he said, with a slight bow. "My name is Colum ban Campbell MacKenzie, laird of this castle. I understand from my brother that he, er, encountered you some distance from here." "He kidnapped me, if you want to know," I said. I would have liked to keep the conversation cordial, but I wanted even more to get away from this castle and back to the hill with the standing stone circle. Whatever had happened to me, the answer lay there—if anywhere. The laird's thick brows rose slightly, and a smile curved the fine-cut lips. "Well, perhaps," he agreed. "Dougal is sometimes a wee bit… impetuous." "Well." I waved a hand, indicating gracious dismissal of the matter. "I'm prepared to admit that a misunderstanding might have arisen. But I would greatly appreciate being returned to… the place he took me from." "Mm." Brows still raised, Colum gestured toward a chair. I sat, reluctantly, and he nodded toward one of the attendants, who vanished through the door. "I've sent for some refreshment, Mistress … Beauchamp, was it? I understand that my brother and his men found ye in … er, some apparent distress." He seemed to be hiding a smile, and I wondered just how my supposed state of undress had been described to him. I took a deep breath. Now it was time for the explanation I had devised. Thinking this out, I had recalled Frank's telling me, during his officer's training, about a course he had taken in withstanding interrogation. The basic principle, insofar as I remembered it, was to stick to the truth as much as humanly possible, altering only those details that must be kept secret. Less chance, the instructor explained, of slipping up in the minor aspects of one's cover story. Well, we'd have to see how effective that was. "Well, yes. I had been attacked, you see." He nodded, face alight with interest. "Aye? Attacked by whom?" Tell the truth. "By English soldiers. In particular, by a man named Randall." The patrician face changed suddenly at the name. Though Colum continued to look interested, there was an increased intensity in the line of the mouth, and a deepening of the creases that bracketed it. Clearly that name was familiar. The MacKenzie chief sat back a bit, and steepled his fingers, regarding me carefully over them. "Ah?" he said. "Tell me more." So, God help me, I told him more. I gave him in great detail the story of the confrontation between the Scots and Randall's men, since he would be able to check that with Dougal. I told him the basic facts of my conversation with Randall, since I didn't know how much the man Murtagh had overheard. He nodded absorbedly, paying close attention. "Aye," he said. "But how did you come to be there in that spot? It's far off the road to Inverness—you meant to take ship from there, I suppose?" I nodded and took a deep breath. Now we entered perforce the realm of invention. I wished I had paid closer attention to Frank's remarks on the subject of highwaymen, but I would have to do my best. I was a widowed lady of Oxfordshire, I replied (true, so far as it went), traveling with a manservant en route to distant relatives in France (that seemed safely remote). We had been set upon by highwaymen, and my servant had either been killed or run off. I had myself dashed into the wood on my horse, but been caught some distance from the road. While I had succeeded in escaping from the bandits, I had perforce to abandon my horse and all property thereon. And while wandering in the woods, I had run afoul of Captain Randall and his men. I sat back a little, pleased with the story. Simple, neat, true in all checkable details. Colum's face expressed no more than a polite attention. He was opening his mouth to ask me a question, when there was a feint rustle at the doorway. A man, one of those I had noticed in the courtyard when we arrived, stood there, holding a small leather box in one hand. The chief of clan MacKenzie excused himself gracefully and left me studying the birds, with the assurance that he would shortly return to continue our most interesting conversation. No sooner had the door swung shut behind him than I was at the bookshelf, running my hand along the leather bindings. There were perhaps two dozen books on this shelf; more on the opposite wall. Hurriedly I flipped the opening pages of each volume. Several had no publication dates; those that did were all dated from 1720 to 1742. Colum MacKenzie obviously liked luxury, but the rest of his room gave no particular indication that he was an antiquarian. The bindings were new. with no sign of cracking or foxed pages within. Quite beyond ordinary scruples by this time, I shamelessly rifled the olivewood desk, keeping an ear out for returning footsteps. I found what I supposed I had been looking for in the central drawer. A half-finished letter, written in a flowing hand rendered no more legible by the eccentric spelling and total lack of punctuation. The paper was fresh and clean, and the ink crisply black. Legible or not, the date at the top of the page sprang out at me as though written in letters of fire: 20 April, 1743. When he returned a few moments later, Colum found his guest seated by the casement windows, hands clasped decorously in her lap. Seated, because my legs would no longer hold me up. Hands clasped, to hide the trembling that had made it difficult for me to stuff the letter back into its resting place. He had brought with him the tray of refreshments; mugs of ale and fresh oatcakes spread with honey. I nibbled sparingly at these; my stomach was churning too vigorously to allow for any appetite. After a brief apology for his absence, he commiserated with me on my sad misfortune. Then he leaned back, eyed me speculatively, and asked, "But how is it, Mistress Beauchamp, that my brother's men found ye wandering about in your shift? Highwaymen would be reluctant to molest your person, as they'd likely mean to hold ye for ransom. And even with such things as I've heard of Captain Randall, I'd be surprised to hear that an officer in the English army was in the habit of raping stray travelers." "Oh?" I snapped. "Well, whatever you've heard about him, I assure you he's entirely capable of it." I had overlooked the detail of my clothing when planning my story, and wondered at what point in our encounter the man Murtagh had spotted the Captain and myself. "Ah, well," said Colum. "Possible, I daresay. The man's a bad reputation, to be sure." "Possible?" I said. "Why? Don't you believe what I've told you?" For the MacKenzie chieftain's face was showing a faint but definite skepticism. "I did not say I didn't believe ye, mistress," he answered evenly. "But I've not held the leadership of a large clan for twenty-odd years without learning not to swallow whole every tale I'm told." "Well, if you don't believe I am who I say, who in bloody hell do you think I am?" I demanded. He blinked, taken aback by my language. Then the sharp-cut features firmed again. "That," he said, "remains to be seen. In the meantime, mistress, you're a welcome guest at Leoch." He raised a hand in gracious dismissal, and the ever-present attendant near the door came forward, obviously to escort me back to my quarters. Colum didn't say the next words, but he might as well have. They hung in the air behind me as clearly as though spoken, as I walked away: "Until I find out who you really are." Part Two - Castle Leoch •6 - Colum's Hall •7 - Davie Beaton's Closet •8 - An Evening's Entertainment •9 - The Gathering •10 - The Oath-taking 6 Colum's Hall The small boy Mrs. FitzGibbons had referred to as 'young Alec' came to fetch me to dinner. This was held in a long, narrow room outfitted with tables down the length of each wall, supplied by a constant stream of servants issuing from archways at either end of the room, laden with trays, trenchers, and jugs. The rays of early summer's late sunlight came through the high, narrow windows; sconces along the walls below held torches to be lighted as the daylight failed. Banners and tartans hung on the walls between the windows, plaids and heraldry of all descriptions splotching the stones with color. By contrast, most of the people gathered below for dinner were dressed in serviceable shades of grey and brown, or in the soft brown and green plaid of hunting kilts, muted tones suited for hiding in the heather. I could feel curious glances boring into my back as young Alec led me toward the top of the room, but most of the diners kept their eyes politely upon their plates. There seemed little ceremony here, people ate as they pleased, helping themselves from the serving platters, or taking their wooden plates to the far end of the room, where two young boys turned a sheep's carcass on a spit in the enormous fireplace. There were some forty people set to eat, and perhaps another ten to serve, The air was loud with conversation, most of it in Gaelic. Colum was already seated at a table at the head of the room, stunted legs tucked out of sight beneath the scarred oak. He nodded graciously at my appearance and waved me to a seat on his left, next to a plump and pretty red-haired woman he introduced as his wife, Letitia. "And this is my son, Hamish," he said, dropping a hand on the shoulder of a handsome red-haired lad of seven or eight, who took his eyes off the waiting platter just long enough to acknowledge my presence with a quick nod. I looked at the boy with interest. He looked like all the other MacKenzie males I had seen, with the same broad, flat cheekbones and deep-set eyes. In fact, allowing for the difference in coloring, he might be a smaller version of his uncle Dougal, who sat next to him. The two teenage girls next to Dougal, who giggled and poked each other when introduced to me, were his daughters, Margaret and Eleanor. Dougal gave me a brief but friendly smile before snatching the platter out from under the reaching spoon of one of his daughters and shoving it toward me. "Ha' ye no manners, lass?" he scolded. "Guests first!" I rather hesitantly picked up the large horn spoon offered me. I had not been sure what sort of food was likely to be offered, and was somewhat relieved to find that this platter held a row of homely and completely familiar smoked herrings. I'd never tried to eat a herring with a spoon, but I saw nothing resembling a fork, and dimly recalled that runcible spoons would not be in general use for quite a few years yet. Judging from the behavior of eaters at other tables, when a spoon proved impracticable, the ever-handy dirk was employed, for the slicing of meat and removal of bones. Lacking a dirk, I resolved to chew cautiously, and leaned forward to scoop up a herring, only to find the deep blue eyes of young Hamish fixed accusingly on me. "Ye've not said grace yet," he said severely, small face screwed into a frown. Obviously he considered me a conscienceless heathen, if not downright depraved. "Er, perhaps you would be so kind as to say it for me?" I ventured. The cornflower eyes popped open in surprise, but after a moment's consideration, he nodded and folded his hands in a businesslike fashion. He glared round the table to ensure that everyone was in a properly reverential attitude before bowing his own head. Satisfied, he intoned, "Some hae meat that canna eat, And some could eat that want it. We hae meat, and we can eat, And so may God be thankit. Amen. Looking up from my respectfully folded hands, I caught Colum's eye, and gave him a smile that acknowledged the sangfroid of his offspring. He suppressed his own smile and nodded gravely at his son. "Nicely said, lad. Will ye hand round the bread?" Conversation at table was limited to occasional requests for further food, as everyone settled down to serious eating. I found my own appetite rather lacking, partly owing to the shock of my circumstances, and partly to the fact that I really didn't care for herring, when all was said and done. The mutton was quite good, though, and the bread was delicious, fresh and crusty, with large dollops of fresh unsalted butter. "I hope Mr. MacTavish is feeling better," I offered, during a momentary pause for breath. "I didn't see him when I came in." "MacTavish?" Letitia's delicate brows tilted over round blue eyes. I felt, rather than saw Dougal look up beside me. "Young Jamie," he said briefly, before returning his attention to the mutton bone in his hands. "Jamie? Why, whatever is the matter wi' the lad?" Her full-cheeked countenance creased with concern. "Naught but a scratch, my dear," Colum soothed. He glanced across at his brother. "Where is he, though, Dougal?" I imagined perhaps, that the dark eyes held a hint of suspicion. His brother shrugged, eyes still on his plate. "I sent him down to the stables to help auld Alec wi' the horses. Seemed the best place for him, all things considered." He raised his eyes to meet his brother's gaze. "Or did ye have some other idea?" Colum seemed dubious. "The stables? Aye, well… ye trust him so far?" Dougal wiped a hand carelessly across his mouth and reached for a loaf of bread. "It's yours to say, Colum, if ye dinna agree wi' my orders." Colum's lips tightened briefly, but he only said, "Nay, I reckon he'll do well enough there," before returning to his meal. I had some doubts myself, as to a stable being the proper place for a patient with a gunshot wound, but was reluctant to offer an opinion in this company. I resolved to seek out the young man in question in the morning, just to assure myself that he was as suitably cared for as could be managed. I refused the pudding and excused myself, pleading tiredness, which was in no way prevarication. I was so exhausted that I scarcely paid attention when Colum said "Good night to ye; then, Mistress Beauchamp. I'll send someone to bring ye to Hall in the morning." One of the servants, seeing me groping my way along the corridor, kindly lighted me to my chamber. She touched her candle to the one on my table, and a mellow light flickered over the massive stones of the wall, giving me a moment's feeling of entombment. Once she had left, though, I pulled the embroidered hanging away from the window, and the feeling blew away with the inrush of cool air. I tried to think about everything that had happened, but my mind refused to consider anything but sleep. I slid under the quilts, blew out the candle, and fell asleep watching the slow rise of the moon. It was the massive Mrs. FitzGibbons who arrived again to wake me in the morning, bearing what appeared to be the full array of toiletries available to a well-born Scottish lady. Lead combs to darken the eyebrows and lashes, pots of powdered orrisroot and rice powder, even a stick of what I assumed was kohl, though I had never seen any, and a delicate lidded porcelain cup of French rouge, incised with a row of gilded swans. Mrs. FitzGibbons also had a striped green overskirt and bodice of silk, with yellow lisle stockings, as a change from the homespun I had been provided with the day before. Whatever "Hall" involved, it seemed to be an occasion of some consequence. I was tempted to insist on attending in my own clothes, just to be contrary, but the memory of fat Rupert's response to my shift was sufficient to deter me. Besides, I rather liked Colum, despite the fact that he apparently intended to keep me here for the foreseeable future. Well, we'd just see about that, I thought, as I did my best with the rouge. Dougal had said the young man I had doctored was in the stables, hadn't he? And stables presumably had horses, upon which one could ride away. I resolved to go looking for Jamie MacTavish, as soon as Hall was over with. Hall turned out to be just that: the dining hall where I had eaten the night before. Now it was transformed, though; tables, benches, and stools pushed back against the walls, the head table removed and replaced by a substantial carved chair of dark wood, covered with what I assumed must be the MacKenzie tartan, a plaid of dark green and black, with a faint red and white over-check. Sprigs of holly decorated the walls, and there were fresh rushes strewn on the stone flags. A young piper was blowing up a set of small pipes behind the empty chair, with numerous sighs and wheezes. Near him were what I assumed must be the intimate members of Colum's staff: a thin-faced man in trews and smocked shirt, who lounged against the wall; a balding little man in a coat of fine brocade, dearly a scribe of some sort, as he was seated at a small table equipped with inkhorn, quills, and paper; two brawny kilted men with the attitude of guards; and to one side, one of the largest men I have ever seen. I stared at this giant with some awe. Coarse black hair grew far down on his forehead, nearly meeting the beetling eyebrows. Similar mats covered the immense forearms, exposed by the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt. Unlike most of the men I had seen, the giant did not seem to be armed, save for a tiny knife he carried in his stocking-top; I could barely make out the stubby hilt in the thickets of black curls that covered his legs above the gaily checked hose. A broad leather belt circled what must be a forty-inch waist, but carried neither dirk nor sword. In spite of his size, the man had an amiable expression, and seemed to be joking with the thin-faced man, who looked like a marionette in comparison with his huge conversant. The piper suddenly began to play, with a preliminary belch, followed at once by an ear-splitting screech that eventually settled down into something resembling a tune. There were some thirty or forty people present, all seeming somewhat better-dressed and groomed than the diners of the night before. All heads turned to the lower end of the hall, where, after a pause for the music to build up steam, Colum entered, followed at a few paces by his brother Dougal. Both MacKenzies were clearly dressed for ceremony, in dark green kilts and well-cut coats, Colum's of pale green and Dougal's of russet, both with the plaid slung across their chests and secured at one shoulder by a large jeweled brooch. Colum's black hair was loose today, carefully oiled and curled upon his shoulders. Dougal's was still clubbed back in a queue that nearly matched the russet satin of his coat. Colum walked slowly up the length of the hall, nodding and smiling to faces on either side. Looking across the hall, I could see another archway, near where his chair was placed. Clearly he could have entered the hall by that doorway, instead of the one at the far end of the room. So it was deliberate, this flaunting of his twisted legs and ungainly waddle on the long progress to his seat. Deliberate, too, the contrast with his tall, straight-bodied younger brother, who looked neither to left nor right, but walked straight behind Colum to the wooden chair and took up his station standing close behind. Colum sat and waited for a moment, then raised one hand. The pipes' wailing died away in a pitiful whine, and "Hall" began. It quickly became apparent that this was the regular occasion on which the laird of Castle Leoch dispensed justice to his tacksmen and tenants, hearing cases and settling disputes. There was an agenda; the balding scribe read out the names and the various parties came forward in their turn. While some cases were presented in English, most of the proceedings were held in Gaelic. I had already noticed that the language involved considerable eye-rolling and foot-stamping for emphasis, making it difficult to judge the seriousness of a case by the demeanor of the participants. Just as I had decided that one man, a rather moth-eaten specimen with an enormous sporran made of an entire badger, was accusing his neighbor of nothing less than murder, arson, and wife-stealing, Colum raised his eyebrows and said something quick in Gaelic that had both complainant and defendant clutching their sides with laughter. Wiping his eyes, the complainant nodded at last, and offered a hand to his opponent, as the scribe scribbled busily, quill scratching like a mouse's feet. I was fifth on the agenda. A placement, I thought, carefully calculated to indicate to the assembled crowd the importance of my presence in the Castle. For my benefit, English was spoken during my presentation. "Mistress Beauchamp, will ye stand forth?" called the scribe. Urged forward by an unnecessary shove from Mrs. FitzGibbons's meaty hand, I stumbled out into the clear space before Colum, and rather awkwardly curtsied, as I had seen other females do. The shoes I had been given did not distinguish between right foot and left, being in either case only an oblong of formed leather, which made graceful maneuvering difficult. There was a stir of interest through the crowd as Colum paid me the honor of getting up from his chair. He offered me his hand, which I took in order not to fall flat on my face. Rising from the curtsy, mentally cursing the slippers, I found myself staring at Dougal's chest. As my captor, it was apparently up to him to make formal application for my reception—or captivity, depending how you wanted to look at it. I waited with some interest to see just how the brothers had decided to explain me. "Sir," began Dougal, bowing formally to Colum, "we pray your indulgence and mercy with regard to a lady in need of succor and safe refuge. Mistress Claire Beauchamp, an English lady of Oxford, finding herself set upon by highwaymen and her servant most traitorously killed, fled into the forests of your lands, where she was discovered and rescued by myself and my men. We beg that Castle Leoch might offer this lady refuge until"—he paused, and a cynical smile twisted his mouth—"her English connections may be apprised of her whereabouts and due provision made for her safe transport." I didn't miss the emphasis laid on "English," and neither did anyone else in the hall, I was sure. So, I was to be tolerated, but held under suspicion. Had he said "French," I would have been considered a friendly, or at worst, neutral intrusion. It might be more difficult than I had expected to get away from the castle. Colum bowed graciously to me and offered me the unlimited hospitality of his humble hearth, or words to that effect. I curtsied again, with somewhat more success, and retired to the ranks, followed by curious but more or less friendly stares. Until this point, the cases seemed to have been of interest chiefly to the parties involved. The spectators had chatted quietly among themselves, waiting their turns. My own appearance had been met with an interested murmur of speculation and, I thought, approval. But now there was an excited stir through the hall. A burly man stepped forward into the clear space, dragging a young girl by the hand. She looked about sixteen, with a pretty, pouting face and long yellow hair tied back with blue ribbon. She stumbled into the space and stood alone, while the man behind her expostulated in Gaelic, waving his arms and occasionally pointing at her in illustration or accusation. Small murmurs ran through the crowd as he talked. Mrs. FitzGibbons, her bulk resting on a sturdy stool, was craning forward with interest. I leaned forward and whispered in her ear. "What's she done?" The huge dame replied without moving her lips or taking her eyes from the action. "Her father accuses her of loose behavior; consortin' improperly wi' young men against his orders," muttered Mistress FitzGibbons, leaning her bulk backward on the stool. "Her father wishes the MacKenzie to have her punished for disobedience." "Punished? How?" I hissed, as quietly as I could. "Shhh." In the center, attention now focused on Colum, who was considering the girl and her father. Looking from one to the other, he began to speak. Frowning, he rapped his knuckles sharply on the arm of his chair, and a shiver ran through the crowd. "He's decided," whispered Mrs. FitzGibbons, unnecessarily. What he had decided was also clear; the giant stirred for the first time, unbuckling his leather belt in a leisurely manner. The two guards took the terrified girl by the arms and turned her so that her back was to Colum and her father. She began to cry, but made no appeal. The crowd was watching with the sort of intent excitement that attends public executions and road accidents. Suddenly a Gaelic voice from the back of the crowd rose, audible over the shuffle and murmur. Heads turned to locate the speaker. Mrs. FitzGibbons craned, even rising on tiptoe to see. I had no idea what had been said, but I thought I recognized that voice, deep but soft, with a spiky way of clipping the final consonants. The crowd parted, and Jamie MacTavish came out into the clear space. He inclined his head respectfully to the MacKenzie, then spoke some more. Whatever he said seemed to cause some controversy. Colum, Dougal, the little scribe, and the girl's father all seemed to be getting into the act. "What is it?" I muttered to Mrs. Fitz. My patient was looking much better than when last seen, though still a bit white-faced, I thought. He'd found a clean shirt somewhere; the empty right sleeve had been folded and tucked into the waist of his kilt. Mrs. Fitz was watching the proceedings with great interest. "The lad's offering to take the girl's punishment for her," she said absently, peeking around a spectator in front of us. "What? But he's injured! Surely they won't let him do something like that!" I spoke as quietly as I could under the hum of the crowd. Mrs. Fitz shook her head. "I dunno, lass. They're arguin' it now. See, 'tis allowable for a man o' her own clan to offer for her, but the lad is no a MacKenzie." "He's not?" I was surprised, having naively assumed that all the men in the group that had captured me came from Castle Leoch. "O' course not," said Mrs. Fitz impatiently. "Do ye no see his tartan?" Of course I did, once she had pointed it out. While Jamie also wore a hunting tartan in shades of green and brown, the colors were different than that of the other men present. It was a deeper brown, almost a bark color, with a faint blue stripe. Apparently Dougal's contribution was the deciding argument. The knot of advisers dispersed and the crowd hushed, falling back to wait. The two guards released the girl, who ran back into the crowd, and Jamie stepped forward to take her place between them. I watched in horror as they moved to take his arms, but he spoke in Gaelic to the man with the strap, and the two guards fell back. Amazingly, a wide, impudent grin lighted his face briefly. Stranger still, there was a quick answering smile on the face of the giant. "What did he say?" I demanded of my interpreter. "He chooses fists rather than the strap. A man may choose so, though a woman may not." "Fists?" I had no time to question further. The executioner drew back a fist like a ham and drove it into Jamie's abdomen, doubling him up and driving his breath out with a gasp. The man waited for him to straighten up before moving in and administering a series of sharp jabs to the ribs and arms. Jamie made no effort to defend himself, merely shifting his balance to remain upright in the face of the assault. The next blow was to the face. I winced and shut my eyes involuntarily as Jamie's head rocked back. The executioner took his time between blows, careful not to knock his victim down or strike too many times in one spot. It was a scientific beating, skillfully engineered to inflict bruising pain, but not to disable or maim. One of Jamie's eyes was swelling shut and he was breathing heavily, but otherwise he didn't appear too badly off. I was in an agony of apprehension, lest one of the blows redamage the wounded shoulder. My strapping job was still in place, but it wouldn't hold for long against this sort of treatment. How long was this going to go on? The room was silent, except for the smacking thud of flesh on flesh and an occasional soft grunt. "Wee Angus'll stop when blood's drawn," whispered Mrs. Fitz, apparently divining my unasked question. "Usually when the nose is broken." "That's barbarous," I hissed fiercely. Several people around us looked at me censoriously. The executioner apparently now decided that the punishment had gone on for the prescribed length of time. He drew back and let fly a massive blow; Jamie staggered and fell to his knees. The two guards hurried forward to pull him to his feet, and as he raised his head, I could see blood welling from his battered mouth. The crowd burst into a hum of relief, and the executioner stepped back, satisfied with the performance of his duty. One guard held Jamie's arm, supporting him as he shook his head to clear it. The girl had disappeared. Jamie raised his head and looked directly at the towering executioner. Amazingly, he smiled again, as best he could. The bleeding lips moved. "Thank you," he said, with some difficulty, and bowed formally to the bigger man before turning to go. The attention of the crowd shifted back to the MacKenzie and the next case before him. I saw Jamie leave the hall by the door in the opposite wall. Having more interest in him now than in the proceedings, I took my leave of Mrs. FitzGibbons with a quick word and pushed my way across the hall to follow him. I found him in a small side courtyard, leaning against a wellhead and dabbing at his mouth with his shirttail. "Here, use this," I said, offering him a kerchief from my pocket "Unh." He accepted it with a noise that I took for thanks. A pale, watery sun had come out by now, and I looked the young man over carefully by its light. A split lip and badly swollen eye seemed to be the chief injuries, though there were marks along the jaw and neck that would be black bruises soon. "Is your mouth cut inside too?" "Unh-huh." He bent down and I pulled down his lower jaw, gently turning down the lip to examine the inside. There was a deep gash in the glistening cheek lining, and a couple of small punctures in the pinkness of the inner lip. Blood mixed with saliva welled up and overflowed. "Water," he said with some difficulty, blotting the bloody trickle that ran down his chin. "Right." Luckily there was a bucket and horn cup on the rim of the well. He rinsed his mouth and spat several times, then splashed water over the rest of his face. "What did you do that for?" I asked curiously. "What?" he said, straightening up and wiping his face on his sleeve. He felt the split lip gingerly, wincing slightly. "Offer to take that girl's punishment for her. Do you know her?" I felt a certain diffidence about asking, but I really wanted to know what lay behind that quixotic gesture. "I ken who she is. Havena spoken to her, though." "Then why did you do it?" He shrugged, a movement that also made him wince. "It would have shamed the lass, to be beaten in Hall. Easier for me." "Easier?" I echoed incredulously, looking at his smashed face. He was probing his bruised ribs experimentally with his free hand, but looked up and gave me a one-sided grin. "Aye. She's verra young. She would ha' been shamed before everyone as knows her, and it would take a long time to get over it. I'm sore, but no really damaged; I'll get over it in a day or two." "But why you?" I asked. He looked as though he thought this an odd question. "Why not me?" he said. Why not? I wanted to say. Because you didn't know her, she was nothing to you. Because you were already hurt. Because it takes something rather special in the way of guts to stand up in front of a crowd and let someone hit you in the face, no matter what your motive. "Well, a musket ball through the trapezius might be considered a good reason," I said dryly. He looked amused, fingering the area in question. "Trapezius, is it? I didna know that." "Och, here ye are, lad! I see ye've found your healer already; perhaps I won't be needed." Mrs. FitzGibbons waddled through the narrow entrance to the courtyard, squeezing a bit. She held a tray with a few jars, a large bowl, and a clean linen towel. "I haven't done anything but fetch some water," I said. "I think he's not badly hurt, but I'm not sure what we can do besides wash his face for him." "Och, now, there's always somethin', always somethin' that can be done," she said comfortably. "That eye, now, lad, let's have a look at that." Jamie sat obligingly on the edge of the well, turning his face toward her. Pudgy fingers pressed gently on the purple swelling, leaving white depressions that faded quickly. "Still bleedin' under the skin. Leeches will help, then." She lifted the cover from the bowl, revealing several small dark sluglike objects, an inch or two long, covered with a disagreeable-looking liquid. Scooping out two of them, she pressed one to the flesh just under the brow bone and the other just below the eye. "See," she explained to me, "once a bruise is set, like, leeches do ye no good. But where ye ha' a swellin' like this, as is still comin' up, that means the blood is flowin' under the skin, and leeches can pull it out." I watched, fascinated and disgusted. "Doesn't that hurt?" I asked Jamie. He shook his head, making the leeches bounce obscenely. "No. Feels a bit cold, is all." Mrs. Fitz was busy with her jars and bottles. "Too many folk misuses leeches," she instructed me. "They're verra helpful sometimes, but ye must understand how. When ye use 'em on an old bruise, they just take healthy blood, and it does the bruise no good. Also ye must be careful not to use too many at a time; they'll weaken someone as is verra ill or has lost blood already." I listened respectfully, absorbing all this information, though I sincerely hoped I would never be asked to make use of it. "Now, lad, rinse your mouth wi' this; 'twill cleanse the cuts and ease the pain. Willow-bark tea," she explained in an aside to me, "wi' a bit of ground orrisroot." I nodded; I recalled vaguely from a long-ago botany lecture hearing that willow bark in fact contained salicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin. "Won't the willow bark increase the chance of bleeding?" I asked. Mrs. Fitz nodded approvingly. "Aye. It do sometimes. That's why ye follow it wi' a good handful of St.John's wort soaked in vinegar; that stops bleedin', if it's gathered under a full moon and ground up well." Jamie obediently swilled his mouth with the astringent solution, eyes watering at the sting of the aromatic vinegar. The leeches were fully engorged by now, swollen to four times their original size. The dark wrinkled skins were now stretched and shiny; they looked like rounded, polished stones. One leech dropped suddenly off, bouncing to the ground at my feet. Mrs. Fitz scooped it up deftly, bending easily despite her bulk, and dropped it back in the bowl. Grasping the other leech delicately just behind the jaws, she pulled gently, making the head stretch. "Ye don't want to pull too hard, lass," she said. "Sometimes they burst." I shuddered involuntarily at the idea. "But if they're nearly full, sometimes they'll come off easy. If they don't, just leave 'em be and they'll fall off by themselves." The leech did, in fact, let go easily, leaving a trickle of blood where it had been attached. I blotted the tiny wound with the corner of a towel dipped in the vinegar solution. To my surprise, the leeches had worked; the swelling was substantially reduced, and the eye was at least partially open, though the lid was still puffy. Mrs. Fitz examined it critically and decided against the use of another leech. "Ye'll be a sight tomorrow, lad, and no mistake," she said, shaking her head, "but at least ye'll be able to see oot o' that eye. What ye want now is a wee bit o' raw meat on it, and a drop o' broth wi' ale in it, for strengthenin' purposes. Come along to the kitchen in a bit, and I'll find some for ye." She scooped up her tray, pausing for a moment. "What ye did was kindly meant, lad. Laoghaire is my granddaughter, ye ken; I'll thank ye for her. Though she had better thank ye herself, if she's any manners at all." She patted Jamie's cheek, and padded heavily off. I examined him carefully; the archaic medical treatment had been surprisingly effective. The eye was still somewhat swollen, but only slightly discolored, and the cut through the lip was now a clean, bloodless line, only slightly darker than the surrounding tissue. "How do you feel?" I asked. "Fine." I must have looked askance at this, because he smiled, still careful of his mouth. "It's only bruises, ye know. I'll have to thank ye again, it seems; this makes three times in three days you've doctored me. Ye'll be thinking I'm fair clumsy." I touched a purple mark on his jaw. "Not clumsy. A little reckless, perhaps." A flutter of movement at the courtyard entrance caught my eye; a flash of yellow and blue. The girl named Laoghaire hung back shyly, seeing me. "I think someone wants to speak with you alone," I said. "I'll leave you. The bandages on your shoulder can come off tomorrow, though. I'll find you then." "Aye. Thank ye again." He squeezed my hand lightly in farewell. I went out, looking curiously at the girl as I passed. She was even prettier close up, with soft blue eyes and rosepetal skin. She glowed as she looked at Jamie. I left the courtyard, wondering whether in fact his gallant gesture had been quite so altruistic as I supposed. Next morning, roused at daylight by the twittering of birds outside and people inside, I dressed and found my way through the drafty corridors to the hall. Restored to its normal identity as a refectory, enormous cauldrons of porridge were being dispensed, together with bannocks baked on the hearth and spread with molasses. The smell of steaming food was almost strong enough to lean against. I felt still off-balance and confused, but a hot breakfast heartened me enough to explore a bit. Finding Mrs. FitzGibbons up to her dimpled elbows in floured dough, I announced that I wanted to find Jamie, in order to remove his bandages and inspect the healing of the gunshot wound. She summoned one of her tiny minions with the wave of a massive white-smeared hand. "Young Alec, do ye run and find Jamie, the new horse-breaker. Tell 'im to come back wi' ye to ha' his shoulder seen to. We shall be in the herb garden." A sharp fingersnap sent the lad scampering out to locate my patient. Turning the kneading over to a maid, Mrs. Fitz rinsed her hands and turned to me. "It will take a while yet before they're back. Would ye care for a look at the herb gardens? It would seem ye've some knowledge of plants, and if you've a mind to, ye might lend a hand there in your spare moments." The herb garden, valuable repository of healing and flavors that it was, was cradled in an inner courtyard, large enough to allow for sun, but sheltered from spring winds, with its own wellhead. Rosemary bushes bordered the garden to the west, chamomile to the south, and a row of amaranth marked the north border, with the castle wall itself forming the eastern edge, an additional shelter from the prevailing winds. I correctly identified the green spikes of late crocus and soft-leaved French sorrel springing out of the rich dark earth. Mrs. Fitz pointed out foxglove, purslane, and betony, along with a few I did not recognize. Late spring was planting time. The basket on Mrs. Fitz's arm carried a profusion of garlic cloves, the source of the summer's crop. The plump dame handed me the basket, along with a digging stick for planting. Apparently I had lazed about the castle long enough; until Colum found some use for me, Mrs. Fitz could always find work for an idle hand. "Here, m'dear. Do ye set 'em here along the south side, between the thyme and foxglove." She showed me how to divide the heads into individual buds without disturbing the tough casing, then how to plant them. It was simple enough, just poke each clove into the ground, blunt end down, buried about an inch and a half below the surface. She got up, dusting her voluminous skirts. "Keep back a few heads," she advised me. "Divide 'em and plant the buds single, one here and one there, all round the garden. Garlic keeps the wee bugs awa' from the other plants. Onions and yarrow will do the same. And pinch the dead marigold heads, but keep them, they're useful." Numerous marigolds were scattered throughout the garden, bursting into golden flower. Just then the small lad she had sent in search of Jamie came up, out of breath from the run. He reported that the patient refused to leave his work. "He says," panted the boy, "as 'e doesna hurt bad enough to need doctorin', but thank ye for yer consairn." Mrs. Fitz shrugged at this not altogether reassuring message. "Weel, if he won't come, he won't. Ye might go out to the paddock near noontide, though, lass, if ye've a mind to. He may not stop to be doctored, but he'll stop for food, if I ken young men. Young Alec here will come back for ye at noon-tide and guide ye to the paddock." Leaving me to plant the rest of the garlic, Mrs. Fitz sailed away like a galleon, young Alec bobbing in her wake. I worked contentedly through the morning, planting garlic, pinching back dead flower heads, digging out weeds and carrying on the gardener's never-ending battle against snails, slugs, and similar pests. Here, though, the battle was waged bare-handed, with no assistance from chemical antipest compounds. I was so absorbed in my work that I didn't notice the reappearance of young Alec until he coughed politely to attract my attention. Not one to waste words, he waited barely long enough for me to rise and dust my skirt before vanishing through the courtyard gate. The paddock to which he led me was some way from the stables, in a grassy meadow. Three young horses frolicked gaily in the meadow nearby. Another, a clean-looking young bay mare, was tethered to the paddock fence, with a light blanket thrown across her back. Jamie was sidling cautiously up along one side of the mare, who was watching his approach with considerable suspicion. He placed his one free arm lightly on her back, talking softly, ready to pull back if the mare objected. She rolled her eyes and snorted, but didn't move. Moving slowly, he leaned across the blanket, still muttering to the mare, and very gradually rested his weight on her back. She reared slightly and shuffled, but he persisted, raising his voice just a trifle. Just then the mare turned her head and saw me and the boy approaching. Scenting some threat, she reared, whinnying, and swung to face us, crushing Jamie against the paddock fence. Snorting and bucking, she leapt and kicked against the restraining tether. Jamie rolled under the fence, out of the way of the flailing hooves. He rose painfully to his feet, swearing in Gaelic, and turned to see what had caused this setback to his work. When he saw who it was, his thunderous expression changed at once to one of courteous welcome, though I gathered our appearance was still not as opportune as might have been wished. The basket of lunch, thoughtfully provided by Mrs. Fitz, who did in fact know young men, did a good deal to restore his temper. "Ahh, settle then, ye blasted beastie," he remarked to the mare, still snorting and dancing on her tether. Dismissing young Alec with a friendly cuff, he retrieved the mare's fallen blanket, and shaking off the dust of the paddock, he gallantly spread it for me to sit on. I tactfully avoided any reference to the recent contretemps with the mare, instead pouring ale and offering chunks of bread and cheese. He ate with a single-minded concentration that reminded me of his absence from the dining hall the two nights before. "Slept through it," he said, when I asked him where he had been. "I went to sleep directly I left ye at the castle, and didna wake 'til dawn yesterday. I worked a bit yesterday after Hall, then sat down on a bale of hay to rest a bit before dinner." He laughed. "Woke up this morning still sitting there, wi' a horse nibbling at my ear." I thought the rest had done him good; the bruises from yesterday's beating were dark, but the skin around them had a good healthy color, and certainly he had a good appetite. I watched him polish off the last of the meal, tidily dabbing stray crumbs from his shirt with a moistened fingertip and popping them into his mouth. "You've a healthy appetite," I said, laughing. "I think you'd eat grass if there was nothing else." "I have," he said in all seriousness. "It doesna taste bad, but it's no verra filling." I was startled, then thought he must be teasing me. "When?" I asked. "Winter, year before last. I was livin' rough—ye know, in the woods with the… with a group of lads, raidin' over the Border. We'd had poor luck for a week and more, and no food amongst us left to speak of. We'd get a bit of parritch now and then from a crofter's cottage, but those folk are so poor themselves there's seldom anything to spare. They'll always find something to give a stranger, mind, but twenty strangers is a bit much, even for a Highlander's hospitality." He grinned suddenly. "Have ye heard—well, no, ye wouldna. I was goin' to say had ye heard the grace they say in the crofts." "No. How does it go?" He shook his hair out of his eyes and recited, "Hurley, hurley, round the table, Eat as muckle as ye're able. Eat muckle, pooch nane, Hurley, hurley, Amen." "Pooch nane?" I said, diverted. He patted the sporran on his belt. "Put it in your belly, not your bag," he explained. He reached out for one of the long-bladed grasses and pulled it smoothly from its sheath. He rolled it slowly between his palms, making the floppy grain-heads fly out from the stem. "It was a late winter then, and mild, which was lucky, or we'd not have lasted. We could usually snare a few rabbits— ate them raw, sometimes, if we couldna risk a fire-and once in a while some venison, but there'd been no game for days, this time I'm talkin' of." Square white teeth crunched down on the grass stem. I plucked a stem myself and nibbled the end. It was sweet and faintly acid, but there was only an inch or so of stem tender enough to eat; hardly much nourishment there. Tossing the half-eaten stalk away, Jamie plucked another, and went on with his story. "There was a light snow a few days before; just a crust under the trees, and mud everywhere else. I was looking for fungas, ye know, the big orange things that grow on the trees low down, sometimes—and put my foot through a rind of snow into a patch of grass, growing in an open spot between the trees; reckon a little sun got in there sometimes. Usually the deer find those patches. They paw away the snow and eat the grass down to the roots. They hadn't found this one yet, and I thought if they managed the winter that way, why not me? I was hungry enough I'd ha' boiled my boots and eaten them, did I not need them to walk in, so I ate the grass, down to the roots, like the deer do." "How long had you been without food?" I asked, fascinated and appalled. "Three days wi' nothing; a week with naught more than drammach—a handful of oats and a little milk. Aye," he said, reminiscently viewing the grass stalk in his hand, "winter grass is tough, and it's sour—not like this—but I didna pay it much mind." He grinned at me suddenly. "I didna pay much mind to the thought that a deer's got four stomachs, either, while I had but one. Gave me terrible cramps, and I had wind for days. One of the older men told me later that if you're going to eat grass, ye boil it first, but I didna know that at the time. Wouldn't ha' mattered; I was too hungry to wait." He scrambled to his feet, leaning down to give me a hand up. "Best get back to work. Thank ye for the food, lass." He handed me the basket, and headed for the horse-sheds, sun glinting on his hair as though on a trove of gold and copper coins. I made my way slowly back to the castle, thinking about men who lived in cold mud and ate grass. It didn't occur to me until I had reached the courtyard that I had forgotten all about his shoulder.