~ Excerpt ~
by Angie Kay
Chapter One
Kate surveyed the vista, hugging her voluminous all-weather coat around her, pressing her guidebook against her chest. A low-pitched wail echoed in her ears. It's just the wind, she told herself, though she had never heard wind blow so monotonously, with such insistence. As she listened, it became the backbeat for a symphony of other sounds, first bagpipes, then drums, then finally the staccato report of gunfire. In the next moment, a man lunged out of the mist, reared up on his toes, his back arched, his arms open wide, and crumpled at her feet. Before she could dislodge the scream that stuck in her throat, he vanished, leaving her with the impression of height and seething urgency, wrapped in dark plaid that was oddly weightless, like gossamer, nearly transparent; leaving her with the realization that the wind had stopped howling. Dead silence.
She suspected she was going to faint.
She stumbled toward one of the benches the National Trust had thoughtfully placed beside the graveled trail that ringed the field. For occasions such as these? she wondered as she sank down onto it, dropping her book. She squeezed her eyes shut. Breathe deeply and steadily, she coached herself, laying two fingers of her right hand against the pounding pulse in her left wrist. She was rewarded by feeling the beat begin to slow, by feeling the tightness in her chest begin to lift. She had never fainted in her life and wasn't going to start today, she concluded finally. She was a physician, after all, trained to expect the unexpected and respond to it calmly, a physician who was respected for the cool and level head with which she approached the hundred minor and major catastrophes that were thrown her way each day in the big city hospital where she was Chief Medical Resident. She never got hysterical – or hadn't before Tuesday. She wasn't prone to flights of fancy. "You have no imagination," Evan had often told her, in the soft and sympathetic tone that he seemed to reserve for enumerating her quirks. And she had rarely doubted Evan's judgments. But here, in twentieth-century Scotland, on the site of the last battle waged on British soil, she had seen the ghost of a slaughtered Highland warrior meet his end yet again. Either her imagination was improving, or she was losing her mind.
She was just overwrought, as her mother would say. Stressed out, not crazy. Setting foot in a place that was the centerpiece in the family lore was bound to give anyone an attack of déjà vu, she assured herself. She had found it particularly unsettling to lay her hand on the weathered boulder with MACGILLVRAY etched on its front. The man it immortalized was her kinsman, two centuries removed but a MacGillvray nonetheless, starving and bone tired before the coup de grace that laid him low, buried in a ragged plaid that bore the blood and dirt of a battle he never could have won, should never have been made to fight. Yearning. His pain was almost palpable here. It wasn't strange that she could empathize with her long-dead relation's wish for solace, for food, and, in the end, for oblivion.
Seeing him, or one of his compatriots, however, was a different matter.
She opened her eyes reluctantly, in time to observe a gaggle of tourists gather around a youthful tour guide in period dress. That's who I saw! she decided, studying the man, pouncing on the explanation. He had just been participating in some kind of historical tableau, and in a certain light…
In any light, the man she'd seen was taller than the guide.
Don't go there! she warned herself. She had come to Scotland during the inhospitable second week in April to escape her fears, not add another to the list. Ghosts. She closed her eyes again, but couldn't block out the image of the place where one MacGillvray had faced his demise - with more courage than she had faced the departure of her fiancé, no doubt. He had probably accepted the loss of a hundred of his men with more courage than she had one of her patients.
They were so very young, every one of them, soldiers in the war on the streets, and many of them were dying as they were wheeled or carried into the emergency room, amid swarms of paramedics and police, their bodies shattered by bullets, torn by knives, broken by bats. You could tell whether a particular boy had fought for the Huns or Diablos if you took the time to read the name stenciled on the back of his jacket. But there wasn't any time ...
"It can't help but affect you. It can move you to tears, but you'll feel better for them."
Kate considered these words, then nodded in concurrence. She had every right to cry over the senseless loss of life – at the Battle of Culloden, or the Battle of North Philly. She had every right to mourn the defection of Evan Hall, the man she loved and had expected to spend her life with, no matter that the touch of his hands made her feel indifferent, at best. She had long since come to terms with the fact that fate, or genetics, or some forgotten psychological trauma had left her with loopholes in her libido. But Evan had asked her to marry him in spite of this small stumbling block on the road to happily ever after, and she had unhesitantly agreed. She had longed to be married. She had wanted the kind of companionship her parents had found in each other, though she had resigned herself to never knowing their kind of intimacy. She had needed someone to come home to at the end of days spent elbow-deep in blood and human misery. What Evan had wanted from their union was never quite as clear. In the end, his reasons for breaking up with her had made more sense than his reasons for pursuing her in the first place.
"Cry!" she ordered herself. Then she stiffened, realizing that the original suggestion hadn't been made by her own battered psyche, but had been spoken from without, in a deep, melodic voice. Ghosts. Do they speak? More likely, it had been an auditory hallucination, a complex but scientifically explainable phenomenon involving a short-circuit in the brain's temporal lobe, she decided, raising her head slowly.
She jumped to her feet, stepping on the guidebook. This auditory hallucination was accompanied by a visual one!
A beam of sunlight broke through the clouds, touching the dark auburn hair of the apparition. He was very tall, an impression exaggerated by the fact that he was standing on the path, a few inches uphill from the patch of grass on which she stood. His hair was clipped short, and it did nothing to soften the angular lines of his face. He was wearing corduroy slacks and a heavy sweater, both in shades of brown, under a shiny yellow rain slicker. His boots were similar to her own, she noted, allowing her gaze to travel down the length of him - definitely L.L. Bean, or the Scottish equivalent.
This man was oddly familiar. He was certainly a stranger, yet she felt as if she had seen him before, somewhere. She suppressed the impulse to touch him, to convince herself that he was, indeed, corporeal, and not the fog-cloaked phantom she had seen right on this field. "Were you wearing a kilt a few minutes ago?" she asked suspiciously.
He glanced down at his trousers. "I don't think so. But I'll run home and put one on, if you'd like," he answered, smiling.
The smile was beautiful. His teeth were white and straight. She placed a shielding hand above her eyes, attempting to determine the color of his through the glare. "Green," she said.
"Pardon?"
"Never mind."
"Your first time?"
"What?" Synapses. Everything in life could be reduced to the synapse, she decided, to that infinitesimally small space between the ending of one nerve and the beginning of the next. Impulses were passed across this chasm in tiny chemical packages called neurotransmitters, permitting orderly transmission of data to the appropriate way-station in the brain. She nodded resolutely. A scientific explanation. A logical one that required little imagination on her part. Too much transmission fluid in the synapse could result in hallucinations, misperceptions. Confusion.
"Is this your first time to Culloden?" he asked.
One bold brow was arched quizzically, and he seemed to be trying to control the very slight Scots burr to his words, as if he believed her failure to comprehend him was due to his accent. He repeated the question, slower this time, deciding, perhaps, that English wasn't her native tongue. Or perhaps he thought she had left her white-coated attendant tied up behind one of the distant trees.
She shook her head, to clear it. The tortoiseshell barrette that had been anchored at the nape of her neck fell to her feet, allowing her hair to tumble to her shoulders. "It's my first time," she whispered, staring at the barrette, suddenly more frightened by the possibility that her head shake might have driven him back into the neurochemical twilight zone from which he had come than that she might look up to find him dressed in plaid.
"It can't help but affect you."
Something was affecting her. The sound of his voice, however, assured her that he was still standing his ground. She sighed in relief, raised her gaze, found that he was still wearing brown cotton and machine-carded wool, yellow vinyl. But now his gaze was intent, with an unmistakably earth-bound appreciation. She felt her face flush. The wind was whipping her hair against her cheeks, into her eyes. She pushed it back impatiently, not wanting to lose sight of him again, guessing she would be content to bask in the warmth of his appreciation for the rest of the afternoon. He rescued the barrette and extended it to her. She took the far end of it, carefully, leaning forward to do so, keeping two arms' length and three full inches of plastic between them. Yet she still jolted back when she touched it, feeling as if it had conducted fifty thousand volts of electricity from his hand to hers. She stared at him in surprise. A shock to the nervous system. A faux tortoiseshell bridge across a synapse.
"Bonnie Prince Charlie could have saved his loyal followers by admitting defeat and fleeing. Instead he had five thousand of them stand here, outnumbered, starving and ill-armed, to be slaughtered by a legion of Redcoats in the futile effort to put his father, James Stuart, on the British throne," he said.
"The terrible waste of it," she murmured, wrestling her hair into a tail and securing it with the barrette. "History has painted it too romantically."
He nodded. "Death isn't romantic. Highlanders were trained to fight in the hills. This place is wide and flat with no cover. Their rations had been cut to a biscuit a day for at least several days before the battle, and they hadn't had much more than that for weeks before. They were armed with broadswords and dirks and small pistols, no match for King George II's firelocks and grapeshot. But they were brave and proud. It was the last day of a romantic year, Bliandna Thearlaich, Charlie's Year, the last day the people of the Highlands believed in miracles and the first one in which they understood that blind devotion to a person, however bonnie, invariably ends in disaster."
"Does it?" she asked. Blind devotion. Evan was bonnie. Undeniably beautiful. And he knew it. "You're careful with your devotion?"
"I've never offered it easily."
"And you can't see yourself marching headlong into the enemy's gunfire in the service of it?"
"No," he said. He glanced over his shoulder, toward the towering cairn that had been raised, rock upon rock, to honor the men who fell on the field behind it. "The 16th of April, 1746. The English started the day with a steady barrage of heavy artillery, for which the Scots had no reply. Then Prince Charles Edward ordered the Highland charge, and the first wave rushed forward. 'Like hungry wolves, they were,' one witness said: the MacDonalds, Alexander MacGillvray and his Clan Chattan, the Camerons, MacLeans, MacLachlans. They ran willy-nilly into a forest of bayonets and the crossfire from two lines of big guns. They never stood a chance."
She studied the desolate field, could almost see the charge, could almost hear the gunfire.
"Next week, descendants of those men will gather here to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the battle. As long as they're all kitted out in their breacan..."
She lifted an inquiring eyebrow, needing a translation.
"... dressed up in their tartans," he clarified, "carrying targes and pikes and facsimile Claymores, I say they might as well have another go at the fighting. Rumor has it the odds favor the Scots this time around, since the English won't be attending."
"Neither will you," she guessed. She would have called his tone contemptuous if it hadn't been so sad.
"I don't care much for battle lore or battlefields. In fact, I'm not certain why I came here today..."
It wasn't the first time unfathomable impulses and random turns of fate had brought a man to this place, she supposed. Or a woman.
He stepped off the path, throwing off what little poise she had managed to marshal. She wasn't petite, yet even from this new vantage point, her chin barely reached his xiphi sternum, the bottom tip of his breastbone. He was lean, but broad-shouldered, and he seemed to radiate a strength and power that drew her toward him, that filled her with the desire to relax against him, to lay her face against his sweater and listen to his heart beating under it.
"American?" he asked.
"What?"
"Are you an American?"
He was speaking slowly again, looking at her oddly. She noticed that his long straight nose sported the faintest dusting of freckles. She found herself wanting to count them, the way a child would, one by one, laying her finger on each before adding it to the tally. She raised her eyes to his. "I'm American. From Philadelphia."
"Will you walk on the moor with me?"
It seemed an intimate question, one full of subtext and possibility. She would have been less surprised if he had asked her to go to bed with him. But she suspected the answer to either question would be the same. "Yes," she said.
She rescued her guidebook, then hurried forward to catch up with him. He walked like a warrior, contradicting his professed aversion to warfare, she noted, with long, purposeful steps, his gaze directed straight ahead, his chin held high. She could almost see the folds of a kilt flapping against his knees in the brisk wind.
He headed away from the path that circumvented the battlefield, toward one that cut right through the middle of it. The ground on either side of the path was much less solid than it looked from a distance, she discovered. It was spongy, covered with clumps of coarse, dark scrub and tangled brush, water bubbling up to form pools between the clumps – difficult terrain to fight on, she imagined.
"The sun doesn't seem to shine on this place often," he said finally.
"I've heard it doesn't shine on Scotland often," she answered.
He laughed. "American propaganda! But somehow Culloden always seems shrouded in fog, chilly and impossibly desolate. There are many stories about illusory clan brigades appearing out of the mist. One tourist, an American, I believe, swore he found himself in the middle of a pitched battle here. Culloden House, over that way," he said, pointing, "was Prince Charles Edward's headquarters. The present structure is built atop the original cellars. Some people say he haunts them still... You don't believe in ghosts, do you?" He stopped short and turned to her.
She stared at him, speechless, wondering if his perceptive eyes could read on her face the truth about her recent departure from reality. "No, of course not," she managed finally, defensively. "I'm a scientist."
He grinned. "A scientist, are you?"
She nodded.
"Then you're of the opinion that there's a rational explanation for everything?"
She raised her shoulders. She could have answered in the affirmative a scant half hour before. But suddenly the world seemed filled with mysterious things, with mist-shrouded moors and phantom Highland warriors, with this man's lips and her almost irresistible need to kiss them until she uncovered all the clues.
The fog was thick on Culloden moor, the sky above it gray, pregnant, threatening rain. The wind was raw, and the flags at either end of the battlefield – the standard of the Jacobite army, the standard of the Hanoverian army – twisted, wraithlike, in it.
Excerpt From A Case of Nerves
©
1999 Angie Kay
ISBN: 0-505-52312-4
Love Spell/Dorchester Publishing