by L. L. Muir
“What are ye doing?”
The voice of a woman came from the trees and Hamish looked up so quickly, it earned him a sharp burn in his neck and he winced. A young woman with dark hair and penetrating dark eyes stood at the edge of the pines wearing denims, sneakers, and a pale blue, hooded sweatshirt. She held a fiddle in one hand and a bow in the other, pointing it toward the hole at his feet.
“Umm… Who are you talking to?”
An American woman! Oh, Soni, how could I have doubted ye?
He offered a brisk bow. “Hamish Farquharson, at yer service, miss.”
Her eyes widened. “Farquharson? Did you say… Oh, my gosh! Willa—” And between one blink and the next, the woman was gone. The sound of her voice faded with the echo in his mind. For all he could swear by, he’d imagined her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Hamish blinked a dozen times, then held his eyes shut for ten seconds, hoping she’d be there again when he opened them. It wasn’t her beauty that intrigued him—though she was quite lovely—he simply wanted proof that he wasn’t imagining things, or that his subconscious was playing tricks on him, bringing wishes to life as easily as Soni had breathed life back into him.
“I dinna ken,” said a small voice from deep inside the hole. “I suspect he might be teched in the head.”
How sweet it was to hear small children speaking the Gaelic tongue. But how much sweeter it might sound if they weren’t hiding from him, thinking him mad. There was nothing for it. The threat had done no good. He would have to dig them out after all.
After one last glance at the spot where the lass had stood, he went to work. “Ye stay put now, ye wee beasties,” he mumbled. “Father’s comin’… And Father has a switch for yer backsides.”
He removed his vest and rolled up his sleeves, and after a quick search, he located the rock with which he’d been bludgeoned nigh to death. It was smaller than he expected, but it made a fine tool. He raised it high and brought it down on the edge of the hole. A large chunk of ground gave way and rained down into the abyss. A small bairn began to cry as Hamish raised the stone high again, and for the life of him he could not bring it down a second time.
“God forgive me,” he whispered, then he shouted. “Bring me the bairn. At least allow me to care for the wee’un!”
“I do care for him,” came a wee lassie’s voice. “We both care for him. Go away!”
A face appeared five feet beneath the surface, but if Hamish hadn’t been expecting a child, he would have thought an animal stared back at him. “Have mercy, my lord. Please go and leave us be. Ye’ve all but brought the Redcoats to our door!”
Redcoats?
Hamish shook his head. “Nay, laddie. There is none here that would harm ye. Come away with me—”
The low shouts of men reached his ears, and not pleasant, friendly shouts were they. A large piece of earth lifted off to his left and a frantic young lass waved him to her. “Cover the hole and come! Hurry!”
The tone of the shouting, combined with the lassie’s honest terror, was enough to convince him that it was better to hide first and ask questions later. He straightened the covering he’d disrupted and hurried to the large trap door. Earthen steps made the descent easy, but he stopped to make certain the door was in place.
“To me,” a man shouted, and Hamish held perfectly still, listening while quick steps ran past. More steps followed, and more shouting. “They’re small. They can hide anywhere. Search the trees, blast you!”
Ridiculous! They sounded like they were chasing monkeys—or children! What the devil did they want with these three? Had they stolen something more valuable than food?
Hamish couldn’t resist. He had to look. And though an insistent hand tugged at him from below, he moved back to the hatch and lifted it by tiny increments until he had two clear inches to view.
Heavy feet stomped close and his heart caught in his throat. He held his breath even after they’d moved on. If they stomped in earnest, they might find the hole he’d found—probably an emergency exit should someone find the larger one.
Clever children. Mercy, but they were too young to be on the mountain alone, being chased by…
Black boots. White trousers. Lord help me, it cannot be!
He had to breathe, but he did so carefully. Small, short puffs. His brain needed oxygen to make sense of it all.
Reenactors? He’d seen plenty of those on the moor. They were the blokes that got booed by most of the crowd, though good-naturedly for the most part. Most of them were Highlanders taking one for the team, so to speak, by wearing the government’s uniform. But he’d never witnessed a reenactor chasing after a child in earnest, terrorizing them into hiding in cairns like animals.
He peeked again. It could not be! But then again, Soni was capable of astonishing things, was she not? Had she sent him back to the year 1746?
The children spoke Gaelic. Few modern Scots bothered to teach their bairns more than the basics, how to read a sign, how to sing songs of old. Older folks mourned the loss.
Another frantic tug from below made Hamish realize he was torturing the lass. So, he cautiously lowered the trap door once and for all and moved away from it. The little fingers finally released his kilt and disappeared.
Hamish stepped down into a dark room much lower in the ground than he’d expected. The circle of stones hadn’t been worn down over time—they’d been buried. The only thing Time was eroding was their concealment. The chamber in which they now stood had to be six feet below the base of Odin’s Helmet.
Light filtered down from a small hole in the ceiling, allowing just enough light to show how truly dark it was. He glanced around and was relieved there were no ancient corpses lying about to add to the nightmares of the three wee’uns before him.
Wearing a tattered skirt beneath her rabbit skins, a lass not ten years old stood with her hands on her hips and her chin in the air. This was his assailant, the only one big enough to lift the heavy stone, let alone raise it as high as his head. He’d been a fool not to turn and look when she tried to distract him, and he’d paid for that foolishness.
A lad of eight stood beside her, still not as tall as his sister. It had been his dark eyes Hamish had seen in the darkness. Now, he watched his sister carefully, to follow her lead, but he was much more excited than she was by their unexpected company.
A bairn of three or four, covered in rabbit skins, crouched on the ground behind the sister, arms wrapped around his knees. He looked at the floor, toyed with the girl’s foot-coverings, and did anything but make eye contact.
The unidentified animal, then.
Hamish forced himself to stop staring at them and gestured around the small chamber that was perhaps a tenth of the size of the cairn above. They stood in a circle in the center with just two passages leading off it—one to the steps and the other to the smaller hole.
“A fine place ye’ve found here, “ he whispered.
The bairn lunged forward, knocked him on the leg, and pressed a finger to his lips before pointing skyward. Hamish nodded and bit his lips together, and the child disappeared behind his sister’s skirt again. It was a shock to realize the three had been alone long enough for the wee’un to learn how to be silent when danger loomed near. He wasn’t ready to concede that those were true Redcoats from The Butcher’s army, but he acknowledged they were a menace to the wee trio.
Tired of looking down at them, he took a seat on the floor and made as little noise as possible—not because he feared the others would overhear him, what with their noisy shouting and running about, but because he didn’t want the children to fash any more than they already were.
Like some old mother, he had an uncontrollable urge to wrap his arms around them and promise that all would be well. And while he could not make such promises when he understood so little, he could at least offer them comfort. So, he opened his arms in any case, an invitation if any of them dared accept it. His sister used to do the same when children would
come closer to hear her music and touch her violin.
The small one looked up at the girl, but she only looked away. He edged closer to her and she reached down blindly to pat his head. He stuck his finger in his mouth and held tight to her wee skirt—a skirt that might have reached the ground a year before…
A year? Had these poor mites suffered through a Highland winter inside this tomb? He shuddered to think it.
Men’s voices drew near again and echoed through the chamber. The shouting was over, but they had yet to leave the mountaintop. Another sound silenced the first, wending its way down through the light-hole like a ribbon of sweet relief. It was the sound of a violin, and the slow meandering notes led into a quick, teasing tune. The children began jumping and grasping at each other in silent excitement. It was like watching the telly with the sound turned off.
The American lass, in the pines! Is she mad?
Belatedly, Hamish jumped back to his feet, thinking the woman would need his aid, but before he could go far, all three ragamuffins wrapped themselves around his boots and hung on.
“I cannot allow them to take her,” he explained in a harsh whisper.
“They cannot,” the girl said. “It is Willa. They cannot take her. She only leads them away from us. But be calm, they cannot harm her now.”
He squatted to look into the confident child’s face. “Ye ken my Willa?” He could barely contain his joy at the possibility that he might see his sister’s dear face once more. If Soni had truly sent him back to 1746, he would only need to hurry down the hill and over River Garry to find home again! But first, he must save his sister!
He tried to shrug the children off, but they clung tight, pulling him low.
“Willa saved us,” the lassie said. “She helped us find this place. She brought us food. And she lured our enemies away when they got too close.” Her wee lip protruded and she lowered her gaze. “They never would have found her, never would have…killed her, if she hadn’t been trying to help us.” Tears poured down her cheeks in one burst. She threw her arms around Hamish’s neck and her little body jerked, over and over again, as she crumbled under the burden of a heartbreaking guilt that was not hers to bear.
He tried to explain just that, though there were many things that had occurred that day beyond explanation. His sister was dead and gone? He’d accepted that inevitability long ago, though it stung to face it again so soon after a phantom of hope.
“‘Tis all right,” her brother whispered. “Willa does not blame us. Else why would she help us still?”
The lassie agreed with a nod and seemed adequately consoled.
“I think it is not Willa who plays for ye now,” Hamish whispered. “I saw another woman with a fiddle, only a bit ago. I spoke with her before I damaged yer rabbit hole.” He also remembered her disappearing in a blink. “I must be certain she gets away, aye?”
“Nay,” the lass insisted. “I ken her tunes well enough. ‘Tis Willa.”
He swallowed the hope trying to claw its way back out of his gut. “And if I went out there, now, I would see her?”
The lad rolled his eyes. “Are ye daft? Willa is gone, my lord. ‘Tis only her music that comes back.”
Hamish listened for a moment and had to admit that the tune was one that his sister had played often, when she was in a fine disposition or trying to lighten the mood of others. But he still suspected it was not Willa’s hand playing it.
He took comfort in the fact that the music played on and was never interrupted. If the Redcoats truly sought the woman, they could easily follow the sound—for the musician, whomever she might be, could not be more than twenty yards from the stones above their heads. And if the enemy hadn’t found her right away…either they had no interest in American women dressed in 21st century clothing, or…
She wasn’t there to begin with.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Bertie McBeadle and Rob Menzies were wrong about how many ghosts haunted the mountains above Killiecrankie Pass. They hadn’t mentioned a Highlander at all.
Sam stood frozen for a long time just staring at the spot where the kilted Adonis had stood. Rich brown hair, powerful body, and penetrating light eyes that looked even more striking because of the black slashes of eyebrows and dark shadows on his jaw.
She was a hundred percent sure she hadn’t imagined him because she wasn’t the type to come up with that kind of fantasy. Oh, she’d seen Scottish hotties in pictures and movies, but she never spent much time wishing one would wander into her life, or disappear on her—because she didn’t usually waste time thinking about impossibilities.
Before she knew she’d be moving to Scotland, the chance of even meeting a gorgeous man in a kilt, in person, was less than getting struck by lightning. And unless you fantasized about being struck, you pretty much never think about lightning at all.
“He had to be a ghost.” She looked at the little wren sitting on a pine branch off to the left. “Right?”
It fluttered its wings, decided she wasn’t worth talking to, and flew away.
“Right,” she said for him.
A Highlander trying to summon others out of the ground? No way did that come out of her vanilla imagination.
She shook off her stupor and decided she didn’t have much time left if she was going to hike back down to her cottage before it got dark, and who knew what might come out to play then? So, she moved back to the tree where she’d left her case, flipped it open, then settled the violin into its bed. She just couldn’t seem to let go.
“He was definitely a ghost,” she said. And he was probably the shadow on the mound when she’d been playing. Now the question was whether the mist had brought him, or her music? She imagined the instrument she loved so much suddenly imbued with the power to raise the dead. “Pretty cool if it were true.”
And only one way to find out.
She ignored the fading light and tested the tuning of each string. The ritual soothed her as it always did, regardless of whether she was on stage, preparing for a performance, or standing on a sidewalk, busking for lunch money, it was the tuning that chased away all the butterflies.
Since she’d arrived in Killiecrankie and found that the home she’d inherited was halfway up a secluded mountain, she’d needed a lot of soothing at night, when the forest came to life around her and all those little noises she’d known at home had somehow changed their pitch. Even the pecking of a woodpecker seemed to sound different—more Scottish, more dangerous.
But now she’d seen the most dangerous Scottish creature there was—-a ghost. And if a good tuning couldn’t chase her nerves away, it might at least keep her heart from leaping out of her chest.
All she wanted was one more glimpse, just to see if it really had been her music that made him appear. A Ouija board with strings.
“Okay children,” she said cheerfully, “or Willa. Whoever is listening.” She wasn’t going to invite Willa’s kinsman by name. “This is for you. Dance if you want.”
She smiled down upon her strings and pulled the bow across them. A light Scottish tune was appropriate, she thought, and she played with equal parts precision and emotion. After all, if Willa Farquharson had been practicing for three hundred years, it wouldn’t be easy to impress her.
~ ~ ~
Nearly an hour passed inside the dark chamber before the music ceased. It seemed a natural signal that the red-coated villains had moved on. If he put himself in their place, he wouldn’t have lingered on the mountain when the source of the music couldn’t be located. Instead, he might have hurried down the mountain to beg a blessing from a priest.
Besides, who in their right state of mind would continue to bedevil an enemy once a spirit had taken up his defense?
Hamish had a much different perspective than in his mortal past. He had no reason to fear ghosties, knowing just how powerless they were, even if they worked up enough emotion to make themselves be felt for a second or two—as when Simon McLaren kissed Soncerae.
He did wonder about the violin carried by the American ghost. Was it real, or had it no more substance than the dagger he’d sported all those years on the moor? If it were she who played and lured their pursuers away, had she done it by the emotion she so clearly poured into her playing?
What’s more, had it been emotion that brought him to life again? Did Soncerae Muir feel so strongly about Culloden’s 79 that she had the power to make them each real? And if so, how strong that emotion must be, then, to keep them whole for a pair of days!
The wee laddie, Roddy, gave a little snore from where he was tucked up beneath the excess of his kilt, huddled against Hamish’s back. The other two, Clyde and Lippa, stirred beneath his arms where he’d dragged them to keep them warm. They hadn’t escaped the storm completely and were nearly as damp as he. But together, their warmth had toasted them all up again. In fact, he’d begun to sweat and needed to stir the air to cool himself again.
He regretted the need to rouse them, for they seemed to be sleeping like the dead, but if they were to get back down the mountain before darkness fell, they needed to move quickly.
“Wake, children,” he said quietly. “Time to wake, now. We must go while our hunters have gone, aye?”
The lass bolted upright, her spine as straight as the fall of rain in a gale-force wind. “Go? Nay! This is our home. Go if ye must, but do not give us away, I beg ye.”
He sat forward and pulled himself free of their clutches. Perhaps it would require a heavy hand to see them safely off the mountain. If they happened to be back in the 18th century, and if those truly had been Redcoats searching for them, he needed to find them safe and permanent refuge before his time came to an end.
Spending leisurely hours with a rich American woman would have to remain a pleasant fantasy, for the only American he’d seen was a ghost herself.
The thought niggled at the back of his brain, however. If she truly had been a ghost, why did she wear the trappings of the future? For few women in his day would have worn breeches, let alone denims and a sweatshirt.