When she was cleaner, he rinsed out John’s sleeve and tied it back around her arm, though this time it was a bandage rather than a tourniquet. He covered her with the black coat, then his own, then curled around her on the ground, holding her close. When night fell, he stayed awake as long as he could, wanting to know if she cried out, needing to know if they’d been discovered, but in the morning they were still alone, and colour had flowed back into her lips.
He shifted onto his elbow and gazed down at her, remembering every freckle and line he’d known so well, spotting ones he’d never seen before and wanting to know when they’d appeared. She was lean, but other than her arm, she seemed healthy, despite . . . He closed his eyes, not wanting to relive what he’d seen in Frank’s thoughts. What she’d survived threatened to kill him. He wished he could have done much worse than kill Frank Hill.
God, Glenna. How can ye be here? How did ye find me? Do ye ken how my soul has cried for ye every day, every night?
Very gently he slid his fingers down a lock of her hair, playing with a knot that had tied itself near one small ear. Her eyes blinked open and Dougal almost cried, seeing their familiar blue.
“Dougal,” she whispered. “Oh, how I missed ye.”
He did cry then, a slow, fat tear creeping down one of his smoke-smudged cheeks and dropping onto the grass. She did, too, her face tortured with emotions as she reached up with her good hand and touched his face. He wanted to say so many things, but he couldn’t speak. There was nothing in his mind but her, no words forming, no way to tell her how he felt, how he couldn’t breathe, how all that mattered was her. She seemed all right with that, though. She ran those little fingers over his short beard, over the creases cut deeply around his eyes, over a scar he’d picked up a few weeks past from his own brush with a bullet. Her other arm brushed accidentally against him and she gasped slightly, reminded of the wound, but he’d already checked. There was no more bleeding and her arm was warm, not hot.
“Ye will be fine, mo ghràidh,” he managed.
She nodded. “Kiss me?”
“Oh, Glenna,” he said, finally smiling and riding a wave of joy when she answered that smile. “I thought ye’d never ask.”
He touched her lips with his, so soft the kiss was barely there, and almost panicked, thinking the feel of her was unfamiliar. But she hooked her hand behind his neck and pulled him closer, pressing her mouth against his, and he lost himself, falling back into the magic of her, the sweet, wonderful Glenna who was his everything. When at last they drew apart, they were both flushed and her quick breaths almost stole what remained of his self-control. He needed to love her, to sink into her warmth and feel her around him, to hear her sweet cry as she moved with him and beneath him, but not here. Not now.
“What will we do, Dougal, now that we’re both outlaws again?” she asked, twisting the side of her mouth into a curl he’d never forgotten. “We’ve both just killed men an’ ye just deserted the king’s army.”
He’d wondered that himself, though his first priority had been to ensure her safety. He’d lain awake for hours the night before, curled against her as he thought it over, trying to figure out where they could hide, where they could live in peace again. And then his brother’s voice had come to him, as clear as the lonely call of a wolf in the next valley. “Dougal. Come home.”
He’d smiled in the dark, his cheek pressing against the back of her head, feeling happier than he’d ever thought possible. Now he lay with her in the early sunlight, starting a new day. Dougal kissed her again, then set his cheek against hers and nuzzled into the messy pile of soft blond hair that cushioned her head, making her giggle with his breath on her ear. He chuckled and felt her curl instinctively against him, wanting him, needing him as he needed her.
“Ye needna worry about a thing, my love. We’ve a home an’ family waitin’ for us.”
She sighed, relaxing. “Never leave me, Dougal.”
“No. Never again.”
An owl hooted from nearby, unconcerned but vocal, his calls clear and haunting. He did it again, then stopped, leaving a vacuum of sound. Dougal’s fingers pressed against Glenna, sensing another rhythm. It beat slowly, calm and determined. He pressed his ear against her body and sank into the sound of her heart, the gentle, soothing assurance that she was there, she was there.
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CHAPTER 1
A Dubious Gift
He has always been there. That fact is as important to me as my own heartbeat.
I first saw him when we were children: a young boy with eyes as dark as rain-soaked mud, staring at me from under a mane of chestnut hair. I kept him secret, invisible to everyone but me. He should have been invisible to me as well, because he was never really there, on the same windblown land, under the same sky. We never stood together, never touched as other people did. Our eyes met, and our thoughts, but our bodies were like opposite banks of a river.
When I was little, I thought of him as just another child. One with a slow smile and gentle thoughts that soothed me, as if he held my hand. When he didn’t fade with my childhood years, I began to wonder if he were a spirit, communicating through my dreams. In my heart, I knew he was more. His world was the same as mine. He was as human as I.
I was born in the year of Our Lord 1730 on a patch of grassland in South Carolina. Our pine-walled house, dried to an ashy gray, stood alone, like an island in a sea of grass. Its only neighbours were a couple of rocky hills that spilled mud down their sides when it rained. They stood about a five-minute run from our house, just close enough to remind us they were there. The house barely stayed upright during the mildest of storms, and we had no neighbours to whom we might run if it ever collapsed. When winter struck, the wind sought out gaps in the walls, shrieking around bits of cloth we stuffed into the holes. The cold pierced our skin as it had the walls, and we wrapped our bodies in dried pelts that reeked of tanned leather. Our barn offered even weaker shelter to one aged horse and a few poorly feathered chickens who, fortunately, were good layers. My father owned a rifle, and he occasionally chanced upon a prize from the nearby forest. He also ran a tangled line of traps that provided most of our meals. Beyond that, we had little. What we did have we mended many, many times.
I was never a regular child, spending my days with nothing but play and chores on my mind. How could I be? My dreams showed me what would happen an hour, a day, a year before it did. I had always dreamed. Not symbolic imaginings of flying or falling, but dreams that showed me where my life would eventually go.
I could also see what wasn’t visible, and hear what made no sound. When I was a toddler, my mother encouraged my odd abilities through games. She would pry a toy from my grip and hide it somewhere, then return and say:
“Go, Maggie. Go find your toy.”
I ran to the target and came back every time, prize in hand.
Mother said I had “the Sight.” I never told her there was more. I never told her about the boy I could see, who spoke to me without words. I wanted to keep him safe within secrecy, as if sharing him might make him disappear.
My dreams introduced me to people I had never seen, and took me to places I could never have known existed. Most nights they appeared and vanished, leaving vague memories in the back of my mind. Other nights I awoke bathed in sweat, drowning in images I didn’t understand: hands flexing into fists, bristled fibres of rope chafing my skin, the thunder of horses’ hooves. And blood. So much blood.
Mother didn’t experience dreams like mine, but she knew I had them. Their existence terrified her. Mother was a small woman of few words. When she saw me awake from the dreams, my head still fuzzy with half memories, her face paled and she looked away, helpless and afraid.
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Her mother, my grandmother, had had the Sight. Mother both respected and feared its power. My grandmother saw her own death a week before it happened. She felt the hands as they tied her to a stake, smelled the smoke as the tinder beneath her bare feet caught fire, and heard the jeering of the crowd as they watched her burn as a witch.
Mother told me the story only once. That didn’t mean it couldn’t repeat itself.
Mother did the best she could. Many nights I awoke in her arms, not remembering her arrival, only knowing she came when my screams jolted her from sleep. She held me, rocked me, sang lullabies that ran through my body like blood. But her songs held no answers, offered no way to chase the images from my mind. She did what she could as my mother, but I faced the dreams on my own.
Except when I was with the boy no one could see. Sometimes he would brush against my thoughts like a feather falling from a passing bird. Sometimes we conversed without words. We could just be, and we understood.
As an infant, I lived with my mother and father and our decrepit horse. My sister Adelaide was born two years after I was. When I first saw her, wrapped like a pea in a faded gray pod, I stroked her little cheek with my finger and loved her without question. We were best friends before the newborn clouds faded from her eyes. Two years later, she moved out of her crib and my bed became ours.
Our brother was born that year. He died before he drew his first breath. We named him Reuben and buried him next to the barn.
Little Ruth arrived on a cloudless day in March when I was six. Ruth Mary Johnson. She was soft and fair and filled with light. Even my father, a man with little patience and less affection, gentled at the sight of her.
Neither one of my sisters had the Sight. Like my mother, they were slender and delicate, like fair-skinned deer. My mother’s skin was always so pale, even under the baking sun, she looked almost transparent. The only way to bring colour to her cheeks was to make her laugh, and my sisters and I did our best to paint them pink. I took after my father, with his brown hair and plain face, though my hands weren’t as quick to form fists as his. My arms and back were built for lifting.
By the time I turned seven, my dreams had become more vivid, and more useful to the family. I was able to catch Ruth before she tripped down a hill, able to find a scrap of cloth my mother sought. One winter I dreamed of a corn harvest, and my mother, daring to believe, planted a garden of it that spring. Her gardens never provided much food, because the ground around our home was either cracked by drought or flooded by heavy rains that stirred the dust to mud. That summer, though, the corn grew high.
Usually my dreams came when I slept, but sometimes they appeared when I sat quietly on my own. They weren’t always clear. Most of the time they had faded into wisps of thought by the time I came back into focus, but they never fully disappeared.
My mother and I never talked about my dreams. Neither of us acknowledged them out loud.
Just like we never talked about my father’s death.
It happened on the night of my seventeenth birthday.
I dreamed of a wheel from our wagon, its spokes blurred to a quick gray. Our ancient gelding pulled the bumping wagon over a moonlit ridge as my father returned from a late trip to town.
He slumped on the wagon bench, his weary body jiggling over every bump. I saw him lift his chin and glance toward the sky. Low-lying storm clouds glowed in the light of the full harvest moon. Everything around the wagon took on a strange orange tinge: the sparse patches of spring grass, the heaps of boulders casting pointed shadows in the dark. Tufts of salted brown hair peeked from under my father’s hat, and he tugged the brim lower on his forehead. My father was not a patient man. He clucked to the horse and snapped the reins over the animal’s back. In response, the gelding tossed his head and picked up speed just as they reached the peak of a long hill. My father should have known better. The pitch was too steep. Once the wagon started racing down the hill, the horse couldn’t slow. The wheels spun out of control, bouncing off rocks and jolting my father so he barely stayed in his seat. He leaned back, lying almost flat as he strained against the reins, but couldn’t slow the panicked horse.
The wagon clattered downhill, too fast to avoid a boulder in its path, and the front wheel smashed into splinters. Jerking in reaction, the wagon staves twisted from the horse’s harness, ricocheted off a solitary oak, and hit the ground with a sickening crack. The horse screamed and ran faster still. My father struggled to loosen the reins tangled around his wrists, but couldn’t do it fast enough. He was yanked from his seat and tossed into the air like a sack of flour. He hit the ground. Hard. His body crashed against rocks and shrubs as he struggled to free himself from the reins, tearing his clothes and scraping long gashes in his skin. The horse raced down the hill, eyes white with terror, chased by the screams and the body that thumped behind him like an anchor.
After a while, the screaming stopped. The horse checked its wild run and trotted to a stop, sides heaving, the insides of his back legs wet with white foam. His nostrils flared, and he bobbed his head nervously at the scent of fresh blood. But he sensed no imminent danger. He dropped his head to a patch of grass and began to graze. My father’s lifeless body rolled to rest a few feet away.
The dream ended and I sat up, gasping, the neckline of my shift soaked with sweat. I twisted toward the window, but all was silent, silver under the moon. I threw back the covers and stood, shaking, on the cold floor.
I knew where to find my father’s body. Not far—the horse had raced past a familiar oak my sisters and I often climbed.
I woke my mother and we ran without a word along the dimly lit path, faded nightgowns flapping around our ankles.
My father’s body was little more than a heap of bloodstained rags. The horse stood nearby, chewing, glancing at us before dropping his head to the grass again. Scraps of cloth fluttered along the pathway the wagon had taken, bits of clothing caught on rocks. My father’s tired gray hat lay at the top of the hill.
I stared at what was left of him and wasn’t sure how I felt. He hadn’t been a kind man. The only thing he had ever given us was beatings.
Still, I should have been lost in grief beside my mother, but my mind was on something else. My dreams had changed. For the first time, they had occurred simultaneously with the event. My dreams were no longer limited to vague messages forecasting the future.
Burying a man in hard ground is difficult work. It took two full days for Adelaide and me to manage a trench large enough for his mangled body. Even then, we had to bend his knees a bit so he fit into the hole. My mother read from her Bible, then nodded at me to shovel the earth onto his body.
Our father had never spent much time with us when he was alive. Even so, the house seemed eerily quiet after his death. It was strange not hearing his heavy footsteps, not hearing him gripe about the sorry state of his life. We mourned, but not terribly. When he left the living, my father took with him the stale reek of alcohol, a sullen expression, and a pair of overused fists.
My mother, my sisters, and I were forced to take on my father’s duties, which included driving the wagon to town for buying and selling. The ride took over two hours each way, but once we arrived, we forgot every bump. My sisters and I never tired of the activity in town. The painted building fronts with fine glass windows, the people who walked the treeless street, kicking up dust as they visited the stores. Dirty children watched like sparrows on perches while fancy ladies strolled the boardwalks under parasols, protecting their faces from the sun, tucking their hands into the arms of stiff-backed men in suits and hats. Sometimes they were shadowed by people whose eyes gleamed white out of sullen black faces. My mother told us they were from Africa, brought to America as slaves.
The town of Saxe Gotha boasted more than two skin colours. Fierce tattoos and feathers enhanced the bronze skin and black hair of men who moved with the casual grace of cats. They avoided the plank walkways, preferring the dust of the road under their feet.
&n
bsp; My father had told us stories about Indians and their bloodthirsty ways. We had stared open-mouthed as he regaled us with violent tales. So when I saw the Indians in town, they both frightened and intrigued me, but I never saw them attack anyone. They were in town for the same reason we were: to trade. An uneasy peace existed between them and the white men while business was conducted. They brought deerskins and beaded jewellery and left with weapons, tools, and rum. No one spoke to them on the street, and they offered no conversation. Business complete, they leapt onto the bare backs of their horses and disappeared into the shadows of the trees beyond the town.
I felt an odd connection to these men. When my mother led my sisters and me into the local shop to trade eggs or small hides for blankets or whatever else we needed, the other customers avoided us as if they were afraid our poverty might touch them. At the end of our day, we climbed onto our clumsily rebuilt wagon, pulled by the only horse we’d ever owned, and were gone.
We crossed paths with the Indians, but never came close enough to make contact. And yet their images began to appear in my dreams, to emerge from the trees and surround me with purpose, the tight skins of their drums resonating with the heartbeat of the earth.
CHAPTER 2
Battle Dream
There was so much blood. My senses reeled with the unfamiliar heat of it, the stench, the sticky weight of it.
It was more than a dream. It had to be. The images were real, but hadn’t come from my own thoughts. It wasn’t my bloodstained hand that gripped the slick hilt of a sword.
But I knew whose it was. He was perhaps twenty, two years older than I, with deep brown eyes. I had seen him my entire life. We had grown together since I was a little girl, in dreams as clear as waking days.
Sound of the Heart Page 28