“As God is my witness my only sin was in the hasty and unsanctified burial of the body, out of fear that those present would be disciplined for dueling, even though none of us had begun that awful process which concluded in such an untimely death. And so to the skirmish at the crossing of the River, to be detailed below, and then coals of fire upon my head when soon afterward, within the confines of Y——, the Earl B—— gave to me a letter informing the late J—— of his brother’s death and so of his accession to the title and the property, which had by the time of the receipt of said letter come to me, by my own hand however unwitting. Oft have I hoped to return to Virginia to provide the poor wretch proper Christian burial, but my hand was stayed by my reluctance to let my dear wife know the truth, and now that she has gone ahead of me to the Elysian Fields I am too old and infirm to accomplish my purpose, God forgive me.”
End of the chapter. Was it ever the end of the chapter.
Swearing beneath her breath, Amanda jammed the manuscript back into the folder. Witnesses, she thought. Archibald had witnesses.
She reached for the bundle of letters labeled “Miscellaneous” and flipped through them. She found a note from a tacksman on the estate, a letter from some minor literary light of the period, and—yes, there were two letters dated 1783, one from Major Alexander MacDonald and one from Major Duncan MacPherson, both of His Majesty’s 71st Regiment of Foot.
Amanda’s patience with period-speak was fraying fast, and she skimmed quickly through the calligraphy. But it was all there: Congratulations to Archibald, Lord Dundreggan, on his recent marriage to Miss Seaton, and roundabout references to the unfortunate incident at—MacPherson at least spelled it out—Melrose, for which Lord Dundreggan bore no fault, as he was but defending his honor against the rash conduct of another.
Yeah, the “Mac——” who’d been Archibald’s second would’ve wanted to whitewash his role in the episode. But MacDonald and MacPherson were majors, second only to Balcarres himself in the regimental pecking order. Archibald’s backer had probably been another lieutenant. How many men in a Highland regiment would be named Mac-something, anyway?
Majors MacDonald and MacPherson would have stopped the duel if they’d known about it, but since James and Archibald had gone at it right away—before James had had time to sober up, let alone come to his senses—the ranking officers probably came on the scene after he was dead. They’d had no choice but to acknowledge that his death was his own damn fault. Whether they’d conspired in his hasty burial and the tale of his honorable death in battle, sparing his family the ugly truth, Amanda had no way of knowing. And, after all these years, it no longer mattered. The words had been exchanged. The shot had been fired. The damage was done.
She could see the scene, lit by lanterns, maybe, or torches, the circle of grim-faced men around James’s body, his warm, vital body sprawled on the dark and bloody ground. God.
Amanda massaged her temples. She’d found Archibald’s confession after all, only—go figure—it wasn’t what she’d expected it to be. And it made sense, damn it. It made perfect sense.
Carrie liked to say that researching the original sources always rearranges your preconceptions. Here was a perfect example—James’s story, a verbal optical illusion that changed depending on how Amanda looked at it.
A little over two weeks ago she’d proclaimed she had no romantic illusions. Last week she’d admitted to Carrie that she did. Now those nonexistent fantasies were crashing and burning around her. The smoke of the destruction stung her eyes. But then, she’d walked into the fire with them wide open, hadn’t she?
Be careful what you ask for, you might get it.
She crammed the papers back into the folder. The truth, at last, was out. And the damage was done.
Chapter Twenty
Amanda looked around as though she’d never seen the room before. A sandwich and a cup of tea sat on a small table beside the settee. She touched the liquid. It was cold. Someone—Norah?—had brought her lunch and she’d never noticed her, let alone thanked her. Not, Amanda thought, that her work was engrossing or anything.
She stood up and shook the kinks out of her limbs. Malcolm wasn’t there. Neither was Cerberus, although the two cats were arranged elegantly on the chairs in front of the fireplace. Margaret looked up, scanned Amanda, dismissed her, and went back to sleep.
The images of a Star Trek screen saver filled the computer screen. From the speakers of the CD player came several a cappella voices: “What force or guile could not subdue, Through many warlike ages, Is wrought now by a coward few, For hireling traitor’s wages. The English steel we could disdain, secure in valor’s station; But English gold has been our bane, Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!”
Amanda thought of James, eager to identify with everything English, and his family and the Frasers as well, who placed assimilation above… . Above what? Honor? Or were they just being practical? Scotland had been bled dry in hopeless quests for independence. Quite a few Scots had fought against Bonnie Prince Charlie in the ’45.
Malcolm’s accent suggested a nationalistic streak, but his consulting work for English estates confirmed his practicality. She’d have to ask his opinion when he got back.
Except for the electronic equipment and the colorful covers of some of the books, the room probably hadn’t changed much since James’s day. Any minute now he could walk in the door, smiling that devastating smile, his eyes filled with pain and doubt.
No, the pain and the doubt had come later, in the coherent moments of his second life. Not that he’d been using doubt and pain to play on Amanda’s sympathies. It would never have occurred to him that a woman could find a hint of vulnerability attractive.
Everything James told her was true. It was just that he’d told it from his own point of view. He saw himself as Archibald’s innocent victim. Now that Amanda knew the truth, the whole truth and nothing but, she also knew that James had no honor to return home with, and no right to revenge of any kind. Crap, she thought. Double crap. So much for her memories of him staying untarnished.
At least she finally knew why an officer and a gentleman had ended up buried at the foot of Melrose’s garden. Because, his birth aside, James had been no gentleman.
James probably would have won the duel if he hadn’t been drunk. So drunk he hadn’t realized he was dead. And what had he been drinking? Some kind of rotgut, not the aromatic single-malt she’d smelled on his breath. Which proved that James’s appearance and manner had been shaped not only by his image of himself, but by what she’d wanted him to be. No, she didn’t have ordinary romantic fantasies. She had George Lucas special-effects epic delusions.
If James was no gentleman, Amanda told herself, then she was no lady. But then, only one of them had been playing by the double standard of the eighteenth century. Malcolm was right, there was no shame in appetite. The shame, the remorse, the chagrin, was in satisfying that appetite with a lie. The truth didn’t cancel out the intense relationship she alone had shared with James. What it did was take the pathos out of his permanent departure. And that, too, was a shame.
Yes, she was going to tell his tale, even though the tale wasn’t what he thought it was. What he wanted it to be.
Amanda’s eyes focussed. Malcolm was standing beside her. Judging by the angle of his brows and mouth, part amused, part wary, he’d been there a while. She collected her scattered wits and smiled up at him.
“Hello, lassie,” he said. “Welcome back. Where have you been?”
“1781, mostly,” she replied. “Having hair-raising adventures in historiography.”
“In Archibald’s memoirs?”
“Yeah, can you believe it? Let’s take a walk outside. I need some air.”
“Oh aye, we should be takin’ the sunshine whilst we have it.”
Malcolm turned off the CD player. Together they walked down the stairs, past the great hall and the portraits, to which Amanda gave a cold shoulder, to the front door and outside.
“You see yon hillside?” he replied, pointing. “When you can see it, it’s goin’ to rain. When you canna see it, it’s rainin’.”
Amanda laughed. She took deep breaths of the cool, clean air. Side by side she and Malcolm crunched down the driveway. Cerberus loped across the lawn toward them and for a few minutes they played with him. No wonder people kept dogs around, Amanda thought. They had no pretensions whatsoever.
At last Malcolm stood, his knees damp and grass-stained, his hair once again tousled. “So then, I’m wantin’ to hear the amazin’ tale. This way.”
He led her through the wrought-iron gate into the walled rose garden. Blossoms of every shape and color nodded against the silvery stone walls, filling the air with fragrance. Amanda craned her neck to look four stories up the tower keep, toward the windows of her bedroom and bath. Cerberus followed, checking out every bush with a sniff and pausing to anoint a few select ones.
A stone bench sat in a sunny corner of the wall, framed by dark pink rambler roses. The garden, James had said, where we plighted our troth. For a little while, maybe, he and Isabel had been happy together, he handing her a flower with a bow, she accepting with a curtsey. Until he found her passing the time of day with Archibald, who bailed out and left James to his jealous tantrum. It would never have occurred to Isabel, Amanda guessed, to be jealous of James not only speaking to other women but bedding them. Isabel would have the wedding ring and the Mrs. in front of her name, and whatever affairs he carried on after the marriage she would have suffered in silent dignity. Or maybe even relief, considering that Dr. Ruth’s How-To books were well in the future.
“A penny for your thoughts,” Malcolm said.
“I’m just glad I didn’t live in the eighteenth century.” Amanda sat down on the sun-warmed stone of the bench and patted the space beside her. “Sit down. It’s quite a story.”
Malcolm sat down. “Fire when ready.”
“Oh, I’m ready,” she told him. “It all started when Dr. Hewitt dug up some human bones in the gardens behind Melrose Hall. With all the insignia it didn’t take long to identify James. Carrie, my friend at the library, and I started looking into his life. The problem we kept having was why he’d been reported killed in the battle, but turned up buried in the garden.”
“I’ve been wonderin’ that masel’.”
Amanda chose her words carefully, saying nothing that didn’t have hard evidence to support it. “So I came up with the bright idea that his cousin Archibald found out about Donald’s death, which made James the heir and Archibald himself second in line, and killed James for the inheritance—and maybe even for Isabel. He buried James at Melrose but told everyone James had died in the battle and been buried with the other casualties.”
Malcolm’s eyes widened. “Oh, that’s a guid one. Old dry as dust Archibald, a murderer? But I dinna think you found supportin’ evidence the day.”
Amanda wondered whether she was that easy to read or whether Malcolm was exceptionally sharp. She might as well cut to the chase. “Yes and no. Archibald did kill James, he says as much in his memoirs.”
“Bluidy hell,” Malcolm said reverently.
“But it was in a duel. James challenged Archibald when he—Archibald—told the owner of Melrose, Page Armstrong, that James was threatening the virtue of his daughter.”
“That’s been in that tatty old manuscript all the while?”
“Yes, but I think you’d have to know about the Armstrongs and James’s body in the garden and everything in advance, or it wouldn’t necessarily make sense. I mean, assuming your grandfather read it all the way through—he must’ve been a man of rare stamina …”
“A proper scholar, he was.”
“… he’d have realized that Archibald killed a fellow officer in a duel. He might even have guessed who it was, because Archibald hints that he and his challenger had the same name, and then says he was horrified when the news of Donald’s death arrived after James’s death and he realized it was ‘by his own hand’ he’d inherited the estate.”
“But since everyone kent that James died in battle …”
“… your grandfather,” concluded Amanda, “might not have made that guess. Even if he did, he must have kept it to himself.”
“The thirties bein’ a more discreet time than our ain,” added Malcolm. “Why, the British papers didna say a word aboot Mrs. Simpson almost until Edward VIII abdicated for her.”
He was intrigued, Amanda estimated, but hardly upset. Good. That was one weight off her shoulders, at least.
“There’re some letters, too,” she went on, “which all fit into the picture. I got so absorbed I didn’t take a single note. I guess I’d better wade back in tomorrow and make some copies. Maybe you could take some pictures of me at work. Carrie will love it, her—our—article will read like a detective story. From the legend, garbled as it is, to the forensic evidence to the documentation to the sword in your hall, it all fits.”
“And posh Mrs. Snotty will love it, too.” Malcolm grinned, teeth flashing, his expression for an instant so like James’s Amanda felt dizzy. His hand took hers in a firm, warm clasp and she steadied.
She liked the way her hand fit snugly into Malcolm’s, and how they both balanced on her denim-clad thigh… . Am I on the rebound or what?
She asked, “I take it you’re not going with anybody, either?”
“No. I’m by way of bein’ in the market, though.”
“Yeah, me too.” Did I say that? Amanda had to laugh. Two weeks ago her love life had been dead in the water. Now it was moving at warp speed. “This is all happening a little bit too fast.”
“Sorry.” With a squeeze he took his hand back. “Noo that I’ve left university, it’s a wee bit difficult meetin’ attractive women wi’ similar interests. I’m comin’ on to you too strong.”
“Don’t apologize. I’m just preoccupied right now. It’s kind of an emotional roller coaster, you know.” Well no, he didn’t know. “After the funeral,” she finished.
“Oh, so he’s hauntin’ you, is he? I never had a ghost for a rival before.”
Amanda opened her mouth and shut it again. He was speaking metaphorically, yes, but what was she supposed to do? Tell him the supernatural and only too literal sequel to the story and have him think she was crazy? She didn’t think so. She settled for, “Yeah, I’ve gotten so wrapped up in my work James is almost real to me.”
Malcolm nodded soothingly. It was his candid blue-gray gaze that was unsettling. He had James’s carved lips and intelligent eyes, but his appreciation of irony was tuned more finely, aimed not at arrogant self-awareness but at perception of everything and everyone around him.
Amanda turned the conversation toward safer areas. “I guess it would be a problem, living out here with just your mother and the Finlays. Of course, if I owned a castle brimming with history, I wouldn’t go anywhere else, either.”
“Oh aye, it’s grand place and no mistake. The problem is I dinna own it. Neither does Mum. It’s my brother’s. The old law o’ primogeniture—the property goes wi’ the title, to the eldest child.”
“That’s right, your mother said something about him not being interested in the property.”
“Ah, no, he’s too much the Sassenach these days, turnin’ his back on his ain history.”
“The what?”
“Sassenach. An insultin’, if a bit old-fashioned, term for Englishman. Etymologically I’m thinkin’ it means ‘Saxon.’”
“My name is Saxon,” Amanda said.
“But you’d be respectin’ an historical property, eh?” Malcolm shook his head. “The title’s well and truly Archie’s and he’s welcome to it. But we’re workin’ on a way he can sel
l Dundreggan to Mum and me—for a parcel o’ English gold, I reckon. I dinna want to have to kill him for it, another round o’ death duties would be the ruin o’ us.”
Amanda met Malcolm’s smile with one of her own. Maybe it was the hand of fate, as the earlier Archibald had put it, which was leading her from the bones in the garden through James’s brief embrace to this other garden and to a very alive and substantial Malcolm. Maybe it only a chain of happenstance. Whatever. Tomorrow she’d gladly—if cautiously—dive into the stream and let herself go with the flow.
Shadows stretched across the garden. The roses bobbed up and down coyly. Far overhead glided a hawk or a falcon. Cerberus pulled his head out of a bush and strolled toward the gate, his tail wagging. Norah peered through the doorway. “There you are! How’s your work getting on, Amanda?”
Malcolm offered his seat to his mother. With a nod of thanks she sat down.
“It’s going really well,” Amanda replied. “Thanks.”
“Wait ’til you hear the tale,” said Malcolm. “Little did we ken all this time that old Archibald had a skeleton in his cupboard. The very skeleton that’s dozin’ in the hall noo.”
“Oh, aye?” Norah prodded.
Amanda repeated what she’d told Malcolm, this time adding more detail.
Norah listened, the rise and fall of her brows annotating the story. At last she whistled. “And here I was thinking Archibald a bit of a prat.”
Shadows in Scarlet Page 24
