Legacy (10 page)

The food tasted like chalk in my mouth. I knew for a fact that I had never before come across the story of Mairi of Shiels in my research. I was equally sure that this was the first time anyone had spoken of it to me. How, then, could the events of my nightmare at Traquair House so closely parallel the professor’s story? Obviously, it was a tale he was very familiar with. But it wasn’t exactly the way I remembered it. Had Professor MacCleod left anything out or was he relaying the facts as modern historians knew of them? I was willing to wager that they didn’t have the same version of the story I did.

“Is there anything else?” I prompted him.

He sipped his tea and peered intently at me over his old-fashioned spectacles. “There is. Lady Douglas placed a curse on the Murrays descended from Mairi Maxwell. We have no record of the nature of her curse, but in my research, I found some interesting similarities in the Murray women who died early.” He laughed self-consciously and took out a handkerchief. Blowing long and hard into the worn linen, he wiped his nose and replaced it in his coat pocket. “This will seem absurd to you, Christina. It certainly did to me, but Ian insisted I tell you. In the entire line descended from Mairi Maxwell, only two women have died tragically and before their time. They were Katrine Murray of Blair-Atholl and Jeanne Maxwell of Traquair. Both, in addition to their descendancy from Mairi and their Murray blood, had another Maxwell ancestor on their mothers’ side of the family. Both were susceptible to terrifying nightmares that didn’t begin until after they became pregnant.”

Katrine Murray. The lovely girl who looked like me had died tragically
. There was more. I knew it. There had to be. Why else would I feel a strange chill creep up my spine? Why would the hair stand up on the back of my neck and an eerie sense of inevitability temper my reactions, giving me this outward appearance of calm?

The professor reached out and covered my hand with his own. “Bear in mind that you’re an American and that this is the twentieth century.”

I laughed with a false bravado that fooled neither of the two men at the table. “Don’t worry about me. If there is anything else, I’d like to know.”

He drew a deep breath. “Katrine Murray and Jeanne Maxwell were afflicted with a disease that had all the symptoms of what we now call juvenile diabetes.”

“Dear God!” I didn’t realize I had whispered the words out loud until Ian leaned forward and gripped my wrist with his hand.

“It doesn’t mean anything, Christina,” he asserted fiercely. “It’s absurd to even consider it. Your circumstances and those of the Murray women are nothing alike.”

Just hearing the words and seeing his face settled my nerves. I turned toward the professor. “My mother is Irish,” I explained. “I haven’t any Maxwell ancestors, and it appears that I can’t have children.”

“But you do have nightmares?” he persisted.

I considered his question carefully before speaking. “They aren’t exactly nightmares, Professor MacCleod. You see, I’m not in any of them.”

“Who is?”

I inhaled deeply. Not for the world could I have turned away from his piercing, hypnotic gaze. “Katrine Murray and Mairi of Shiels,” I said at last.

“Ah.” He nodded as if satisfied. “I thought so.”

“You did not!” Ian was visibly upset. “You knew nothing about Christina’s association with the curse until I told you about her.”

“That isn’t true, Ian.” The old man’s voice was very soft. “I knew from the first moment I met Christina Murray ten years ago at the university that there was a strong possibility she would be part of this legacy.”

“How?” Ian demanded.

“Traquair is a marvelous old house,” MacCleod explained. “You really must explore it some time. Take the visitor’s tour. It’s really the best way to view the house. In the priests’ room at the top of stairwell called the hidden stairs is a portrait of Jeanne Maxwell. It was painted at the beginning of the sixteenth century just before her death.” His eyes were moving across my face, as if committing my features to memory. “You really must look at it, Ian. It’s a haunting experience.” Somehow I expected what was coming next. The professor’s words only confirmed what I already knew. “Jeanne Maxwell looks exactly like Christina.”

“There is something else,” I said.

The glow of discovery illuminated his face. “Tell me.”

“I know the nature of Grizelle Douglas’s curse.”

“You also know her first name,” he observed. “I didn’t and neither does anyone else alive today. Please go on.”

“It has to do with the stone.” I closed my eyes, trying to remember the words from my dream. “For your treachery the Maxwell women through David’s line will never rest,” I recited. “Their sleep will be haunted by ghosts of the dead who walk the earth until they die by foul and tragic means. Only when Scotland’s Stone of Destiny is found and returned to Scotland, will the curse be lifted.”

“Good God.” The professor sighed. “We have about as much chance of lifting the curse as we have of going back in time to change the course of history.”

“But Christina isn’t a Maxwell,” interrupted Ian. “Christ, MacCleod, she isn’t even a Scot on her mother’s side. Even if this preposterous theory is true, the Maxwell strain should be stronger. And what of the dreams? They came to Jeanne and Katrine while they were pregnant. Christina isn’t able to have children.”

Professor MacCleod looked at me and stroked his chin. “He’s right, of course. Only your diabetes and your face links you to these women, unless—”

“Unless what?” I was having difficulty breathing.

He looked at the white ridge around Ian’s lips and the hand that held my wrist in a desperate grip. “I don’t wish to make this any more painful for you, Christina, but was your infertility diagnosed?”

I shook my head. “Not really. I had all the tests, but the doctors couldn’t come up with any reason for Stephen and I not to have a child. It just didn’t happen.”

He smiled wisely. “I see. What about your family? Are you sure your mother has no Scottish blood?”

“Very sure.” Susan Donnally Murray was as proud of her German-Irish ancestry as if she’d arranged the genotype herself.

“Well then, perhaps the reason for your dreams is that you have
an da shelladh
, ‘the sight.’ It’s not uncommon in Scotland.” He smiled at us both. “Shall I pick up the check?”

When Ian and I were back in the car and on our way to Blair Castle, I realized that I still didn’t know the answer to the question that had been bothering me since we sat down to lunch with Professor MacCleod. “Ian,” I said tentatively. He didn’t really look like he was in the mood for conversation.

“What is it?”

“Grizelle Douglas was your ancestor too, wasn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Does any of this have to do with you?”

He looked at me, and I could see the beginnings of fine lines etched into the skin around his eyes.

“Apparently so,” he replied with a lightness that belied his expression. “I haven’t sorted it out yet, love. But when I do, I’ll tell you.”

Love. He’d called me love. I closed my eyes, lingering over the word, repeating it silently to myself.

***

Two hours later, following the A9 into Perthshire, eight miles northwest of Pitlochry, we came to the Vale of Atholl and Blair Castle. I had seen it before and been impressed with the pristine whiteness of the castle walls, the magnificent parklands, and what surely must be one of the largest private historical collections on display in all of Great Britain.

Because I was a Murray, I knew that my ancestors had come from this area of Scotland. I had always assumed that my people were peasants forced to leave Scotland because of the clearances, hoping for a better life in a land of greater opportunity. Now, I wasn’t so sure. If Katrine Murray and Mairi Maxwell were direct ancestors, some of my past was here in the castle of the duke of Atholl. I could feel my heart pound with excitement. It was already after four and the last tour left at five. I didn’t want to rush this visit.

“Shouldn’t we find a hotel first?” I asked. “It’s too late to get a good look around.”

Ian shook his head. “We aren’t staying at a hotel.”

“Why not?”

He drove past the coach park into a private road with a carport. Setting the emergency brake, he turned to face me, sliding his hand across the back of my seat to rest lightly on my shoulder. “George Murray and I shared a room at Harrow when we were children. We attended Oxford together before I left for America. I have a standing invitation to stay at Blair whenever I visit the Highlands.”

“The tenth duke of Atholl is your friend?” He couldn’t miss the incredulous wonder in my voice.

“His son is my friend. The duke is seventy-two years old.”

For the first time I realized the differences in our backgrounds. He was a British gentleman, untitled, but still brought up with money and privilege to a lifestyle that was completely foreign to my middle-class American values. He was no longer wealthy, of course, and between the two of us, I had more formal education, but there was a chasm a mile wide separating us. Was I in for more heartache? Chewing my lip, I stared at Ian’s handsome, slightly worried face.

“Christina.” His voice had a breathless, husky quality.

“Hmm?”

“This is your family home, not mine. George Murray, the man you are descended from, was the younger brother of the duke of Atholl. You have more right to be here than I do.”

I looked around at the acres of green parklands, at the mile-long driveway, at the hundreds of windows and the towering turrets where the standard of the House of Murray waved proudly in the wind. Blair Castle had welcomed visitors for more than seven hundred years.

Closing my eyes, I pictured a girl in a beautiful evening gown, a girl with black hair and gray eyes. That girl had ridden across these parklands. She had danced in the ballroom, played in the nursery, learned her lessons in the wonderful old library, and drawn the cocooning curtains around her at night in a bedchamber somewhere above the curving staircase. I was Katrine’s legacy. I was also a Murray. Opening the door, I smiled across the chasm at Ian. “Shall we go inside?”

The family wasn’t in residence, but it didn’t seem to matter. Ian and I were treated like honored guests. We were ushered into the drawing room for afternoon tea. In direct view of family portraits and armor, exquisite furniture, moldings, and a china collection my mother would have swum the Atlantic to possess, we were served cucumber sandwiches, scones, and tea.

My bedroom was something out of a Georgette Heyer novel. Elegant stucco scrollwork in the curving rococo style was evident in the mantel. Painted wallpaper decorated with flowers and brightly colored birds covered the walls. The furniture was Georgian with delicate Chippendale carvings in the bedposters and canopy. A commode in one corner of the room had ivory fittings and covered urns. The fender, grate, and fire irons were copied from Chinese designs, reminiscent of the Oriental craze dominating the middle of the seventeenth century. When I opened a door at the end of the room, I was relieved to see a modern bathroom, complete with a state-of-the-art showerhead, thick towels, and creamy rugs. There was another door at the opposite end of the bathroom. I opened it and found Ian in the next room, sprawled out on the bed, asleep. Closing the door carefully, I retreated to my own room.

It might be hours before he awoke, and I desperately wanted to get back to Janet’s diary. Pulling up a comfortable chair to one of the floor-length windows, I looked out over the hills of Perthshire. There was something gracious and comforting and familiar inside these medieval stone walls of Blair Castle. They welcomed me just as Traquair had welcomed me. I opened the diary and began to read, but I couldn’t focus on the words. My head ached and I felt dizzy. Suddenly the pain increased. I dropped the journal and let my head fall back against the chair. A terrifying wave of blackness engulfed me, and then, as before, the visions came.

Ashton Manor

February 1746

Katrine was very thin and unnaturally pale. For the first time in his life Lord Richard Wolfe was desperately afraid. Afraid he would lose her and the child she finally confessed to be carrying. Against his better judgment, he was almost convinced to allow her to return home to the loving ministrations of Janet Murray. The Highlands would bring the roses back to her cheeks. Now that she carried his child, he had no fear that she would leave him permanently. Katrine’s sense of duty was too ingrained. He frowned at the glass of ruby-colored liquid at his elbow. The port was strong, and for weeks he had been drinking heavily. Leaving the wine untouched, he walked out of his study to the stairs. There was a loud commotion at the door.

“What is it, Hastings?” Richard asked, his hand on the railing.

“This gentlemen seeks speech with Lady Wolfe.” The butler pointed to a bearded, disreputable-looking figure wrapped in plaid. “I told him she was unavailable, but he will not accept my answer.”

Richard walked toward the door. “Perhaps he will accept mine. My wife is resting, sir,” he said politely. “May I take her your message?”

“I canna’ do that,” the man said in a brogue so thick it was difficult to understand. “Wha’ I ha’ is for the lass, only. Do you ken?”

“Nevertheless, we will not wake her,” insisted Richard firmly. “You may wait in the hall if you like.”

“It’s all right, darling. I’m up now.” All heads turned to the voice at the top of the landing. Katrine, dressed in a loose-fitting gown of soft blue wool, appeared to float effortlessly down the stairs.

“Angus.” She held out her hand to the clansman. “’Tis lovely to see you. Have you eaten?”

Richard’s mouth twisted. Only Katrine, with the beautiful manners instilled into her from birth, would think to ask if this scowling, mud-stained peasant was hungry.

The man called Angus shook his head. “I’m to bring you to Scone, lass. Alasdair is dead and your ma beside hersel’.”

Katrine whitened and swayed. Richard sprang to her side, holding her up with his arm. “Damn you!” he swore. “Can’t you see that she is breeding.”

“Aye.” Angus nodded. “We’ll need a carriage. I brough’ only horses.”

Katrine straightened. “I’ll come immediately.”

“Katrine,” Richard protested. “You can’t be serious. Of course you must go, but ’tis nearly night. A few more hours won’t make a difference.”

She shook her head, her rain-colored eyes filled with tears. “I must leave now, Richard. Please understand.”

In the end, he let her go. It was after dark when the travel coach, emblazoned with the Wolfe crest, pulled out of the courtyard into the long driveway. Richard watched from the steps as the square-shaped cab pulled by six horses turned past the gates and disappeared into the mist. With a bleakness born of resignation, he knew that, given Katrine’s poor health, his child had only a prayer’s chance of surviving the journey.

***

Katrine’s heart lifted as she crossed the borders into Scotland. It was early February and bitterly cold, but she was home. Her brother was dead and nothing would ever be the same again, but she was finally home. That, in itself, was nothing short of a miracle. Here she would heal. She would speak to her mother and learn the source of the frightening nightmares that sucked the sleep from her exhausted body.

Janet Murray took one horrified look at her daughter’s emaciated figure with its large belly and another at her face, where the skin was stretched so tightly across the bones that the girl’s every heartbeat was evident in the blue veins pulsing at her temples, and refused to answer any questions. Instead she ordered her to bed. It wasn’t until later, weeks later, after fortifying broths and soothing plasters and honey-sweetened teas had added pounds to Katrine’s slender frame and filled out her cheeks, that she relented and told her about Alasdair.

He had fallen at Falkirk on the seventeenth of January. The battle was a victory for the prince’s army, but the advantage was not taken. In the confusion of a winter dusk, Alasdair was marched to Edinburgh, and hanged to death on the gallows. There was nothing anyone could do. Stirling surrendered to the prince, but the castle remained in government hands. Charles was at Inverness waiting out the winter weather. The duke of Cumberland, second son of the English king, had reached Aberdeen on the twenty-seventh of February. His army had received five thousand German troops under Prince Frederick of Hesse.

Katrine knew the duke from her London season. He was a heavy, pompous young man in his early twenties with a tendency to overrate his own importance. Still, he was an experienced commander, and the fact that he was in Scotland to command the English troops did not bode well for the Jacobites.

“You should not have returned to Scotland at this time, Katrine,” her mother admonished her. “What were you thinking?”

“I had to come,” Katrine replied softly. “Even if it weren’t for Alasdair, I still would have come. Ever since the standard was raised at Glenfinnan, I planned to return.”

“What does Richard say?”

Katrine bit her lip. “He was against it at first, but I think he was at the point of changing his mind. My illness frightened him. Of course, when Angus brought the news of Alasdair, he couldn’t refuse.”

“Angus went on his own,” said Janet. “I would never have sent him. You were safe in England.” She rose from the side of the bed and walked to the window. “I fear it is all at an end for the clans, Katrine. Your father is convinced that the retreat from London disheartened the troops. He has lost his hope of victory.”

“I did not come home for Scotland or for the Jacobite cause, Mother.”

At the odd note in her voice, Janet turned toward the bed and frowned. “What is it, Katrine? Why did you arrive here thin and pale, on the brink of death?”

Her eyes were huge and filled with terrible purpose. “’Tis the nightmares. They wake me night after night, always the same. Tell me, Mother. Tell me truly. Am I accursed? Am I destined to live the rest of my life with this fear of the night and my own sleep?”

Janet closed her eyes.
Oh God, no. Please, no. What have we done, George and I?
She looked again upon her daughter. “What is it that you see, Katrine?”

“I see two women from the past.”

“Women?” asked Janet sharply. “There is more than one?”

Katrine nodded.

Her mother sat down beside her on the bed. “Tell me of your dreams.”

Katrine closed her eyes and leaned her head back on the pillow. It was such a relief to confide in someone. Someone who carried the same dark legacy in her blood. “Do you know of Mairi of Shiels, Mother?”

“Aye.” Janet’s lips trembled. She knew more than she wanted of Mairi Maxwell of Shiels.

“She married David Murray before Bannockburn,” Katrine continued. “But she loved King Edward of England. She was killed for giving him the Coronation Stone and cursed by David’s mother, Lady Douglas.” Her eyes were huge in her too-thin face. “The woman was a witch, Mother. Her curse haunts us still. It comes through the women of the Murray line.” In a hushed whisper she told of Mairi’s deception, of how she switched the stones, of the long, narrow passageway, the flickering candles, the netherworld-lit stone in the burial crypt, and the desperate, persuasive power of Mairi’s haunted eyes.

“You said there were two women,” Janet reminded her. “Who else did you see?”

Katrine took several deep breaths, willing her thundering heart to calm itself. “Every night I see it over and over again. There is a wide moor filled with horses and armor and stained with blood. The wounded cry out. ’Tis a horrible sight. It smells of death and rotting flesh. Mountains overlook the moor on three sides.” Katrine wrinkled her nose against the odor and swatted at imaginary flies.

Janet’s hand rose to her throat. Flodden Moor! She could almost see the terrifying images Katrine described.

“A woman, richly dressed, walks among the bodies,” said Katrine. “She searches the wounded on the field, turning them over, one after another, asking those who live, ‘Where is John Maxwell?’ Finally she finds the one she seeks. With a cry, she pulls his head into her lap. ‘You’re very pale, my love,’ he says. ‘You must eat. It isn’t wise for you to go without food. Don’t cry, Jeannie,’ he begs her. ‘Maxwells never cry.’”

Tears rolling down her cheeks, Katrine sat up and grasped her mother’s shoulders. “’Tis my own face I see,” she whispered. “Tell me why Mairi of Shiels and Jeanne Maxwell have my face.”

Janet’s eyes were wide with shock and startled recognition. “Of course,” she said, tracing the bones of her daughter’s cheeks with wondering fingers. “How could I not have seen it? Yet, it was so very long ago when they last came to me.”

“What are you saying?”

Katrine’s horrified whisper pulled Janet back into the present. She sighed and explained. “I, too, was afflicted with the nightmares. They first came when I carried you. After you were born, they disappeared forever. I believe ’tis the curse.”

“But you are a Douglas, not a Murray,” Katrine protested.

Janet shook her head. “I cannot explain everything, my love. Lady Douglas was a Murray and also a Douglas by marriage. She gave her husband three children. Our families have intermarried so often that it would be an amazing thing were we not all related.” Her hands clenched in her lap. “There was opposition when your father and I wanted to wed,” she confessed. “I carry Maxwell and Douglas blood. Your father is a Murray from the line of David and Mairi. Although no one admits to actually believing the power of the curse, they all step carefully around it.” She reached out and brushed the hair back from her daughter’s brow. “I believe there are many who have had the dreams. Otherwise the curse would have long since been forgotten. It is only dangerous when all the conditions are present.”

“What are the other conditions?”

“I’m not sure.”

Katrine’s forehead wrinkled in concentration. “There must be a reason we dream of only these two. Something about them was the same.” She gasped and clutched her mother’s sleeve as a thought occurred to her. Looking into Janet’s dark eyes, she realized her mother had come to the same conclusion. “They have my face,” she whispered. “They died horribly and they have my face.”

“It means nothing, nothing at all.” Janet was on the brink of hysteria. “When you have the bairn, this nonsense will stop just as it did for me.”

Katrine kicked away the confining bedcovers. Taking Janet’s hands in her own, she knelt beside her and spoke slowly and deliberately. “Don’t you see, Mother? I am the one. I must prove Mairi of Shiels did not betray Scotland. I must end the curse or I will not live to bear my child.”

Janet’s eyes burned with an eerie light. For a moment, Katrine thought she recognized the fanatical glow of Grizelle Douglas’s witchery in her mother’s gentle face.

“No, Katrine,” she said softly. “You have it all wrong. The child will be born first. Mairi and Jeanne bore their sons. Otherwise you would not be here.”

“Of course.” Katrine barely whispered the words, but Janet, tuned to every nuance of her daughter’s expression, heard them. “Alasdair will never sire children. There is no one left but me.” She turned determined eyes on her mother. “Somehow we must find the stone. If my child is a girl, she will inherit the curse, and if it is not, then ’tis I who will die.”

Janet did not tell her daughter that she had never seen Jeanne Maxwell in her dreams nor had Mairi ever drawn her down a cold, narrow passageway. Before Katrine had revealed the nature of the curse, she had known nothing of the stone. All that she knew of Mairi of Shiels was of the moments before her death.

There was compassion and pain and tremendous love in the kiss Janet placed on the young cheek beside her. She saw no point in telling Katrine that she was most definitely “the one” and that the child she carried was not a girl.

Blair Castle

1993

I don’t know when I realized that the words in Janet Douglas’s diary fell far short of the story that unfolded before me. The words were there, of course, and beautifully written but not the way I saw them. There was nothing in the black, carefully bound book that described the clarity of Katrine Murray’s bones beneath her pale skin or the look of anguish in her eyes. Nor did the words describe the sudden meeting of minds between mother and daughter as they stared at one another. I knew what Katrine would do next as surely as I drew breath. I knew because it was exactly what I would do.
She would search for the stone.

Brushing away tears, I stood and walked to the window. Rubbing my arms against the cold, I stared outside at green lawns and pine forests. Blair Castle was well heated. The sudden chill in the room had nothing to do with temperature. It had to do with my ability to see into an unalterable past. With an overwhelming sense of despair, I knew that Katrine Murray would fail in her quest. She would fail because I was alive with all the conditions she knew nothing about. All except one. I was not pregnant. Or at least I hadn’t been when Mairi of Shiels first led me down the dark passageway to the stone.

Leaning against the window, I closed my eyes and let the visions clamoring for release inside my head envelop me.

April 1746

Katrine pressed the scented handkerchief against her nose and rubbed her enormous stomach. She was exhausted and longed to rest her aching back against the dungeon wall, but she dared not. The hewn stone ran wet with dampness, and the cold was so intense it seeped through her woolen cloak, past her gown and petticoats to the sensitive skin beneath. She knew she shouldn’t be here. The slick stone stairway with its numbing cold and lonely isolation, with its scurrying rats and shadowed darkness, was no place for a woman in her last month of pregnancy.

The stone was not to be found here at Scone Castle, and it wasn’t at Blair-Atholl. She had searched every room, every hidden stairway, every cell, every rank-smelling and musty dungeon, to no avail. Nothing even remotely resembled the hallways of her dream. The narrow passageway and large burial chamber filled with death masks and glowing light was nowhere to be found. Only Traquair was left to explore. Traquair with its secret stairs and hidden cellars, its ancient library, and tranquil, gracious public rooms. Traquair, a refuge for Catholic priests, a pleasure ground for Scottish kings, Jacobite seat of the Maxwells, and home to Jeanne Maxwell, direct descendent of Mairi of Shiels.