Moving Target (49 page)

Shrieking, Cleary shot out of her chair and launched herself at her father with murder in her eyes. Garrison grabbed her and held her as gently as possible until her screams subsided into a shattered kind of silence.

“Get her out of here before she drools on something valuable,” Warrick said.

Garrison looked at his grandfather over his mother’s bent head. “Shut up. Just. Shut. Up. Too bad you weren’t on Paul’s kill list. You can’t die soon enough for me.”

Stunned into silence, Warrick watched while Garrison picked up his mother and carried her away from the man who never should have had children at all.

“Are you happy now that you’ve turned my grandson against me?” Warrick asked Dana bitterly. “But if you expect to prosecute anyone, forget it. You have your pound of flesh. I have a university full of psychiatrists who will be happy to swear that Cleary isn’t competent to stand trial.”

Dana and Niall exchanged looks. Dana nodded slightly.

Niall spoke for the first time. “We’re willing to let Paul Carson go to his grave as a murderer working with one hired hand, William Wallace. We even have a motive: he was protecting the House of Warrick’s reputation during the delicate sales negotiations between you and—”

“How did you know about that!” Warrick interrupted. “No one but—”

“When more than one person knows,” Niall cut in impatiently, “there’s no such thing as a secret. A lot of what you were selling was your reputation. Linking you to a trade in forgeries—much less the creation of those forgeries—would have killed the sale and left Cleary a much less wealthy woman. As Paul expected to marry Cleary as soon as you died, he had several million dollars’ worth of motive for murder.”

Warrick sat slowly, then nodded. “Makes more sense than her mewing about love.”

“In return for keeping your reputation intact,” Dana said, “you will agree to open your files so we can trace the missing pages from the Book of the Learned. You can put whatever face you want on it, but I would suggest you say that you have reason to suspect the pages are forgeries and you’re willing to buy them back for their most recent purchase price since the error was originally yours in identifying them as valid pages.”

Warrick grunted. “I’ll think about it.”

“Not good enough,” Dana said crisply. “You will agree now to help make the Book of the Learned whole or you won’t. There will be no waffling.”

Warrick’s mouth thinned until it disappeared into the grim lines of his face. “Agreed.” Then he pointed to Serena. “But if you think I’m going to do anything else to help that misbegotten bitch, you’re mistaken. I will never acknowledge her as my granddaughter. Never!”

Serena smiled with all the savagery of the last sorceress of Silverfells. “I will hold you to that.” Then she looked at Dana. “Get it in writing.”

Without another glance at her grandfather, Serena turned and walked out, carrying the Book of the Learned in her hands.

S
erena sat at her loom, flanked by colorful yarns hanging from bobbins. Her unbound hair shifted and burned with each motion she made as she worked the heddles and threw the shuttle with tireless, timeless rhythms of her body. She worked as she had for the last two nights, in candlelight, with Erik reading aloud from the Book of the Learned.

The pattern that was growing under her deft hands was as old as the intertwined initials of E and S, and as new as the peace she felt each time she looked up and saw Erik watching her, smiling. She had been terrified that he would bleed to death before the paramedics came, but he had been right when he said that the wound wasn’t as bad as it appeared. The medics had muttered about ribs like steel plate and how lucky he was. Healthy, too.

He had healed with a speed that made Niall mumble about weird cloth and things that go bump in the night.

“Go on,” Serena said to Erik, her voice husky with memory.

“You sure you want the story to end?”

“I’m sure I want to know how it ends.”

He laughed. It caused a small twinge along his ribs, but only a small one. Whatever had been woven into that old cloth was better than penicillin. His wound had healed the way corn grew in Kansas—while you watched. He still wore the scarf wrapped around his ribs beneath his shirt. Every time he took it off, he started to hurt.

He took the hint and left the uncanny cloth in place.

“You’re going to torment me, aren’t you?” Serena said with an exaggerated pout. “You can read it and I can’t, so you’re going to make me beg.”

He looked at his beautiful fire-haired lover and felt an ache like time twisting through his gut. “Never.”

He began to read aloud.

Today the mists parted for me.

She waited within them, hair like fire, eyes like amethyst. When she saw her cloak held tenderly in my hand, the cloak brought to me by the daughter I never knew I had, she smiled despite the tears burning silver on her cheeks.

I held out my hand, asking.

She came to me, answering.

The crystal bells of Silverfells sang around us.

When Erik stopped reading, the silence in the room quivered with candle flames and the whisper of leaves of time turning and returning. Gently he closed the Book of the Learned.

“I’m glad they got past their unhappiness,” Serena said, putting aside her shuttle.

“More like pigheadedness,” he said dryly.

“That, too.” She sighed. “Think of it. She bore twins alone and raised them alone. She was last of an outlaw clan, protected only by uncanny mists that kept retreating farther inward each year when Erik the Learned went back to seek . . . What was it he sought, revenge?”

“I’m sure that’s what he told himself. He had enough pride for a regiment of men.”

“You don’t think he wanted revenge?”

“I think,” he said deliberately, sliding his arms around her, “that once he got his hands on his beautiful witch, revenge would have been the last thing on his mind. He spent those thirteen years of separation in living hell.”

“What about her?” Serena objected. “She hardly had an easy time of it.”

“At least she had children to love.” He bent and tasted her neck with deliberate intent.

She tilted her head to give him access to more skin. “And a lover whose memory was like a knife in her heart every time his smile flashed on his son’s face or his daughter’s eyes burned gold while she wove.”

“My point exactly.” Teeth nipped lightly. “Pigheaded. You’re not going to be like you’re ancestor, are you?”

“Are you saying I might be pigheaded?”

“Yeah.”

“So are you.”

“Yeah. What are we going to do about it?”

Smiling, she looked over her shoulder at him. “Enjoy every bit of it while we look for the rest of the Book of the Learned.”

“Good idea. Any time limit? Even with Warrick cooperating, Cleary on meds, and Garrison back to being charming, it could take years to track everything.”

“No time limit.” She lifted her head proudly and looked him in the eye. “How about you?”

He drew in a slow breath. It was scented with spice and cloves, alive with overlapping colored shadows and the trembling song of crystal bells.

Silently they looked at each other, accepting what neither could understand.

He had sun-bright hair cut so that it would fit beneath a war helmet. His cloak floated on a breeze, revealing the chain mail hauberk beneath. A peregrine falcon rode his left arm. At his feet lay a staghound the size of a pony. He was watching a woman weave on a loom that was taller than a man. Her unbound hair tumbled in a fiery torrent down her back to her knees. She was looking over her shoulder at him with eyes the color of woodland violets. Instead of castle walls, they were surrounded by a rain-drenched forest, as though nothing on earth existed but these two people caught in the mists of time.

“I want a thousand years,” Erik said. “Minimum. We’ve earned at least that much.”

T
o my knowledge, the Book of the Learned doesn’t exist. But it could have. Stranger things happen all the time.

Don’t believe me?

Let me tell you a story that is as strange as it is true . . .

For thirty-four years I have been well and truly married to the only man I ever loved. In addition to being husband, lover, friend, and father of my children, Evan is a hardheaded contrarian who will take either side of any argument that is offered. If one isn’t offered, he’ll offer it himself.

Ten years ago, we went to Britain for the first time. With Maxwell as a last name, it was inevitable that we would end up seeing Scotland. My maiden name, Charters, is also Scots, a corruption of the name Charteris. But we didn’t go to Scotland for a personal, sentimental journey. We just wanted to see the islands that had had such an impact on Western civilization.

After several days in London, we piled into a rented car—where everything but the clutch, brake pedal, and gas pedal were reversed—and set off on our adventure down the wrong side of the road. By the time we reached the border, we were tired of superhighways and modern concrete. Once over the border, we got off on the first country lane we found. It wound along beside a windswept shallow bay, the Solway Firth. When I spotted some ruins rising out of the land, I was thrilled. A lot of buildings in England were quite old, but hardly ruined.

It took a while, but Evan was game. Heading for the ruins with nothing more in the way of directions than ‘There, I see it again! Turn left!’ we found ourselves on smaller and smaller ‘roads’ until we were driving on one lane with tall hedgerows crowding up on either side and no place to hide if we met oncoming traffic. When we finally got to what was left of the castle, we discovered it was part of the Scottish National Trust. And it was closed for the season.

I didn’t think a few pictures would rupture international relations, so I started photographing the magnificent red ruins. Evan saw a plaque and walked off to see what it offered. A minute later he called and waved me over. When I got there, he simply pointed to the plaque. The wonderful sandstone ruins were all that remained of Castle Caerlaverock (Nest of the Meadowlark), which had been built in the twelfth century.

Caerlaverock had been the Maxwell clan stronghold.

We were stunned by the coincidence of time and place and us. Curious, we went to the nearby town and bought a pint for one of the locals at the pub. He told us that we should go to the Maxwell museum in Maxwellton (Maxwell Town).

We got there just before the museum closed. While Evan admired arms and armor, I did a fast circuit to see what I wanted to concentrate on. The first thing I saw was a map showing all the Scottish clans. I was surprised to discover that my own clan Charteris had claim to a fingernail of land hanging on to the vast lands of the clan Maxwell.

Nearby was an oil portrait of a fierce Maxwell. Beneath it was the clan history. I started reading. And then I started laughing out loud, laughing so hard I had to lean on the wall.

Evan came out of a library room to see what had come over his wife. All I could do was point to the history. He read and discovered what I already had: the Maxwell clan had fought on the wrong side of every major battle after 1066 . . . including the Spanish Armada! Three times various English kings laid siege and after six months managed to tear down the Maxwell castle walls, strip them of land and titles, and force them to bend their stiff necks. And three times the English kings were forced to give back the land and titles and war hardware, because England needed a warrior clan to fend off the Vikings, who made a habit of landing in the Solway Firth and raiding. The fourth time the Maxwells put an English king to the trouble of a six-month siege, they eventually got their land and titles back, but not the right to build a castle. The Vikings were contained; there was no more need of the headstrong clan Maxwell.

The Maxwells were contrarians to a man.

That, at least, hasn’t changed in a thousand years.

Evan didn’t think it was quite as funny as I did. He pointed out that my ancestors had been fighting and losing right alongside the Maxwells, as their duly obedient vassals. I gave him an oh sure look. To prove his point, he led me to the library, where a curator was watching over several huge leather volumes. They turned out to be Maxwell genealogies compiled in the nineteenth century. Smiling oddly, Evan motioned for me to read.

I began scanning through the volumes, moving backward in time with each turned page. At first I mentioned given names and short life spans to Evan. Then I fell silent. On those yellowed pages I kept seeing one name over and over, and what I saw was an explanation of something I had never expected to understand: from the moment I first saw Evan in California in 1963, I felt that I knew him in some impossible way. He felt the same about me.

Now we knew why.

Maxwells and Charterses had been intermarrying for nine hundred years.

I figure it took that long for two hardheaded clans to get it right.

New York Times
bestselling author Elizabeth Lowell is a recipient of the Romance Writers of America Lifetime Achievement Award. There are more than 8 million copies of her books in print. Her most recent novel,
Amber Beach
, was published in hardcover by Avon Books in October 1997. A lifelong believer in romance, she is presently at work on a new novel.

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