Chill (7 page)

He hoped the weeping woman would not be too disturbed by the loss of her ring.

The whole house was undisturbed by Samuel’s night-time visit, and slept on, regardless. Chris Morton re-settled herself in her lonely bed, and lay on her side, gently drifting back to sleep. Granny Hughes and her husband snored in their own little guest room, dreaming about their comfortable centrally-heated flat down in the village, waiting for them to return. Fiona nodded off again surprisingly quickly after Samuel’s intrusion, and Sebastian had not for one moment surfaced from unconsciousness throughout the whole night. But not everyone slept soundly.

Upstairs in his room at the top of the tower, Charles suddenly sat bolt upright in his bed, blinking. Around him the dark shadows hung, unmoving. He had had the dream again, the same dream. The dream that had haunted his father. The woman with the heavy dark eyes and almost-black hair had stood before him, at the foot of his bed, staring at him and whispering over and over in a dry, rasping, barely audible voice “I – will – get – you!”

He lay back down again, and waited for sleep to come.

A few hours later, when Samuel opened his eyes, he saw the carved ebony box sitting on his desk where he had left it the night before. He took out the brittle yellowing pages torn from the twelve-year-old Catherine Morton’s journal. It was hard to believe that this was the same ebony box she had mentioned in her diary, kept here at Dunadd all those years at least since 1708. Samuel felt like a true historian or archaeologist, unearthing a story that had remained untold for three hundred years. He switched on his mother’s computer in the corner of the sitting room, and it hummed into life. He was going to spend the morning doing some research.

“What’s the big secret?” Fiona asked later, as they climbed the stairs to her room that afternoon. But Samuel wouldn’t tell her. He merely waved a CD in front of her face, and said “This!”

His eyes were gleaming, and he looked rather pleased with himself, she could tell. “I spent the morning on the Internet,” he told her. “Did a bit of research.” He’d downloaded the information he was looking for, and burnt it onto CD. Now they sat together at her computer. Samuel glanced over his shoulder and murmured “Push the door to.”

She did as she was told. He slid the CD into the disc drive and they waited for the screen to show his findings. Then he
scrolled downwards. Fiona’s eyes opened wide.

“Where did you get all this stuff?”

“Easy. I just typed
Sheriffmuir
and
battle
into Google’s search engine. And this is what I came up with.”

Fiona peered forward, and began to read.

Then Samuel clicked open another file.

“So the Battle of Sheriffmuir swept right through Lynns Farm,” Fiona said, “where a woman lived with her sons …”

The two of them fell silent. “Patrick MacFarlane, the young stable boy,” she added. “He was probably still living there at the time. Maybe he’s one of the sons mentioned.”

“And your people, the Mortons, watched it from the drawing room windows,” Samuel added.

“And the weeping woman?”

They looked at each other in silence.

They were thoughtful for a moment, trying to imagine the confusion and horror of the battle that had raged below Dunadd. Samuel remembered Catherine’s words in her journal.
“So we have become friends. Life has brightened up now. When I’ve finished my sewing and bible study, and helped with the chores, I go outside to find Patrick … He listens to me as if I have something important to say.”
And then later
“I have found a friend, only to lose him again.”
Samuel began to hear in his head the cries of the wounded and dying on the field of battle, as the Highland warriors fought for their lost independence in the mist.

“The Jacobites fought against my family,” Fiona announced suddenly. “Or against my ancestors at Dunadd, anyway.”

“Did they?” He looked at her, perplexed.

“During the battle my family were on the side of Argyll’s troops. They were Government supporters. The other farmers on the moor resented this, and never forgot it.”

“Why didn’t you mention this before?” Samuel said.

“I didn’t think about it. It’s not something we jump up and down about, to be quite honest.”

“How long have the Mortons owned Dunadd?” he asked her now.

“As long as anyone can remember. And before that, it was just a kind of open barn without a roof, where drovers used to sleep on their way to market. It must have been freezing. My father’s ancestors were the first to occupy it and own the land.”

Fiona looked away from the computer screen and sighed. “It’s all very well,” she said. “But what does any of this tell us about Catherine? Nothing. She remains a complete mystery.”

Samuel looked at her and grinned.

“I’ve got a present for you,” he said.

“What?”

“I thought you might like this as a new desktop background.”

He opened a further file and revealed his most exciting piece of information. There on the computer screen in front of them was an example of the tartan found in Catherine’s ebony box, the small frayed square which had been carefully hidden away and preserved along with the silver ring. “The MacFarlane tartan,” the text underneath it read. It was described as Jacobite. Anyone wearing it would be seen as a Jacobite warrior, prepared to fight in the cause of the Stewarts against the Hanoverian king.

Fiona stared at the screen.

“Whoever wore this tartan was no friend of your family’s,” Samuel murmured. “So it does tell us something about her.”

“It tells us she kept a piece of Patrick’s tartan, despite the fact he was a Jacobite.”

Whether they had liked it or not, history had driven these two people apart. Samuel thought of the peaceful
hills of Sheriffmuir, the grasses waving in the breeze, and found it difficult to imagine the place filled with the cries of the wounded and dying. So much bloodshed had taken place here, so many lives had been lost, and Scotland as a nation had made her last bid for independence. The Jacobite uprising had been suppressed until the year of Culloden in 1746, and their final defeat. The whole course of Scottish history had been influenced up on these windy heights of Sheriffmuir, a battle had been fought and lost and a woman had watched it from the windows of Dunadd and wept.

“Where is this Gathering Stone?” he asked Fiona now.

“It’s hidden amongst the trees. On the far side of the road going from Dunadd. Behind the MacRae Monument.”

“Can we go there?”

“Of course. It’ll be heavy-going in the snow, but we can try.”

They shut down the computer, and stared at the blank screen. They had more than enough to keep them guessing about what might have happened to Catherine Morton. The Weeping Woman had haunted Dunadd for years, but Samuel and Fiona felt certain they were on the verge of solving the mystery of what had happened to her. They had the journal and the objects inside the ebony box to help them. Now all they needed was to interview the old man at Lynns Farm. But first of all, Samuel wanted to see the stone where the clans had gathered the night before the battle. He wanted to imagine what it was really like, to set out across this lonely moor, knowing that a stronger enemy than yourself waited in the dips and hollows of Sheriffmuir.

From an upstairs window Charles stood watching Fiona and Samuel as they made their way down the avenue of beech trees. He kept his eyes on them, until they disappeared from view.

His mother had come into the drawing room behind him and stood there in silence. She glanced over his shoulder at the two disappearing figures on the moor, then looked at Charles curiously. She knew there was something wrong with her eldest son, but she didn’t know what. “What are those two up to, I wonder?” she said, narrowing her eyes into the distance.

Charles shrugged.

Mrs Morton watched him leave the room, her face creased by a worried frown.
The sooner we can get out of here, so that the children can start school again, the better
, she thought grimly, looking out at the implacable snowdrifts that were imprisoning them on the moor. Charles’ mood had been so dark lately. He was always brooding. He needed to get back into the routine of term-time.

Downstairs she came across Isabel sitting with Granny Hughes at the kitchen table, a pot of tea between them.

“How’s the work going?” she asked her, helping herself to a mug from the dresser.

“Very well,” Isabel mused, smiling to herself. “Couldn’t be better in fact. That work shed is the perfect place for my
art. It gives me room to work in, and I don’t need to worry about the mess.”

Granny resisted the impulse to roll her eyes, or to show too plainly what she was thinking.

“I see Fiona and Samuel are off out again?”

Isabel nodded. “Yes, they do seem to be preoccupied lately, don’t they?”

“Mmm,” and Mrs Morton frowned slightly as she poured tea into a mug.

“I’m worried about Charles,” she confessed, looking from one to the other. Granny Hughes kept her counsel, and munched a biscuit in silence. She knew when to leave the two younger women to have their cosy tête-à-tête.
If that made them feel better, well then, let them get on with it.

“How do you mean?” Isabel ventured nervously.

“He seems so strange lately.”

Isabel listened, not knowing what to say. To be honest, she had found the Morton boys a little difficult, oddly remote and intensely private. They evidently preferred to keep themselves to themselves.

Chris Morton gazed out of the narrow window at the end of the kitchen, at the bleak white world which lay outside.

“One day this snow will melt,” she sighed wistfully. “One day …”

Isabel smiled. “It’s hard to imagine it ever being anything other than winter here.” It was as if she had moved to a land locked in a perpetual arctic freeze.

“Huh!” Granny said gruffly, but it was the only comment she was prepared to make. She drew her chair out from beneath her, and it scraped noisily against the tiles. “Well,
some of us have work to do!”

Chris Morton’s dreamy gaze didn’t falter, however.

“Oh, the summers are beautiful here. You’ll just have to take my word for it,” she continued, ignoring Granny’s interruption. “This winter is not typical, I’m glad to say. Not typical at all …”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Isabel murmured.

As soon as Fiona and Samuel were out of sight, Charles crept out of the house away from the prying eyes of the adults. He had his own agenda.

Knowing that what he was about to do was dubious and risky in the extreme, he crunched his way through the snow to the back door of the cottage. He stood on the step, and tried the door handle. As usual, it was unlocked.

Glancing furtively over his shoulder, he pushed it open and stepped inside the dark gloomy kitchen. It was cold in here, no fires lit, no lamps on. Samuel’s mother was planning on spending the best part of the day in her studio. He wiped his feet on the mat, and tiptoed across the flagged floor into the quiet sitting room beyond, and down the long hallway to Samuel’s bedroom at the far end of the cottage. He felt like a burglar, creeping by stealth through someone else’s house like this, but he couldn’t stop now.

He located Samuel’s bedroom at the far end of the cottage, the bed still unmade, the covers thrown back. The first thing that caught his eye was the wooden box on the desk under the window. It looked slightly familiar to him. Hadn’t he seen it somewhere before, in their own house perhaps, in the library? At this realization, he felt less guilty
about breaking into the Cunninghams’ cottage. It looked as if Samuel had taken to thieving, removing objects from the house without their permission, so what did it matter if he in turn did his own share of trespassing?

He lifted the lid of the box; it creaked in the silence, and he peered nervously over his shoulder. He looked inside, and took out the leather bag. What was this? He turned it over in his hands, took out the ring and the piece of tartan. Interesting, but they told him nothing.

As an afterthought he opened Samuel’s desk and saw the bundle of brittle brown papers lying there, as if waiting to be read.

He took them out, and began to read for the first time Catherine Morton’s journal. Now he too could hear her voice speaking to them from the remote past.

“The nineteenth day of April 1708. My name is Catherine Morton …”

For several minutes he was mesmerized, his head bent over the delicate papers, absorbing their contents, listening to the unfinished story she had to tell.

He was reading the final page when he heard a sound that stopped his heart. The door of the cottage opening, and a clash of pots and pans in the sink. Isabel had come back. Closing the lid of the desk and replacing the box on it, he stealthily crept out into the hallway, his heart beating fast. What would Isabel say if she found him here?

Quickly he made his way to the front porch, half-way along the corridor – the door they never used. If it was locked, then he would be stuck, but at least he could hide in the unused porch for a while, behind the drawn curtains, until the coast was clear
again. The door into the front porch squeaked as he inched it open, and he winced, wondering if she’d heard anything from the kitchen. Nothing. As luck would have it, the key of the outer-door was in the lock, so he twisted it, and stepped outside into the cold snow. The trail of footprints he left behind him would be visible to anyone passing that way, but hopefully no one would. Fiona and Samuel walked slowly along the Sheriffmuir road, cutting a careful path over the densely-packed snow and ice. They were heading for the MacRae Monument, which loomed up ahead of them, a pyramid shape built of stone and surrounded by trees. It stood on the roadside at a particularly lonely and desolate part of Sheriffmuir. There was no traffic. The narrow roads had disappeared under the snowdrifts.

“We’ve got to be quick,” Fiona said. “We don’t want to be out here after dark.”

“Wait!” Samuel stopped to read the inscription on the stone monument.

“In memory of the MacRaes killed at Sheriffmuir 13th November 1715.”

According to the information from the Internet, other clans fought in the battle too, but it was the Clan MacRae who suffered the worst losses. It was their descendants who thought to erect a monument here, in their memory, two hundred years later.

They gazed at the pile of stones with the tragic inscription. “And they started the day so triumphantly too,” Fiona mused.

She entered the trees and began to cut a path through the deep snow. Samuel followed her. They came at last to a clearing, and Fiona stopped. “This is where many of the men died. They were buried in great mounds.”

Samuel stared through the snowy trees and the mist, and thought of the Highland warriors and Redcoat soldiers clashing here, and fighting their last. It was no wonder the place was said to be haunted by battleground ghosts.

“It all seems so peaceful now,” he murmured.

They walked on in silence for a while.

Ahead of them they could just make out the soaring peak of a mountain covered in snow. It loomed through the mist, and vanished again.

They left the main path behind and struck out across the deep snowdrifts, forging a way forward until Fiona came to a standstill. They had reached a bank of trees, in front of which, rising from the snow, were the dark lines of an iron cage.

“Here it is,” she said. “This is where the clans gathered the night before the battle.”

As they cleared the snow from around the cage, the Gathering Stone emerged, lying flat on the ground. The cage had been added years after the battle, when vandals had broken the stone in half.

They looked down at the stone and listened to the wind sighing in the frozen branches of the trees above them, a sad sound like music.

“And what did Catherine Morton and Patrick MacFarlane have to do with it all?” Samuel asked. “Did he fight in the battle do you think, wearing his Jacobite tartan?”

One of the trees had fallen and lay on its side. Samuel rested his foot on the trunk, and gazed across the moor at the mist and cloud obscuring the distant mountain peaks.

“It’s such a beautiful place, your moor.”

“I know.”

They were both quiet for a moment, as Samuel tried to imagine the Highlanders rallying in their thousands at this point, having tramped all the way by foot from the farthest mountains of the north.

“Seb and Charles used to come here with their swords and shields, and re-enact the battle,” Fiona said. “It was one of our games.”

Samuel could well imagine them dodging one another in the mist, diving behind trees and re-appearing, or doing a Highland charge with their swords raised, their blood-curdling battle-cry ringing on the air.

“Listen, what was that?” He looked round at the ranks of frozen white trees.

“It’s just the wind in the branches,” Fiona assured him.

Samuel could make out a bank of solid white mist appearing in the hollow below them. It advanced towards them like an army.

“Look at that,” he whispered, pointing.

“It’s just the mist. Will you calm down,” she hissed. “You’re making me jumpy. I told you it was a bad idea to come here,” she muttered.

“No, you didn’t.”

“Well I am now. Can you walk a bit faster? We’d better be heading back before it gets dark.” Their feet were frozen, despite their boots and thick socks.

“What about Lynns farm?” Samuel asked.

Fiona looked at him in disbelief. “It’s a bit late for that now. We’ll have to leave it till tomorrow. We don’t want to get caught out in this,” she added as snowflakes began to spiral out of a darkening sky. It clung to everything, their gloves and scarves,
muffling the hills in more silence.

“You’re right,” he agreed.

They began to make their way back to the road.

“Have you ever met Mr MacFarlane before?” Samuel asked.

She shook her head. “He’s a bit of a recluse. Mum’s met him though. They didn’t exactly see eye to eye.”

At last they burst out from under the trees onto the road again, the monument in front of them.

As they began to trudge uphill towards Dunadd, Fiona stopped and pointed.

“Look. See that?” Below them, in the dip of the land, surrounded by a thick band of snow-covered trees, lay the rooftop and chimneys of a little white farmhouse which Samuel had never seen before. “Lynns Farm,” she announced.

It looked a dark and gloomy place, slightly sinister with an air of neglect about it. Samuel wasn’t sure he liked the idea of having to go there. Mr MacFarlane did not sound like the sort of man who encouraged visitors.

By the time they reached Dunadd it was dark and the adults had begun to worry. As they walked into the kitchen of the big house, a great fuss broke out. Fiona and Samuel were given a good talking to by not one, but three anxious females – Mrs Morton, Granny Hughes and Isabel Cunningham. All three women had a great deal to say on the subject.

As Samuel and his mother made to leave, Fiona stopped him in the corridor and they began to whisper about their plans for the next day.

“Are you still on for tomorrow?” she hissed. “Lynns Farm?”

He nodded.

“We won’t go together though,” she whispered, “in case
my Mum starts getting suspicious. Meet me at the waterfall at nine o’ clock tomorrow morning.”

As she finished speaking Samuel thought he heard a door quietly closing behind them. He turned his head, but the corridor was empty.

“Really, Samuel, I don’t know what you and Fiona could have been thinking about, wandering about the moor after dark. It could be very dangerous, you know,” Isabel berated him, as they made their way across the courtyard back to the cottage.

“I know, Mum, I’m sorry,” he said. “It only started to get dark when we were nearly home.”

“That’s not the point. Don’t let it happen again. I’ve aged about ten years this afternoon. I hadn’t even realized you were missing until Granny Hughes started fretting about it.”

Samuel decided the best policy was to apologize as often as possible. They opened the door of the cottage, only to find the stove had gone out again.

“Blast,” Isabel muttered, as she set to work to rescue it. Samuel made his way to his own room.

There, on his desk under the window, was the carved ebony box in which had been stored secret treasures from the past. In unlocking the box, they had unlocked more of that mysterious past. Now Samuel picked up the fragments torn from Catherine Morton’s journal, and placed them beside the leather bag, containing the ring and the piece of tartan. These objects belonged together, he decided. Inside the ebony box, where she would have wanted them.

As he glanced about the room he noticed a muddy footprint on the rug beside his bed. He peered at it and frowned. Odd, he thought, as he slowly lowered the lid of the box.