“Such as?”
“Once I purposely lost the discharge papers on a patient who was to go home one morning, and that afternoon she suffered a heart attack. She survived because she was still in hospital. Another time I scribbled a note in a chart and forged a signature. It led a doctor to order more testing and saved another patient’s life. A classmate complained of menstrual cramps, and I dragged her to casualty. Her appendix had nearly ruptured.”
“Come on, Mara. Those were all things you might have noticed or known because of your training.”
“There was a young doctor at the hospital, Robert Fitzwilliams. Robbie told me one morning that he was going to fly to Austria for a skiing holiday with his friends over the weekend. I saw an avalanche and certain death. I was terribly worried, but I did no’ know what to do. He was no’ a particularly sensitive man. I knew he would only laugh if I told him what I’d seen.”
She stood and faced the fire, crossing her arms as if she were still chilled. “The night before he was to leave I saw Robbie making rounds. I went into the doctors’ lounge and went through his jacket and found his airplane ticket. I took it and hid it under my cardigan. By the next morning, when Robbie discovered the ticket was gone, it was too late to replace it, and he missed his trip. He was furious enough to make inquiries. Someone remembered that they’d seen me leaving the doctors’ lounge, a place I never should have been. Robbie confronted me, of course. I did no’ know what to do except tell him the truth and return his ticket.”
She turned. “Robbie said he was going to report me on Monday when the hospital administration returned. That night there was an avalanche on a trail at the resort where he’d been scheduled to stay. Several skiers died, among them Robbie’s friends.”
“Surely he saw it was a coincidence. Avalanches aren’t uncommon.”
“No’ one of that dimension. Robbie believed he’d escaped death because of my intervention. He was grateful. I was lonely. Gratitude seemed to lead naturally to love. We married the next year. I was certain that at last someone understood my strange gift, and that he would help me deal with its burdens. And at first he did.”
“At first?”
“Robbie was…is a fine doctor. But nowt in his training could compete with my predictions. After a few months he began to resent me. He wanted victory over death. He worked twelve hour days, and when he was no’ working, he studied. But I had only to walk into a room and I could tell if a patient was going to live or die.”
“I gather you’re not married to him now?”
“No, I left him. Robbie did what my parents had done. He began to make me doubt myself. He questioned me constantly, but he never wanted to hear my answers. He belittled me to his friends and colleagues. At home he found fault with everything I did and was.”
Duncan might not believe that Mara had the gift she claimed, but she believed it, and it had caused her nothing but sorrow. He wanted to reach out to her, but he was too cautious and too skeptical of all she’d said. He could only manage a gruff “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, but I’m no’. I stayed with Robbie for three years. I believed in marriage, but I did no’ believe in myself. Now I believe in both, but they have to go hand in hand, do they no’?”
She had revealed so much, in the spaces between sentences as well as in the sentences themselves. She talked with reserve about her marriage and her childhood, but he suspected there was a great deal more to each than she’d related. What had her husband done to make her leave him? And what about her parents? She’d said that their punishments had gotten harsher as she’d aged, but what exactly did that mean? And the school where she’d been sent? What had the teachers done to continue the destruction of her spirit? How had she survived the continued onslaught on her self-respect?
Duncan didn’t believe in Mara’s abilities, but he believed in her. He realized it, and battled it the next instant. “I can’t accept any of this,” he said. He stood. She was only a few feet from him.
“You are no’ the first, Duncan.”
He saw resignation in her eyes and not a trace of anger. She didn’t expect support or even understanding. She had come to the Highlands to learn to live without either. She lived alone because she believed that was her only salvation.
Perhaps if she had expected more from him, he would have turned away. He thought of that as he moved toward her. He reached out, and he saw her tense. But she didn’t move away. She had schooled herself to face whatever was thrown at her.
He touched her shoulder. His hand rested lightly there. “I can’t accept any of this,” he repeated. “But I accept that you believe it, Mara. I don’t believe that anyone can see the future. I don’t know what you see, and I don’t know why. But I know you’re not lying to me.”
She didn’t relax under his touch, but she didn’t move away. “You realize you’ll have to reconcile that someday, do you no’? You’ll have to find a way to explain to yourself that I’m no’ lying but I’m no’ telling the truth.”
“Why don’t we just leave it the way it is?”
“Why should we leave it any way? We’re strangers. We can remain strangers.”
She was right, but she didn’t feel like a stranger. He was unwillingly entranced by the delicate curve of her shoulder under his palm, the sheen of her hair in the firelight, the candid, wounded green of her eyes.
“Can you see your own future?” he asked.
“No. And I can no’ see the future of anyone I love.”
“Can you see mine?”
She paused. “No.”
“Then I’ll be easy for you to know.”
She shook her head. “There’s nowt easy about you, Duncan Sinclair.”
“And nothing so hard.” He dropped his hand. “Right now I’m just a man with a favor to ask.”
She took a deep breath, as if to cleanse herself of all she’d said. “What could I possibly do for you?”
“Would you join April and me for a picnic on Saturday? It’s her birthday, and she wants you to help us celebrate.”
“And all the things you said before? After tonight you must know I have no’ changed, but I have no new way to explain the things I see.”
“I’m sorry.” The words tasted strange against his tongue. He had said them so rarely, but never with more sincerity. “I shouldn’t have said the things I did. I know you won’t hurt April. And you were right. She seems to need something you can give her. She wants you in her life.”
“And you?”
He wasn’t sure what she was asking. “I would be grateful if you’d be our friend.”
She hesitated before she spoke. He could see her sifting through answers, and he couldn’t rate his chances of success. “Shall I pack a picnic tea, or shall you?” she asked at last.
He was surprised at his own pleasure. “I’ll have Frances put a basket together for all of us. Will you choose a place? Is there somewhere near enough to walk to?”
Her lips turned up slowly into a smile. “Aye, I know a place. I can almost guarantee you’ll feel at home there.”
“Good.”
“You’ll be careful going back to the hotel tonight? No more clashes with lorries on my road?”
He had already turned to go, but he turned back. “You don’t know something I should know, do you?”
She shook her head.
“Mara, have you considered that you didn’t predict I would have a brush with death tonight?”
“I’ve considered it, aye.”
“And?”
“You did no’ die, did you, Duncan?”
* * *
He wasn’t dead; that much was true. He had gone in search of lights where no lights should have been, and that bit of whimsy had saved his life. He had been spellbound by stray moonbeams and swirling mists, by an illusion that for moments had seemed like a woman beckoning.
Scotland was getting to him.
Duncan had planned to go back to the hotel after leaving Mara’s, but in
stead he found himself heading toward the Ross estate, several miles in the other direction. He turned onto the road that girdled Loch Ceo.
As a boy he had taken this trip often. Had the circumstances been different, he might never have shared more than a word or two with Iain Ross. But the good people of Druidheachd had proclaimed that the wee laddies of midnight would be raised together. And the Rosses, like the Sinclairs and MacDougalls, hadn’t been courageous enough to refuse.
The Ross home, Fearnshader, had been a second home to Duncan. And Iain’s parents had welcomed him and treated him with the same mixture of reserve and warmth with which they treated their son. Only Andrew had been treated differently, Andrew who had never thought twice about crawling up on the lap of Lady Mary Ross and throwing his chubby arms around her neck. There had always been an extra smile for Andrew, a glance the other way when he misbehaved, an extra scone or spoonful of jam when no one was looking.
The elder Rosses were gone now, Malcolm Ross of a sudden illness when Iain was only ten, and Mary Ross of heartbreak—diagnosed as pneumonia—less than a year later. Iain had been sent away to school in England. On holidays he had grown from youth into adulthood under the care of servants and an aged great-uncle who rarely left his bed.
There was a legend repeated in Druidheachd, one as old as the village itself, that the Rosses of Iain’s line would never know happiness. There had been a curse on one of Iain’s ancestors, a chieftain of his clan, and the modern-day Rosses still labored under its spell. No one knew the particulars of the curse—at least, no one who was willing to talk about it—but almost anyone in the village could count back generations and relate stories about Rosses who had died under mysterious circumstances or lived desperately unhappy lives.
Legends and curses, the stuff of the Middle Ages, but still a vital part of the lore of Druidheachd. As he drove, Duncan wondered about his own decision to return. He had come here to give April a stable place to recover from her mother’s neglect, and he had wanted to make a success of the hotel so that he could make a greater profit when he sold it. But what exactly had he done? Apparently even he wasn’t immune to the effects of Druidheachd’s magic. Witness his sympathy tonight for one green-eyed fairy-witch who believed she could see into the future.
The fog had lessened as the night wore on. The road ahead of him was clear. It widened perceptibly as he approached Iain’s house. He had been on Ross land for miles. There was little of the surrounding area that Iain didn’t have title to, although most of it was leased to others.
He rounded a bend and saw the skeletal outline of Ceo Castle beside the loch. It was daunting in moonlight, daunting in sunlight. He knew every stone, every step, every grisly reminder of ancient tortures deep in the castle dungeons. He had romped through the halls with Andrew and Iain, camped in chambers where princes had slept, shot handmade arrows through slits in the north tower. Ceo Castle was as much a part of the mystery and reality of Druidheachd as the glistening midnight waters of Loch Ceo.
He turned away from the castle and started up a drive that led to an inlet of the loch. He drove until the castle had disappeared behind a grove of alders at his left, which gave Fearnshader—alder house—its name. He parked beside a small, vacant gatehouse and started toward the house. Rhododendrons as tall as small trees lined the path. Duncan knew that in a month or two peonies, roses and sweet william would perfume the journey to the front door. In Mary Ross’s day the gardens of Fearnshader had been renowned throughout the Highlands.
He paused at the doorway and reconsidered his visit, but only for a moment. He let the knocker, a ferocious bronze gargoyle, fall against the carved mahogany door. Then he waited.
Iain answered on the third knock. His household staff was small. He was seldom at home, and when he was, he liked solitude. More than once Duncan had been ushered into the cavernous kitchen to find Iain at the stove alone, frying his own sausages for supper.
Duncan stared at Iain, lounging in the doorway. He was casually dressed in dark trousers and a shirt of finely woven cotton. His hair was rumpled, as if he had finger-combed the curls he despised on the way to the door.
“Are you alone?” Duncan asked.
“Unfortunately.” He stepped aside, and Duncan entered.
Fearnshader was large by the standards of anyone except other landed gentry. The hallway was wide enough for a bevy of servants to pass without touching; the rooms were many and varied, all with elaborately ornamented plaster cornices and skillfully carved woodwork.
“I’ve got a fire in the sitting room.”
“Am I interrupting something?”
“Contemplation. You’re welcome to interrupt.”
Duncan followed Iain through the hallway. On those rare Highland days when the sun shone, the sitting room was awash in light, but tonight the heavy formal draperies were drawn against the chill, and the massive dark furniture that cluttered every square foot seemed on guard against pleasant thoughts.
“You need to have a garage sale, Macbeth,” Duncan said. “Scrap everything in here and start all over.”
“Better men than you have sat on these chairs, Sinclair.”
“And after spending a few evenings in here, they probably didn’t even flinch when their heads were lopped off or their kingdoms snatched out from under their noses.”
“You have no respect for tradition.” Iain flopped into a particularly aged chair with fraying upholstery. He gestured to the one beside him.
The fire was warm, and despite the gloom, Duncan could feel himself beginning to relax.
“Just out for a drive?” Iain asked.
“Have I ever, in all my years, just gone out for a drive?”
“That’s one of the things that’s wrong with you.”
“Do you want to tell me the others? Or don’t we have that much time?”
“You’re overly cocky and underly appreciative of the value of my friendship.”
“I’m here, aren’t I? And I came solely for a chunk of your remarkable insight.”
“Then you don’t have enough time. It would take me years to set you on the proper course.”
Duncan put his feet out and his arms behind his head. He stared at the flames, and they reminded him of the fireplace at Mara’s cottage. “I was just up at Mara MacTavish’s.”
“At this hour?”
“April wanted me to invite her for a birthday picnic. You and Andrew are invited to the hotel Saturday night, by the way, for cake and ice cream.”
“I wouldn’t miss it.”
Duncan knew Iain was sincere. Iain adored April. He lavished her with affection, brought her dolls and dresses from faraway places and, this year, the first primroses and violets from Fearnshader’s gardens. He was her beloved uncle, and she worshipped him and Andrew equally. “Seven o’clock,” he said. “And be on time, even if Andrew isn’t.”
“You weren’t just up at Mara’s to invite her on a picnic, were you?”
“No. We’d had a run in.”
“And you went to apologize? The guilt must have been overwhelming.”
Duncan smiled. Iain understood him so well. “She’s not your everyday run-of-the-mill beautiful woman.”
“You’ve been listening to the good folk of Druidheachd?”
“I haven’t needed to. She gave me a small sampling of her so-called abilities a few weeks ago. You know, don’t you, that she claims to be able to see the future?”
“I know quite a lot about Mara. Is that why you’re here?”
“Yes.”
“What is it you plan to do with whatever I tell you?”
Duncan considered. The bantering was over. “I don’t know what I’ll do. I don’t even know why I’m interested.”
“You said it yourself. She’s a beautiful woman.”
“But I’m not in the market for another beautiful woman with her head screwed on backwards.”
“Mara is not Lisa.”
“Why don’t you tell me who she is, then? S
tart with why you sold her such a godforsaken piece of property. Or better yet, tell me how you met her.”
The fire had burned down a little more before Iain answered. “I met her through her husband…her ex-husband. He was my physician.”
“He practiced a little too faraway to treat colds and stomach aches, didn’t he?”
“I had a problem I had to consult him about.” Iain didn’t elaborate. “He’s very capable and, on the surface, quite a pleasant chap. He invited me out to dinner after an appointment. Mara met us at the restaurant. It became a tradition of sorts. Whenever I was in Edinburgh, or later, after they moved to Pitlochry in Perthshire, we would dine together. It was a harmless habit, one I saw no reason to break. But eventually I couldn’t close my eyes to the way Fitzwilliams treated Mara. He seemed to pride himself on humiliating her.”
Duncan recognized the edge in Iain’s voice. He knew from childhood skirmishes how deceptive Iain’s patrician manner could be. He was perfectly capable of going from bored lord of the manor to avenging angel in the blink of an eye. “She said that he belittled her.”
“That’s gently put. The last time the three of us were together, she was a bit late getting to the restaurant. Fitzwilliams entertained himself and me with two extra rounds of drinks. By the time she arrived he was in fine form. He told me that Mara fancied herself able to tell the future, but she couldn’t tell when her own car would get stuck in traffic. She tried to quiet him down, but he got more loathsome as the night went on. He told one tale after another about Mara’s strange abilities, twisting them to make her look like a fool. I tried to leave once, but he wouldn’t let me, and I didn’t want to make a scene, because I knew it would upset Mara more.”
Iain turned so that he and Duncan were eye to eye. “Finally, Mara tried to leave. But Fitzwilliams wouldn’t allow that, either. He’d had far too much to drink by then. He leaned over the table, and he said that Mara was just upset because he’d told her that morning that he never wanted children. He was afraid a child of hers might have the sight, too. He said he didn’t want another freak in his family. One was more than enough.”
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