by L. L. Muir
JAMIE
The Ghosts of Culloden Moor (No.3)
By L.L. Muir
AMAZON KDP EDITION
PUBLISHED BY
Lesli Muir Lytle
www.llmuir.weebly.com
Jamie © 2015 L.Lytle
The Ghosts of Culloden Moor © 2015 L.Lytle
All rights reserved
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION
A NOTE ABOUT THE SERIES
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
About the Author
DEDICATION
To the woman
who brought a copy of Outlander
to my little flower shop…
once upon a time.
A NOTE ABOUT THE SERIES
Although the individual stories of Culloden’s 79 need not be read in strict order, The Gathering should definitely be read first to understand what’s going on between the Muir Witch and these Highland warriors from 1745.
The Reckoning, Number 79’s story, will finish the series.
CHAPTER ONE
Jamie watched Lachlan McLean step close to the young witch and disappear.
As a ghost, the man disappeared all the time, as all of Culloden’s 79 did. It was a fact that anytime Jamie’s own mind had nothing of much to hold on to, he would fade as well. It was much like falling to—no—fading to sleep, he supposed. One moment, he’d be pondering this or that, and the next, he’d feel himself going.
And when next he woke, roused by one strong memory or another—or the stirring of his soul when Soncerae, the witch, was about—he’d find himself in the same position in which he’d awakened that morning after the Battle of Culloden Moor. Awkward, that. Lying on his side with a sword stuck through his middle, keeping him from rolling forward or back, his legs covered with red mud all the way to his knees. The blade stayed put only because the English blackheart who’d placed it there had no more use for it, since Jamie had cut the man down with his own dirk before breathing his last.
Justice.
He’d been fortunate. Not many found justice that day. But sadly, that justice hadn’t been enough to send him on to face God, for there had been a far greater injustice keeping his muddy feet on the moor. And since that injustice could never be undone, he’d been resolved to the idea that he would never be leaving Culloden. Ever.
But that strange Summer Solstice evening, when he’d worried along with the rest that Soni would not come, he was pleased when she’d finally appeared in her odd costume. A long black robe with a hood draped over her hair. For a moment, he wondered if she had the occasion wrong, if she thought it might be Samhain/All Hallows Eve.
However, the wee witch—who was the personal pet of sorts of Culloden’s 79—was a clever lass. Not one to mix up her holidays, let alone her seasons.
There was something new between herself and their leader, Number 79. After a spirited conversation between them, which had ended with 79 tramping away from her, she’d drawn them all to her and offered up a bargain, albeit a bargain none of them might have the power to refuse.
He’d expected his turn to come much later, but Soncerae called him forward right away. Himself. Specifically. And just after Lachlan had disappeared. It was almost enough to make a lad believe himself a wee bit important.
For once, Lachlan hadn’t faded. He’d gone somewhere. And Soni was inviting Jamie to do the same.
“Do ye trust me, Jamie?” she said.
What was not to trust? Hadn’t the lass become one of the family, so to speak?
“Aye, Soni. I trust that ye’ve not sent Lachlan to Hell at least.”
That won him a bit of laughter from the others, which always pleased him.
“Nay. I’ve sent him to a pleasant place, though ripe with opportunities for a man to prove his worth. So?” She grinned at him with a twinkle of white firelight and a flash of green in her eyes from the strange swirl of emerald light that moved around her—a fence of sorts that he would never attempt to cross. “What do ye say, Jamie? Are ye game? Will ye do a noble turn for the chance to face Charles Edward Stuart and say yer piece?”
Vent my anger on the prince and give up stalking the moors of Culloden forever?
He gave a sharp nod. “Aye. And happily. Though I’d prefer to send the bonny prince back here to haunt the place for a few hundred years.”
More laughter bubbled behind him and he noticed he had already moved forward to stand within Soni’s reach. It was all happening too fast! A light touch of panic caught him by the chest and he turned to take one last look at the field in which he’d spent two and a half centuries. Did he dare leave it? Truly?
But he couldn’t see the field, even if it had been light enough to do so. A wall of relatively solid ghosts surrounded him. Familiar faces all. They’d begun as strangers united in Scotland’s cause. They’d continued as like-minded spirits tortured by the failings of a leader they’d believed in. But now, they were ending alone, to be sent off, one at a time, just as they’d risen that 17th day of April, 1745.
When Jamie pulled himself off the ground that morning long ago, wee Rabbie stood nearby with his dog.
“Ye’re Number 64,” the laddie said. “Sixty-three of us have already climbed from our graves, aye? What do ye suppose it means?”
Jamie looked at the other Highlanders about him, unable to imagine what might happen next, when another body rose from the ground twenty yards away. Rabbie and the dog padded off, presumably to give the man his number, and Jamie became just another ghost standing above the fallen, waiting for someone to explain why their spirits were being gathered.
Called by no voice, but called together just the same.
More Highlanders rose to join them. All young. All too young. Though all death was tragic, it seemed more so that morning when every one of them was in his prime, but for Rabbie, whose presence only exaggerated the tragedy.
Jamie was a bit nervous when Number 79 rose and joined them. A captain, he was, with shoulders broader and his form taller than even the largest among them. An easy target to be sure. But also a leader born. No rank required.
While the big man surveyed the ghosts before him, they waited for the next to rise. From that moment onward, however, the bodies of soldiers lying in rows only moved when the Grave Detail moved them. No more spirits joined their number.
Jamie couldn’t have said why there hadn’t been eighty, or seventy-eight of them who rose that morning. There was no rhyme or reason to it, but it was a fine mystery to ponder on the odd night when a ghostie felt particularly restless, in no hurry to fade back to sleep again.
There were mysteries a’ plenty at Culloden of course. For instance, why were they all drawn to Soni when she was but a wee bairn? And why were they all instantly awakened each and every time she returned? Why did the other ghosts take no notice of her? Why were they somehow apart?
And what about the connection that existed between their Soni and 79?
There was something that went unspoken about the man. Soni seemed to sense it too. In fact, she often went walking with the big, pale-haired Highlander, sometimes for the whole of her visit.
What could they have spent so much time discussing? And if Jamie
hadn’t been imagining it, 79 had been able to kiss the lass in truth! Just a wee while ago! Though surely their lips, being of different realms, could never have truly touched. Could they?
But there was no more time to ask questions. There was nothing at all to say to the rest of Culloden’s 79. It was time for Jamie to prove he was at least brave enough to go.
“Let’s be about it then,” he shouted, as much to bolster his courage as to preserve his dignity with the others.
“I would caution ye, Jamie,” Soni said quietly.
A small frown marred her brow but none of the rest were close enough to have seen it. Not even 32 who stood nearest. He was forever tilting his head to the side, trying to hear better. But that concern on her face was for Jamie alone. And it was enough to turn his blood chill—if he’d had any blood to turn.
She waved him nearer. “Dinna wander far, aye?”
“Dinna wander far?” he whispered. “Far from where, lass?”
“Dinna wander far from home, Jamie…until I come for ye.” Her smile was suddenly bright—a facade, he realized. “God go with ye, Jamie Houston.”
Far from home?
Can she truly be sending me to Kinkelding?
And whether he willed it or not, he went.
CHAPTER TWO
Culloden was stripped from Jamie, or rather, he was violently stripped from Culloden. A neat trick for a man who had nothing solid about him.
Or at least, when he started, he’d been intangible.
A range of surprisingly physical things shifted inside him, but the first was his stomach. He was never one for wild rides in a wagon or faring well on the water. His belly wasn’t meant for such things and always gave him fits. If he’d known what lay beneath him, he might have enjoyed the relief of emptying his gullet. But he dared not do anything more than hang onto his dignity and hope the sensations ended soon.
And praise God, they did.
He was suddenly standing on solid ground again, still in the dark, with his body balanced over his feet. He held his hands out in front of him, prepared to catch himself as the weight of real blood pumped through his person as it hadn’t done for two hundred and seventy years.
The heart in his chest boomed and whooshed with the power of a great set of bellows he might have found in the hands of a blacksmith. And so warm was his blood, it too might have come from a smithy.
But it wasn’t the heat of his blood, nor the force of it pushing through his veins that struck him dumb. It was the simple fact that he could feel it at all!
He was a man again! Warm blood, strong heart, weak stomach, and all of it welcome.
“Thank ye, Soncerae,” he whispered and hoped she could somehow hear him. “Bless ye, lassie.”
He breathed deeply and pulled familiar smells across his tongue and into his belly. Heather. Grass. The familiar smells of hay and horse. He was a great hand with the horses back in his lifetime. He’d been called upon to soothe Lord Lovat’s beasts just a few days— Nay, it had been centuries before.
Jamie closed his eyes and shook his head, hoping his memories would all settle back into the proper order.
Horses. There were horses nearby. And though the night sky wasn’t much darker than it had been over Culloden a minute ago, he knew just where he was!
Kinkelding.
He asked God to bless Soni Muir yet again for being so kind as to send a lad home.
The knoll that sat against the sky could be none other than his own. He’d perched upon it most evenings after his mother thought him abed. But she had to have known that he slept there on fine nights because she would fling the door open and call him to breakfast. If she thought he was still in his bed, she would have hiked the stairs and when she’d found him gone, she’d have bellowed out the window.
And if that was his wee knoll, set against the night sky, then… He turned slowly, not daring to hope that his family home still stood at his back.
In spite of his lack of faith, there it loomed. Kinkeld House. A fine manor for raising two lads and a lassie. A pale, hulking, three-storied house of tan stone waited for the morning sun to rise over Dunain Hill and reveal the manor’s golden hue.
Home!
His sudden dizziness reminded him that in his present form, he did indeed need to breathe.
The West tower still stood, though a few stones seemed to be missing from the parapet. The shadow of the largest barn that had once stood off to the left was missing as well. A large, silent fountain stood in the center of the drive blocking his view of the front door to the house. No water splashed from it, and there were small lights shining up at the piece from the ground giving the flowers and figures a menacing aspect.
He promised himself that it wouldn’t matter if the English now lived within the walls of Kinkeld House. It was gift enough to see the place whole one more time before leaving this earth once and for all in a day or two.
The heaviness of his new body weighed at him, made him long for the sleep that had eluded him for all those years since Culloden. So he set off toward the top of his knoll.
After all, Soni had bid him to stay put, had she not? And in the dead of night, there seemed to be nothing awake at all, let alone someone who required an heroic deed. In order to earn his meeting with the prince and rid his gut of the bile and anger that still simmered there, he was required to prove his worth, and had a day or two to do it. Afterward, whether he wished it or not, he would move on to that other side of this life.
But not yet. Now he wanted true, revitalizing sleep.
Jamie settled his backside on the thick grass and looked once more at the tower. He could clearly imagine Elspeth standing at the top of it, her white shift blowing out around her, her pleading hand raised in his direction. But if it had truly been the ghost of her, she’d have been reaching out toward the road, not his knoll.
He shook away the wishful thinking with the toss of his head and stretched his still-lanky body out along the crest of the hill, on his side. He bent a knee to keep from rolling to the base in his sleep since the saber that usually propped him up was missing from his middle. It was a strange sensation, having such a nuisance missing after all that time.
His arm was pillow enough. The air was cool and his plaid was more of a comfort to him than it had been on the moor.
Home.
The perfect gift. Almost like…justice.
And with that sweet word echoing in his mind, he drifted off to sleep without fading in the least. His dreams, however, were no more easy than they had been at Culloden. They brought him little refreshment at all.
A woman came to him, whispering frantically. Her voice hissed in his ear, close as could be, but he couldn’t understand a word. Absently, he waved her away in case she was just a midge. It wouldn’t be the first time one of the tiresome insects had chased him off his knoll and driven him back inside the house.
Aware of his surroundings, even half asleep, he considered going indoors to find his bed. But then he remembered when he was, and that the inside of Kinkeld House was not his. Neither would any bed be, even if he found a way to get through a locked door.
“Soni,” he muttered. “Would ye send this besom away from me?”
He heard a small gasp and it brought him instantly awake. Sitting up straight, he looked about. But there was nothing on the hill except one weary Scotsman, recently returned from the dead.
Nothing stirred around the house. And no ghostie, real or imagined, reached out to him from the tower. The moon was just rising in the East, adding its bit of light to the stars. And though he held perfectly still, nothing returned to buzz in his ear.
He smiled at the idea of Soni defending him from winged things, but knew she was probably too occupied, sending Highlanders this way and that.
Again, he stretched out upon the knoll and flexed his muscles, enjoying the pull of them beneath his skin. He drank in the smell of grass and moss, and the fragrance of horses in the distance… and slept uninterrupted fo
r the rest of the night.
CHAPTER THREE
Jamie woke to the sound of car wheels crunching on the pebbled drive that surrounded the fancy fountain. Like the thousands of times he’d been stirred awake on the battlefield, he sat up and waited to learn what had awakened him, hoping for something interesting.
Two new gates hadn’t been visible in the dark. One stood at the far end of the long drive at the point where the property ended at the road, and another one at the close end of it. Three white vans drove around the fountain—the features of which were far less menacing in the daylight—and made their way back out of the gate. They stopped half way to the road, pulled to the side, and parked.
Are they lost?
The doors exploded out and a small horde of mortals emerged. Some carried large bits of camera equipment Jamie remembered seeing on the many occasions film crews had come to Culloden. Two men loaded cables onto each other’s shoulders while others started back toward the house.
A film crew at Kinkelding?
He stared at the building bathed in the orange and yellow glow of morning and had to admit, after all those years, the structure was still impressive, albeit smaller than the wondrous place of his memories. The decorative stones above and below the larger windows sagged some, making the façade appear more like that of an old woman instead of the firm face of youth.
Still, it was in far better condition than the Leanach Cottage that still stood on Culloden’s field. That landmark wasn’t made of stone, however, so even though it had been well cared for, it sagged like an old broom out in the weather for ages.
But not Kinkeld House. His home would stand another two hundred years, surely. And if the owners cared enough about the place to add the elaborate fountain in the drive, they had to be taking fine care of the house as well.
He nodded with pride. The Houston descendants would have had a fine home for a good long while. Or at least, the offspring of some other Houston…