by L. L. Muir
He paused and took a few deep breaths himself. She knew because her neck felt icy cold where the air passed over wet skin.
He straightened, pulled her against his chest, and kissed the top of her head. She looked up at him and grinned, pretending she was much more together than she felt.
“I think you were better prepared this time.”
They chuckled together and the awkwardness she expected never came.
“What do ye say, love? Now that our curiosities, at least, have been satisfied, shall we carry on?”
She was a little too light-headed to answer responsibly, so she didn’t.
He made a noise in his throat that was half-growl, half-groan. “I am referring to the attic, lass. Shall we continue searching?”
She nodded and reluctantly pulled her hands away from him. He was trying to be a gentleman, so she would try to be a lady—though it never usually took so much effort.
“What are those?” He stepped back just a little so she could follow his gaze. They were standing beside an old armoire they’d already emptied, but it was far too heavy for the two of them to take down stairs. But behind it was a stack of old pictures and frames.
“Those are pretty much worthless. They’ve been up here for as long as I can remember, and they were never good enough for my grandmother to hang anywhere. They can go straight to Goodwill.”
“And the frames?”
She shook her head. “You’re right. I should look.”
He nudged her back toward the bench. “Sit ye doon. I’ll hold them up and ye can play Nero. Thumbs up or down. I’ll chuck the undesirables in that box.”
“Deal.”
She was grateful to sit again. If the kiss had turned her knees to Jello, the endearment turned them to water. They were useless.
He dragged the entire collection out at once, then held them up, one at a time, facing her. He only watched her thumb.
Nope. Nope.
Two went into the box.
A dog and two little girls—at least she thought that’s what it was supposed to be—went next. The frame was the best feature, and it was little better than firewood.
Another two followed.
“I guess, if the frames had been decent, they would have been rescued a long time ago.”
He shrugged and held up the last. She groaned and gave it a thumbs down. It had been the stuff of nightmares. Now that she’d seen it again, the nightmares felt disturbingly recent.
He tossed it into the box and brushed his hands together. “We gave it a go.”
The painting fell out of the box again and clattered to the floor. He picked it up and stuffed it in tight with the others.
In spite of the heat, a shiver ran through her and she shook violently.
“What is it?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Just that painting, I guess. It’s pretty gruesome. Gave me nightmares when I was a little girl.”
“Well then, good riddance, I say.”
She agreed. “You know, maybe we should burn it so it doesn’t give some other kid nightmares.”
He laughed. “It would be the kind thing to do, I’m sure.” He removed the painting from the box and held out his hand to her. “We could use a bit of cool air, I think.”
She blushed, assuming he was talking about their kissing and not just the dusty heat of the attic.
Together, they danced down the rear stairs and rushed out the kitchen door. The cloudy day had to be at least ten degrees cooler than the last and she twirled around in a circle so the cool air would cool her faster. There wasn’t much of a breeze, and it only tickled the very tops of the shade trees.
Drunk on silliness and holding hands again, they stumbled around the work shed to the isolated area where garbage was burned now and then. She looked in the can where the matches were kept, but there weren’t any.
“I’ll have to get a lighter from the kitchen,” she said, and hurried back to the house. She eventually found a butane lighter in the junk drawer, tested it, and grabbed a small stack of newspaper to help get the fire started.
She rounded the back corner of the work shed and stopped short when she saw Dougal was sitting on his butt, with his legs out straight, his hands gripped on either side of the nightmare painting. He looked absolutely horrified, like he’d been shot. And considering the painting, she had the fleeting, ludicrous thought that maybe someone from the painting had shot him.
She started toward him, her steps heavy and slow with irrational fear, but he held up his hand to stop her.
“Nay! Dinna come close, lass.”
She took another step and he shouted at her again.
“Dinna bring yer lighter anywhere near this, Hannah. I mean what I say. Go ye back to the house, even. Wash yer hands. Find plastic gloves if ye have them.”
“What are you talking about?”
For a moment, he struggled to speak, holding his breath or trying to keep his emotions in check, she couldn’t tell which. She wanted so badly to go to him, but she knew it would only upset him more.
“Yer salvation,” he said, “is right here, in my hands… And we must be verra careful indeed.”
“I don’t care about my stupid salvation, whatever that means. I want to know if you’re all right, Dougal. Are you wounded or something?”
He grinned and shook his head. Water splashed out of his eyes and onto his face.
“I’m in the finest health, lass. We’re both of us in fine shape indeed.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Hannah finally got sense out of him. The painting was priceless, or so he said, and it had scared him to know how close they’d come to burning it. She did have some latex gloves in the house, and he made her put on a pair and hold the painting while he stood and stretched a pair over his massive hands. Then he slowly carried the supposedly priceless painting into the house like an overgrown ring-bearer.
She had to spread a clean tablecloth over the table before he’d set it down. And he made her shut the curtains and block as much sunlight as she could. It wasn’t possible to cover the higher windows, however. And she told him he’d just have to relax.
She also had to turn off the air conditioning to keep dust from being blown around. She had to bite her tongue to keep from reminding him where the painting had been for maybe the last fifty years.
She looked closely at the brush strokes through a magnifying glass her grandma once used to read the crossword puzzle. “It looks like an original.”
“Aye, lass. It has to be an original. There were no copies made. It was hung in no gallery for art students to copy for practice. It was stolen soon after it was painted and its existence denied outright.”
“I only took one art history class, in junior college. I’ve never heard of this, but then again, it doesn’t have a name, does it?”
His grin looked a little eerie in the strange combination of suffused sunlight and three lightbulbs hanging over their heads. “Aye, it does, though not the name the artist would have wanted. This,” he opened his arms to gesture to the painting as a whole. “This is The Butcher’s Butchers.”
“Well, it’s not a very romantic name, is it?”
“Nay, lass. But first things first. Do ye ken where yer family acquired it?”
She shook her head and tried to ignore looking directly at the painting, afraid those images might still have some hold on her subconscious. “It’s just always been here. I think my grandpa once said it was handed down from his Grandma MacSorlie. I think those are the only Scots in the family. And she came over with a wagon train in the 1850’s.”
“Hannah.” His nostrils flared like something she’d said had excited him.
“What?”
“Hannah, I was a MacSorlie.”
“Was?”
He frowned for a second. “We were part of Clan Cameron, and many of us took on the Cameron name, but I was born a MacSorlie.”
“Wow. So we’re kind of related.”
He la
ughed. “A drop or two, is all.”
She assumed he was talking about blood. “Did they never find out who stole the painting?”
“Aye,” he whispered. “A Jacobite spy who worked in the household of The Duke of Cumberland, The Butcher himself.”
She plopped down into a chair and took a deep breath. “Maybe you’d better start at the beginning.”
He nodded and sat too, though he pushed his chair away from the table a little bit, like he was afraid he’d lean his elbows on it.
“Once upon a time, right?”
He nodded. “Aye. Once upon a time…in 1746. We’ll start there for simplicity’s sake.”
“I appreciate that.”
He told her about the Jacobites—supporters of King James, who wanted to put him back on the throne of England. She wasn’t sure who had taken it from him, but apparently, it pissed off the Scots. After nearly a year of fighting, it all ended at the battle of Culloden, the place where he used to do ghost tours.
“The Duke of Cumberland put as many Highlanders to the sword as he could run to ground—men, women, children, all. And those who remained were stripped of their crops and livestock, and had their homes burned in hopes they would either starve or freeze. Did ye know, for instance, that a bill was put before Parliament to have the wives of all known Jacobites sterilized?”
He shook his head and looked off in the distance, seeing who knows what, and the moisture in his eyes was no longer from tears of joy. Eventually, he came back to her, but his voice had changed, like the passion in him had all been spent.
“A few years after that battle, Cumberland became the patron of a Swiss artist named David Morier.” He looked at her, expectantly.
She shook her head and shrugged.
“He commissioned one painting to depict the war between the Jacobites and the Hanoverians, supposedly.”
“Supposedly?”
“Aye.” He looked around. “Where is yer wee tablet? Can ye search for something on the Internet for me?”
“Sure.” She found the tablet and did a search for An Incident in the Rebellion of 1745. She gasped when a painting popped up. “This has to have been painted by the same hand!”
“Aye, lass.” Dougal’s eyebrows were kind of stuck high on his forehead, like he couldn’t quite believe it himself. “And An Incident in the Rebellion of 1745, now part of the Royal Collection Trust, hangs in the Queen’s Ante-Chamber, Palace of Holyroodhouse, in Edinburgh!”
She swallowed hard when one word got stuck in her throat. Palace. “So what you’re saying is, both Queen Elizabeth and I own paintings by the same artist?”
“Just so, lass. Just so.”
He pulled a corner of his plaid up to wipe his face. She would have suggested she open a door to cool them off, but he would have jumped out of his skin.
“Before… You said, supposedly?”
“Aye.” He pointed to the table. “This is the painting Cumberland commissioned.”
Her heart dropped. “So Queen Elizabeth, when she hears about it, will think it belongs to her?”
Dougal laughed. “Nay, lass. No one can ever claim this painting in truth because its existence was denied, by Cumberland himself.”
“Okay. So it is mine?”
“Aye. And look how close ye might have come to leaving it in the attic where Zilla might have found it later.” His smile returned. “So, I suppose I was some help to ye after all.”
“Yeah. I mean, I was going to burn it, or would have sent it off to charity. But I don’t understand why the guy denied it existed.”
“Well, look at it, love. Ye said yerself it gave ye nightmares, and so it should, because it did too good a job depicting what happened at Culloden.”
She looked at it again, seeing it through Dougal’s eyes. There were the same characters as the other painting, the same faces, same clothes and weapons. Even the setting looked the same. But in The Butcher’s Butchers, most of the Scots were lying on the ground, already sporting bandages or bleeding from their legs or heads, and the Redcoats standing above them were stabbing them with bayonets.
“They’re killing the wounded?”
Dougal nodded. He didn’t look right, like he might throw up.
“Can I get you something? Maybe you need to go outside and get some fresh air again. It’s getting pretty warm in here.”
He nodded, got to his feet, then started for the door. She got up to help him, but he waved her away. He hadn’t been gone five minutes before he was back again, like he couldn’t stand to leave the painting.
When he sat down again, she handed him a cold pop. He tasted it, coughed, and handed it back. “No, but thank ye.” He scooted closer to the table and pointed at the main character in a long red uniform. “This is Barrel here.” He pointed to the left side where the Scots lay in agony. “But this is all wrong. It should be Barrel’s men on the ground here. It’s where they lost most of their casualties. We Camerons were the first to break ranks and attack when Bonnie Prince Charlie failed to give the order. And this is also where our lines were closest. We reached Barrel’s men before the artillery could cut us down. The ground was drier than the rest. We were able to perform our Highland charge here, and only here.”
The way he talked, she could almost believe he’d been there, on the battlefield. But she knew he was just speaking on behalf of his clan.
“But you see what Morier has done? He has taken the one scene of the battle that belonged to us and changed it into Cumberland’s fantasy. If he believed Barrel’s men had truly been the victor, then the entire battle was his. And that is precisely what this is. Cumberland’s fantasy.”
“And he hid it because it was a lie?”
Dougal shook his head and that eerie grin was back. “Nay, love. He ordered Morier to paint it again, paint over it, because of the truth it told. Ye see, even though the scene it depicts didn’t happen here, the murders did happen all over the moor. The painting showed just what a monster Cumberland is…er, was. And faced with his own sins, he ordered them to be covered up.”
“But Morier couldn’t do it.”
“Could ye have?”
“Absolutely not. I’d have hidden it, even if I had to wait for the other guy to die before I could show it to anyone.”
“I have no doubt Morier felt the same. But then the Jacobite spy found it, and took it, and Morier said nothing. How could he raise a hue and cry when he’d told the Butcher that the first painting lay beneath the surface of the second?”
“But Cumberland found out?”
“He did.” Absently, Dougal picked up her hand and kissed the back of her knuckles while he grinned at the painting. “It was now in the hands of the Jacobites, and rumors spread. When Cumberland heard about it, he assumed someone had seen the first painting before it was hidden, so he denied it existed, believing no one could produce it.”
Dougal scooted his chair to face Hannah’s and took both her hands in his. “And do ye ken the name of the Jacobite spy who took the painting and fled back to the Highlands?”
“MacSorlie?”
He nodded. “MacSorlie.”
“And it really is mine?”
“Aye, Miss Hannah,” came a female voice from the doorway. “It truly is yers.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
In complete shock, Hannah couldn’t move. Dougal didn’t have the same problem and jumped to his feet, but held on to one of Hannah’s hands. The young witch from her dream walked over to the table, kicking her long black robe as she came. Though Hannah hadn’t been able to remember what the girl looked like enough to paint her face, her memory cleared as soon as the girl spoke.
“You’re real,” Hannah said.
“I am.” The girl smiled at Dougal. “Ye’re a sight for sore eyes, Dougal Cameron.”
“As are ye, Soncerae. Though, if ye’d like to go away again, say, for fifty years or more, I promise not to grieve for ye overmuch.”
The girl looked at Hannah and nodded. “I can
see that, my friend. But a bargain is a bargain, aye?”
“This is Soni?”
The girl winked. Dougal did the introductions. “Though it seems ye’ve seen my wee witch before.”
Hannah nodded. “In a dream. Her mist was green, like you said, but I liked blue better.” To the girl she said, “You knew about the painting in the attic?”
The witch nodded but didn’t look the least bit repentant.
“Then why didn’t you tell me. Even in the dream, you could have told me. That was six months ago. You could have saved me…”
“From meeting Dougal, ye mean?”
Hannah shook her head fast. “No. No. I wouldn’t have wanted that.”
Soni nodded. “I thought not. And besides, I am not allowed to interfere…with the natural order of things…excepting for my lads, of course.”
“Your lads?” Where had she heard that before? When Dougal had been talking about the ghosts on the battlefield! “What do you mean, your lads?” She held tight to Dougal’s hand and hoped the girl would have a great explanation that wouldn’t include him.
“Highlanders, who haunt Culloden Moor. I see Dougal has not explained why he has come then.”
Hannah braced herself and faced him. “You’re just a tour guide, right? Or you were.”
“Aye, lass. I am no longer. For now that I’ve helped ye with her dilemma, I must…move on.”
Her hand went cold, even though his was as warm as ever. They’d talked about moving on before too, in the truck. About mortals always wanting to help ghosts move on.
She dropped his hand and stepped back. “You can’t be.”
Soni stepped closer. “Nay, lass. He is no ghost at the moment. But it won’t be long now, so ye must say what ye wish to say. Do what ye must do while ye can still feel each other, aye?”
Hannah shook her head at him. “What is she saying?”
He sighed and rolled his eyes. “She’s saying if ye want to kiss me goodbye, Hannah, ye must hurry.”
She decided she would just have to fall apart later. She was not going to add any more regrets to her life. Ever. So she jumped into his open arms and kissed him for all she was worth. There was no time to doubt. There was a witch standing in her kitchen, insisting Dougal was a ghost. If she believed the first, she had to believe the second, even though it broke her heart.