Dragonfly in Amber, Page 7

  “Well, he was a fat little fellow,” Roger agreed, amused. “Hell of a general, though, at least as compared to his elegant cousin over there.” He waved a hand at the taller figure of Charles Edward Stuart on the other side of the foyer, gazing nobly off into the distance under his blue velvet bonnet with its white cockade, loftily ignoring the Duke of Cumberland.

  “They called him ‘Butcher Billy.’ ” Roger gestured at the Duke, stolid in white knee breeches and gold-braided coat. “For excellent reason. Aside from what they did here”—he waved toward the expanse of the spring-green moor outside, dulled by the lowering sky—“Cumberland’s men were responsible for the worst reign of English terror ever seen in the Highlands. They chased the survivors of the battle back into the hills, burning and looting as they went. Women and children were turned out to starve, and the men shot down where they stood—with no effort to find out whether they’d ever fought for Charlie. One of the Duke’s contemporaries said of him, ‘He created a desert and called it peace’—and I’m afraid the Duke of Cumberland is still rather noticeably unpopular hereabouts.”

  This was true; the curator of the visitors’ museum, a friend of Roger’s, had told him that while the figure of the Bonnie Prince was treated with reverent respect, the buttons off the Duke’s jacket were subject to constant disappearance, while the figure itself had been the butt of more than one rude joke.

  “He said one morning he came in early and turned on the light, to find a genuine Highland dirk sticking in His Grace’s belly,” Roger said, nodding at the podgy little figure. “Said it gave him a right turn.”

  “I’d think so,” Brianna murmured, looking at the Duke with raised brows. “People still take it that seriously?”

  “Oh, aye. Scots have long memories, and they’re not the most forgiving of people.”

  “Really?” She looked at him curiously. “Are you Scottish, Roger? Wakefield doesn’t sound like a Scottish name, but there’s something about the way you talk about the Duke of Cumberland…” There was the hint of a smile around her mouth, and he wasn’t sure whether he was being teased, but he answered her seriously enough.

  “Oh, aye.” He smiled as he said it. “I’m Scots. Wakefield’s not my own name, see; the Reverend gave it me when he adopted me. He was my mother’s uncle—when my parents were killed in the War, he took me to live with him. But my own name is MacKenzie. As for the Duke of Cumberland”—he nodded at the plate-glass window, through which the monuments of Culloden Field were plainly visible. “There’s a clan stone out there, with the name of MacKenzie carved on it, and a good many of my relatives under it.”

  He reached out and flicked a gold epaulet, leaving it swinging. “I don’t feel quite so personal about it as some, but I haven’t forgotten, either.” He held out a hand to her. “Shall we go outside?”

  It was cold outside, with a gusty wind that lashed two pennons, flying atop the poles set at either side of the moor. One yellow, one red, they marked the positions where the two commanders had stood behind their troops, awaiting the outcome of the battle.

  “Well back out of the way, I see,” Brianna observed dryly. “No chance of getting in the way of a stray bullet.”

  Roger noticed her shivering, and drew her hand further through his arm, bringing her close. He thought he might burst from the sudden swell of happiness touching her gave him, but tried to disguise it with a retreat into historical monologue. “Well, that was how generals led, back then—from the rear. Especially Charlie; he ran off so fast at the end of the battle that he left behind his sterling silver picnic set.”

  “A picnic set? He brought a picnic to the battle?”

  “Oh, aye.” Roger found that he quite liked being Scottish for Brianna. He usually took pains to keep his accent modulated under the all-purpose Oxbridge speech that served him at the university, but now he was letting it have free rein for the sake of the smile that crossed her face when she heard it.

  “D’ye know why they called him ‘Prince Charlie’?” Roger asked. “English people always think it was a nickname, showing how much his men loved him.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  Roger shook his head. “No, indeed. His men called him Prince Tcharlach”—he spelled it carefully—“which is the Gaelic for Charles. Tcharlach mac Seamus, ‘Charles, son of James.’ Very formal and respectful indeed. It’s only that Tcharlach in Gaelic sounds the hell of a lot like ‘Charlie’ in English.”

  Brianna grinned. “So he never was ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’?”

  “Not then.” Roger shrugged. “Now he is, of course. One of those little historical mistakes that get passed on for fact. There are a lot of them.”

  “And you a historian!” Brianna said, teasing.

  Roger smiled wryly. “That’s how I know.”

  They wandered slowly down the graveled paths that led through the battlefield, Roger pointing out the positions of the different regiments that had fought there, explaining the order of battle, recounting small anecdotes of the commanders.

  As they walked, the wind died down, and the silence of the field began to assert itself. Gradually their conversation died away as well, until they were talking only now and then, in low voices, almost whispers. The sky was gray with cloud from horizon to horizon, and everything beneath its bowl seemed muted, with only the whisper of the moor plants speaking in the voices of the men who fed them.

  “This is the place they call the Well of Death.” Roger stooped by the small spring. Barely a foot square, it was a tiny pool of dark water, welling under a ridge of stone. “One of the Highland chieftains died here; his followers washed the blood from his face with the water from this spring. And over there are the graves of the clans.”

  The clan stones were large boulders of gray granite, rounded by weather and blotched with lichens. They sat on patches of smooth grass, widely scattered near the edge of the moor. Each one bore a single name, the carving so faded by weather as to be nearly illegible in some cases. MacGillivray. MacDonald. Fraser. Grant. Chisholm. MacKenzie.

  “Look,” Brianna said, almost in a whisper. She pointed at one of the stones. A small heap of greenish-gray twigs lay there; a few early spring flowers mingled, wilted, with the twigs.

  “Heather,” Roger said. “It’s more common in the summer, when the heather is blooming—then you’ll see heaps like that in front of every clan stone. Purple, and here and there a branch of the white heather—the white is for luck, and for kingship; it was Charlie’s emblem, that and the white rose.”

  “Who leaves them?” Brianna squatted on her heels next to the path, touching the twigs with a gentle finger.

  “Visitors.” Roger squatted next to her. He traced the faded letters on the stone—FRASER. “People descended from the families of the men who were killed here. Or just those who like to remember them.”

  She looked sidelong at him, hair drifting around her face. “Have you ever done it?”

  He looked down, smiling at his hands as they hung between his knees.

  “Yes. I suppose it’s very sentimental, but I do.”

  Brianna turned to the thicket of moor plants that edged the path on the other side.

  “Show me which is heather,” she said.

  On the way home, the melancholy of Culloden lifted, but the feeling of shared sentiment lingered, and they talked and laughed together like old friends.

  “It’s too bad Mother couldn’t come with us,” Brianna remarked as they turned into the road where the Randalls’ bed-and-breakfast was.

  Much as he liked Claire Randall, Roger didn’t agree at all that it was too bad she hadn’t come. Three, he thought, would have been a crowd, and no mistake. But he grunted noncommitally, and a moment later asked, “How is your mother? I hope she’s not terribly ill.”

  “Oh, no, it’s just an upset stomach—at least that’s what she says.” Brianna frowned to herself for a moment, then turned to Roger, laying a hand lightly on his leg. He felt the muscles quiver from knee to gr
oin, and had a hard time keeping his mind on what she was saying. She was still talking about her mother.

  “…think she’s all right?” she finished. She shook her head, and copper glinted from the waves of her hair, even in the dull light of the car. “I don’t know; she seems awfully preoccupied. Not ill, exactly—more as though she’s kind of worried about something.”

  Roger felt a sudden heaviness in the pit of his stomach.

  “Mphm,” he said. “Maybe just being away from her work. I’m sure it will be all right.” Brianna smiled gratefully at him as they pulled up in front of Mrs. Thomas’s small stone house.

  “It was great, Roger,” she said, touching him lightly on the shoulder. “But there wasn’t much here to help with Mama’s project. Can’t I help you with some of the grubby stuff?”

  Roger’s spirits lightened considerably, and he smiled up at her. “I think that might be arranged. Want to come tomorrow and have a go at the garage with me? If it’s filth you want, you can’t get much grubbier than that.”

  “Great.” She smiled, leaning on the car to look back in at him. “Maybe Mother will want to come along and help.”

  He could feel his face stiffen, but kept gallantly smiling.

  “Right,” he said. “Great. I hope so.”

  * * *

  In the event, it was Brianna alone who came to the manse the next day.

  “Mama’s at the public library,” she explained. “Looking up old phone directories. She’s trying to find someone she used to know.”

  Roger’s heart skipped a beat at that. He had checked the Reverend’s phonebook the night before. There were three local listings under the name “James Fraser,” and two more with different first names, but the middle initial “J.”

  “Well, I hope she finds him,” he said, still trying for casualness. “You’re really sure you want to help? It’s boring, filthy work.” Roger looked at Brianna dubiously, but she nodded, not at all discomposed at the prospect.

  “I know. I used to help my father sometimes, dredging through old records and finding footnotes. Besides, it’s Mama’s project; the least I can do is help you with it.”

  “All right.” Roger glanced down at his white shirt. “Let me change, and we’ll go have a look.”

  The garage door creaked, groaned, then surrendered to the inevitable and surged suddenly upward, amid the twanging of springs and clouds of dust.

  Brianna waved her hands back and forth in front of her face, coughing. “Gack!” she said. “How long since anyone’s been in this place?”

  “Eons, I expect.” Roger replied absently. He shone his torch around the inside of the garage, briefly lighting stacks of cardboard cartons and wooden crates, old steamer trunks smeared with peeling labels, and amorphous tarpaulin-draped shapes. Here and there, the upturned legs of furniture poked through the gloom like the skeletons of small dinosaurs, protruding from their native rock formations.

  There was a sort of fissure in the junk; Roger edged into this and promptly disappeared into a tunnel bounded by dust and shadows, his progress marked by the pale spot of his torch as it shone intermittently on the ceiling. At last, with a cry of triumph, he seized the dangling tail of a string hanging from above, and the garage was suddenly illuminated in the glare of an oversized bulb.

  “This way,” Roger said, reappearing abruptly and taking Brianna by the hand. “There’s sort of a clear space in back.”

  An ancient table stood against the back wall. Perhaps originally the centerpiece of the Reverend Wakefield’s dining room, it had evidently gone through several successive incarnations as kitchen block, toolbench, sawhorse, and painting table, before coming to rest in this dusty sanctuary. A heavily cobwebbed window overlooked it, through which a dim light shone on the nicked, paint-splattered surface.

  “We can work here,” Roger said, yanking a stool out of the mess and dusting it perfunctorily with a large handkerchief. “Have a seat, and I’ll see if I can pry the window open; otherwise, we’ll suffocate.”

  Brianna nodded, but instead of sitting down, began to poke curiously through the nearer piles of junk, as Roger heaved at the warped window frame. He could hear her behind him, reading the labels on some of the boxes. “Here’s 1930–33,” she said, “And here’s 1942–46. What are these?”

  “Journals,” said Roger, grunting as he braced his elbows on the grimy sill. “My father—the Reverend, I mean—he always kept a journal. Wrote it up every night after supper.”

  “Looks like he found plenty to write about.” Brianna hoisted down several of the boxes, and stacked them to the side, in order to inspect the next layer. “Here’s a bunch of boxes with names on them—‘Kerse,’ ‘Livingston,’ ‘Balnain.’ Parishioners?”

  “No. Villages.” Roger paused in his labors for a moment, panting. He wiped his brow, leaving a streak of dirt down the sleeve of his shirt. Luckily both of them were dressed in old clothes, suitable for rootling in filth. “Those will be notes on the history of various Highland villages. Some of those boxes ended up as books, in fact; you’ll see them in some of the local tourist shops through the Highlands.”

  He turned to a pegboard from which hung a selection of dilapidated tools, and selected a large screwdriver to aid his assault on the window.

  “Look for the ones that say ‘Parish Registers,’ he advised. “Or for village names in the area of Broch Tuarach.”

  “I don’t know any of the villages in the area,” Brianna pointed out.

  “Oh, aye, I was forgetting.” Roger inserted the point of the screwdriver between the edges of the window frame, grimly chiseling through layers of ancient paint. “Look for the names Broch Mordha…um, Mariannan, and…oh, St. Kilda. There’s others, but those are ones I know had fair-sized churches that have been closed or knocked down.”

  “Okay.” Pushing aside a hanging flap of tarpaulin, Brianna suddenly leaped backward with a sharp cry.

  “What? What is it?” Roger whirled from the window, screwdriver at the ready.

  “I don’t know. Something skittered away when I touched that tarp.” Brianna pointed, and Roger lowered his weapon, relieved.

  “Oh, that all? Mouse, most like. Maybe a rat.”

  “A rat! You have rats in here?” Brianna’s agitation was noticeable.

  “Well, I hope not, because if so, they’ll have been chewing up the records we’re looking for,” Roger replied. He handed her the torch. “Here, shine this in any dark places; at least you won’t be taken by surprise.”

  “Thanks a lot.” Brianna accepted the torch, but still eyed the stacks of cartons with some reluctance.

  “Well, go on then,” Roger said. “Or did you want me to do you a rat satire on the spot?”

  Brianna’s face split in a wide grin. “A rat satire? What’s that?”

  Roger delayed his answer, long enough for another try at the window. He pushed until he could feel his biceps straining against the fabric of his shirt, but at last, with a rending screech, the window gave way, and a reviving draft of cool air whooshed in through the six-inch gap he’d created.

  “God, that’s better.” He fanned himself exaggeratedly, grinning at Brianna. “Now, shall we get on with it?”

  She handed him the torch, and stepped back. “How about you find the boxes, and I’ll sort through them? And what’s a rat satire?”

  “Coward,” he said, bending to rummage beneath the tarpaulin. “A rat satire is an old Scottish custom; if you had rats or mice in your house or your barn, you could make them go away by composing a poem—or you could sing it—telling the rats how poor the eating was where they were, and how good it was elsewhere. You told them where to go, and how to get there, and presumably, if the satire was good enough—they’d go.”

  He pulled out a carton labeled JACOBITES, MISCELLANEOUS, and carried it to the table, singing,

  “Ye rats, ye are too many,

  If ye would dine in plenty,

  Ye mun go, ye mun go.”

  Lowering
the box with a thump, he bowed in response to Brianna’s giggling and turned back to the stacks, continuing in stentorian voice.

  “Go to Campbell’s garden,

  Where nae cat stands warden,

  And the kale, it grows green.

  Go and fill your bellies,

  Dinna stay and gnaw my wellies—

  Go, ye rats, go!”

  Brianna snorted appreciatively. “Did you just make that up?”

  “Of course.” Roger deposited another box on the table with a flourish. “A good rat satire must always be original.” He cast a glance at the serried ranks of cartons. “After that performance, there shouldn’t be a rat within miles of this place.”

  “Good.” Brianna pulled a jackknife from her pocket and slit the tape that sealed the topmost carton. “You should come do one at the bed-and-breakfast place; Mama says she’s sure there’s mice in the bathroom. Something chewed on her soap case.”