Legacy (3 page)

He laughed. “Is it still standing?”

“I’m serious. And yes, it is still standing. It’s really more of a mansion than a regular home. Have you ever heard of Traquair House?”

There was silence at the end of the line.

“Dad? Can you hear me?”

“I’m here, Chris. Tell me more about Traquair House.”

“I don’t know anything yet. The lawyers will be here tomorrow. Do me a favor. See if you can locate any information on entailed estates and rights of survivorship. I’d like to know what I’m up against here. And if you can find out anything about our family tree, I’d appreciate it.”

“I’ll do that. Be careful, Chris.”

It wasn’t until I’d hung up the phone that I realized he hadn’t said that to me in years.

***

The car that Ian parked at the entrance to Traquair that evening was not the small compact that we had ridden in before. It was a lovely old Jaguar sedan of deep forest green with leather seats. The camel sports jacket and wool trousers he wore confirmed what I’d already assumed. Dinner in Scotland, even in the small town of Innerleithen, was a dress-up affair. I was grateful that I’d thought to include in my travel wardrobe a form-fitting dress of fine wool with a v neck. I’d been told the deep cherry color with its white border was flattering to my hair and eyes. The look on Ian Douglas’s face when I came down the stairs was worth every minute of the time I’d spent in preparation.

“You look lovely, Miss Murray.”

His old-world formality was endearing, but I was ready to do away with it. The man had kissed me, for heaven’s sake. “Please call me Christina.”

“All right, Christina. We’ve reservations for seven-thirty.”

We were the only ones patronizing the restaurant that evening. The conversation remained light as the proprietor ushered us into what looked like a formal drawing room where large comfortable chairs were arranged around the fireplace. Ian ordered a drink while I looked over the menu.

“I recommend the salmon,” he said, a hint of laughter in his voice. “There is enough of it to satisfy even your appetite.”

“Well then,” I replied, determined to remain as cool as possible, “I’ll take it.”

“Two poached salmon dinners with dill sauce, Angus. Have you any
criachan
today?” Ian asked the waiter.

“Kirstie was here first thing in the morning making it, sir. It’s the best of the lot, if I do say so myself.”

“We’ll have some of that as well. Miss Murray loves sweets.”

“What makes you say that?” I asked.

“Three raspberry scones gave me a small hint.”

Heat rose in my cheeks.

“Surely you know I’m teasing, Christina?” His eyes were clear and contrite. “I admire the fact that you don’t pick at your food. There isn’t anything more aggravating than buying an expensive meal for a woman, only to have her eat two bites and push it away.”

It was obvious that he spoke from experience. “I’ll try not to disappoint you,” I said.

His gaze swept over my figure, lingering on my legs, crossed and visible below the hem of my skirt. “I don’t think that’s possible,” he said dryly, swallowing a healthy portion of his drink.

“Actually I’m not supposed to have sweets,” I reminded him. “I’m a diabetic. The raspberry scones were a rare treat.”

He looked startled. “Good God! I never even connected it. Why on earth did you eat them?”

I laughed. “I’m only human and I love sugar. When I indulge, I pay for it. Fortunately I’m not tempted often or easily.”

I leaned my head back against the chair and closed my eyes. The room was lovely. The warmth of the fire and the intimate flickering lights wove their spell. I felt mellow and slightly drowsy, otherwise I would never have said what I did. “I’d like to think you invited me here tonight because you were bowled over by my charms. But I don’t really believe that.”

He looked at me curiously. “Why not? You’re not exactly the type a man would overlook in a crowd.”

Again, I could feel the color in my cheeks. “Thank you,” I murmured, clearly uncomfortable with the way the conversation had turned. “I wasn’t begging for compliments.”

“I know. That makes you even more appealing.” He studied me thoughtfully. “What was your husband like?”

“I beg your pardon?” Whatever I had expected of the evening, it certainly wasn’t this.

“He must have been the worst kind of fool to make a woman like you unaware of her appeal.”

My stomach knotted in that twisting, painful way it always did when I thought of Stephen. I couldn’t discuss him. Not yet. “He wasn’t a fool,” I said quickly. “We just wanted different things. What about you?” I remembered the beauty seated beside him in church. “Are you married?”

He grinned, and the pain in my stomach disappeared. “Shame on you, Christina. Would I be here if I were?”

“I hope not,” I answered, “but I don’t really know you.”

“That can be remedied. In answer to your question, no, I’m not married. I came close once, but it didn’t work out.”

“What happened?” The minute I asked the question I wished it back. “I’m sorry. Please don’t feel you have to answer that.”

“I don’t mind at all,” he assured me. “I took her to America with me while I earned my degree at Cornell. She refused to come back.”

“Why didn’t you stay?”

He shrugged, a beautiful fluid lifting of his shoulders. “This is my home. I’ve spent my entire life preparing to take over the land. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

I agreed with him. “Scotland is a wonderful place to raise children. Much better, I think, than America.”

“Thank God children were never an issue.”

“Do you dislike children, Ian?”

“Not at all,” he replied promptly. “But I do believe that every child deserves two devoted parents. I deplore the current trend of selfishness that puts children’s needs last in a relationship.”

He spoke with such feeling. I wondered if it came from personal experience. Curiosity prevailed. “You can’t actually believe that people should endure a miserable existence for the sake of their children?”

“Of course not.” He set his empty glass on the table. “But people’s definitions of miserable are varied. Most of the time, problems can be worked out with a bit of effort. There are few things important enough to break up a marriage.”

What about infertility,
I wanted to cry out.
What if a man wants children so desperately that nothing else will satisfy him, not even the woman he promised to love, honor, and cherish fifteen years before?
Of course I didn’t say it. It was ridiculous to even think it. No one would believe me. This was the twentieth century. A woman’s worth was no longer measured by the number of children she brought into the world. Or was it?

I closed my eyes and remembered the hands. I could still feel those hands, sterile, competent, cold, sure, precise, sliding across my skin, probing, prodding, inspecting every inch of flesh, examining over, under, inside, the tests inconclusive and never ending, until that night when I couldn’t tell my husband’s hands from the hands of the hundred specialists I’d seen, and the very thought of exploring fingers inching their way across my body was like the exploding pain of brilliant light against eyes that had been too long in dark places. I simply couldn’t bear it, and in the end it cost me my life as I’d planned it.

Deliberately, with great effort, I pushed the memories aside and opened my eyes. Ian was staring at me again. Why did I feel as if he knew exactly what I was thinking?

Just then, the proprietor walked through the door to the dining room. “Please follow me,” he said. “Dinner will be served shortly.”

Over a bottle of wine and the best salmon I’d ever tasted, Ian brought up the real subject of our dinner conversation. “What do you know about your family history, Christina?”

“If you mean my personal family line, not much. But I know a great deal about the Murrays.”

“Did you know that the widow of the last Murray of Bothwell married the third earl of Douglas?”

Pausing, with my fork halfway to my mouth, I stared at him. Ian was a Douglas and I, a Murray. “Are you telling me we’re related?”

He laughed. “In a manner of speaking. I don’t believe we’re close enough to worry about genetic defects in our children.”

Even before he saw the stricken expression on my face, he realized what he’d done. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, horror at his faux pas evident on his face.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I assured him and quickly changed the subject. “My family is descended from the Atholl Murrays. George Murray, leader of the Jacobite troops at Culloden, is my direct ancestor.”

“A good man,” Ian acknowledged, cutting off another piece of salmon. “When you made that comment this afternoon, I remembered something.”

Somehow I knew this was it, the reason we were here, eating salmon and drinking wine in this lovely restaurant, cloaking our true intentions in the mantle of polite conversation. “What comment?” I asked, although I knew exactly what he was about to say.

He repeated my words exactly as I had said them. “
I’m the last of the Murrays.
” He was silent for a moment, allowing me the full impact of the words before he continued. “When I first saw you, I thought you reminded me of someone.” His voice was quiet and reflective with the familiar lilting cadence of a born storyteller. Intrigued, as usual, with any tidbit describing the ancient lore of Scotland, I hung on every word.

“During the 1700s, before Culloden, Janet Douglas married George Murray. For some reason, neither the Douglases nor the Murrays approved of the union. I believe it had to do with an ancient curse. Her diary is in the family archives at Traquair House. Apparently she came back to Traquair after the Battle of Culloden Moor to collect her daughter’s belongings. She must have left it there. It was found, surprisingly intact, in a remote guest room.

When it became obvious that Janet was pregnant, the families put aside their objections and the wedding was hastily arranged. A son was born six months after. Later, they had a daughter named Katrine. According to Janet’s diary, Katrine grew up and fell in love with an Englishman, the infamous Sir Richard Wolfe, on the eve of Culloden. She died tragically, fulfilling the prophecy. Nothing in her mother’s diary explains the nature of the curse, but apparently Katrine’s death didn’t surprise her.”

The flickering candlelight made a circle of golden light in the bottom of my wineglass. Was it a trick of the flame or was Ian looking at me strangely? He had stopped talking long enough to refill his wineglass. “The reason I reacted so strongly to your words this afternoon,” he continued, “is because Janet used almost the same ones in her diary. She wrote that her daughter was cursed because
Katrine was the last of the Murrays
.”

Reaching across the table, he lifted my chin and thoroughly scrutinized my face. “I have a portrait of Katrine Murray. It’s only an oil painting, nothing like the accuracy of a photograph, of course. She’s younger and her clothing and hair are different, but only a blind man could miss the resemblance. Gathering dust in my attic, Christina, is the picture of a woman who could be you.”

I shivered and pulled the covers up to my neck. The cozy fire crackling in the fireplace wasn’t enough to warm my entire room. Traquair had central heating, but the cost was too phenomenal to even think of turning it on in June. At least my feet weren’t cold, thanks to the warming pans Kate had insisted on slipping between the sheets.

It was late, and I should have been tired. But I couldn’t sleep. All I could think about was Katrine Murray. After dinner, I’d insisted on returning to Ian’s home to view the infamous portrait. I suppose she might have appeared differently in the glaring brightness of electric light, but the attic had no electricity.

Softened by the flickering glow of candles, the hollows under her cheekbones deepened in purple shadow, Katrine Murray was beautiful. Her black hair was unpowdered and pulled off her face to surround her head in a cluster of curls, one lying temptingly against the swell of her white breast. Her bodice was very low and edged with lace in the fashion of the day. Wide skirts flared out from an amazingly tiny waist. Her nose was small and straight, her cheekbones pronounced, her mouth turned up in a tantalizing smile. But it was her eyes that held me. They were large and light, a clear lucid gray, framed with feathery black lashes.

They were my eyes and they looked out from my face. Or at least it had been my face twenty years ago. This girl from the past, at the height of her beauty, knew the full extent of her power. She had not yet experienced doubt or disillusionment or loss. Looking into the eyes of that undeniable ancestor whose genes had passed down two hundred years, through generations of Murrays, to show up in the face of an innocuous American, I felt a strong and inexplicable desire to weep.

Ian seemed to understand what I was feeling. He said very little on our way back to Traquair. I didn’t mind that he didn’t speak or that he didn’t kiss me good night. All I could think of was getting my hands on Janet Douglas’s diary.

Kate had left a pot of hot milk on my nightstand. It had a strange pleasant flavor, unlike anything I’d tasted before, something between cinnamon and sage. I drained the pot, turned out the light, and drifted into an unsettled sleep. At least I think it was sleep. There could be no other explanation for the events I experienced that night. I remember it began with the cold. Not the kind of clean cold that comes from being outside in the wind chill of January in Boston. This was a clammy cold. The kind that works its way deep inside aching bones.

I stood on a narrow, dangerous stairway in a chamber that I’d never seen before. The walls were granite and very close together, hewed unevenly by a negligent craftsman with crude tools. The dripping dampness increased my feeling of dread. I rubbed my arms, wondering why I had chosen to wear nothing more than a cotton nightgown with thin straps. The only light came from a glow farther ahead, down the stairs. Bracing myself with my hands on opposite sides of the wall, I carefully inched my way, one step at a time, toward the light.

I can’t begin to describe the near misses on those slippery steps, the growing tension, the aching muscles in my shoulders and arms as I braced my body weight for what seemed like hours during that dark, twisted descent into the unknown. All I could do was follow the light. Instinctively, I knew wherever it led was my destination. There were moments when I looked up from the next treacherous step, when the stairwell straightened for a bit, that I thought I saw shadows and the fluttering of a dark cloth or it could have been a blanket.

Finally it was over. There were no more stairs. Turning sideways I managed to squeeze through a narrow opening and stepped into a cave-like room lit by foul-smelling torches mounted on the walls. I looked around. The hair on my neck lifted as I recognized where I was. The tiny altar with a statue of the Virgin Mary set above a large irregular stone, the flickering candles, the faint subtle hint of herbs, the square stones set inside the granite walls, and the death masks, peaceful and expressionless, etched into the granite. There could be no mistake. I had been led into a crypt, a family burial chamber. Goose bumps appeared on my arms and I panicked.

I can’t explain my trauma regarding the whole idea of death. I have no idea how long I’ve felt this way or where it even began. I only know that for as long as I can remember I’ve lived with the recurring nightmare that walls are closing in on me. With every heartbeat, they move closer and closer until, with one last sobbing breath, one painful scrape of nails against stone, one horrified memory of light and life and effortless breath, I feel the unbearable pressure crushing my chest. Then I feel no more.

My heart slammed against my ribs. I slid to my knees, my hands shaking. I would have closed my eyes, but something stopped me. A movement in the darkness. The panic receded. I wasn’t alone. A slender figure, shrouded in a dark, feminine cloak, the hood pulled up to shield her face, moved out of the shadows and faced me. She said nothing.

“Who are you?” I whispered. I couldn’t be sure, the cloak hid so much, but there was something familiar about the way she moved. “Please, speak to me.”

She moved aside and gestured toward the altar. I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

With an impatient shrug of her shoulders she turned, walked to the altar, and placed both hands on the stone. I don’t know how long I watched her standing, her face hidden, her hands on the pyrite-studded sandstone. I was no longer cold. The woman changed position. She knelt, pressing her lips against the stone. Then I saw it. Rays of light, warm and breathtakingly beautiful, dim at first and then growing steadily brighter, illuminated the rock. There was no window, no outside light, no artificial source. It came from inside the stone. In that piercing, crystal-bright moment, I realized what I was looking at. This was the Stone of Destiny, Scotland’s Stone. The stone that was supposed to be sitting under England’s Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey. It had been there since the thirteenth century. But what was it doing here?

Forgetting my fear, I stood and walked toward the woman and the miracle of light. She stood and turned to meet me, dropping the cloak. I stopped, riveted to the freezing granite under my feet. Framed in long black hair, gray eyes stared back at me from a clear, finely featured face. It was my face and Katrine Murray’s. No, definitely not Katrine’s. This woman was older, closer to my own age than the lovely girl in the portrait. Her hair was braided with gold thread and hung, thick and black, past her knees. A twisted red girdle gathered the draping folds of her white dress around her hips, and the deep, square bodice showed a slender neck and sloping shoulders.

It wasn’t her face that separated her from women like Katrine Murray and myself. It was her expression. This woman had known suffering. There was pain in the trembling lips and desperate lift of her chin. Pain and pride. But it was her eyes that revealed the depths of her despair. Those clear gray eyes were filled with a longing so complete, it consumed her. I knew without question that whatever trials I’d experienced in my life, they were nothing compared to the heartbreak this woman with her white gown and ravaged face carried with her.

Her features were so like my own it was like looking into a mirror, and yet she was nothing like me. This was a woman who would stop conversation when she entered a room. The smooth, graceful glide of her walk, the imperious wave of her hand, the richness of her hair, the passion brimming from her light-filled eyes. This woman had conquered fear. She stood before me with the bearing of a queen, straight backed, her head held high. Like Helen of Troy and Eleanor of Aquitaine, this was a woman who had it within her to change the course of history.

“Who are you?” I asked again, refusing to allow her identity to remain a mystery.

She tilted her head, as if considering my question. Then she turned back to the stone, motioning me to join her. I hurried forward. We stood together, two women so alike and yet nothing alike. Together we knelt. Together we placed our hands on the stone.

The pulsing began in my fingers. Spreading like a wave, it moved to my temples, down to my throat and across my chest, until I could no longer separate it from the pounding of my heart. There was an explosion of light, a sensation of heat. The room rocked and then disappeared.

And then I was alone, standing at the Bear Gates of Traquair House in broad daylight. Horrified, I realized that I was still in my nightgown.

Even now, when I try to recall my experience, I find it difficult to explain with any clarity at all. There is nothing by which to compare it. It had the essence of a dream, but it was far more than that. I had full awareness of the events without the power to participate or influence their outcome. But I wasn’t spared the ability to feel. I felt everything: the horror that surrounded me, the hot tears that blinded my eyes and burned my cheeks, the rage at my inability to alter the course of fate, the fierce pride that welled up inside of me when I realized who this woman was.

From early childhood, I have always been a dreamer, remembering events with clairvoyance found only in those particularly susceptible to hypnotism. But never before had I experienced such total omniscience. I was everywhere, knowing all things, without the ability to interfere, like a novelist who has lost control of her book to Hollywood screenwriters. That must be why I heard the angry crowd advancing on Traquair House before anyone else was aware of it.

I could still see it in my mind just as it happened in my dream. The blood pooled out between the stone slabs into the courtyard, welling and eddying up to my knees, soaking my nightgown. A dark, ugly purple-red, it crept to the level of my neck, then my chin, and finally my lips until I was drowning in the warm animal smell and taste of it.

I will never forget the dark-eyed woman whose face looked frighteningly familiar. She cursed the women of the Maxwell line, damning them to tragic deaths and ghosts who walked in the night until the Stone of Destiny was restored to its rightful resting place.

Recalling the horrifying events never fails to make my skin crawl, but I can’t help looking back and remembering every lifelike and terrifying detail. The events are clearly etched in my mind as was the knowledge that whatever Mairi of Shiels was, a traitor to Scotland she was not. But how could I, an insignificant American, prove her innocence and why, after seven hundred years, should it be so important that I do so?