Dragonfly In Amber

Through a

Looking Glass,

Darkly

Inverness, 1968

1 MUSTERING THE ROLL

Roger Wakefield stood in the center of the room, feeling surrounded. He thought the feeling largely justified, insofar as he was surrounded: by tables covered with bric-a-brac and mementos, by heavy Victorian-style furniture, replete with antimacassars, plush and afghans, by tiny braided rugs that lay on the polished wood, craftily awaiting an opportunity to skid beneath an unsuspecting foot. Surrounded by twelve rooms of furniture and clothing and papers. And the books – my God, the books!

The study where he stood was lined on three sides by bookshelves, every one crammed past bursting point. Paperback mystery novels lay in bright, tatty piles in front of calf-bound tomes, jammed cheek by jowl with book-club selections, ancient volumes pilfered from extinct libraries, and thousands upon thousands of pamphlets, leaflets, and hand-sewn manuscripts.

A similar situation prevailed in the rest of the house. Books and papers cluttered every horizontal surface, and every closet groaned and squeaked at the seams. His late adoptive father had lived a long, full life, a good ten years past his biblically allotted threescore and ten. And in eighty-odd years, the Reverend Mr. Reginald Wakefield had never thrown anything away.

Roger repressed the urge to run out of the front door, leap into his Morris Minor, and head back to Oxford, abandoning the manse and its contents to the mercy of weather and vandals. Be calm, he told himself, inhaling deeply. You can deal with this. The books are the easy part; nothing more than a matter of sorting through them and then calling someone to come and haul them away. Granted, they’ll need a lorry the size of a railcar, but it can be done. Clothes – no problem. Oxfam gets the lot.

He didn’t know what Oxfam was going to do with a lot of vested black serge suits, circa 1948, but perhaps the deserving poor weren’t all that picky. He began to breathe a little easier. He had taken a month’s leave from the History department at Oxford in order to clear up the Reverend’s affairs. Perhaps that would be enough, after all. In his more depressed moments, it had seemed as though the task might take years.

He moved toward one of the tables and picked up a small china dish. It was filled with small metal rectangles; lead “gaberlunzies,” badges issued to eighteenth-century beggars by parishes as a sort of license. A collection of stoneware bottles stood by the lamp, a ramshorn snuff mull, banded in silver, next to them. Give them to a museum? he thought dubiously. The house was filled with Jacobite artifacts; the Reverend had been an amateur historian, the eighteenth century his favorite hunting ground.

His fingers reached involuntarily to caress the surface of the snuff mull, tracing the black lines of the inscriptions – the names and dates of the Deacons and Treasurers of the Incorporation of Tailors of the Canongate, from Edinburgh, 1726. Perhaps he should keep a few of the Reverend’s choicer acquisitions… but then he drew back, shaking his head decidedly. “Nothing doing, cock,” he said aloud, “this way lies madness.” Or at least the incipient life of a pack rat. Get started saving things, and he’d end up keeping the lot, living in this monstrosity of a house, surrounded by generations of rubbish. “Talking to yourself, too,” he muttered.

The thought of generations of rubbish reminded him of the garage, and he sagged a bit at the knees. The Reverend, who was in fact Roger’s great-uncle, had adopted him at the age of five when his parents had been killed in World War II; his mother in the Blitz, his father out over the dark waters of the Channel. With his usual preservative instincts, the Reverend had kept all of Roger’s parents’ effects, sealed in crates and cartons in the back of the garage. Roger knew for a fact that no one had opened one of those crates in the past twenty years.

Roger uttered an Old Testament groan at the thought of pawing through his parents’ memorabilia. “Oh, God,” he said aloud. “Anything but that!”

The remark had not been intended precisely as prayer, but the doorbell pealed as though in answer, making Roger bite his tongue in startlement.

The door of the manse had a tendency to stick in damp weather, which meant that it was stuck most of the time. Roger freed it with a rending screech, to find a woman on the doorstep.

“Can I help you?”

She was middle height and very pretty. He had an overall impression of fine bones and white linen, topped with a wealth of curly brown hair in a sort of half-tamed chignon. And in the middle of it all, the most extraordinary pair of light eyes, just the color of well-aged sherry.

The eyes swept up from his size-eleven plimsolls to the face a foot above her. The sidelong smile grew wider. “I hate to start right off with a cliché,” she said, “but my, how you have grown, young Roger!”

Roger felt himself flushing. The woman laughed and extended a hand. “You are Roger, aren’t you? My name’s Claire Randall; I was an old friend of the Reverend’s. But I haven’t seen you since you were five years old.”

“Er, you said you were a friend of my father’s? Then, you know already…”

The smile vanished, replaced by a look of regret.

“Yes, I was awfully sorry to hear about it. Heart, was it?”

“Um, yes. Very sudden. I’ve only just come up from Oxford to start dealing with… everything.” He waved vaguely, encompassing the Reverend’s death, the house behind him, and all its contents.

“From what I recall of your father’s library, that little chore ought to last you ’til next Christmas,” Claire observed.

“In that case, maybe we shouldn’t be disturbing you,” said a soft American voice.

“Oh, I forgot,” said Claire, half-turning to the girl who had stood out of sight in the corner of the porch. “Roger Wakefield – my daughter, Brianna.”

Brianna Randall stepped forward, a shy smile on her face. Roger stared for a moment, then remembered his manners. He stepped back and swung the door open wide, momentarily wondering just when he had last changed his shirt.

“Not at all, not at all!” he said heartily. “I was just wanting a break. Won’t you come in?”

He waved the two women down the hall toward the Reverend’s study, noting that as well as being moderately attractive, the daughter was one of the tallest girls he’d ever seen close-to. She had to be easily six feet, he thought, seeing her head even with the top of the hall stand as she passed. He unconsciously straightened himself as he followed, drawing up to his full six feet three. At the last moment, he ducked, to avoid banging his head on the study lintel as he followed the women into the room.

“I’d meant to come before,” said Claire, settling herself deeper in the huge wing chair. The fourth wall of the Reverend’s study was equipped with floor-to-ceiling windows, and the sunlight winked off the pearl clip in her light-brown hair. The curls were beginning to escape from their confinement, and she tucked one absently behind an ear as she talked.

“I’d arranged to come last year, in fact, and then there was an emergency at the hospital in Boston – I’m a doctor,” she explained, mouth curling a little at the look of surprise Roger hadn’t quite managed to conceal. “But I’m sorry that we didn’t; I would have liked so much to see your father again.”

Roger rather wondered why they had come now, knowing the Reverend was dead, but it seemed impolite to ask. Instead, he asked, “Enjoying a bit of sightseeing, are you?”

“Yes, we drove up from London,” Claire answered. She smiled at her daughter. “I wanted Bree to see the country; you wouldn’t think it to hear her talk, but she’s as English as I am, though she’s never lived here.”

“Really?” Roger glanced at Brianna. She didn’t really look English, he thought; aside from the height, she had thick red hair, worn loose over her shoulders, and strong, sharp-angled bones in her face, with the nose long and straight – maybe a touch too long.

“I was born in America,” Brianna explained, “but both Mother and Daddy are – were – English.”

“Were?”

“My husband died two years ago,” Claire explained. “You knew him, I think – Frank Randall.”

“Frank Randall! Of course!” Roger smacked himself on the forehead, and felt his cheeks grow hot at Brianna’s giggle. “You’re going to think me a complete fool, but I’ve only just realized who you are.”

The name explained a lot; Frank Randall had been an eminent historian, and a good friend of the Reverend’s; they had exchanged bits of Jacobite arcana for years, though it was at least ten years since Frank Randall had last visited the manse.

“So – you’ll be visiting the historical sites near Inverness?” Roger hazarded. “Have you been to Culloden yet?”

“Not yet,” Brianna answered. “We thought we’d go later this week.” Her answering smile was polite, but nothing more.

“We’re booked for a trip down Loch Ness this afternoon,” Claire explained. “And perhaps we’ll drive down to Fort William tomorrow, or just poke about in Inverness; the place has grown a lot since I was last here.”

“When was that?” Roger wondered whether he ought to volunteer his services as tour guide. He really shouldn’t take the time, but the Randalls had been good friends of the Reverend’s. Besides, a car trip to Fort William in company with two attractive women seemed a much more appealing prospect than cleaning out the garage, which was next on his list.

“Oh, more than twenty years ago. It’s been a long time.” There was an odd note in Claire’s voice that made Roger glance at her, but she met his eyes with a smile.

“Well,” he ventured, “if there’s anything I can do for you, while you’re in the Highlands…”

Claire was still smiling, but something in her face changed. He could almost think she had been waiting for an opening. She glanced at Brianna, then back to Roger.

“Since you mention it,” she said, her smile broadening.

“Oh, Mother!” Brianna said, sitting up in her chair. “You don’t want to bother Mr. Wakefield! Look at all he’s got to do!” She waved a hand at the crowded study, with its overflowing cartons and endless stacks of books.

“Oh, no bother at all!” Roger protested. “Er… what is it?”

Claire shot her daughter a quelling look. “I wasn’t planning to knock him on the head and drag him off,” she said tartly. “But he might well know someone who could help. It’s a small historical project,” she explained to Roger. “I need someone who’s fairly well versed in the eighteenth-century Jacobites – Bonnie Prince Charlie and all that lot.”

Roger leaned forward, interested. “Jacobites?” he said. “That period’s not one of my specialties, but I do know a bit – hard not to, living so close to Culloden. That’s where the final battle was, you know,” he explained to Brianna. “Where the Bonnie Prince’s lot ran up against the Duke of Cumberland and got slaughtered for their pains.”

“Right,” said Claire. “And that, in fact, has to do with what I want to find out.” She reached into her handbag and drew out a folded paper.

Roger opened it and scanned the contents quickly. It was a list of names – maybe thirty, all men. At the top of the sheet was a heading: “JACOBITE RISING, 1745 – CULLODEN”

“Oh, the ’45?” Roger said. “These men fought at Culloden, did they?”

“They did,” Claire replied. “What I want to find out is – how many of the men on this list survived that battle?”

Roger rubbed his chin as he perused the list. “That’s a simple question,” he said, “but the answer might be hard to find. So many of the Highland clansmen who followed Prince Charles were killed on Culloden Field that they weren’t buried individually. They were put into mass graves, with no more than a single stone bearing the clan name as a marker.”

“I know,” Claire said. “Brianna hasn’t been there, but I have – a long time ago.” He thought he saw a fleeting shadow in her eyes, though it was quickly hidden as she reached into her handbag. No wonder if there was, he thought. Culloden Field was an affecting place; it brought tears to his own eyes, to look out over that expanse of moorland and remember the gallantry and courage of the Scottish Highlanders who lay slaughtered beneath the grass.

She unfolded several more typed sheets and handed them to him. A long white finger ran down the margin of one sheet. Beautiful hands, Roger noted; delicately molded, carefully kept, with a single ring on each hand. The silver one on her right hand was especially striking; a wide Jacobean band in the Highland interlace pattern, embellished with thistle blossoms.

“These are the names of the wives, so far as I know them. I thought that might help, since if the husbands were killed at Culloden, you’d likely find these women remarrying or emigrating afterward. Those records would surely be in the parish register? They’re all from the same parish; the church was in Broch Mordha – it’s a good bit south of here.”

“That’s a very helpful idea,” Roger said, mildly surprised. “It’s the sort of thing an historian would think of.”

“I’m hardly an historian,” Claire Randall said dryly. “On the other hand, when you live with one, you do pick up the occasional odd thought.”

“Of course.” A thought struck Roger, and he rose from his chair. “I’m being a terrible host; please, let me get you a drink, and then you can tell me a bit more about this. Perhaps I could help you with it myself.”

Despite the disorder, he knew where the decanters were kept, and quickly had his guests supplied with whisky. He’d put quite a lot of soda in Brianna’s, but noticed that she sipped at it as though her glass contained ant spray, rather than the best Glenfiddich single malt. Claire, who took her whisky neat by request, seemed to enjoy it much more.

“Well.” Roger resumed his seat and picked up the paper again. “It’s an interesting problem, in terms of historical research. You said these men came from the same parish? I suppose they came from a single clan or sept – I see a number of them were named Fraser.”

Claire nodded, hands folded in her lap. “They came from the same estate; a small Highland farm called Broch Tuarach – it was known locally as Lallybroch. They were part of clan Fraser, though they never gave a formal allegiance to Lord Lovat as chief. These men joined the Rising early; they fought in the Battle of Prestonpans – while Lovat’s men didn’t come until just before Culloden.”

“Really? That’s interesting.” Under normal eighteenth-century conditions, such small tenant-farmers would have died where they lived, and be filed tidily away in the village churchyard, neatly docketed in the parish register. However, Bonnie Prince Charlie’s attempt to regain the throne of Scotland in 1745 had disrupted the normal course of things in no uncertain terms.

In the famine after the disaster of Culloden, many Highlanders had emigrated to the New World; others had drifted from the glens and moors toward the cities, in search of food and employment. A few stayed on, stubbornly clinging to their land and traditions.

“It would make a fascinating article,” Roger said, thinking aloud. “Follow the fate of a number of individuals, see what happened to them all. Less interesting if they all were killed at Culloden, but chances were that a few made it out.” He would be inclined to take on the project as a welcome break even were it not Claire Randall who asked.

“Yes, I think I can help you with this,” he said, and was gratified at the warm smile she bestowed on him.

“Would you really? That’s wonderful!” she said.

“My pleasure,” Roger said. He folded the paper and laid it on the table. “I’ll start in on it directly. But tell me, how did you enjoy your drive up from London?”

The conversation became general as the Randalls regaled him with tales of their transatlantic journey, and the drive from London. Roger’s attention drifted slightly, as he began to plan the research for this project. He felt mildly guilty about taking it on; he really shouldn’t take the time. On the other hand, it was an interesting question. And it was possible that he could combine the project with some of the necessary clearing-up of the Reverend’s material; he knew for a fact that there were forty-eight cartons in the garage, all labeled JACOBITES, MISCELLANEOUS. The thought of it was enough to make him feel faint.

With a wrench, he tore his mind away from the garage, to find that the conversation had made an abrupt change of subject.

“Druids?” Roger felt dazed. He peered suspiciously into his glass, checking to see that he really had added soda.

“You hadn’t heard about them?” Claire looked slightly disappointed. “Your father – the Reverend – he knew about them, though only unofficially. Perhaps he didn’t think it worth telling you; he thought it something of a joke.”

Roger scratched his head, ruffling the thick black hair. “No, I really don’t recall. But you’re right, he may not have thought it anything serious.”

“Well, I don’t know that it is.” She crossed her legs at the knee. A streak of sunlight gleamed down the shin of her stockings, emphasizing the delicacy of the long bone beneath.

“When I was here last with Frank – God, that was twenty-three years ago! – the Reverend told him that there was a local group of – well, modern Druids, I suppose you’d call them. I’ve no idea how authentic they might be; most likely not very.” Brianna was leaning forward now, interested, the glass of whisky forgotten between her hands.

“The Reverend couldn’t take official notice of them – paganism and all that, you know – but his housekeeper, Mrs. Graham, was involved with the group, so he got wind of their doings from time to time, and he tipped Frank that there would be a ceremony of some kind on the dawn of Beltane – May Day, that is.”

Roger nodded, trying to adjust to the idea of elderly Mrs. Graham, that extremely proper person, engaging in pagan rites and dancing round stone circles in the dawn. All he could remember of Druid ceremonies himself was that some of them involved burning sacrificial victims in wicker cages, which seemed still more unlikely behavior for a Scottish Presbyterian lady of advanced years.

“There’s a circle of standing stones on top of a hill, fairly nearby. So we went up there before dawn to, well, to spy on them,” she continued, shrugging apologetically. “You know what scholars are like; no conscience at all when it comes to their own field, let alone a sense of social delicacy.” Roger winced slightly at this, but nodded in wry agreement.

“And there they were,” she said. “Mrs. Graham included, all wearing bedsheets, chanting things and dancing in the midst of the stone circle. Frank was fascinated,” she added, with a smile. “And it was impressive, even to me.”

She paused for a moment, eyeing Roger rather speculatively.

“I’d heard that Mrs. Graham had passed away a few years ago. But I wonder… do you know if she had any family? I believe membership in such groups is often hereditary; maybe there’s a daughter or granddaughter who could tell me a bit.”

“Well,” Roger said slowly. “There is a granddaughter – Fiona’s her name, Fiona Graham. In fact, she came to help out here at the manse after her grandmother died; the Reverend was really too elderly to be left all on his own.”

If anything could displace his vision of Mrs. Graham dancing in a bedsheet, it was the thought of nineteen-year-old Fiona as a guardian of ancient mystic knowledge, but Roger rallied gamely and went on.

“She isn’t here just now, I’m afraid. I could ask her for you, though.”

Claire waved a slender hand in dismissal. “Don’t trouble yourself. Another time will do. We’ve taken up too much of your time already.”

To Roger’s dismay, she set down her empty glass on the small table between the chairs and Brianna added her own full one with what looked like alacrity. He noticed that Brianna Randall bit her nails. This small evidence of imperfection gave him the nerve to take the next step. She intrigued him, and he didn’t want her to go, with no assurance that he would see her again.

“Speaking of stone circles,” he said quickly. “I believe I know the one you mentioned. It’s quite scenic, and not too far from town.” He smiled directly at Brianna Randall, registering automatically the fact that she had three small freckles high on one cheekbone. “I thought perhaps I’d start on this project with a trip down to Broch Tuarach. It’s in the same direction as the stone circle, so maybe… aaagh!”

With a sudden jerk of her bulky handbag, Claire Randall had bumped both whisky glasses off the table, showering Roger’s lap and thighs with single malt whisky and quite a lot of soda.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she apologized, obviously flustered. She bent and began picking up pieces of shattered crystal, despite Roger’s half-coherent attempts to stop her.

Brianna, coming to assist with a handful of linen napkins seized from the sideboard, was saying “Really, Mother, how they ever let you do surgery, I don’t know. You’re just not safe with anything smaller than a bread-box. Look, you’ve got his shoes soaked with whisky!” She knelt on the floor, and began busily mopping up spilled Scotch and fragments of crystal. “And his pants, too.”

Whipping a fresh napkin from the stack over her arm, she industriously polished Roger’s toes, her red mane floating deliriously around his knees. Her head was rising, as she peered at his thighs, dabbing energetically at damp spots on the corduroy. Roger closed his eyes and thought frantically of terrible car crashes on the motorway and tax forms for the Inland Revenue and the Blob from Outer Space – anything that might stop him disgracing himself utterly as Brianna Randall’s warm breath misted softly through the wet fabric of his trousers.

“Er, maybe you’d like to do the rest yourself?” The voice came from somewhere around the level of his nose, and he opened his eyes to find a pair of deep blue eyes facing him above a wide grin. He rather weakly took the napkin she was offering him, breathing as though he had just been chased by a train.

Lowering his head to scrub at his trousers, he caught sight of Claire Randall watching him with an expression of mingled sympathy and amusement. There was nothing else visible in her expression; nothing of that flash he thought he’d seen in her eyes just before the catastrophe. Flustered as he was, it was probably his imagination, he thought. For why on earth should she have done it on purpose?

“Since when are you interested in Druids, Mama?” Brianna seemed disposed to find something hilarious in the idea; I had noticed her biting the insides of her cheeks while I was chatting with Roger Wakefield, and the grin she had been hiding then was now plastered across her face. “You going to get your own bedsheet and join up?”

“Bound to be more entertaining than hospital staff meetings every Thursday,” I said. “Bit drafty, though.” She hooted with laughter, startling two chickadees off the walk in front of us.

“No,” I said, switching to seriousness. “It isn’t the Druid ladies I’m after, so much. There’s someone I used to know in Scotland that I wanted to find, if I can. I haven’t an address for her – I haven’t been in touch with her for more than twenty years – but she had an interest in odd things like that: witchcraft, old beliefs, folklore. All that sort of thing. She once lived near here; I thought if she was still here, she might be involved with a group like that.”

“What’s her name?”

I shook my head, grabbing at the loosened clip as it slid from my curls. It slipped through my fingers and bounced into the deep grass along the walk.

“Damn!” I said, stooping for it. My fingers were unsteady as I groped through the dense stalks, and I had trouble picking up the clip, slippery with moisture from the wet grass. The thought of Geillis Duncan tended to unnerve me, even now.

“I don’t know,” I said, brushing the curls back off my flushed face. “I mean – it’s been such a long time, I’m sure she’d have a different name by now. She was widowed; she might have married again, or be using her maiden name.”

“Oh.” Brianna lost interest in the topic, and walked along in silence for a little. Suddenly she said, “What did you think of Roger Wakefield, Mama?”

I glanced at her; her cheeks were pink, but it might be from the spring wind.

“He seems a very nice young man,” I said carefully. “He’s certainly intelligent; he’s one of the youngest professors at Oxford.” The intelligence I had known about; I wondered whether he had any imagination. So often scholarly types didn’t. But imagination would be helpful.

“He’s got the grooviest eyes,” Brianna said, dreamily ignoring the question of his brain. “Aren’t they the greenest you’ve ever seen?”

“Yes, they’re very striking,” I agreed. “They’ve always been like that; I remember noticing them when I first met him as a child.”

Brianna looked down at me, frowning.

“Yes, Mother, really! Did you have to say ‘My, how you’ve grown?’ when he answered the door? How embarrassing!”

I laughed.

“Well, when you’ve last seen someone hovering round your navel, and suddenly you find yourself looking up his nose,” I defended myself, “you can’t help remarking the difference.”

“Mother!” But she fizzed with laughter.

“He has a very nice bottom, too,” I remarked, just to keep her going. “I noticed when he bent over to get the whisky.”

“Mo-THERRR! They’ll hear you!”

We were nearly at the bus stop. There were two or three women and an elderly gentleman in tweeds standing by the sign; they turned to stare at us as we came up.

“Is this the place for the Loch-side Tours bus?” I asked, scanning the bewildering array of notices and advertisements posted on the signboard.

“Och, aye,” one of the ladies said kindly. “The bus will be comin’ along in ten minutes or so.” She scanned Brianna, so clearly American in blue jeans and white windbreaker. The final patriotic note was added by the flushed face, red with suppressed laughter. “You’ll be going to see Loch Ness? Your first time, is it?”

I smiled at her. “I sailed down the loch with my husband twenty-odd years ago, but this is my daughter’s first trip to Scotland.”

“Oh, is it?” This attracted the attention of the other ladies and they crowded around, suddenly friendly, offering advice and asking questions until the big yellow bus came chugging round the corner.

Brianna paused before climbing the steps, admiring the picturesque drawing of green serpentine loops, undulating through a blue-paint lake, edged with black pines.

“This will be fun,” she said, laughing. “Think we’ll see the monster?”

“You never know,” I said.

Roger spent the rest of the day in a state of abstraction, wandering absently from one task to another. The books to be packed for donation to the Society for the Preservation of Antiquities lay spilling out of their carton, the Reverend’s ancient flatbed lorry sat in the drive with its bonnet up, halfway through a motor check, and a cup of tea sat half-drunk and milk-scummed at his elbow as he gazed blankly out at the falling rain of early evening.

What he should do, he knew, was get at the job of dismantling the heart of the Reverend’s study. Not the books; massive as that job was, it was only a matter of deciding which to keep himself, and which should be dispatched to the SPA or the Reverend’s old college library. No, sooner or later he would have to tackle the enormous desk, which had papers filling each huge drawer to the brim and protruding from its dozens of pigeonholes. And he’d have to take down and dispose of all of the miscellany decorating the cork wall that filled one side of the room; a task to daunt the stoutest heart.

Aside from a general disinclination to start the tedious job, Roger was hampered by something else. He didn’t want to be doing these things, necessary as they were; he wanted to be working on Claire Randall’s project, tracking down the clansmen of Culloden.

It was an interesting enough project in its way, though probably a minor research job. But that wasn’t it. No, he thought, if he were being honest with himself, he wanted to tackle Claire Randall’s project because he wanted to go round to Mrs. Thomas’s guesthouse and lay his results at the feet of Brianna Randall, as knights were supposed to have done with the heads of dragons. Even if he didn’t get results on that scale, he urgently wanted some excuse to see her and talk with her again.

It was a Bronzino painting she reminded him of, he decided. She and her mother both gave that odd impression of having been outlined somehow, drawn with such vivid strokes and delicate detail that they stood out from their background as though they’d been engraved on it. But Brianna had that brilliant coloring, and that air of absolute physical presence that made Bronzino’s sitters seem to follow you with their eyes, to be about to speak from their frames. He’d never seen a Bronzino painting making faces at a glass of whisky, but if there had been one, he was sure it would have looked precisely like Brianna Randall.

“Well, bloody hell,” he said aloud. “It won’t take a lot of time just to look over the records at Culloden House tomorrow, will it? You,” he said, addressing the desk and its multiple burdens, “can wait for a day. So can you,” he said to the wall, and defiantly plucked a mystery novel from the shelf. He glanced around belligerently, as though daring any of the furnishings to object, but there was no sound but the whirring of the electric fire. He switched it off and, book under his arm, left the study, flicking off the light.

A minute later, he came back, crossing the room in the dark, and retrieved the list of names from the table.

“Well, bloody hell anyway!” he said, and tucked it into the pocket of his shirt. “Don’t want to forget the damn thing in the morning.” He patted the pocket, feeling the soft crackle of the paper just over his heart, and went up to bed.

We had come back from Loch Ness blown with wind and chilled with rain, to the warm comfort of a hot supper and an open fire in the parlor. Brianna had begun to yawn over the scrambled eggs, and soon excused herself to go and take a hot bath. I stayed downstairs for a bit, chatting with Mrs. Thomas, the landlady, and it was nearly ten o’clock before I made my way up to my own bath and nightgown.

Brianna was an early riser and an early sleeper; her soft breathing greeted me as I pushed open the bedroom door. An early sleeper, she was also a sound one; I moved carefully around the room, hanging up my clothes and tidying things away, but there was little danger of waking her. The house grew quiet as I went about my work, so that the rustle of my own movements seemed loud in my ears.

I had brought several of Frank’s books with me, intending to donate them to the Inverness Library. They were laid neatly in the bottom of my suitcase, forming a foundation for the more squashable items above. I took them out one by one, laying them on the bed. Five hardbound volumes, glossy in bright dust covers. Nice, substantial things; five or six hundred pages each, not counting index and illustrations.

My late husband’s Collected Works, in the Fully Annotated editions. Inches of admiring reviews covered the jacket flaps, comments from every recognized expert in the historical field. Not bad for a Life’s Work, I thought. An accomplishment to be proud of. Compact, weighty, authoritative.

I stacked the books neatly on the table next to my bag, so as not to forget them in the morning. The titles on the spines were different, of course, but I stacked them so that the uniform “Frank W. Randall” ’s at the ends lined up, one above the other. They glowed jewel-bright in the small pool of light from the bedside lamp.

The bed-and-breakfast was quiet; it was early in the year for guests, and those there were had long since gone to sleep. In the other twin bed, Brianna made a small whuffling noise and rolled over in her sleep, leaving long strands of red hair draped across her dreaming face. One long, bare foot protruded from the bedclothes, and I pulled the blanket gently over it.

The impulse to touch a sleeping child never fades, no matter that the child is a good deal larger than her mother, and a woman – if a young one – in her own right. I smoothed the hair back from her face and stroked the crown of her head. She smiled in her sleep, a brief reflex of contentment, gone as soon as it appeared. My own smile lingered as I watched her, and whispered to her sleep-deaf ears, as I had so many times before, “God, you are so like him.”

I swallowed the faint thickening in my throat – it was nearly habit, by now – and took my dressing gown from the chairback. It was bloody cold at night in the Scottish Highlands in April, but I wasn’t yet ready to seek the warm sanctuary of my own twin bed.

I had asked the landlady to leave the fire burning in the sitting room, assuring her that I would bank it before retiring. I closed the door softly, still seeing the sprawl of long limbs, the splash and tumble of red silk across the quilted blue spread.

“Not bad for a Life’s Work, either,” I whispered to the dark hallway. “Maybe not so compact, but damned authoritative.”

The small parlor was dark and cozy, the fire burnt down to a steady glow of flame along the backbone of the main log. I pulled a small armchair up before the fire and propped my feet on the fender. I could hear all the small usual sounds of modern life around me; the faint whirr of the refrigerator in the basement below, the hum and whoosh of the central heating that made the fire a comfort rather than a necessity; the passing rush of an occasional car outside.

But under everything was the deep silence of a Highland night. I sat very still, reaching for it. It had been twenty years since I last felt it, but the soothing power of the dark was still there, cradled between the mountains.

I reached into the pocket of my dressing gown and pulled out the folded paper – a copy of the list I had given Roger Wakefield. It was too dark to read by firelight, but I didn’t need to see the names. I unfolded the paper on my silk-clad knee and sat blindly staring at the lines of illegible type. I ran my finger slowly across each line, murmuring each man’s name to myself like a prayer. They belonged to the cold spring night, more than I did. But I kept looking into the flames, letting the dark outside come to fill the empty places inside me.

And speaking their names as though to summon them, I began the first steps back, crossing the empty dark to where they waited.

2 THE PLOT THICKENS

Roger left Culloden House next morning with twelve pages of notes and a growing feeling of bafflement. What had at first seemed a fairly straightforward job of historical research was turning up some odd twists, and no mistake.

He had found only three of the names from Claire Randall’s list among the rolls of the dead of Culloden. This in itself was nothing remarkable. Charles Stuart’s army had rarely had a coherent roll of enlistment, as some clan chieftains had joined the Bonnie Prince apparently on whim, and many had left for even less reason, before the names of their men could be inscribed on any official document. The Highland army’s record-keeping, haphazard at best, had disintegrated almost completely toward the end; there was little point in keeping a payroll, after all, if you had nothing with which to pay the men on it.

He carefully folded his lanky frame and inserted himself into his ancient Morris, automatically ducking to avoid bumping his head. Taking the folder from under his arm, he opened it and frowned at the pages he had copied. What was odd about it was that nearly all of the men on Claire’s list had been shown on another army list.

Within the ranks of a given clan regiment, men might have deserted as the dimensions of the coming disaster became clearer; that would have been nothing unusual. No, what made the whole thing so incomprehensible was that the names on Claire’s list had shown up – entire and complete – as part of the Master of Lovat’s regiment, sent late in the campaign to fulfill a promise of support made to the Stuarts by Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat.

Yet Claire had definitely said – and a glance at her original sheets confirmed it – that these men had all come from a small estate called Broch Tuarach, well to the south and west of the Fraser lands – on the border of the MacKenzie clan lands, in fact. More than that, she had said these men had been with the Highland army since the Battle of Prestonpans, which had occurred near the beginning of the campaign.

Roger shook his head. This made no kind of sense. Granted, Claire might have mistaken the timing – she had said herself that she was no historian. But not the location, surely? And how could men from the estate of Broch Tuarach, who had given no oath of allegiance to the chief of clan Fraser, have been at the disposal of Simon Fraser? True, Lord Lovat had been known as “the Old Fox,” and for good reason, but Roger doubted that even that redoubtable old Earl had had sufficient wiliness to pull off something like this.

Frowning to himself, Roger started the car and pulled out of the parking lot. The archives at Culloden House were depressingly incomplete; mostly a lot of picturesque letters from Lord George Murray, beefing about supply problems, and things that looked good in the museum displays for the tourists. He needed a lot more than that.

“Hold on, cock,” he reminded himself, squinting in the rearview mirror at the turn. “You’re meant to be finding out what happened to the ones that didn’t cark it at Culloden. What does it matter how they got there, so long as they left the battle in one piece?”

But he couldn’t leave it alone. It was such an odd circumstance. Names got muddled with enormous frequency, especially in the Highlands, where half the population at any given moment seemed to be named “Alexander.” Consequently, men had customarily been known by their place-names, as well as their clan or surnames. Sometimes instead of the surnames. “Lochiel,” one of the most prominent Jacobite chieftains, was in fact Donald Cameron, of Lochiel, which distinguished him nicely from the hundreds of other Camerons named Donald.

And all the Highland men who hadn’t been named Donald or Alec had been named John. Of the three names that he’d found on the death rolls that matched Claire’s list, one was Donald Murray, one was Alexander MacKenzie Fraser, and one was John Graham Fraser. All without place-names attached; just the plain name, and the regiment to which they’d belonged. The Master of Lovat’s regiment, the Fraser regiment.

But without the place-name, he couldn’t be sure that they were the same men as the names on Claire’s list. There were at least six John Frasers on the death roll, and even that was incomplete; the English had given little attention to completeness or accuracy – most of the records had been compiled after the fact, by clan chieftains counting noses and determining who hadn’t come home. Frequently the chieftains themselves hadn’t come home, which complicated matters.

He rubbed his hand hard through his hair with frustration, as though scalp massage might stimulate his brain. And if the three names weren’t the same men, the mystery only deepened. A good half of Charles Stuart’s army had been slaughtered at Culloden. And Lovat’s men had been in the thick of it, right in the center of the battle. It was inconceivable that a group of thirty men had survived in that position without one fatality. The Master of Lovat’s men had come late to the Rising; while desertion had been rife in other regiments, who had served long enough to have some idea what they were in for, the Frasers had been remarkably loyal – and suffered in consequence.

A loud horn-blast from behind startled him out of his concentration, and he pulled to the side to let a large, annoyed lorry rumble past. Thinking and driving were not compatible activities, he decided. End up smashed against a stone wall, if he kept this up.

He sat still for a moment, pondering. His natural impulse was to go to Mrs. Thomas’s bed-and-breakfast, and tell Claire what he had found to date. The fact that this might involve basking for a few moments in the presence of Brianna Randall enhanced the appeal of this idea.

On the other hand, all his historian’s instincts cried out for more data. And he wasn’t at all sure that Claire was the person to provide it. He couldn’t imagine why she should commission him to do this project, and at the same time, interfere with its completion by giving him inaccurate information. It wasn’t sensible, and Claire Randall struck him as an eminently sensible person.

Still, there was that business with the whisky. His cheeks grew hot in memory. He was positive she’d done it on purpose – and as she didn’t really seem the sort for practical jokes, he was compelled to assume she’d done it to stop him inviting Brianna to Broch Tuarach. Did she want to keep him away from the place, or only to stop him taking Brianna there? The more he thought about the incident, the more convinced he became that Claire Randall was keeping something from her daughter, but what it was, he couldn’t imagine. Still less could he think what connection it had with him, or the project he had undertaken.

He’d give it up, were it not for two things. Brianna, and simple curiosity. He wanted to know what was going on, and he bloody well intended to find out.

He rapped his fist softly against the wheel, thinking, ignoring the rush of passing traffic. At last, decision made, he started the engine again and pulled into the road. At the next roundabout, he went three-quarters round the circle and headed for the town center of Inverness, and the railroad station.

The Flying Scotsman could have him in Edinburgh in three hours. The curator in charge of the Stuart Papers had been a close friend of the Reverend. And he had one clue to start with, puzzling as it was. The roll that had listed the names in the Master of Lovat’s regiment had shown those thirty men as being under the command of a Captain James Fraser – of Broch Tuarach. This man was the only apparent link between Broch Tuarach and the Frasers of Lovat. He wondered why James Fraser had not appeared on Claire’s list.

The sun was out; a rare event for mid-April, and Roger made the most of it by cranking down the tiny window on the driver’s side, to let the bright wind blow past his ear.

He had had to stay overnight in Edinburgh, and coming back late the next day, had been so tired from the long train ride that he had done little more than eat the hot supper Fiona insisted on fixing him before he fell into bed. But today he had risen full of renewed energy and determination, and motored down to the small village of Broch Mordha, near the site of the estate called Broch Tuarach. If her mother didn’t want Brianna Randall going to Broch Tuarach, there was nothing stopping him from having a look at the place.

He had actually found Broch Tuarach itself, or at least he assumed so; there was an enormous pile of fallen stone, surrounding the collapsed remnant of one of the ancient circular brochs, or towers, used in the distant past both for living and for defense. He had sufficient Gaelic to know that the name meant “north-facing tower,” and had wondered briefly just how a circular tower could have come by such a name.

There was a manor house and its outbuildings nearby, also in ruins, though a good deal more of it was left. An estate agent’s sign, weathered almost to illegibility, stood tacked to a stake in the dooryard. Roger stood on the slope above the house, looking around. At a glance, he could see nothing that would explain Claire’s wanting to keep her daughter from coming here.

He parked the Morris in the dooryard, and climbed out. It was a beautiful site, but very remote; it had taken him nearly forty-five minutes of careful maneuvering to get his Morris down the rutted country lane from the main highway without fracturing his oil pan.

He didn’t go into the house; it was plainly abandoned, and possibly dangerous – there would be nothing there. The name FRASER was carved into the lintel, though, and the same name adorned most of the small tombstones in what must have been the family graveyard – those that were legible. Not a great help, that, he reflected. None of these stones bore the names of men on his list. He’d have to go on along the road; according to the AA map, the village of Broch Mhorda was three miles farther on.

As he’d feared, the small village church had fallen into disuse and been knocked down years ago. Persistent knockings on doors elicited blank stares, dour looks, and finally a doubtful speculation from an aged farmer that the old parish records might have gone to the museum in Fort William, or maybe up to Inverness; there was a minister up that way who collected such rubbish.

Tired and dusty, but not yet discouraged, Roger trudged back to his car, sheltering in the lane by the village pub. This was the sort of setback that so often attended historical field research, and he was used to it. A quick pint – well, two, maybe, it was an unusually warm day – and then on to Fort William.

Serve him right, he reflected wryly, if the records he was looking for turned out to be in the Reverend’s archives all along. That’s what he got for neglecting his work to go on wild-goose chases to impress a girl. His trip to Edinburgh had done little more than serve to eliminate the three names he’d found at Culloden House; all three men proved to have come from different regiments, not the Broch Tuarach group.

The Stuart Papers took up three entire rooms, as well as untold packing cases in the basement of the museum, so he could hardly claim to have made an exhaustive study. Still, he had found a duplicate of the payroll he’d seen at Culloden House, listing the joining of the men as part of a regiment under the overall command of the Master of Lovat – the Old Fox’s son, that would have been, Young Simon. Cagy old bastard split his vote, Roger thought; sent the heir to fight for the Stuarts, and stayed home himself, claiming to have been a loyal subject of King Geordie all along. Much good it did him.

That document had listed Simon Fraser the Younger as commander, and made no mention of James Fraser. A James Fraser was mentioned in a number of army dispatches, memoranda, and other documents, though. If it was the same man, he’d been fairly active in the campaign. Still, with only the name “James Fraser,” it was impossible to tell if it was the Broch Tuarach one; James was as common a Highland name as Duncan or Robert. In only one spot was a James Fraser listed with additional middle names that might help in identification, but that document made no mention of his men.

He shrugged, irritably waving off a sudden cloud of voracious midges. To go through those records in coherent fashion would take several years. Unable to shake the attentions of the midges, he ducked into the dark, brewery atmosphere of the pub, leaving them to mill outside in a frenzied cloud of inquiry.

Sipping the cool, bitter ale, he mentally reviewed the steps taken so far, and the options open to him. He had time to go to Fort William today, though it would mean getting back to Inverness late. And if the Fort William museum turned up nothing, then a good rummage through the Reverend’s archives was the logical, if ironic, next step.

And after that? He drained the last drops of bitter, and signaled the landlord for another glass. Well, if it came down to it, a tramp round every kirkyard and burying ground in the general vicinity of Broch Tuarach was likely the best he could do in the short term. He doubted that the Randalls would stay in Inverness for the next two or three years, patiently awaiting results.

He felt in his pocket for the notebook that is the historian’s constant companion. Before he left Broch Mhorda, he should at least have a look at what was left of the old kirkyard. You never knew what might turn up, and it would at least save him coming back.

The next afternoon, the Randalls came to take tea at Roger’s invitation, and to hear his progress report.

“I’ve found several of the names on your list,” he told Claire, leading the way into the study. “It’s very odd; I haven’t yet found any who died for sure at Culloden. I thought I had three, but they turned out to be different men with the same names.” He glanced at Dr. Randall; she was standing quite still, one hand clasping the back of a wing chair, as though she’d forgotten where she was.

“Er, won’t you sit down?” Roger invited, and with a small, startled jerk, she nodded and sat abruptly on the edge of the seat. Roger eyed her curiously, but went on, pulling out his folder of research notes and handing it to her.

“As I say, it’s odd. I haven’t tracked down all the names; I think I’ll need to go nose about among the parish registers and graveyards near Broch Tuarach. I found most of these records among my father’s papers. But you’d think I’d have turned up one or two battle-deaths at least, given that they were all at Culloden. Especially if, as you say, they were with one of the Fraser regiments; those were nearly all in the center of the battle, where the fighting was thickest.”

“I know.” There was something in her voice that made him look at her, puzzled, but her face was invisible as she bent over the desk. Most of the records were copies, made in Roger’s own hand, as the exotic technology of photocopying had not yet penetrated to the government archive that guarded the Stuart Papers, but there were a few original sheets, unearthed from the late Reverend Wakefield’s hoard of eighteenth-century documents. She turned over the records with a gentle finger, careful not to touch the fragile paper more than necessary.

“You’re right; that is odd.” Now he recognized the emotion in her voice – it was excitement, but mingled with satisfaction and relief. She had been in some way expecting this – or hoping for it.

“Tell me…” She hesitated. “The names you’ve found. What happened to them, if they didn’t die at Culloden?”

He was faintly surprised that it should seem to matter so much to her, but obligingly pulled out the folder that held his research notes and opened it. “Two of them were on a ship’s roll; they emigrated to America soon after Culloden. Four died of natural causes about a year later – not surprising, there was a terrible famine after Culloden, and a lot of people died in the Highlands. And this one I found in a parish register – but not the parish he came from. I’m fairly sure it’s one of your men, though.”

It was only as the tension went out of her shoulders that he noticed it had been there.

“Do you want me to look for the rest, still?” he asked, hoping that the answer would be “yes.” He was watching Brianna over her mother’s shoulder. She was standing by the cork wall, half-turned as though uninterested in her mother’s project, but he could see a small vertical crease between her brows.

Perhaps she sensed the same thing he did, the odd air of suppressed excitement that surrounded Claire like an electric field. He had been aware of it from the moment she walked into the room, and his revelations had only increased it. He imagined that if he touched her, a great spark of static electricity would leap between them.

A knock on the study door interrupted his thoughts. The door opened and Fiona Graham came in, pushing a tea cart, fully equipped with teapot, cups, doilies, three kinds of sandwiches, cream-cakes, sponge cake, jam tarts, and scones with clotted cream.

“Yum!” said Brianna at the sight. “Is that all for us, or are you expecting ten other people?”

Claire Randall looked over the tea preparations, smiling. The electric field was still there, but damped down by major effort. Roger could see one of her hands, clenched so hard in the folds of her skirt that the edge of her ring cut into the flesh.

“That tea is so high, we won’t need to eat for weeks,” she said. “It looks wonderful!”

Fiona beamed. She was short, plump and pretty as a small brown hen. Roger sighed internally. While he was pleased to be able to offer his guests hospitality, he was well aware that the lavish nature of the refreshments was intended for his appreciation, not theirs. Fiona, aged nineteen, had one burning ambition in life. To be a wife. Preferably of a professional man. She had taken one look at Roger when he arrived a week earlier to tidy up the Reverend’s affairs, and decided that an assistant professor of history was the best prospect Inverness offered.

Since then, he had been stuffed like a Christmas goose, had his shoes polished, his slippers and toothbrush laid out, his bed turned down, his coat brushed, the evening paper bought for him and laid alongside his plate, his neck rubbed when he had been working over his desk for long hours, and constant inquiries made concerning his bodily comfort, state of mind, and general health. He had never before been exposed to such a barrage of domesticity.

In short, Fiona was driving him mad. His current state of unshaven dishabille was more a reaction to her relentless pursuit than it was a descent into that natural squalor enjoyed by men temporarily freed from the demands of job and society.

The thought of being united in bonds of holy wedlock with Fiona Graham was one that froze him to the marrow. She would drive him insane within a year, with her constant pestering. Aside from that, though, there was Brianna Randall, now gazing contemplatively at the tea cart, as though wondering where to start.

He had been keeping his attention firmly fixed on Claire Randall and her project this afternoon, avoiding looking at her daughter. Claire Randall was lovely, with the sort of fine bones and translucent skin that would make her look much the same at sixty as she had at twenty. But looking at Brianna Randall made him feel slightly breathless.

She carried herself like a queen, not slumping as tall girls so often do. Noting her mother’s straight back and graceful posture, he could see where that particular attribute had come from. But not the remarkable height, the cascade of waist-length red hair, sparked with gold and copper, streaked with amber and cinnamon, curling casually around face and shoulders like a mantle. The eyes, so dark a blue as almost to be black in some lights. Nor that wide, generous mouth, with a full lower lip that invited nibbling kisses and biting passion. Those things must have come from her father.

Roger was on the whole rather glad that her father was not present, since he would certainly have taken paternal umbrage at the sorts of thoughts Roger was thinking; thoughts he was desperately afraid showed on his face.

“Tea, eh?” he said heartily. “Splendid. Wonderful. Looks delicious, Fiona. Er, thanks, Fiona. I, um, don’t think we need anything else.”

Ignoring the broad hint to depart, Fiona nodded graciously at the compliments from the guests, laid out the doilies and cups with deft economy of motion, poured the tea, passed round the first plate of cake, and seemed prepared to stay indefinitely, presiding as lady of the house.

“Have some cream on your scones, Rog – I mean, Mr. Wakefield,” she suggested, ladling it on without waiting for his reply. “You’re much too thin; you want feeding up.” She glanced conspiratorially at Brianna Randall, saying, “You know what men are; never eat properly without a woman to look after them.”

“How lucky that he’s got you to take care of him,” Brianna answered politely.

Roger took a deep breath, and flexed his fingers several times, until the urge to strangle Fiona had passed.

“Fiona,” he said. “Would you, um, could you possibly do me a small favor?”

She lit up like a small jack-o’-lantern, mouth stretched in an eager grin at the thought of doing something for him. “Of course, Rog – Mr. Wakefield! Anything at all!”

Roger felt vaguely ashamed of himself, but after all, he argued, it was for her good as much as his. If she didn’t leave, he was shortly going to cease being responsible and commit some act they would both regret.

“Oh, thanks, Fiona. It’s nothing much; only that I’d ordered some… some” – he thought frantically, trying to remember the name of one of the village merchants – “some tobacco, from Mr. Buchan in the High Street. I wonder if you’d be willing to go and fetch it for me; I could just do with a good pipe after such a wonderful tea.”

Fiona was already untying her apron – the frilly, lace-trimmed one, Roger noted grimly. He closed his eyes briefly in relief as the study door shut behind her, dismissing for the moment the fact that he didn’t smoke. With a sigh of relief, he turned to conversation with his guests.

“You were asking whether I wanted you to look for the rest of the names on my list,” Claire said, almost at once. Roger had the odd impression that she shared his relief at Fiona’s departure. “Yes, I do – if it wouldn’t be too much trouble?”

“No, no! Not at all,” Roger said, with only slight mendacity. “Glad to do it.”

Roger’s hand hovered uncertainly amid the largesse of the tea cart, then snaked down to grasp the crystal decanter of twelve-year-old Muir Breame whisky. After the skirmish with Fiona, he felt he owed it to himself.

“Will you have a bit of this?” he asked his guests politely. Catching the look of distaste on Brianna’s face, he quickly added, “Or maybe some tea?”

“Tea,” Brianna said with relief.

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” Claire told her daughter, inhaling the whisky fumes with rapture.

“Oh yes I do,” Brianna replied. “That’s why I’m missing it.” She shrugged and quirked an eyebrow at Roger.

“You have to be twenty-one before you can drink legally in Massachusetts,” Claire explained to Roger. “Bree has another eight months to go, so she really isn’t used to whisky.”

“You act as though not liking whisky was a crime,” Brianna protested, smiling at Roger above her teacup.

He raised his own brows in response. “My dear woman,” he said severely. “This is Scotland. Of course not liking whisky is a crime!”

“Oh, aye?” said Brianna sweetly, in a perfect imitation of his own slight Scots burr. “Well, we’ll hope it’s no a capital offense like murrderrr, shall we?”

Taken by surprise, he swallowed a laugh with his whisky and choked. Coughing and pounding himself on the chest, he glanced at Claire to share the joke. A forced smile hung on her lips, but her face had gone quite pale. Then she blinked, the smile came back more naturally, and the moment passed.

Roger was surprised at how easily conversation flowed among them – both about trivialities, and about Claire’s project. Brianna clearly had been interested in her father’s work, and knew a great deal more about the Jacobites than did her mother.

“It’s amazing they ever made it as far as Culloden,” she said. “Did you know the Highlanders won the battle of Prestonpans with barely two thousand men? Against an English army of eight thousand? Incredible!”

“Well, and the Battle of Falkirk was nearly that way as well,” Roger chimed in. “Outnumbered, outarmed, marching on foot… they should never have been able to do what they did… but they did!”

“Um-hm,” said Claire, taking a deep gulp of her whisky. “They did!”

“I was thinking,” Roger said to Brianna, with an assumed air of casualness. “Perhaps you’d like to come with me to some of the places – the battle sites and other places? They’re interesting, and I’m sure you’d be a tremendous help with the research.”

Brianna laughed and smoothed back her hair, which had a tendency to drop into her tea. “I don’t know about the help, but I’d love to come.”

“Terrific!” Surprised and elated with her agreement, he fumbled for the decanter and nearly dropped it. Claire fielded it neatly, and filled his glass with precision.

“The least I can do, after spilling it the last time,” she said, smiling in answer to his thanks.

Seeing her now, poised and relaxed, Roger was inclined to doubt his earlier suspicions. Maybe it had been an accident after all? That lovely cool face told him nothing.

A half-hour later, the tea table lay in shambles, the decanter stood empty, and the three of them sat in a shared stupor of content. Brianna shifted once or twice, glanced at Roger, and finally asked if she might use his “rest room.”

“Oh, the W.C.? Of course.” He heaved himself to his feet, ponderous with Dundee cake and almond sponge. If he didn’t get away from Fiona soon, he’d weigh three hundred pounds before he got back to Oxford.

“It’s one of the old-fashioned kind,” he explained, pointing down the hall in the direction of the bathroom. “With a tank on the ceiling and a pull-chain.”

“I saw some of those in the British Museum,” Brianna said, nodding. “Only they weren’t in with the exhibits, they were in the ladies’ room.” She hesitated, then asked, “You haven’t got the same sort of toilet paper they have in the British Museum, do you? Because if you do, I’ve got some Kleenex in my purse.”

Roger closed one eye and looked at her with the other. “Either that’s a very odd non sequitur,” he said, “or I’ve drunk a good deal more than I thought.” In fact, he and Claire had accounted very satisfactorily for the Muir Breame, though Brianna had confined herself to tea.

Claire laughed, overhearing the exchange, and got up to hand Brianna several folded facial tissues from her own bag. “It won’t be waxed paper stamped with ‘Property of H.M. Government,’ like the Museum’s, but it likely won’t be much better,” she told her daughter. “British toilet paper is commonly rather a stiff article.”

“Thanks.” Brianna took the tissues and turned to the door, but then turned back. “Why on earth would people deliberately make toilet paper that feels like tinfoil?” she demanded.

“Hearts of oak are our men,” Roger intoned, “stainless steel are their bums. It builds the national character.”

“In the case of Scots, I expect it’s hereditary nerve-deadening,” Claire added. “The sort of men who could ride horse-back wearing a kilt have bottoms like saddle leather.”

Brianna fizzed with laughter. “I’d hate to see what they used for toilet paper then,” she said.

“Actually, it wasn’t bad,” Claire said, surprisingly. “Mullein leaves are really very nice; quite as good as two-ply bathroom tissue. And in the winter or indoors, it was usually a bit of damp rag; not very sanitary, but comfortable enough.”

Roger and Brianna both gawked at her for a moment.

“Er… read it in a book,” she said, and blushed amazingly.

As Brianna, still giggling, made her way off in search of the facilities, Claire remained standing by the door.

“It was awfully nice of you to entertain us so grandly,” she said, smiling at Roger. The momentary discomposure had vanished, replaced by her usual poise. “And remarkably kind of you to have found out about those names for me.”

“My pleasure entirely,” Roger assured her. “It’s made a nice change from cobwebs and mothballs. I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve found out anything else about your Jacobites.”

“Thank you.” Claire hesitated, glanced over her shoulder, and lowered her voice. “Actually, since Bree’s gone for the moment… there’s something I wanted to ask you, in private.”

Roger cleared his throat and straightened the tie he had donned in honor of the occasion.

“Ask away,” he said, feeling cheerfully expansive with the success of the tea party. “I’m completely at your service.”

“You were asking Bree if she’d go with you to do field research. I wanted to ask you… there’s a place I’d rather you didn’t take her, if you don’t mind.”

Alarm bells went off at once in Roger’s head. Was he going to find out what the secret was about Broch Tuarach?

“The circle of standing stones – they call it Craigh na Dun.” Claire’s face was earnest as she leaned slightly closer. “There’s an important reason, or I wouldn’t ask. I want to take Brianna to the circle myself, but I’m afraid I can’t tell you why, just now. I will, in time, but not quite yet. Will you promise me?”

Thoughts were chasing themselves through Roger’s mind. So it hadn’t been Broch Tuarach she wanted to keep the girl away from, after all! One mystery was explained, only to deepen another.

“If you like,” he said at last. “Of course.”

“Thank you.” She touched his arm once, lightly, and turned to go. Seeing her silhouetted against the light, he was suddenly reminded of something. Perhaps it wasn’t the moment to ask, but it couldn’t do any harm.

“Oh, Dr. Randall – Claire?”

Claire turned back to face him. With the distractions of Brianna removed, he could see that Claire Randall was a very beautiful woman in her own right. Her face was flushed from the whisky, and her eyes were the most unusual light golden-brown color, he thought – like amber in crystal.

“In all the records that I found dealing with these men,” Roger said, choosing his words carefully, “there was a mention of a Captain James Fraser, who seems to have been their leader. But he wasn’t on your list. I only wondered; did you know about him?”

She stood stock-still for a moment, reminding him of the way she had behaved upon her arrival that afternoon. But after a moment, she shook herself slightly, and answered with apparent equanimity.

“Yes, I knew about him.” She spoke calmly, but all the color had left her face, and Roger could see a small pulse beating rapidly at the base of her throat.

“I didn’t put him on the list because I already knew what happened to him. Jamie Fraser died at Culloden.”

“Are you sure?”

As though anxious to leave, Claire scooped up her handbag, and glanced down the hall toward the bathroom, where the rattling of the ancient knob indicated Brianna’s attempts to get out.

“Yes,” she said, not looking back. “I’m quite sure. Oh, Mr. Wakefield… Roger, I mean.” She swung back now, fixing those oddly colored eyes on him. In this light, they looked almost yellow, he thought; the eyes of a big cat, a leopard’s eyes.

“Please,” she said, “don’t mention Jamie Fraser to my daughter.”

It was late, and he should have been abed long since, but Roger found himself unable to sleep. Whether from the aggravations of Fiona, the puzzling contradictions of Claire Randall, or from exaltation over the prospect of doing field research with Brianna Randall, he was wide-awake, and likely to remain so. Rather than toss, turn, or count sheep, he resolved to put his wakefulness to good use. A rummage through the Reverend’s papers would probably put him to sleep in no time.

Fiona’s light down the hall was still on, but he tiptoed down the stair, not to disturb her. Then, snapping on the study light, he stood for a moment, contemplating the magnitude of the task before him.

The wall exemplified the Reverend Wakefield’s mind. Completely covering one side of the study, it was an expanse of corkboard measuring nearly twenty feet by twelve. Virtually none of the original cork was visible under the layers upon layers of papers, notes, photographs, mimeographed sheets, bills, receipts, bird feathers, torn-off corners of envelopes containing interesting postage stamps, address labels, key rings, postcards, rubber bands, and other impedimenta, all tacked up or attached by bits of string.

The trivia lay twelve layers deep in spots, yet the Reverend had always been able to set his hand unerringly on the bit he wanted. Roger thought that the wall must have been organized according to some underlying principle so subtle that not even American NASA scientists could discern it.

Roger viewed the wall dubiously. There was no logical point at which to start. He reached tentatively for a mimeographed list of General Assembly meeting dates sent out by the bishop’s office, but was distracted by the sight underneath of a crayoned dragon, complete with artistic puffs of smoke from the flaring nostrils, and green flames shooting from the gaping mouth.

ROGER was written in large, straggling capitals at the bottom of the sheet. He vaguely remembered explaining that the dragon breathed green fire because it ate nothing but spinach. He let the General Assembly list fall back into place, and turned away from the wall. He could tackle that lot later.

The desk, an enormous oak rolltop with at least forty stuffed-to-bursting pigeonholes, seemed like pie by comparison. With a sigh, Roger pulled up the battered office chair and sat down to make sense of all the documents the Reverend thought worth keeping.

One stack of bills yet to be paid. Another of official-looking documents: automobile titles, surveyor’s reports, building-inspection certificates. Another for historical notes and records. Another for family keepsakes. Another – by far the largest – for rubbish.

Deep in his task, he didn’t hear the door open behind him, or the approaching footsteps. Suddenly a large teapot appeared on the desk next to him.

“Eh?” He straightened up, blinking.

“Thought you might do with some tea, Mr. Wake – I mean, Roger.” Fiona set down a small tray containing a cup and saucer and a plate of biscuits.

“Oh, thanks.” He was in fact hungry, and gave Fiona a friendly smile that sent the blood rushing into her round, fair cheeks. Seemingly encouraged by this, she didn’t go away, but perched on the corner of the desk, watching him raptly as he went about his job between bites of chocolate biscuit.

Feeling obscurely that he ought to acknowledge her presence in some way, Roger held up a half-eaten biscuit and mumbled, “Good.”

“Are they? I made them, ye know.” Fiona’s flush grew deeper. An attractive little girl, Fiona. Small, rounded, with dark curly hair and wide brown eyes. He found himself wondering suddenly whether Brianna Randall could cook, and shook his head to clear the image.

Apparently taking this as a gesture of disbelief, Fiona leaned closer. “No, really,” she insisted. “A recipe of my gran’s, it is. She always said they were a favorite of the Reverend’s.” The wide brown eyes grew a trifle misty. “She left me all her cookbooks and things. Me being the only granddaughter, ye see.”

“I was sorry about your grandmother,” Roger said sincerely. “Quick, was it?”

Fiona nodded mournfully. “Oh, aye. Right as rain all day, then she said after supper as she felt a bit tired, and went up to her bed.” The girl lifted her shoulders and let them fall. “She went to sleep, and never woke up.”

“A good way to go,” Roger said. “I’m glad of it.” Mrs. Graham had been a fixture in the manse since before Roger himself had come, a frightened, newly orphaned five-year-old. Middle-aged even then, and widowed with grown children, still she had provided an abundant supply of firm, no-nonsense maternal affection during school holidays when Roger came home to the manse. She and the Reverend made an odd pair, and yet between them they had made the old house definitely a home.

Moved by his memories, Roger reached out and squeezed Fiona’s hand. She squeezed back, brown eyes suddenly melting. The small rosebud mouth parted slightly, and she leaned toward Roger, her breath warm on his ear.

“Uh, thank you,” Roger blurted. He pulled his hand out of her grasp as though scorched. “Thanks very much. For the… the… er, tea and things. Good. It was good. Very good. Thanks.” He turned and reached hastily for another stack of papers to cover his confusion, snatching a rolled bundle of newspaper clippings from a pigeonhole chosen at random.

He unrolled the yellowed clippings and spread them on the desk, holding them down between his palms. Frowning in apparent deep concentration, he bent his head lower over the smudged text. After a moment Fiona rose with a deep sigh, and her footsteps receded toward the door. Roger didn’t look up.

Letting out a deep sigh of his own, he closed his eyes briefly and offered a quick prayer of thanks for the narrow escape. Yes, Fiona was attractive. Yes, she was undoubtedly a fine cook. She was also nosy, interfering, irritating, and firmly bent on marriage. Lay one hand on that rosy flesh again, and they’d be calling the banns by next month. But if there was any bann-calling to be done, the name linked with Roger Wakefield in the parish register was going to be Brianna Randall’s, if Roger had anything to say about it.

Wondering just how much he would have to say about it, Roger opened his eyes and then blinked. For there in front of him was the name he had been envisioning on a wedding license – Randall.

Not, of course, Brianna Randall. Claire Randall. The headline read RETURNED FROM THE DEAD. Beneath was a picture of Claire Randall, twenty years younger, but looking little different than she did now, bar the expression on her face. She had been photographed sitting bolt upright in a hospital bed, hair tousled and flying like banners, delicate mouth set like a steel trap, and those extraordinary eyes glaring straight into the camera.

With a sense of shock, Roger thumbed rapidly through the bundle of clippings, then returned to read them more carefully. Though the papers had made as much sensation as possible of the story, the facts were sparse.

Claire Randall, wife of the noted historian Dr. Franklin W. Randall, had disappeared during a Scottish holiday in Inverness, late in the spring of 1946. A car she had been driving had been found, but the woman herself was gone without trace. All searches having proved futile, the police and bereaved husband had at length concluded that Claire Randall must have been murdered, perhaps by a roving tramp, and her body concealed somewhere in the rocky crags of the area.

And in 1948, nearly three years later, Claire Randall had returned. She had been found, disheveled and dressed in rags, wandering near the spot at which she had disappeared. While appearing to be in good physical health, though slightly malnourished, Mrs. Randall was disoriented and incoherent.

Raising his eyebrows slightly at the thought of Claire Randall ever being incoherent, Roger thumbed through the rest of the clippings. They contained little more than the information that Mrs. Randall was being treated for exposure and shock at a local hospital. There were photographs of the presumably overjoyed husband, Frank Randall. He looked stunned rather than overjoyed, Roger thought critically, not that one could blame him.

He examined the pictures curiously. Frank Randall had been a slender, handsome, aristocratic-looking man. Dark, with a rakish grace that showed in the angle of his body as he stood poised in the door of the hospital, surprised by the photographer on his way to visit his newly restored wife.

He traced the line of the long, narrow jaw, and the curve of the head, and realized that he was searching for traces of Brianna in her father. Intrigued by the thought, he rose and fetched one of Frank Randall’s books from the shelves. Turning to the back jacket, he found a better picture. The jacket photograph showed Frank Randall in color, in full-face view. No, the hair was definitely dark brown, not red. That blazing glory must have come from a grandparent, along with the deep blue eyes, slanted as a cat’s. Beautiful they were, but nothing like her mother’s. And not like her father’s either. Try as he might, he could see nothing of the flaming goddess in the face of the famous historian.

With a sigh, he closed the book and gathered up the clippings. He really must stop this mooning about and get on with the job, or he’d be sitting here for the next twelvemonth.

He was about to put the clippings into the keepsake pile, when one, headlined KIDNAPPED BY THE FAIRIES?, caught his eye. Or rather, not the clipping, but the date that appeared just above the headline. May 6, 1948.

He set the clipping down gently, as though it were a bomb that might go off in his hand. He closed his eyes and tried to summon up that first conversation with the Randalls. “You have to be twenty-one to drink in Massachusetts,” Claire had said. “Brianna still has eight months to go.” Twenty, then. Brianna Randall was twenty.

Unable to count backward fast enough, he rose and scrabbled through the perpetual calendar that the vicar had kept, in a clear space to itself on his cluttered wall. He found the date and stood with his finger pressed to the paper, blood draining from his face.

Claire Randall had returned from her mysterious disappearance disheveled, malnourished, incoherent – and pregnant.

In the fullness of time, Roger slept at last, but in consequence of his wakefulness, woke late and heavy-eyed, with an incipient headache, which neither a cold shower nor Fiona’s chirpiness over breakfast did much to dispel.

The feeling was so oppressive that he abandoned his work and left the house for a walk. Striding through a light rain, he found the fresh air improved his headache, but unfortunately cleared his mind enough to start thinking again about the implications of last night’s discovery.

Brianna didn’t know. That was clear enough, from the way she spoke about her late father – or about the man she thought was her father, Frank Randall. And presumably Claire didn’t mean her to know, or she would have told the girl herself. Unless this Scottish trip were meant to be a prelude to such a confession? The real father must have been a Scot; after all, Claire had disappeared – and reappeared – in Scotland. Was he still here?

That was a staggering thought. Had Claire brought her daughter to Scotland in order to introduce her to her real father? Roger shook his head doubtfully. Bloody risky, a thing like that. Bound to be confusing to Brianna, and painful as hell to Claire herself. Scare the shoes and socks off the father, too. And the girl plainly was devoted to Frank Randall. What was she going to feel like, realizing that the man she’d loved and idolized all her life in fact had no blood ties to her at all?

Roger felt bad for all concerned, including himself. He hadn’t asked to have any part of this, and wished himself in the same state of blissful ignorance as yesterday. He liked Claire Randall, liked her very much, and he found the thought of her committing adultery distasteful. At the same time, he jeered at himself for his old-fashioned sentimentality. Who knew what her life with Frank Randall had been like? Perhaps she’d had good reason for going off with another man. But then why had she come back?

Sweating and moody, Roger wandered back to the house. He shed his jacket in the hallway and went up to have a bath. Sometimes bathing helped to soothe him, and he felt much in need of soothing.

He ran a hand along the row of hangers in his closet, groping for the fuzzy shoulder of his worn white toweling robe. Then, pausing for a moment, he reached instead far to the back of the closet, sweeping the hangers along the rod until he could grasp the one he wanted.

He viewed the shabby old dressing gown with affection. The yellow silk of the background had faded to ochre, but the multicolored peacocks were bold as ever, spreading their tails with lordly insouciance, regarding the viewer with eyes like black beads. He brought the soft fabric to his nose and inhaled deeply, closing his eyes. The faint whiff of Borkum Riff and spilled whisky brought back the Reverend Wakefield as not even his father’s wall of trivia could do.

Many were the times he had smelled just that comforting aroma, with its upper note of Old Spice cologne, his face pressed against the smooth slickness of this silk, the Reverend’s chubby arms wrapped protectively around him, promising him refuge. He had given the old man’s other clothes to Oxfam, but somehow he couldn’t bear to part with this.

On impulse, he slipped the robe over his bare shoulders, mildly surprised at the light warmth of it, like the caress of fingers across his skin. He shifted his shoulders pleasurably under the silk, then wrapped it closely about his body, tying the belt in a careless knot.

Keeping a wary eye out in case of raids by Fiona, he made his way along the upper hall to the bathroom. The hot-water geyser stood against the head of the bath like the guardian of a sacred spring, squat and eternal. Another of his youthful memories was the weekly terror of trying to light the geyser with a flint striker in order to heat the water for his bath, the gas escaping past his head with a menacing hiss as his hands, sweaty with the fear of explosion and imminent death, slipped ineffectively on the metal of the striker.

Long since rendered automatic by an operation on its mysterious innards, the geyser now gurgled quietly to itself, the gas ring at its base rumbling and whooshing with unseen flame beneath the metal shield. Roger twisted the cracked “Hot” tap as far as it would go, added a half-turn of the “Cold,” then stood to study himself in the mirror while waiting for his bath to fill.

Nothing much wrong with him, he reflected, sucking in his stomach and pulling himself upright before the full-length reflection on the back of the door. Firm. Trim. Long-legged, but not spindle-shanked. Possibly a bit scrawny through the shoulders? He frowned critically, twisting his lean body back and forth.

He ran a hand through his thick black hair, until it stood on end like a shaving brush, trying to envision himself with a beard and long hair, like some of his students. Would he look dashing, or merely moth-eaten? Possibly an earring, while he was about it. He might look piratical then, like Edward Teach or Henry Morgan. He drew his brows together and bared his teeth.

“Grrrrr,” he said to his reflection.

“Mr. Wakefield?” said the reflection.

Roger leaped back, startled, and stubbed his toe painfully against the protruding claw-foot of the ancient bath.

“Ow!”

“Are you all right, Mr. Wakefield?” the mirror said. The porcelain doorknob rattled.

“Of course I am!” he snapped testily, glaring at the door. “Go away, Fiona, I’m bathing!”

There was a giggle from the other side of the door.

“Ooh, twice in one day. Aren’t we the dandy, though? Do you want some of the bay-rum soap? It’s in the cupboard there, if you do.”

“No, I don’t,” he snarled. The water level had risen midway in the tub, and he cut off the taps. The sudden silence was soothing, and he drew a deep breath of steam into his lungs. Wincing slightly at the heat, he stepped into the water and lowered himself gingerly, feeling a light sweat break out on his face as the heat rushed up his body.

“Mr. Wakefield?” The voice was back, chirping on the other side of the door like a hectoring robin.

“Go away, Fiona,” he gritted, easing himself back in the tub. The steaming water rose around him, comforting as a lover’s arms. “I have everything I want.”

“No, you haven’t,” said the voice.

“Yes, I have.” His eye swept the impressive lineup of bottles, jars, and implements arrayed on the shelf above the tub. “Shampoo, three kinds. Hair conditioner. Shaving cream. Razor. Body soap. Facial soap. After-shave. Cologne. Deodorant stick. I don’t lack a thing, Fiona.”

“What about towels?” said the voice, sweetly.

After a wild glance about the completely towel-less confines of the bathroom, Roger closed his eyes, clenched his teeth and counted slowly to ten. This proving insufficient, he made it twenty. Then, feeling himself able to answer without foaming at the mouth, he said calmly.

“All right, Fiona. Set them outside the door, please. And then, please… please, Fiona…go.”

A rustle outside was succeeded by the sound of reluctantly receding footsteps, and Roger, with a sigh of relief, gave himself up to the joys of privacy. Peace. Quiet. No Fiona.

Now, able to think more objectively about his upsetting discovery, he found himself more than curious about Brianna’s mysterious real father. Judging from the daughter, the man must have had a rare degree of physical attractiveness; would that alone have been sufficient to lure a woman like Claire Randall?

He had wondered already whether Brianna’s father might have been a Scot. Did he live – or had he lived – in Inverness? He supposed such proximity might account for Claire’s nervousness, and the air she had of keeping secrets. But did it account for the puzzling requests she had made of him? She didn’t want him to take Brianna to Craigh na Dun, nor to mention the captain of the Broch Tuarach men to her daughter. Why on earth not?

A sudden thought made him sit upright in the tub, water sloshing heedlessly against the cast-iron sides. What if it were not the eighteenth-century Jacobite soldier she was concerned about, but only his name? What if the man who had fathered her daughter in 1947 was also named James Fraser? It was a common enough name in the Highlands.

Yes, he thought, that might very well explain it. As for Claire’s desire to show her daughter the stone circle herself, perhaps that was also connected with the mystery of her father; maybe that’s where she’d met the man, or perhaps that’s where Brianna had been conceived. Roger was well aware that the stone circle was commonly used as a trysting spot; he’d taken girls there himself in high school, relying on the circle’s air of pagan mystery to loosen their reserve. It always worked.

He had a sudden startling vision of Claire Randall’s fine white limbs, locked in wild abandon with the naked, straining body of a red-haired man, the two bodies slick with rain and stained with crushed grass, twisting in ecstasy among the standing stones. The vision was so shocking in its specificity that it left him trembling, sweat running down his chest to vanish into the steaming water of the bath.

Christ! How was he going to meet Claire Randall’s eyes, next time they met? What was he going to say to Brianna, for that matter? “Read any good books lately?” “Seen any good flicks?” “D’you know you’re illegitimate?”

He shook his head, trying to clear it. The truth was that he didn’t know what to do next. It was a messy situation. He wanted no part in it, and yet he did. He liked Claire Randall; he liked Brianna Randall, too – much more than liked her, truth be told. He wanted to protect her, and save her whatever pain he could. And yet there seemed no way to do that. All he could do was keep his mouth shut until Claire Randall did whatever it was she planned to do. And then be there to pick up the pieces.

3 MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS

I wondered just how many tiny tea shops there were in Inverness. The High Street is lined on both sides with small cafes and tourist shops, as far as the eye can see. Once Queen Victoria had made the Highlands safe for travelers by giving her Royal approval of the place, tourists had flocked north in ever-increasing numbers. The Scots, unaccustomed to receiving anything from the South but armed invasions and political interference, had risen to the challenge magnificently.

You couldn’t walk more than a few feet on the main street of any Highland town without encountering a shop selling shortbread, Edinburgh rock, handkerchiefs embroidered with thistles, toy bagpipes, clan badges of cast aluminum, letter-openers shaped like claymores, coin purses shaped like sporrans (some with an anatomically correct “Scotchman” attached underneath), and an eye-jangling assortment of spurious clan tartans, adorning every conceivable object made of fabric, from caps, neckties, and serviettes down to a particularly horrid yellow “Buchanan” sett used to make men’s nylon Y-front underpants.

Looking over an assortment of tea towels stenciled with a wildly inaccurate depiction of the Loch Ness monster singing “Auld Lang Syne,” I thought Victoria had a lot to answer for.

Brianna was wandering slowly down the narrow aisle of the shop, head tilted back as she stared in amazement at the assortment of merchandise hanging from the rafters.

“Do you think those are real?” she said, pointing upward at a set of mounted stag’s antlers, poking their tines inquisitively through an absolute forest of bagpipe drones.

“The antlers? Oh, yes. I don’t imagine plastics technology’s got quite that good, yet,” I replied. “Besides, look at the price. Anything over one hundred pounds is very likely real.”

Brianna’s eyes widened, and she lowered her head.

“Jeez. I think I’ll get Jane a skirt-length of tartan instead.”

“Good-quality wool tartan won’t cost a lot less,” I said dryly, “but it will be a lot easier to get home on the plane. Let’s go across to the Kiltmaker store, then; they’ll have the best quality.”

It had begun to rain – of course – and we tucked our paper-wrapped parcels underneath the raincoats I had prudently insisted we wear. Brianna snorted with sudden amusement.

“You get so used to calling these things ‘macs,’ you forget what they’re really called. I’m not surprised it was a Scot that invented them,” she added, looking up at the water sheeting down from the edge of the canopy overhead. “Does it rain all the time here?”

“Pretty much,” I said, peering up and down through the downpour for oncoming traffic. “Though I’ve always supposed Mr. Macintosh was rather a lily-livered sort; most Scots I’ve known were relatively impervious to rain.” I bit my lip suddenly, but Brianna hadn’t noticed the slip, minor as it was; she was eyeing the ankle-deep freshet running down the gutter.

“Tell you what, Mama, maybe we’d better go up to the crossing. We aren’t going to make it jaywalking here.”

Nodding assent, I followed her up the street, heart pounding with adrenaline under the clammy cover of my mac. When are you going to get it over with? my mind demanded. You can’t keep watching your words and swallowing half the things you start to say. Why not just tell her?

Not yet, I thought to myself. I’m not a coward – or if I am, it doesn’t matter. But it isn’t quite time yet. I wanted her to see Scotland first. Not this lot – as we passed a shop offering a display of tartan baby booties – but the countryside. And Culloden. Most of all, I want to be able to tell her the end of the story. And for that, I need Roger Wakefield.

As though my thought had summoned it into being, the bright orange top of a battered Morris caught my eye in the parking lot to the left, glowing like a traffic beacon in the foggy wet.

Brianna had seen it too – there couldn’t be many cars in Inverness of that specific color and disreputability – and pointed at it, saying, “Look, Mama, isn’t that Roger Wakefield’s car?”

“Yes, I think so,” I said. There was a cafe on the right, from which the scent of fresh scones, stale toast, and coffee drifted to mingle with the fresh, rainy air. I grabbed Brianna’s arm and pulled her into the cafe.

“I think I’m hungry after all,” I explained. “Let’s have some cocoa and biscuits.”

Still child enough to be tempted by chocolate, and young enough to be willing to eat at any time, Bree offered no argument, but sat down at once and picked up the tea-stained sheet of green paper that served as the daily menu.

I didn’t particularly want cocoa, but I did want a moment or two to think. There was a large sign on the concrete wall of the parking lot across the street, reading PARKING FOR SCOTRAIL ONLY, followed by various lowercase threats as to what would happen to the vehicles of people who parked there without being train riders. Unless Roger knew something about the forces of law and order in Inverness that I didn’t know, chances were that he had taken a train. Granted that he could have gone anywhere, either Edinburgh or London seemed most likely. He was taking this research project seriously, dear lad.

We had come up on the train from Edinburgh ourselves. I tried to remember what the schedule was like, with no particular success.

“I wonder if Roger will be back on the evening train?” Bree said, echoing my thoughts with an uncanniness that made me choke on my cocoa. The fact that she wondered about Roger’s reappearance made me wonder just how much notice she had taken of young Mr. Wakefield.

A fair amount, apparently.

“I was thinking,” she said casually, “maybe we should get something for Roger Wakefield while we’re out – like a thank-you for that project he’s doing for you?”

“Good idea,” I said, amused. “What do you think he’d like?”

She frowned into her cocoa as though looking for inspiration. “I don’t know. Something nice; it looks like that project could be a lot of work.” She glanced up at me suddenly, brows raised.

“Why did you ask him?” she said. “If you wanted to trace people from the eighteenth century, there’re companies that do that. Genealogies and like that, I mean. Daddy always used Scot-Search, if he had to figure out a genealogy and didn’t have time to do it himself.”

“Yes, I know,” I said, and took a deep breath. We were on shaky ground here. “This project – it was something special to… to your father. He would have wanted Roger Wakefield to do it.”

“Oh.” She was silent for a while, watching the rain spatter and pearl on the cafe window.

“Do you miss Daddy?” she asked suddenly, nose buried in her cup, lashes lowered to avoid looking at me.

“Yes,” I said. I ran a forefinger up the edge of my own untouched cup, wiping off a drip of spilled cocoa. “We didn’t always get on, you know that, but… yes. We respected each other; that counts for a lot. And we liked each other, in spite of everything. Yes, I do miss him.”

She nodded, wordless, and put her hand over mine with a little squeeze. I curled my fingers around hers, long and warm, and we sat linked for a little while, sipping cocoa in silence.

“You know,” I said at last, pushing back my chair with a squeak of metal on linoleum, “I’d forgotten something. I need to post a letter to the hospital. I’d meant to do it on the way into town, but I forgot. If I hurry, I think I can just catch the outgoing post. Why don’t you go to the Kiltmaker’s – it’s just down the street, on the other side – and I’ll join you there after I’ve been to the post office?”

Bree looked surprised, but nodded readily enough.

“Oh. Okay. Isn’t the post office a long way, though? You’ll get soaked.”

“That’s all right. I’ll take a cab.” I left a pound note on the table to pay for the meal, and shrugged back into my raincoat.

In most cities, the usual response of taxicabs to rain is to disappear, as though they were soluble. In Inverness, though, such behavior would render the species rapidly extinct. I’d walked less than a block before finding two squatty black cabs lurking outside a hotel, and I slid into the warm, tobacco-scented interior with a cozy feeling of familiarity. Besides the greater leg room and comfort, British cabs smelled different than American ones; one of those tiny things I had never realized I’d missed during the last twenty years.

“Number sixty-four? Tha’s the auld manse, aye?” In spite of the efficiency of the cab’s heater, the driver was muffled to the ears in a scarf and thick jacket, with a flat cap guarding the top of his head from errant drafts. Modern Scots had gone a bit soft, I reflected; a long way from the days when sturdy Highlanders had slept in the heather in nothing but shirt and plaid. On the other hand, I wasn’t all that eager to go sleep in the heather in a wet plaid, either. I nodded to the driver, and we set off in a splash.

I felt a bit subversive, sneaking round to interview Roger’s housekeeper while he was out, and fooling Bree into the bargain. On the other hand, it would be difficult to explain to either of them just what I was doing. I hadn’t yet determined exactly how or when I would tell them what I had to say, but I knew it wasn’t time yet.

My fingers probed the inner pocket of my mac, reassured by the scrunch of the envelope from Scot-Search. While I hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to Frank’s work, I did know about the firm, which maintained a staff of half a dozen professional researchers specializing in Scottish genealogy; not the sort of place that gave you a family tree showing your relationship to Robert the Bruce and had done with it.

They’d done their usual thorough, discreet job on Roger Wakefield. I knew who his parents and grandparents had been, back some seven or eight generations. What I didn’t know was what he might be made of. Time would tell me that.

I paid off the cab and splashed up the flooded path to the steps of the old minister’s house. It was dry on the porch, and I had a chance to shake off the worst of the wet before the door was opened to my ring.

Fiona beamed in welcome; she had the sort of round, cheerful face whose natural expression was a smile. She was attired in jeans and a frilly apron, and the scent of lemon polish and fresh baking wafted from its folds like incense.

“Why, Mrs. Randall!” she exclaimed. “Can I be helpin’ ye at all, then?”

“I think perhaps you might, Fiona,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you about your grandmother.”

“Are you sure you’re all right, Mama? I could call Roger and ask him to go tomorrow, if you’d like me to stay with you.” Brianna hovered in the doorway of the guesthouse bedroom, an anxious frown creasing her brow. She was dressed for walking, in boots, jeans, and sweater, but she’d added the brilliant orange and blue silk scarf Frank had brought her from Paris, just before his death two years before.

“Just the color of your eyes, little beauty,” he’d said, smiling as he draped the scarf around her shoulders, “ – orange.” It was a joke between them now, the “little beauty,” as Bree had topped Frank’s modest five feet ten since she was fifteen. It was what he’d called her since babyhood, though, and the tenderness of the old name lingered as he reached up to touch the tip of her nose.

The scarf – the blue part – was in fact the color of her eyes; of Scottish lochs and summer skies, and the misty blue of distant mountains. I knew she treasured it, and revised my assessment of her interest in Roger Wakefield upward by several notches.

“No, I’ll be fine,” I assured her. I gestured toward the bedside table, adorned with a small teapot, carefully keeping warm under a knitted cozy, and a silver-plated toast rack, just as carefully keeping the toast nice and cold. “Mrs. Thomas brought me tea and toast; perhaps I’ll be able to nibble a little later on.” I hoped she couldn’t hear the rumbling of my empty stomach under the bedclothes, registering appalled disbelief at this prospect.

“Well, all right.” She turned reluctantly to the door. “We’ll come right back after Culloden, though.”

“Don’t hurry on my account,” I called after her.

I waited until I heard the sound of the door closing below, and was sure she was on her way. Only then did I reach into the drawer of the bedtable for the large Hershey bar with almonds that I had hidden there the night before.

Cordial relations with my stomach reestablished, I lay back against the pillow, idly watching the gray haze thicken in the sky outside. The tip of a budding lime branch flicked intermittently against the window; the wind was rising. It was warm enough in the bedroom, with the central-heating vent roaring away at the foot of the bed, but I shivered nonetheless. It would be cold on Culloden Field.

Not, perhaps, as cold as it had been in the April of 1746, when Bonnie Prince Charlie led his men onto that field, to stand in the face of freezing sleet and the roar of English cannon fire. Accounts of the day reported that it was bitterly cold, and the Highland wounded had lain heaped with the dead, soaked in blood and rain, awaiting the mercies of their English victors. The Duke of Cumberland, in command of the English army, had given no quarter to the fallen.

The dead were heaped up like cordwood and burned to prevent the spread of disease, and history said that many of the wounded had gone to a similar fate, without the grace of a final bullet. All of them lay now beyond the reach of war or weather, under the greensward of Culloden Field.

I had seen the place once, nearly thirty years before, when Frank had taken me there on our honeymoon. Now Frank was dead, too, and I had brought my daughter back to Scotland. I wanted Brianna to see Culloden, but no power on earth would make me set foot again on that deadly moor.

I supposed I had better stay in bed, to maintain credence in the sudden indisposition that had prevented me accompanying Brianna and Roger on their expedition; Mrs. Thomas might blab if I got up and put in an order for lunch. I peeked into the drawer; three more candy bars and a mystery novel. With luck, those would get me through the day.

The novel was good enough, but the rush of the rising wind outside was hypnotic, and the embrace of the warm bed welcoming. I dropped peacefully into sleep, to dream of kilted Highland men, and the sound of soft-spoken Scots, burring round a fire like the sound of bees in the heather.

4 CULLODEN

“What a mean little piggy face!” Brianna stooped to peer fascinated at the red-coated mannequin that stood menacingly to one side of the foyer in the Culloden Visitors Centre. He stood a few inches over five feet, powdered wig thrust belligerently forward over a low brow and pendulous, pink-tinged cheeks.

“Well, he was a fat little fellow,” Roger agreed, amused. “Hell of a general, though, at least as compared to his elegant cousin over there.” He waved a hand at the taller figure of Charles Edward Stuart on the other side of the foyer, gazing nobly off into the distance under his blue velvet bonnet with its white cockade, loftily ignoring the Duke of Cumberland.

“They called him ‘Butcher Billy.’ ” Roger gestured at the Duke, stolid in white knee breeches and gold-braided coat. “For excellent reason. Aside from what they did here” – he waved toward the expanse of the spring-green moor outside, dulled by the lowering sky – “Cumberland’s men were responsible for the worst reign of English terror ever seen in the Highlands. They chased the survivors of the battle back into the hills, burning and looting as they went. Women and children were turned out to starve, and the men shot down where they stood – with no effort to find out whether they’d ever fought for Charlie. One of the Duke’s contemporaries said of him, ‘He created a desert and called it peace’ – and I’m afraid the Duke of Cumberland is still rather noticeably unpopular hereabouts.”

This was true; the curator of the visitors’ museum, a friend of Roger’s, had told him that while the figure of the Bonnie Prince was treated with reverent respect, the buttons off the Duke’s jacket were subject to constant disappearance, while the figure itself had been the butt of more than one rude joke.

“He said one morning he came in early and turned on the light, to find a genuine Highland dirk sticking in His Grace’s belly,” Roger said, nodding at the podgy little figure. “Said it gave him a right turn.”

“I’d think so,” Brianna murmured, looking at the Duke with raised brows. “People still take it that seriously?”

“Oh, aye. Scots have long memories, and they’re not the most forgiving of people.”

“Really?” She looked at him curiously. “Are you Scottish, Roger? Wakefield doesn’t sound like a Scottish name, but there’s something about the way you talk about the Duke of Cumberland…” There was the hint of a smile around her mouth, and he wasn’t sure whether he was being teased, but he answered her seriously enough.

“Oh, aye.” He smiled as he said it. “I’m Scots. Wakefield’s not my own name, see; the Reverend gave it me when he adopted me. He was my mother’s uncle – when my parents were killed in the War, he took me to live with him. But my own name is MacKenzie. As for the Duke of Cumberland” – he nodded at the plate-glass window, through which the monuments of Culloden Field were plainly visible. “There’s a clan stone out there, with the name of MacKenzie carved on it, and a good many of my relatives under it.”

He reached out and flicked a gold epaulet, leaving it swinging. “I don’t feel quite so personal about it as some, but I haven’t forgotten, either.” He held out a hand to her. “Shall we go outside?”

It was cold outside, with a gusty wind that lashed two pennons, flying atop the poles set at either side of the moor. One yellow, one red, they marked the positions where the two commanders had stood behind their troops, awaiting the outcome of the battle.

“Well back out of the way, I see,” Brianna observed dryly. “No chance of getting in the way of a stray bullet.”

Roger noticed her shivering, and drew her hand further through his arm, bringing her close. He thought he might burst from the sudden swell of happiness touching her gave him, but tried to disguise it with a retreat into historical monologue. “Well, that was how generals led, back then – from the rear. Especially Charlie; he ran off so fast at the end of the battle that he left behind his sterling silver picnic set.”

“A picnic set? He brought a picnic to the battle?”

“Oh, aye.” Roger found that he quite liked being Scottish for Brianna. He usually took pains to keep his accent modulated under the all-purpose Oxbridge speech that served him at the university, but now he was letting it have free rein for the sake of the smile that crossed her face when she heard it.

“D’ye know why they called him ‘Prince Charlie’?” Roger asked. “English people always think it was a nickname, showing how much his men loved him.”

“It wasn’t?”

Roger shook his head. “No, indeed. His men called him Prince Tcharlach” – he spelled it carefully – “which is the Gaelic for Charles. Tcharlach mac Seamus, ‘Charles, son of James.’ Very formal and respectful indeed. It’s only that Tcharlach in Gaelic sounds the hell of a lot like ‘Charlie’ in English.”

Brianna grinned. “So he never was ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’?”

“Not then.” Roger shrugged. “Now he is, of course. One of those little historical mistakes that get passed on for fact. There are a lot of them.”

“And you a historian!” Brianna said, teasing.

Roger smiled wryly. “That’s how I know.”

They wandered slowly down the graveled paths that led through the battlefield, Roger pointing out the positions of the different regiments that had fought there, explaining the order of battle, recounting small anecdotes of the commanders.

As they walked, the wind died down, and the silence of the field began to assert itself. Gradually their conversation died away as well, until they were talking only now and then, in low voices, almost whispers. The sky was gray with cloud from horizon to horizon, and everything beneath its bowl seemed muted, with only the whisper of the moor plants speaking in the voices of the men who fed them.

“This is the place they call the Well of Death.” Roger stooped by the small spring. Barely a foot square, it was a tiny pool of dark water, welling under a ridge of stone. “One of the Highland chieftains died here; his followers washed the blood from his face with the water from this spring. And over there are the graves of the clans.”

The clan stones were large boulders of gray granite, rounded by weather and blotched with lichens. They sat on patches of smooth grass, widely scattered near the edge of the moor. Each one bore a single name, the carving so faded by weather as to be nearly illegible in some cases. MacGillivray. MacDonald. Fraser. Grant. Chisholm. MacKenzie.

“Look,” Brianna said, almost in a whisper. She pointed at one of the stones. A small heap of greenish-gray twigs lay there; a few early spring flowers mingled, wilted, with the twigs.

“Heather,” Roger said. “It’s more common in the summer, when the heather is blooming – then you’ll see heaps like that in front of every clan stone. Purple, and here and there a branch of the white heather – the white is for luck, and for kingship; it was Charlie’s emblem, that and the white rose.”

“Who leaves them?” Brianna squatted on her heels next to the path, touching the twigs with a gentle finger.

“Visitors.” Roger squatted next to her. He traced the faded letters on the stone – FRASER. “People descended from the families of the men who were killed here. Or just those who like to remember them.”

She looked sidelong at him, hair drifting around her face. “Have you ever done it?”

He looked down, smiling at his hands as they hung between his knees.

“Yes. I suppose it’s very sentimental, but I do.”

Brianna turned to the thicket of moor plants that edged the path on the other side.

“Show me which is heather,” she said.

On the way home, the melancholy of Culloden lifted, but the feeling of shared sentiment lingered, and they talked and laughed together like old friends.

“It’s too bad Mother couldn’t come with us,” Brianna remarked as they turned into the road where the Randalls’ bed-and-breakfast was.

Much as he liked Claire Randall, Roger didn’t agree at all that it was too bad she hadn’t come. Three, he thought, would have been a crowd, and no mistake. But he grunted noncommitally, and a moment later asked, “How is your mother? I hope she’s not terribly ill.”

“Oh, no, it’s just an upset stomach – at least that’s what she says.” Brianna frowned to herself for a moment, then turned to Roger, laying a hand lightly on his leg. He felt the muscles quiver from knee to groin, and had a hard time keeping his mind on what she was saying. She was still talking about her mother.

“…think she’s all right?” she finished. She shook her head, and copper glinted from the waves of her hair, even in the dull light of the car. “I don’t know; she seems awfully preoccupied. Not ill, exactly – more as though she’s kind of worried about something.”

Roger felt a sudden heaviness in the pit of his stomach.

“Mphm,” he said. “Maybe just being away from her work. I’m sure it will be all right.” Brianna smiled gratefully at him as they pulled up in front of Mrs. Thomas’s small stone house.

“It was great, Roger,” she said, touching him lightly on the shoulder. “But there wasn’t much here to help with Mama’s project. Can’t I help you with some of the grubby stuff?”

Roger’s spirits lightened considerably, and he smiled up at her. “I think that might be arranged. Want to come tomorrow and have a go at the garage with me? If it’s filth you want, you can’t get much grubbier than that.”

“Great.” She smiled, leaning on the car to look back in at him. “Maybe Mother will want to come along and help.”

He could feel his face stiffen, but kept gallantly smiling.

“Right,” he said. “Great. I hope so.”

In the event, it was Brianna alone who came to the manse the next day.

“Mama’s at the public library,” she explained. “Looking up old phone directories. She’s trying to find someone she used to know.”

Roger’s heart skipped a beat at that. He had checked the Reverend’s phonebook the night before. There were three local listings under the name “James Fraser,” and two more with different first names, but the middle initial “J.”

“Well, I hope she finds him,” he said, still trying for casualness. “You’re really sure you want to help? It’s boring, filthy work.” Roger looked at Brianna dubiously, but she nodded, not at all discomposed at the prospect.

“I know. I used to help my father sometimes, dredging through old records and finding footnotes. Besides, it’s Mama’s project; the least I can do is help you with it.”

“All right.” Roger glanced down at his white shirt. “Let me change, and we’ll go have a look.”

The garage door creaked, groaned, then surrendered to the inevitable and surged suddenly upward, amid the twanging of springs and clouds of dust.

Brianna waved her hands back and forth in front of her face, coughing. “Gack!” she said. “How long since anyone’s been in this place?”

“Eons, I expect.” Roger replied absently. He shone his torch around the inside of the garage, briefly lighting stacks of cardboard cartons and wooden crates, old steamer trunks smeared with peeling labels, and amorphous tarpaulin-draped shapes. Here and there, the upturned legs of furniture poked through the gloom like the skeletons of small dinosaurs, protruding from their native rock formations.

There was a sort of fissure in the junk; Roger edged into this and promptly disappeared into a tunnel bounded by dust and shadows, his progress marked by the pale spot of his torch as it shone intermittently on the ceiling. At last, with a cry of triumph, he seized the dangling tail of a string hanging from above, and the garage was suddenly illuminated in the glare of an oversized bulb.

“This way,” Roger said, reappearing abruptly and taking Brianna by the hand. “There’s sort of a clear space in back.”

An ancient table stood against the back wall. Perhaps originally the centerpiece of the Reverend Wakefield’s dining room, it had evidently gone through several successive incarnations as kitchen block, toolbench, sawhorse, and painting table, before coming to rest in this dusty sanctuary. A heavily cobwebbed window overlooked it, through which a dim light shone on the nicked, paint-splattered surface.

“We can work here,” Roger said, yanking a stool out of the mess and dusting it perfunctorily with a large handkerchief. “Have a seat, and I’ll see if I can pry the window open; otherwise, we’ll suffocate.”

Brianna nodded, but instead of sitting down, began to poke curiously through the nearer piles of junk, as Roger heaved at the warped window frame. He could hear her behind him, reading the labels on some of the boxes. “Here’s 1930-33,” she said, “And here’s 1942-46. What are these?”

“Journals,” said Roger, grunting as he braced his elbows on the grimy sill. “My father – the Reverend, I mean – he always kept a journal. Wrote it up every night after supper.”

“Looks like he found plenty to write about.” Brianna hoisted down several of the boxes, and stacked them to the side, in order to inspect the next layer. “Here’s a bunch of boxes with names on them – ‘Kerse,’ ‘Livingston,’ ‘Balnain.’ Parishioners?”

“No. Villages.” Roger paused in his labors for a moment, panting. He wiped his brow, leaving a streak of dirt down the sleeve of his shirt. Luckily both of them were dressed in old clothes, suitable for rootling in filth. “Those will be notes on the history of various Highland villages. Some of those boxes ended up as books, in fact; you’ll see them in some of the local tourist shops through the Highlands.”

He turned to a pegboard from which hung a selection of dilapidated tools, and selected a large screwdriver to aid his assault on the window.

“Look for the ones that say ‘Parish Registers,’ he advised. “Or for village names in the area of Broch Tuarach.”

“I don’t know any of the villages in the area,” Brianna pointed out.

“Oh, aye, I was forgetting.” Roger inserted the point of the screwdriver between the edges of the window frame, grimly chiseling through layers of ancient paint. “Look for the names Broch Mordha… um, Mariannan, and… oh, St. Kilda. There’s others, but those are ones I know had fair-sized churches that have been closed or knocked down.”

“Okay.” Pushing aside a hanging flap of tarpaulin, Brianna suddenly leaped backward with a sharp cry.

“What? What is it?” Roger whirled from the window, screwdriver at the ready.

“I don’t know. Something skittered away when I touched that tarp.” Brianna pointed, and Roger lowered his weapon, relieved.

“Oh, that all? Mouse, most like. Maybe a rat.”

“A rat! You have rats in here?” Brianna’s agitation was noticeable.

“Well, I hope not, because if so, they’ll have been chewing up the records we’re looking for,” Roger replied. He handed her the torch. “Here, shine this in any dark places; at least you won’t be taken by surprise.”

“Thanks a lot.” Brianna accepted the torch, but still eyed the stacks of cartons with some reluctance.

“Well, go on then,” Roger said. “Or did you want me to do you a rat satire on the spot?”

Brianna’s face split in a wide grin. “A rat satire? What’s that?”

Roger delayed his answer, long enough for another try at the window. He pushed until he could feel his biceps straining against the fabric of his shirt, but at last, with a rending screech, the window gave way, and a reviving draft of cool air whooshed in through the six-inch gap he’d created.

“God, that’s better.” He fanned himself exaggeratedly, grinning at Brianna. “Now, shall we get on with it?”

She handed him the torch, and stepped back. “How about you find the boxes, and I’ll sort through them? And what’s a rat satire?”

“Coward,” he said, bending to rummage beneath the tarpaulin. “A rat satire is an old Scottish custom; if you had rats or mice in your house or your barn, you could make them go away by composing a poem – or you could sing it – telling the rats how poor the eating was where they were, and how good it was elsewhere. You told them where to go, and how to get there, and presumably, if the satire was good enough – they’d go.”

He pulled out a carton labeled JACOBITES, MISCELLANEOUS, and carried it to the table, singing,

“Ye rats, ye are too many,

If ye would dine in plenty,

Ye mun go, ye mun go.”

Lowering the box with a thump, he bowed in response to Brianna’s giggling and turned back to the stacks, continuing in stentorian voice.

“Go to Campbell’s garden,

Where nae cat stands warden,

And the kale, it grows green.

Go and fill your bellies,

Dinna stay and gnaw my wellies –

Go, ye rats, go!”

Brianna snorted appreciatively. “Did you just make that up?”

“Of course.” Roger deposited another box on the table with a flourish. “A good rat satire must always be original.” He cast a glance at the serried ranks of cartons. “After that performance, there shouldn’t be a rat within miles of this place.”

“Good.” Brianna pulled a jackknife from her pocket and slit the tape that sealed the topmost carton. “You should come do one at the bed-and-breakfast place; Mama says she’s sure there’s mice in the bathroom. Something chewed on her soap case.”

“God knows what it would take to dislodge a mouse capable of eating bars of soap; far beyond my feeble powers, I expect.” He rolled a tattered round hassock out from behind a teetering stack of obsolete encyclopedias, and plumped down next to Brianna. “Here, you take the parish registers, they’re a bit easier to read.”

They worked through the morning in amiable companionship, turning up occasional interesting passages, the odd silverfish, and recurrent clouds of dust, but little of value to the project at hand.

“We’d better stop for lunch soon,” Roger said at last. He felt a strong reluctance to go back into the house, where he would once more be at Fiona’s mercy, but Brianna’s stomach had begun to growl almost as loudly as his own.

“Okay. We can do some more after we eat, if you’re not worn out.” Brianna stood and stretched herself, her curled fists almost reaching the rafters of the old garage. She wiped her hands on the legs of her jeans, and ducked between the stacks of boxes.

“Hey!” She stopped short, near the door. Roger, following her, was brought up sharp, his nose almost touching, the back of her head.

“What is it?” he asked. “Not another rat?” He noted with approval that the sun lit her thick single braid with glints of copper and gold. With a small golden nimbus of dust surrounding her, and the light of noon silhouetting her long-nosed profile, he thought she looked quite medieval; Our Lady of the Archives.

“No. Look at this, Roger!” She pointed at a cardboard carton near the middle of a stack. On the side, in the Reverend’s strong black hand, was a label with the single word “Randall.”

Roger felt a stab of mingled excitement and apprehension. Brianna’s excitement was unalloyed.

“Maybe that’s got the stuff we’re looking for!” she exclaimed. “Mama said it was something my father was interested in; maybe he’d already asked the Reverend about it.”

“Could be.” Roger forced down the sudden feeling of dread that had struck him at sight of the name. He knelt to extract the box from its resting place. “Let’s take it in the house; we can look in it after lunch.”

The box, once opened in the Reverend’s study, held an odd assortment of things. There were old photostats of pages from several parish registers, two or three army muster lists, a number of letters and scattered papers, a small, thin notebook, bound in gray cardboard covers, a packet of elderly photographs, curling at the edges, and a stiff folder, with the name “Randall” printed on the cover.

Brianna picked up the folder and opened it. “Why, it’s daddy’s family tree!” she exclaimed. “Look.” She passed the folder to Roger. Inside were two sheets of thick parchment, with lines of descent neatly ruled across and down. The beginning date was 1633; the final entry, at the foot of the second page, showed

Frank Wolverton Randall m. Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp, 1937

“Done before you were born,” Roger murmured.

Brianna peered over his shoulder as his finger passed slowly down the lines of the genealogical table. “I’ve seen it before; daddy had a copy in his study. He used to show it to me all the time. His had me at the bottom, though; this must be an early copy.”

“Maybe the Reverend did some of the research for him.” Roger handed Brianna back the folder, and picked up one of the papers from the stack on the desk.

“Now here’s an heirloom for you,” he said. He traced the coat of arms embossed at the head of the sheet. “A letter of commission in the army, signed by His Royal Majesty, King George II.”

“George the Second? Jeez, that’s even before the American Revolution.”

“Considerably before. It’s dated 1735. In the name of Jonathan Wolverton Randall. Know that name?”

“Yeah.” Brianna nodded, stray wisps of hair falling in her face. She wiped them back carelessly and took the letter. “daddy used to talk about him every now and then; one of the few ancestors he knew much about. He was a captain in the army that fought Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden.” She looked up at Roger, blinking. “I think maybe he was killed in that battle, in fact. He wouldn’t have been buried there, would he?”

Roger shook his head. “I shouldn’t think so. It was the English who cleared up after the battle. They shipped most of their own dead back home for burial – the officers, anyway.”

He was prevented from further observation by the sudden appearance in the doorway of Fiona, bearing a feather duster like a battle standard.

“Mr. Wakefield,” she called. “There’s the man come to take awa’ the Reverend’s truck, but he canna get it started. He says will ye be givin’ him a hand, like?”

Roger started guiltily. He had taken the battery to a garage for testing, and it was still sitting in the backseat of his own Morris. No wonder the Reverend’s truck wasn’t starting.

“I’ll have to go sort this out,” he told Brianna. “I’m afraid it might take a while.”

“That’s okay.” She smiled at him, blue eyes narrowing to triangles. “I should go too. Mama will be back by now; we thought we might go out to the Clava Cairns, if there was time. Thanks for the lunch.”

“My pleasure – and Fiona’s.” Roger felt a stab of regret at being unable to offer to go with her, but duty called. He glanced at the papers spread out on the desk, then scooped them up and deposited them back in the box.

“Here,” he said. “This is all your family records. You take it. Maybe your mother would be interested.”

“Really? Well, thanks, Roger. Are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” he said, carefully laying the folder with the genealogical chart on top. “Oh, wait. Maybe not all of it.” The corner of the gray notebook stuck out from under the letter of commission; he pulled it free, and tidied the disturbed papers back into the box. “This looks like one of the Reverend’s journals. Can’t think what it’s doing in there, but I suppose I’d better put it with the others; the historical society says they want the whole lot.”

“Oh, sure.” Brianna had risen to go, clutching the box to her chest, but hesitated, looking at him. “Do you – would you like me to come back?”

Roger smiled at her. There were cobwebs in her hair, and a long streak of dirt down the bridge of her nose.

“Nothing I’d like better,” he said. “See you tomorrow, eh?”

The thought of the Reverend’s journal stayed with Roger, all during the tedious business of getting the ancient truck started, and the subsequent visit of the furniture appraiser who came to sort the valuable antiques from the rubbish, and set a value on the Reverend’s furnishings for auction.

This disposition of the Reverend’s effects gave Roger a sense of restless melancholy. It was, after all, a dismantling of his own youth, as much as the clearing away of useless bric-a-brac. By the time he sat down in the study after dinner, he could not have said whether it was curiosity about the Randalls that compelled him to pick up the journal, or simply the urge somehow to regain a tenuous connection with the man who had been his father for so many years.

The journals were kept meticulously, the even lines of ink recording all major events of the parish and the community of which the Reverend Mr. Wakefield had been a part for so many years. The feel of the plain gray notebook and the sight of its pages conjured up for Roger an immediate vision of the Reverend, bald head gleaming in the glow of his desk lamp as he industriously inscribed the day’s happenings.

“It’s a discipline,” he had explained once to Roger. “There’s a great benefit to doing regularly something that orders the mind, you know. Catholic monks have services at set times every day, priests have their breviaries. I’m afraid I haven’t the knack of such immediate devotion, but writing out the happenings of the day helps to clear my mind; then I can say my evening prayers with a calm heart.”

A calm heart. Roger wished he could manage that himself, but calmness hadn’t visited him since he’d found those clippings in the Reverend’s desk.

He opened the book at random, and slowly turned the pages, looking for a mention of the name “Randall.” The dates on the notebook’s cover were January-June, 1948. While what he had told Brianna about the historical society was true, that had not been his chief motive in keeping the book. In May of 1948, Claire Randall had returned from her mysterious disappearance. The Reverend had known the Randalls well; such an event was sure to have found mention in his journal.

Sure enough, the entry for May 7:

“Visit w. Frank Randall this evening; this business about his wife. So distressing! Saw her yesterday – so frail, but those eyes staring – made me uneasy to sit w. her, poor woman, though she talked sensibly.

Enough to unhinge anyone, what she’s been through – whatever it was. Terrible gossip about it all – so careless of Dr. Bartholomew to let on that she’s pregnant. So hard for Frank – and for her, of course! My heart goes out to them both.

Mrs. Graham ill this week – she could have chosen a better time; jumble sale next week, and the porch full of old clothes…”

Roger flipped rapidly through the pages, looking for the next mention of the Randalls, and found it, later the same week.

“ May 10 – Frank Randall to dinner. Doing my best to associate publicly both w. him and his wife; I sit with her for an hour most days, in hopes of quelling some of the gossip. It’s almost pitying now; word’s gone round that she’s demented. Knowing Claire Randall, I’m not sure that she would not be more offended at being thought insane than at being considered immoral – must be one or the other though?

Tried repeatedly to talk to her about her experiences, but she says nothing of that. Talks all right about anything else, but always a sense that she’s thinking of something else.

Must make a note to preach this Sunday on the evils of gossip – though I’m afraid calling attention to the case with a sermon will only make it worse.”

“ May 12 -…Can’t get free of the notion that Claire Randall is not deranged. Have heard the gossip, of course, but see nothing in her behaviour that seems unstable in the slightest.

Do think she carries some terrible secret; one she’s determined to keep. Spoke – cautiously – to Frank of this; he’s reticent, but I’m convinced she has said something to him. Have tried to make it clear I wish to help, in any way I can.”

“ May 14 – A visit from Frank Randall. Very puzzling. He has asked my help, but I can’t see why he asked what he has. Seems very important to him, though; he keeps himself under close rein, but wound tight as a watch. I fear the release – if it comes.

Claire well enough to travel – he means to take her back to London this week. Assured him I would communicate any results to him by letter at his University address; no hint to his wife.

Have several items of interest on Jonathan Randall, though I can’t imagine the significance of Frank’s ancestor to this sorry business. Of James Fraser, as I told Frank – no inkling; a complete mystery.”

A complete mystery. In more ways than one, Roger thought. What had Frank Randall asked the Reverend to do? To find out what he could about Jonathan Randall and about James Fraser, apparently. So Claire had told her husband about James Fraser – told him something, at least, if not everything.

But what conceivable connection could there be between an English army captain who had died at Culloden in 1746, and the man whose name seemed inextricably bound up with the mystery of Claire’s disappearance in 1945 – and the further mystery of Brianna’s parentage?

The rest of the journal was filled with the usual miscellany of parish happenings; the chronic drunkenness of Derick Gowan, culminating in that parishioner’s removal from the River Ness as a water-logged corpse in late May; the hasty wedding of Maggie Brown and William Dundee, a month before the christening of their daughter, June; Mrs. Graham’s appendectomy, and the Reverend’s attempts to cope with the resultant influx of covered dishes from the generous ladies of the parish – Herbert, the Reverend’s current dog, seemed to have been the beneficiary of most of them.

Reading through the pages, Roger found himself smiling, hearing the Reverend’s lively interest in his flock come to life once more in the old minister’s words. Browsing and skimming, he nearly missed it – the last entry concerning Frank Randall’s request.

“ June 18 – Had a brief note from Frank Randall, advising me that his wife’s health is somewhat precarious; the pregnancy is dangerous and he asks my prayers.

Replied with assurances of prayers and good wishes for both him and his wife. Enclosed also the information I had so far found for him; can’t say what use it will be to him, but that must be his own judgement. Told him of the surprising discovery of Jonathan Randall’s grave at St. Kilda; asked if he wishes me to photograph the stone.”

And that was all. There was no further mention of the Randalls, or of James Fraser. Roger laid the book down and massaged his temples; reading the slanting lines of handwriting had given him a mild headache.

Aside from confirming his suspicions that a man named James Fraser was mixed up in all this, the matter remained as impenetrable as ever. What in the name of God did Jonathan Randall have to do with it, and why on earth was the man buried at St. Kilda? The letter of commission had given Jonathan Randall’s place of birth as an estate in Sussex; how did he end up in a remote Scottish kirkyard? True, it wasn’t all that far from Culloden – but why hadn’t he been shipped back to Sussex?

“Will ye be needin’ anything else tonight, Mr. Wakefield?” Fiona’s voice roused him from his fruitless meditations. He sat up, blinking, to see her holding a broom and a polishing cloth.

“What? Er, no. No, thanks, Fiona. But what are you doing with all that clobber? Not still cleaning at this time of night?”

“Well, it’s the church ladies,” Fiona explained. “You remember, ye told them they could hold their regular monthly meeting here tomorrow? I thought I’d best tidy up a bit.”

The church ladies? Roger quailed at the thought of forty housewives, oozing sympathy, descending on the manse in an avalanche of tweeds, twin-sets, and cultured pearls.

“Will ye be takin’ tea with the ladies?” Fiona was asking. “The Reverend always did.”

The thought of entertaining Brianna Randall and the church ladies simultaneously was more than Roger could contemplate with equanimity.

“Er, no,” he said abruptly. “I’ve… I’ve an engagement tomorrow.”

His hand fell on the telephone, half-buried in the debris of the Reverend’s desk. “If you’ll excuse me, Fiona, I’ve got to make a call.”

Brianna wandered back into the bedroom, smiling to herself. I looked up from my book and arched a brow in inquiry.

“Phone call from Roger?” I said.

“How’d you know?” She looked startled for a moment, then grinned, shucking off her robe. “Oh, because he’s the only guy I know in Inverness?”

“I didn’t think any of your boyfriends would be calling long-distance from Boston,” I said. I peered at the clock on the table. “Not at this hour, anyway; they’ll all be at football practice.”

Brianna ignored this, and shoved her feet under the covers. “Roger’s invited us to go up to a place called St. Kilda tomorrow. He says it’s an interesting old church.”

“I’ve heard of it,” I said, yawning. “All right, why not? I’ll take my plant press; maybe I can find some crown vetch – I promised some to Dr. Abernathy for his research. But if we’re going to spend the day tramping round reading old gravestones, I’m turning in now. Digging up the past is strenuous work.”

There was a brief flicker in Brianna’s face, and I thought she was about to say something. But she merely nodded, and reached to turn out the light, the secretive smile still lurking in the corners of her mouth.

I lay looking up into the darkness, hearing her small tossings and turnings fade into the regular cadences of her sleeping breath. St. Kilda, eh? I had never been there, but I knew of the place; it was an old church, as Brianna had said, long deserted and out of the way for tourists – only the occasional researcher ever went there. Perhaps this was the opportunity I had been waiting for, then?

I would have Roger and Brianna together there, and alone, with little fear of interruption. And perhaps it was a suitable place to tell them – there among the long-dead parishioners of St. Kilda. Roger had not yet verified the whereabouts of the rest of the Lallybroch men, but it seemed fairly sure that they had at least left Culloden Field alive, and that was really all I needed to know, now. I could tell Bree the end of it, then.

My mouth grew dry at the thought of the coming interview. Where was I to find the words for this? I tried to visualize how it might go; what I might say, and how they might react, but imagination failed me. More than ever, I regretted my promise to Frank that had kept me from writing to the Reverend Wakefield. If I had, Roger at least might already know. Or perhaps not; the Reverend might not have believed me.

I turned restlessly, seeking inspiration, but weariness crept over me. And at last I gave up and turned onto my back, closing my eyes on the dark above me. As though my thinking of him had summoned the Reverend’s spirit, a biblical quotation drifted into my fading consciousness: Sufficient unto the day, the Reverend’s voice seemed to murmur to me, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. And then I slept.

I woke up in the shadowed dark, hands clenched in the bedclothes, heart beating with a force that shook me like the skin of a kettledrum. “Jesus!” I said.

The silk of my nightgown was hot and clinging; looking down, I could dimly see my nipples thrusting through it, hard as marbles. The quivering spasms were still rippling through wrists and thighs, like the aftershocks of an earthquake. I hoped I hadn’t cried out. Probably not; I could hear Brianna’s breathing, untroubled and regular across the room.

I fell back on the pillow, shaking with weakness, the sudden flush washing my temples with damp.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I muttered, breathing deeply as my heart slowly returned to normal.

One of the effects of a disturbed sleep cycle is that one stops dreaming coherently. Through the long years of early motherhood, and then of internship, residency, and nights on-call, I had got used to falling at once into oblivion when I lay down, with such dreams as occurred nothing more than fragments and flashes, restless flickers in the dark as synapses fired at random, recharging themselves for the work of the day that would come too soon.

In more recent years, with the resumption of something resembling a normal schedule, I had begun to dream again. The usual kinds of dreams, whether nightmare or good dream – long sequences of images, wanderings in the wood of the mind. And I was familiar with this kind of dream, too; it was common to what might politely be called periods of deprivation.

Usually, though, such dreams came floating, soft as the touch of satin sheets, and if they woke me, I fell at once back into sleep, glowing dimly with a memory that would not last ’til morning.

This was different. Not that I remembered much about it, but I had a vague impression of hands that gripped me, rough and urgent, not wooing but compelling. And a voice, nearly shouting, that echoed in the chambers of my inner ear, along with the sound of my fading heartbeat.

I put my hand on my chest over the leaping pulse, feeling the soft fullness of my breast beneath the silk. Brianna’s breath caught in a soft snore, then resumed its even cadence. I remembered listening for that sound when she was small; the slow, stertorous rhythm of reassurance, sounding through the darkened nursery, even as a heartbeat.

My own heartbeat was slowing under my hand, under the deep rose silk, the color of a baby’s sleep-flushed cheek. When you hold a child to your breast to nurse, the curve of the little head echoes exactly the curve of the breast it suckles, as though this new person truly mirrors the flesh from which it sprang.

Babies are soft. Anyone looking at them can see the tender, fragile skin and know it for the rose-leaf softness that invites a finger’s touch. But when you live with them and love them, you feel the softness going inward, the round-checked flesh wobbly as custard, the boneless splay of the tiny hands. Their joints are melted rubber, and even when you kiss them hard, in the passion of loving their existence, your lips sink down and seem never to find bone. Holding them against you, they melt and mold, as though they might at any moment flow back into your body.

But from the very start, there is that small streak of steel within each child. That thing that says “I am,” and forms the core of personality.

In the second year, the bone hardens and the child stands upright, skull wide and solid, a helmet protecting the softness within. And “I am” grows, too. Looking at them, you can almost see it, sturdy as heartwood, glowing through the translucent flesh.

The bones of the face emerge at six, and the soul within is fixed at seven. The process of encapsulation goes on, to reach its peak in the glossy shell of adolescence, when all softness then is hidden under the nacreous layers of the multiple new personalities that teenagers try on to guard themselves.

In the next years, the hardening spreads from the center, as one finds and fixes the facets of the soul, until “I am” is set, delicate and detailed as an insect in amber.

I had thought I was well beyond that stage, had lost all trace of softness and was well set on my way to a middle age of stainless steel. But now I thought that Frank’s death had cracked me in some way. And the cracks were widening, so that I could no longer patch them with denial. I had brought my daughter back to Scotland, she with those bones strong as the ribs of Highland mountains, in the hope that her shell was strong enough to hold her together, while the center of her “I am” might still be reachable.

But my own core held no longer in the isolation of “I am,” and I had no protection to shield me from the softness from within. I no longer knew what I was or what she would be; only what I must do.

For I had come back, and I dreamed once more, in the cool air of the Highlands. And the voice of my dream still echoed through ears and heart, repeated with the sound of Brianna’s sleeping breath.

“You are mine,” it had said. “Mine! And I will not let you go.”

5 BELOVED WIFE

The kirkyard of St. Kilda lay quiet in the sun. Not entirely flat, it occupied a plateau carved from the side of the hill by some geological freak. The land sloped and curved, so that the gravestones lay hidden in small hollows or jutted suddenly from the crest of a rise. The shifting of the earth had moved many, tilting them drunkenly or toppling them altogether, to lie flattened and broken in the long grass.

“It’s a bit untidy,” Roger said, apologetically. They paused in the kirkyard gate, looking over the small collection of ancient stones, overgrown and shadowed by the row of giant yews, planted long ago as a windbreak against the storms that rolled in from the northern sea. Clouds massed there now, far out over the distant firth, but the sun shone on the hilltop, and the air was still and warm.

“My father used to get together a gang of men from the church once or twice a year, and bring them up to keep the place in order, but I’m afraid it’s rather gone to seed lately.” He swung the lych-gate experimentally, noting the cracked hinge and the latch-fitting, dangling by one nail.

“It’s a lovely, quiet place.” Brianna edged carefully past the splintery gate. “Really old, isn’t it?”

“Aye, it is. dad thought the kirk itself was built on the site of an early church or an even older temple of some kind; that’s why it’s up here in such an inconvenient spot. One of his friends from Oxford was always threatening to come up and excavate the place to see what was under it, but of course he couldn’t get clearance from the Church authorities, even though the place has been deconsecrated for years.”

“It’s kind of a climb.” The flush of exertion was beginning to fade from Brianna’s face as she fanned her cheeks with a guidebook. “Beautiful, though.” She eyed the facade of the kirk with appreciation. Built into a natural opening in the crag, the stones and timbers of the kirk had been fitted by hand, the chinks caulked with peat and mud, so that it seemed to have grown there, a natural part of the cliff face. Ancient carvings decorated door sill and window frame, some showing the symbols of Christianity, some obviously much older.

“Is Jonathan Randall’s stone over there?” She waved toward the kirkyard, visible beyond the gate. “Mother will be so surprised!”

“Aye, I expect so. Haven’t seen it myself.” He hoped the surprise would be a pleasant one; when he had mentioned the stone cautiously to Brianna over the phone the night before, she had been enthusiastic.

“I know about Jonathan Randall,” she was telling Roger. “Daddy always admired him; said he was one of the few interesting people in the family tree. I guess he was a good soldier; Daddy had lots of commendations and things he’d gotten.”

“Really?” Roger looked back, in search of Claire. “Does your mother need help with that plant press?”

Brianna shook her head. “Nah. She just found a plant by the path she couldn’t resist. She’ll be up in a minute.”

It was a silent place. Even the birds were quiet as midday approached, and the dark evergreens that edged the plateau were still, with no breeze to stir their branches. Without the raw scars of recent graves or the flags of plastic flowers as testimony to still-fresh grief, the kirkyard breathed only the peace of the long-dead. Removed from strife and trouble, only the fact of their life remained to give the comfort of a human presence on the lonely heights of an empty land.

The progress of the three visitors was slow; they wandered their way casually through the old kirkyard, Roger and Brianna pausing to read aloud quaint inscriptions from the weathered stones, Claire, on her own, stooping now and then to clip a vine or uproot a small flowering plant.

Roger bent over one stone, and grinning, beckoned Brianna to read the inscription.

“ ‘Approach and read, not with your hats on,’ ” she read. “ ‘For here lies Bailie William Watson/Who was famous for his thinking/And moderation in his drinking.’ ” Brianna rose from examining the stone, her face flushed with laughter. “No dates – I wonder when William Watson lived.”

“Eighteenth century, most likely,” Roger said. “The seventeenth-century stones are mostly too weathered to read, and no one’s been buried here in two hundred years; the church was deconsecrated in 1800.”

A moment later, Brianna let out a muffled whoop. “Here it is!” She stood up and waved to Claire, who was standing on the far side of the kirkyard, peering inquisitively at a length of greenery she held in one hand. “Mama! Come look at this!”

Claire waved back, and made her way to where they stood beside the flat, square stone, stepping carefully across the crowded graves.

“What is it?” she asked. “Find an interesting grave?”

“I think so. Recognize this name?” Roger stepped back, so she could have a clear view.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” Mildly startled, Roger glanced at Claire, and was alarmed to see how pale she was. She stared down at the weathered stone, and the muscles of her throat moved in a convulsive swallow. The plant she had pulled was crushed in her hand, unregarded.

“Dr. Randall – Claire – are you all right?”

The amber eyes were blank, and she appeared not to hear him for a moment. Then she blinked, and looked up. She was still pale, but seemed better now; back in control.

“I’m fine,” she said, voice flat. She stooped, and ran her fingers over the letters of the stone as though reading them in Braille.

“Jonathan Wolverton Randall,” she said softly, “1705-1746. I told you, didn’t I? You bastard, I told you!” Her voice, so flat an instant before, was suddenly vibrant, filled with a restrained fury.

“Mama! Are you all right?” Brianna, obviously upset, pulled at her mother’s arm.

Roger thought it was as though a shade had dropped behind Claire’s eyes; the feeling that had shone there was suddenly hidden, as she snapped back to a realization of the two people staring at her, aghast. She smiled, a brief, mechanical grimace, and nodded.

“Yes. Yes, of course. I’m fine.” Her hand opened, and the stalk of limp greenery dropped to the ground.

“I thought you’d be surprised.” Brianna was looking worriedly at her mother. “Isn’t this Daddy’s ancestor? The soldier who died at Culloden?”

Claire glanced down at the gravestone near her feet.

“Yes, it is,” she said. “And he is dead, isn’t he?”

Roger and Brianna exchanged looks. Feeling responsible, Roger touched Claire on the shoulder.

“It’s rather a hot day,” he said, trying for a note of casual matter-of-factness. “Perhaps we should go into the church for a little shade. There are some very interesting carvings on the font; well worth seeing.”

Claire smiled at him. A real smile this time, a little tired, but eminently sane.

“You go,” she said, including Brianna with a tilt of her head. “I need a little air. I’ll stay out here for a bit.”

“I’ll stay with you.” Brianna was hovering, clearly unwilling to leave her mother on her own, but Claire had recovered both her equanimity and her air of command.

“Nonsense,” she said briskly. “I’m perfectly all right. I’ll go sit in the shade of the trees over there. You go along. I’d rather be by myself for a bit,” she added firmly, seeing Roger opening his mouth to protest.

With no further ado, she turned and walked off, toward the line of dark yew trees that edged the kirkyard to the west. Brianna hesitated, looking after her, but Roger took the girl by the elbow, and drew her toward the church.

“Best leave her alone,” he murmured. “After all, your mother’s a doctor, isn’t she? She’ll know if it’s all right.”

“Yeah… I suppose so.” With a final troubled glance after Claire’s retreating figure, Brianna allowed him to lead her away.

The kirk was no more than an empty wood-floored room, with the abandoned font left in place only because it could not be removed. The shallow basin had been scooped out of the stone ledge that ran along one side of the room. Above the basin, the carved visage of St. Kilda gazed emptily toward the ceiling, eyes piously upturned.

“It was probably one of the pagan gods to start with,” Roger said, tracing the line of the carving with a finger. “You can see where they added the veil and wimple to the original figure – not to mention the eyes.”

“Like poached eggs,” Brianna agreed, rolling her own up in imitation. “What’s this carving over here? It looks a lot like the patterns on those Pictish stones outside Clava.”

They strolled casually around the walls of the kirk, breathing the dusty air, examining the ancient carvings in the stone walls, and reading the small wooden plaques affixed by long-vanished parishioners in memory of ancestors gone still longer. They spoke quietly, both keeping an ear out for any sounds from the kirkyard, but all was quiet, and slowly they began to relax again.

Roger followed Brianna toward the front of the room, watching the curling tendrils that escaped from her braid to coil damply on her neck.

All that remained now at the front of the kirk was a plain wooden ledge above the hole where the altarstone had been removed. Still, Roger felt something of a quiver up his spine as he stood beside Brianna, facing the vanished altar.

The sheer intensity of his feelings seemed to echo in the empty place. He hoped she couldn’t hear them. They had known each other barely a week, after all, and had had scarcely any private conversation. She would be taken aback, surely, or frightened, if she knew what he felt. Or worse yet, she would laugh.

Yet, when he stole a glance at her, her face was calm and serious. It was also looking back at him, with an expression in the dark blue of her eyes that turned him toward her and made him reach for her without conscious thought.

The kiss was brief and gentle, scarcely more than the formality that concludes a wedding, yet as striking in its impact as though they had this minute plighted a troth.

Roger’s hands fell away, but the warmth of her lingered, in hands and lips and body, so that he felt as though he held her still. They stood a moment, bodies grazing, breathing each other’s air, and then she stepped back. He could still feel the touch of her on the palms of his hands. He curled his fingers into fists, seeking to hold the feeling.

The still air of the church shivered suddenly into bits, the echoes of a scream scattering the dust motes. Without conscious thought, Roger was outside, running, stumbling and scrambling over the tumbled stones, heading for the dark line of the yews. He pushed his way between the overgrown branches, not bothering to hold back the scaly twigs for Brianna, hot on his heels.

Pale in the shadows, he saw Claire Randall’s face. Completely drained of color, she looked like a wraith against the dark branches of the yew. She stood for a moment, swaying, then sank to her knees in the grass, as though her legs would no longer support her.

“Mother!” Brianna dropped to her knees beside the crouching figure, chafing one of the limp hands. “Mama, what is it? Are you faint? You should put your head between your knees. Here, why don’t you lie down?”

Claire resisted the helpful proddings of her offspring, and the drooping head came upright on its slender neck once more.

“I don’t want to lie down,” she gasped. “I want… oh, God. Oh, dear holy God.” Kneeling among the unmowed grass she stretched out a trembling hand to the surface of the stone. It was carved of granite, a simple slab.

“Dr. Randall! Er, Claire?” Roger dropped to one knee on her other side, putting a hand under her other arm to support her. He was truly alarmed at her appearance. A fine sweat had broken out on her temples and she looked as though she might keel over at any moment. “Claire,” he said again, urgently, trying to rouse her from the staring trance she had fallen into. “What is it? Is it a name you know?” Even as he spoke, his own words were ringing in his ears. No one’s been buried here since the eighteenth century, he’d told Brianna. No one’s been buried here in two hundred years.

Claire’s fingers brushed his own away, and touched the stone, caressing, as though touching flesh, gently tracing the letters, the grooves worn shallow, but still clear.

“ ‘JAMES ALEXANDER MALCOLM MACKENZIE FRASER,’ ” she read aloud. “Yes, I know him.” Her hand dropped lower, brushing back the grass that grew thickly about the stone, obscuring the line of smaller letters at its base.

“ ‘Beloved husband of Claire,’ ” she read.

“Yes, I knew him,” she said again, so softly Roger could scarcely hear her. “I’m Claire. He was my husband.” She looked up then, into the face of her daughter, white and shocked above her. “And your father,” she said.

Roger and Brianna stared down at her, and the kirkyard was silent, save for the rustle of the yews above.

“No!” I said, quite crossly. “For the fifth time – no! I don’t want a drink of water. I have not got a touch of the sun. I am not faint. I am not ill. And I haven’t lost my mind, either, though I imagine that’s what you’re thinking.”

Roger and Brianna exchanged glances that made it clear that that was precisely what they were thinking. They had, between them, got me out of the kirkyard and into the car. I had refused to be taken to hospital, so we had gone back to the manse. Roger had administered medicinal whisky for shock, but his eyes darted toward the telephone now as though wondering whether to dial for additional help – like a straitjacket, I supposed.

“Mama.” Brianna spoke soothingly, reaching out to try to smooth the hair back from my face. “You’re upset.”

“Of course I’m upset!” I snapped. I took a long, quivering breath and clamped my lips tight together, until I could trust myself to speak calmly.

“I am certainly upset,” I began, “but I’m not mad.” I stopped, struggling for control. This wasn’t the way I’d intended to do it. I didn’t know quite what I had intended, but not this, blurting out the truth without preparation or time to organize my own thoughts. Seeing that bloody grave had disrupted any plan I might have formed.

“Damn you, Jamie Fraser!” I said, furious. “What are you doing there anyway; it’s miles from Culloden!”

Brianna’s eyes were halfway out on stalks, and Roger’s hand was hovering near the telephone. I stopped abruptly and tried to get a grip on myself.

Be calm, Beauchamp, I instructed myself. Breathe deeply. Once… twice… once more. Better. Now. It’s very simple; all you have to do is tell them the truth. That’s what you came to Scotland for, isn’t it?

I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. I closed my mouth, and my eyes as well, hoping that my nerve would return, if I couldn’t see the two ashen faces in front of me. Just… let… me… tell… the… truth, I prayed, with no idea who I was talking to. Jamie, I thought.

I’d told the truth once before. It hadn’t gone well.

I pressed my eyelids shut more tightly. Once more I could smell the carbolic surroundings of a hospital, and feel the unfamiliar starched pillowcase beneath my cheek. From the corridor outside came Frank’s voice, choked with baffled rage.

“What do you mean, don’t press her? Don’t press her? My wife’s been gone for nearly three years, and come back filthy, abused, and pregnant, for God’s sake, and I’m not to ask questions?”

And the doctor’s voice, murmuring soothingly. I caught the words “delusion,” and “traumatic state,” and “leave it for later, old man – just for a bit” as Frank’s voice, still arguing and interrupting, was gently but firmly eased down the hall. That so-familiar voice, which raised anew the storm of grief and rage and terror inside me.

I had curled my body into a defensive ball, pillow clutched to my chest, and bitten it, as hard as I could, until I felt the cotton casing give way and the silky grit of feathers grinding between my teeth.

I was grinding them now, to the detriment of a new filling. I stopped, and opened my eyes.

“Look,” I said, as reasonably as I could. “I’m sorry, I know how it sounds. But it’s true, and nothing I can do about it.”

This speech did nothing to reassure Brianna, who edged closer to Roger. Roger himself had lost that green-about-the-gills look, though, and was exhibiting signs of cautious interest. Could it be possible that he really did have enough imagination to be able to grasp the truth?

I took hope from his expression, and unclenched my fists.

“It’s the bloody stones,” I said. “You know, the standing stone circle, on the fairies’ hill, to the west?”

“Craigh na Dun,” Roger murmured. “That one?”

“Right.” I exhaled consciously. “You may know the legends about fairy hills – do you? About people who get trapped in rocky hills and wake up two hundred years later?”

Brianna was looking more alarmed by the moment.

“Mother, I really think you ought to go up and lie down,” she said. She half-rose from her seat. “I could go get Fiona…”

Roger put a hand on her arm to stop her.

“No, wait,” he said. He looked at me, with the sort of suppressed curiosity a scientist shows when putting a new slide under the microscope. “Go ahead,” he said to me.

“Thanks,” I said dryly. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to start driveling about fairies; I just thought you’d like to know there’s some basis to the legends. I haven’t any idea what it actually is up there, or how it works, but the fact is…” I took a deep breath, “Well, the fact is, that I walked through a bloody cleft stone in that circle in 1945, and I ended up on the hillside below in 1743.”

I’d said exactly that to Frank. He’d glared at me for a moment, picked up a vase of flowers from my bedside table, and smashed it on the floor.

Roger looked like a scientist whose new microbe has come through a winner. I wondered why, but was too engrossed in the struggle to find words that sounded halfway sane.

“The first person I ran into was an English dragoon in full fig,” I said. “Which rather gave me a hint that something was wrong.”

A sudden smile lighted Roger’s face, though Brianna went on looking horrified. “I should think it might,” he said.

“The difficulty was that I couldn’t get back, you see.” I thought I’d better address my remarks to Roger, who at least seemed disposed to listen, whether he believed me or not.

“The thing is, ladies then didn’t go about the place unescorted, and if they did, they didn’t do it wearing print dresses and oxford loafers,” I explained. “Everyone I met, starting with that dragoon captain, knew there was something wrong about me – but they didn’t know what. How could they? I couldn’t explain then any better than I can now – and lunatic asylums back then were much less pleasant places than they are now. No basket weaving,” I added, with an effort at a joke. It wasn’t noticeably successful; Brianna grimaced and looked more worried than ever.

“That dragoon,” I said, and a brief shudder went over me at the memory of Jonathan Wolverton Randall, Captain of His Majesty’s Eighth Dragoons. “I thought I was hallucinating at first, because the man looked so very like Frank; at first glance, I thought it was he.” I glanced at the table where a copy of one of Frank’s books lay, with its back-cover photograph of a dark and handsome lean-faced man.

“That’s quite a coincidence,” Roger said. His eyes were alert, fixed on mine.

“Well, it was and it wasn’t,” I told him, wrenching my eyes with an effort from the stack of books. “You know he was Frank’s ancestor. All the men in that family have a strong family resemblance – physically, at least,” I added, thinking of the rather striking nonphysical differences.

“What – what was he like?” Brianna seemed to be coming out of her stupor, at least slightly.

“He was a bloody filthy pervert,” I said. Two pairs of eyes snapped open wide and turned to each other with an identical look of consternation.

“You needn’t look like that,” I said. “They had perversion in the eighteenth century; it isn’t anything new, you know. Only it was worse then, maybe, since no one really cared, so long as things were kept quiet and decent on the surface. And Black Jack Randall was a soldier; he captained a garrison in the Highlands, charged with keeping the clans under control – he had considerable scope for his activities, all officially sanctioned.” I took a restorative gulp from the whisky glass I still held.

“He liked to hurt people,” I said. “He liked it a lot.”

“Did he… hurt you?” Roger put the question with some delicacy, after a rather noticeable pause. Bree seemed to be drawing into herself, the skin tightening across her cheekbones.

“Not directly. Or not much, at least.” I shook my head. I could feel a cold spot in the pit of my stomach, which the whisky was doing little to thaw. Jack Randall had hit me there, once. I felt it in memory, like the ache of a long-healed wound.

“He had fairly eclectic tastes. But it was Jamie that he… wanted.” Under no circumstances would I have used the word “loved.” My throat felt thick, and I swallowed the last drops of whisky. Roger held up the decanter, one brow raised questioningly, and I nodded and held out my glass.

“Jamie. That’s Jamie Fraser? And he was…”

“He was my husband,” I said.

Brianna shook her head like a horse driving off flies.

“But you had a husband,” she said. “You couldn’t… even if… I mean… you couldn’t.”

“I had to,” I said flatly. “I didn’t do it on purpose, after all.”

“Mother, you can’t get married accidentally!” Brianna was losing her kindly-nurse-with-mental-patient attitude. I thought this was probably a good thing, even if the alternative was anger.

“Well, it wasn’t precisely an accident,” I said. “It was the best alternative to being handed over to Jack Randall, though. Jamie married me to protect me – and bloody generous of him, too,” I finished, glaring at Bree over my glass. “He didn’t have to do it, but he did.”

I fought back the memory of our wedding night. He was a virgin; his hands had trembled when he touched me. I had been afraid too – with better reason. And then in the dawn he had held me, naked back against bare chest, his thighs warm and strong behind my own, murmuring into the clouds of my hair, “Dinna be afraid. There’s the two of us now.”

“See,” I turned to Roger again, “I couldn’t get back. I was running away from Captain Randall when the Scots found me. A party of cattle-raiders. Jamie was with them, they were his mother’s people, the MacKenzies of Leoch. They didn’t know what to make of me, but they took me with them as a captive. And I couldn’t get away again.”

I remembered my abortive efforts to escape from Castle Leoch. And then the day when I had told Jamie the truth, and he – not believing, any more than Frank had, but at least willing to act as though he did – had taken me back to the hill and the stones.

“He thought I was a witch, perhaps,” I said, eyes closed, smiling just a bit at the thought. “Now they think you’re mad; then they thought you were a witch. Cultural mores,” I explained, opening my eyes. “Psychology is just what they call it these days instead of magic. Not the hell of a lot of difference.” Roger nodded, seeming a little stunned.

“They tried me for witchcraft,” I said. “In the village of Cranesmuir, just below the castle. Jamie saved me, though, and then I told him. And he took me to the hill, and told me to go back. Back to Frank.” I paused and drew a deep breath, remembering that October afternoon, where control of my destiny, taken from me for so long, had been suddenly thrust back into my hands, and the choice not given, but demanded of me.

“Go back!” he had said. “There’s nothing here for ye! Nothing save danger.”

“Is there really nothing here for me?” I had asked. Too honorable to speak, he had answered nonetheless, and I had made my choice.

“It was too late,” I said, staring down at my hands, lying open on my knees. The day was darkening to rain, but my two wedding rings still gleamed in the fading light, gold and silver. I hadn’t taken Frank’s gold band from my left hand when I married Jamie, but had worn Jamie’s silver ring on the fourth finger of my right hand, for every day of the twenty-odd years since he put it there.

“I loved Frank,” I said quietly, not looking at Bree. “I loved him a lot. But by that time, Jamie was my heart and the breath of my body. I couldn’t leave him. I couldn’t,” I said, raising my head suddenly to Bree in appeal. She stared back at me, stone-faced.

I looked down at my hands again, and went on.

“He took me to his own home – Lallybroch, it was called. A beautiful place.” I shut my eyes again, to get away from the look on Brianna’s face, and deliberately summoned the image of the estate of Broch Tuarach – Lallybroch, to the people who lived there. A beautiful Highland farm, with woods and streams; even a bit of fertile ground – rare for the Highlands. A lovely, peaceful place, sealed within high hills above a mountain pass that kept it remote from the recurrent strife that troubled the Highlands. But even Lallybroch had proved only a temporary sanctuary.

“Jamie was an outlaw,” I said, seeing behind my closed eyelids the scars of flogging that the English had left on his back. A network of thin white lines that webbed the broad shoulders like a branded grid. “There was a price on his head. One of his own tenants betrayed him to the English. They captured him, and took him to Wentworth Prison – to hang him.”

Roger gave a long, low whistle.

“Hell of a place,” he remarked. “Have you seen it? The walls must be ten feet thick!”

I opened my eyes. “They are,” I said wryly. “I’ve been inside them. But even the thickest walls have doors.” I felt a small flicker of the blaze of desperate courage that had taken me inside Wentworth Prison, in pursuit of my heart. If I could do that for you, I told Jamie silently, I can do this as well. But help me, you bloody big Scot – help me!

“I got him out,” I said, taking a deep breath. “What was left of him. Jack Randall commanded the garrison at Wentworth.” Now I didn’t want to remember the images that my words brought back, but they wouldn’t stop. Jamie, naked and bloody, on the floor of Eldridge Manor, where we had found sanctuary.

“I wilna let them take me back again, Sassenach,” he’d said to me, teeth clenched against the pain as I’d set the crushed bones of his hand and cleansed his wounds. “Sassenach.” He had called me that from the first; the Gaelic word for an outlander, a stranger. An Englishman. First in jest, and then in affection.

And I hadn’t let them find him; with the help of his kinsman, a little Fraser clansman called Murtagh, I’d gotten him across the Channel to France, and to refuge in the Abbey of Ste. Anne de Beaupré, where one of his Fraser uncles was abbot. But once there in safety, I had found that saving his life was not the end of the task set me.

What Jack Randall had done to him had sunk into his soul as surely as the flails of the lash had sunk in his back, and had left scars every bit as permanent. I was not sure, even now, what I had done, when I had summoned his demons and fought them single-handed, in the dark of his mind; there is very little difference between medicine and magic, when it comes to some kinds of healing.

I could still feel the cold, hard stone that bruised me, and the strength of the fury that I had drawn from him, the hands that closed round my neck and the burning creature who had hunted me through the dark.

“But I did heal him,” I said softly. “He came back to me.”

Brianna was shaking her head slowly back and forth, bewildered, but with a stubborn set to her head that I knew very well indeed. “Grahams are stupid, Campbells are deceitful, MacKenzies are charming but sly, and Frasers are stubborn,” Jamie had told me once, giving me his view of the general characteristics of the clans. He hadn’t been far wrong, either; Frasers were extremely stubborn, not least him. Nor Bree.

“I don’t believe it,” she said flatly. She sat up straighter, eyeing me closely. “I think maybe you’ve been thinking too much about those men at Culloden,” she said. “After all, you’ve been under a strain lately, and maybe Daddy’s death…”

“Frank wasn’t your father,” I said bluntly.

“He was!” She flashed back with it immediately, so fast that it startled both of us.

Frank had, in time, bowed to the doctors’ insistence that any attempt to “force me to accept reality,” as one of them put it, might be harmful to my pregnancy. There had been a lot of murmuring in corridors – and shouting, now and then – but he had given up asking me for the truth. And I, in frail health and sick at heart, had given up telling it to him.

I wasn’t going to give up, this time.

“I promised Frank,” I said. “Twenty years ago, when you were born. I tried to leave him, and he wouldn’t let me go. He loved you.” I felt my voice soften as I looked at Brianna. “He couldn’t believe the truth, but he knew – of course – that he wasn’t your father. He asked me not to tell you – to let him be your only father – as long as he lived. After that, he said, it was up to me.” I swallowed, licking dry lips.

“I owed him that,” I said. “Because he loved you. But now Frank’s dead – and you have a right to know who you are.”

“If you doubt it,” I said, “go to the National Portrait Gallery. They’ve a picture there of Ellen MacKenzie; Jamie’s mother. She’s wearing these.” I touched the pearl necklace at my throat. A string of baroque freshwater pearls from Scottish rivers, strung with roundels of pierced gold. “Jamie gave them to me on our wedding day.”

I looked at Brianna, sitting tall and stiff, the bones of her face stark in protest. “Take along a hand mirror,” I said. “Take a good look at the portrait and then in the mirror. It’s not an exact likeness, but you’re very like your grandmother.”

Roger stared at Brianna as though he’d never seen her before. He glanced back and forth between us, then, as though making up his mind, suddenly squared his shoulders and rose from the sofa where he had been sitting beside her.

“I’ve something I think you should see,” he said firmly. He crossed quickly to the Reverend’s old rolltop desk and pulled a rubber-banded bundle of yellowed newspaper clippings from one of the pigeonholes.

“When you’ve read them, look at the dates,” he told Brianna, handing them to her. Then, still standing, he turned to me and looked me over, with the long, dispassionate gaze that I recognized as a that of a scholar, schooled in objectivity. He didn’t yet believe, but he had the imagination to doubt.

“Seventeen forty-three,” he said, as though to himself. He shook his head, marveling. “And I thought it was a man you’d met here, in 1945. God, I would never have thought – well, Christ, who would?”

I was surprised. “You knew? About Brianna’s father?”

He nodded at the clippings in Brianna’s hands. She hadn’t yet looked at them, but was staring at Roger, half-bewildered, half-angry. I could see the storm gathering in her eyes, and so, I thought, could Roger. He looked hastily away from her, turning back to me in question.

“Then those men whose names you gave me, the ones who fought at Culloden – you knew them?”

I relaxed, ever so slightly. “Yes, I knew them.” There was a grumble of thunder to the east, and the rain broke in a spatter against the long windows that lined the study from floor to ceiling on one side. Brianna’s head was bent over the clippings, the wings of her hair hiding everything but the tip of her nose, which was bright red. Jamie always went red when he was furious or upset. I was all too familiar with the sight of a Fraser on the verge of explosion.

“And you were in France,” Roger murmured as though to himself, still studying me closely. The shock in his face was fading into surmise, and a kind of excitement. “I don’t suppose you knew…”

“Yes, I did,” I told him. “That’s why we went to Paris. I’d told Jamie about Culloden – the ’45, and what would happen. We went to Paris to try to stop Charles Stuart.”