The Adventurer (32 page)

He is going to kill me,
she thought as she stood there, somehow suddenly unable to move.

In the moment just before he reached her, Isabella felt herself being pushed off and away, sending her tumbling to the floor.

She lifted her head and recognized Calum. It was then she realized he had stepped in to take the blow meant for her.

Isabella opened her mouth to scream at the very moment St. Clive’s blade entered Calum’s body.

“No!”

She couldn’t breathe. She crawled across the floor, her fingernails scratching along the stones, clawing her way to where Calum had fallen. She reached for him, felt the wetness of his life’s blood spilling onto her hands.

She watched him close his eyes against the terrible pain of the sword thrust. “Lass ...”

Isabella lifted her head, crying out for someone, anyone to help. Her heart was pounding, choking her, her tears blurring her vision. “Please, God, no ... don’t let him die. Please!”

Already his body was trembling with shock.

No!

She saw her father through the sea of bodies that were scrambling around her. She cried out for him.

She saw at least a half dozen of Calum’s men dragging a raging and screaming St. Clive out of the room.

Fergus, M’Cuick, Douglas, Lachlann, all raced forward as one.

Isabella was frantically ripping at her petticoats, trying to stem the flow of blood that was seeping from the slice in Calum’s side.

“Bella ...”

She looked up, saw Alec. “Alec, help me, please ...”

But it wasn’t Alec who was standing beside her. It was Calum, his hazel-colored eyes wide with concern. Which only meant that the man lying on the floor, bleeding from the sword wound, was Alec.

M’Cuick came with water, some cloths. He peered at the wound, the flesh it had laid open. He sucked in a breath. “ ’Tis a fearsome injury.”

Isabella stood up, trembling as she watched M’Cuick tend to him.

Calum put his arm around her shoulders and held her.

“He saved my life,” she whispered.

“Aye, lass. He did.”

Some of the other men, familiar with such wounds, were shaking their heads, doffing their bonnets, crossing themselves as they muttered a quick prayer.

“Calum, he cannot die.”

“ ’Tis a terrible wound, lass. M’Cuick will do all he can for him.”

“No.”
She refused to consider it. “We cannot let him die, Calum. Not like this. Please we must be able to do something!”

“Just pray, lass. Pray for a miracle.”

A miracle.

And, suddenly, Isabella knew what to do.

She knelt beside M’Cuick and lifted the silver chain from around her neck. She held the stone of the MacAoidh up before her and looked at Calum. “You once told me this stone had been used to cure sickness by dipping it in water.”

She reached for the bowl of water M’Cuick had brought, and dropped the stone into it.

The stone immediately flashed, like a spark of lightning. Isabella reached for the cloth, soaked it in the water, and pressed it against the wound to stem the flow of the blood. And as she held it there, she closed her eyes and said a silent prayer.

August, 1747

Isabella closed the door softly behind her.

The room that stretched before her was filled with shadows as the late-afternoon sun drifted its way off to the west.

It was a dark room, paneled in oak and lit only by the brisk fire that burned in the hearth. A basket stood beside the hearth filled with fresh peats. A worn Turkish carpet, its colors long faded, covered the floorboards beneath furnishings that were once grand, now weathered from generations of use. The room smelled of the books that lined its walls, aged and cracked along their bindings. It was a room that had seen grander times, that had been left behind by a new era just dawning.

Much the same could be said for its sole occupant, who lay quietly on the chaise that faced out onto the back garden.

“Is that you, child?” he said, and motioned to her from the shadows.

Isabella crossed the room, stopping just beside the chaise. “Good day to you, sir.”

“Come.” He patted the edge of the chaise beside him. “Come closer so that I might see you.”

Isabella did as she was bid, smiling as the Mackay chief covered her hands with his gnarled aged ones.

“My nephew was right,” he said, his rheumy eye still managing a playful twinkle. “You do have a mermaid’s face.”

Isabella lowered her eyes, smiled. “Calum likes to tease me ...”

“Oh, but it wasna Calum who told it to me.”

Isabella looked up. “Alec?”

“Aye. He says you must have just a wee bit of mermaid in you. You did, after all, save his life.”

“As he did mine, sir,” she said. “ ’Twas the stone’s doing, not mine.”

“Aye, but the stone would not have had any effect for someone who did not deserve its power. ’Tis why it ne’er brought anything but misfortune to those who sought to steal it from the clan.”

Isabella simply smiled.

“Calum tells me you seek my advice in the decision of what you should do with the stone.”

“I do, sir. I love them both. I cannot believe that either is the better choice over the other.”

“Then the answer is clear.”

“It is?”

“Aye. They shall both serve as chief when I am gone.”

Isabella looked at him. “Both?”

“Aye. As you said, neither is stronger in character than the other, and together they can face any challenge that comes their way. It is how it should have been from the beginning. I should never have separated them as I did when they were born. ’Twill not be the same for their children. They will all live as one family. United. Together. And the stone ... I think ’tis time the Mackay lasses kept it. Pass it mother to daughter instead of father to son. ’Tis better for it to be used for the healing. No longer for battling.”

The chief was taken by a fit of coughing that had Isabella fetching him a glass of water from the sideboard.

When she came back to the chaise, she brought with her a small miniature portrait she had noticed hanging on the wall.

“Sir, who is this man?”

The chief took a sip of water, glanced at the miniature, and nodded. “That is my brother, Artair.”

“Calum’s father?”

“Aye. ’Twas painted just afore he went off to fight for King James in ’fifteen ...”

Isabella felt a shiver as she stared down into the suddenly recognizable face.

It was the same face of the man she had previously known as the Comte de St. Germain.

“It was him,” she whispered.

“What is that, child?”

“The man who gave me the stone when I was in Paris—the man they call St. Germain. It was him. It was Calum’s father.”

Isabella ran to the door, pulled it open. “Calum! Alec!”

“You’re certain of it, Bella?” Calum said when she told him the unbelievable news.

“Yes, Calum. Don’t you see? It all makes sense now. Your father didn’t die at Sheriffmuir as you believed. Somehow he must have gotten away, and he escaped to France.”

“Where he assumed the persona of the comte,” Calum finished.

“But why?” wondered Alec. “Why not simply live in exile?”

“To protect you.”

They all turned to the old chief.

“What do you mean, Uncle?”

“Your father knew if it was discovered that he was yet alive, this estate and all the lands of Mackay would have been forfeited to the Crown for his part in the rebellion. As it was, the only way we managed to save it was to have the chiefship assumed by me. As a supporter of the Crown, King George need ne’er fear the new Mackay chief raising an army against him.”

“You just said
we,
Uncle,” Calum said. “Who else made this decision to have you assume the chiefship?”

The Mackay looked at him. “Your father, of course.”

“You knew he was alive, all this time ...”

“But if you knew, why did you never tell us,” asked Alec.

“That, my dear boy, is a question you must ask your father.”

Calum looked at Alec and then to Isabella, who smiled and nodded in understanding.

“To Paris, lass?”

Isabella nodded and stepped into his arms. “To Paris.”

And to a new adventure.

Dear Reader,

I hope you enjoyed reading
The Adventurer.
As I finished writing, I remained enthralled with the idea of the legendary charm stone, so much so that I began to wonder what would have happened to it afterward, after Isabella and Calum, after their children, generations on. I’m thrilled to announce that I’m going to explore that idea in my next novel, taking the Mackay charm stone into the 21st century. I hope you’ll look for it in the fall of 2003.

Until then, here is a little hint of what is to come...

Jaclyn

“It’s for you, Lib.”

It was Rosalia, their Wednesday afternoon clerk, who spoke, poking her dark head around the doorway of the book-crammed office. She wasn’t, however, her usual cheery self.

“It’s ...” She hesitated, bit her bottom lip. “Um, it sounds serious.”

Libby didn’t even ask who it was. She only fished for the receiver hidden beneath the nest of packing material that littered the desk beside her.

“Hello? This is Libby Hutcheson.”

“Isabella ... this is Dr. Winston.”

From that moment on, and for the rest of her life, the poetry of Anne Bradstreet would be linked to her mother’s death.

That had been a week ago. Libby was no longer sitting in her comfortable but cluttered office at Belvedere Books at 58th and Lexington on Manhattan’s east side. Instead she was standing in the parlor of her mother’s Victorian house, high above the Atlantic in Ipswich-By-The-Sea, Massachusetts. It was the same parlor where Libby had played as a child, had had tea parties with her mother on summer afternoons, and where her height every year had been chinked into the doorjamb with her mother’s favorite paring knife.

Even then Libby felt her gaze unwittingly turning toward that doorjamb, giving in to a small smile as she remembered how she had always tried to lift her heels a little off the hardwood floor to make herself taller than she really was. She remembered, too, how her mother would always catch her and say “Flatten those feet, Isabella Elizabeth Mackay Hutcheson ...” with the lilt in her voice that had remained with her long after she had crossed the ocean to America.

Libby had always hated the fact that she hadn’t grown tall and lanky—and blond—like her friend, Fay Mills, who had become a runway model at the age of sixteen, had left high school in Ipswich to move to New York, and now had her face beaming out from the covers of a growing number of magazines. Instead, Libby was just
average
—average height, average weight, average black hair and eyes that were more smoky than blue. She made an average salary, lived in an average studio apartment on West 76th Street that needed far more work than her average salary would allow, and since she spent most of her time surrounded by musty, aging books, she wore average clothes, comfortable khakis and chunky oversized sweaters that she ordered from the L.L.Bean catalog because she was too busy most of the time to go shopping.

“You’ll ne’er be average to me, Isabella Elizabeth,” her mother had always said. “To me you’ll always be my one-of-a-kind ...”

The only child Matilde Mackay Hutcheson had ever had.

Feeling the now familiar sting of tears threatening to spill, Libby closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and tucked the memory back into the corner of her mind. It was then she caught the whisper of voices coming from the other side of the arched doorway.

“A shame it is, poor child.”

“Yes, Libby’s all alone now,” agreed the second voice. “No brothers or sisters to comfort her. Not even a husband ...”

It was Mrs. Phillips and Mrs. Fanshaw, two of her mother’s neighbors who had always made it their business to comment on the business of others. Libby should have expected they would certainly have an opinion of this particular occasion.

“And how old is she now, Libby? Must be nearly thirty.”

Thirty-one, Libby wanted to say, but decided to keep her presence unknown. The other one spoke again.

“Goodness, I was wed and had three children by the time I was thirty. At this rate, by the time little Libby finds herself a man, it’ll be too late for her to have any children to leave this place to. And to think, all those bedrooms upstairs, empty still. Poor Matilde and Hugh never had any other children.”

“I wonder if she’d be interested in selling the place. Charles Derwent had always told Matilde she need only name her price and he’d buy it from her. The view is simply the best anywhere on the north shore ...”

Libby stiffened, a simmering outrage deafening her to whatever else her mother’s neighbors and friends might have to say. Sell her mother’s house? She couldn’t possibly.

“What other choice will she have?” one of them persisted. “Living so far away now in that city?”

That city.
As if New York was akin to Sodom and Gomorrah.

“Oh, yes,” the other said. “Though she never let on, I know Matilde was simply destroyed when Libby moved away. And look how she came to visit less and less often these past few years, too. Poor Matilde. At her age a woman should have been surrounded by grandchildren, instead of sitting on that porch alone each night, staring out at the sea ...”

Libby turned toward the front window, catching a glimpse of her mother’s rocking chair, its wooden spindles bleached from years of sunlight and the sea wind. She felt an unpleasant shiver run along the back of her neck. Had her mother felt alone as they said? Abandoned by her for having moved to New York those five years ago? Libby thought back to the day she had told her mother of the position she had accepted with Belvedere Books, Manhattan’s oldest and most prestigious antiquarian bookshop. It had been an opportunity she had only ever dreamed of, a chance to spend her days immersed in her love of old books.