Flame

by May McGoldrick

  “This is not your guilt to carry, Joanna!” Mater’s voice rasped in the dim light. “You must push it from you.”

  “I cannot!” She desperately entwined her burn-scarred fingers with the gnarled bones of the older woman’s hand. “Make me understand. I am tired of this confusion. I need to see the past so that I can face the present.”

  “I can teach you the history of those tombs.”

  “Nay! I want to learn your past. Your connection with the blood that flows through my body.”

  “I tell you ‘tis not your guilt to bear,” Mater argued.

  “But do you not see that it must be mine to bear? It always will be until I know the truth.”

  Mater shook her head.

  “Mater, help me,” Joanna pleaded. “Without knowing, I have been taught to hate. Without realizing, I have put a blindfold over my own eyes! Let me see! ‘Tis my right, Mater!”

  The old abbess took another moment to gaze into Joanna’s eyes before looking away into the darkness. “What more do you want to know? ‘Twas he. Your grandsire, Duncan.”

  “He took you against your will?”

  “He took me as he was used to taking any woman whom he saw and fancied.”

  “But there is a difference. Others, perhaps, were willing.”

  “He never understood the difference,” Mater said softly. “As far as Duncan MacInnes was concerned, he had a right to the bodies of all who lived on his lands.”

  Joanna stared, nausea gripping her middle, sickened at the thought that the very blood she felt pounding in her temples was the same blood that had flowed in the veins of such a monster.

  “He took you against your will, and then he threw you out?”

  Mater didn’t meet her gaze but looked away instead into the darkness.

  “Tell me the truth, Mater,” Joanna’s voice shook with desperation, with the need to know and to understand. “What happened to you?”

  The old woman’s eyes snapped back to hers. “I ran away! In my struggles to fight him off, I had been beaten. I was torn and bloody. After he left me, I could not stay any longer at Ironcross. I would not live with the fear that at any time he might decide to do the same thing to me again. So I ran away.” Mater let out a shaky breath. “That night, I left the only place I had ever lived, and crawled into the hills. The full moon shone down on me and I wept with despair. In truth, I almost hoped that some wild animal might find me and relieve me of my shame. But ‘twas not to be. The Lord had other plans for me. The women of the abbey found me. They took me into their care.”

  Mater’s eyes took on a faraway look as they stared into an empty corner of the room. “They were compassionate and strong, those women. They never asked any questions. They just accepted me as I was.”

  “So that is how you stayed and became one of them. Became their leader.”

  “You know, Joanna, I think I would have believed my life blessed if that were all I have to tell.” Mater’s gaze returned to fix on Joanna’s face. “But there is more. I did not know it then, but I was with child. Duncan’s child.”

  Joanna took one of Mater’s thin hands and held it tightly between her own. “What happened to that child?”

  “I...” The old woman’s voice was choked, and it was a long moment before she spoke. “Foolish as I was, I thought that the bairn might be better off raised as Duncan’s own. Though a bastard, the bairn would live a better life at Ironcross than in the ruins of the abbey among poor women who could barely manage to feed themselves.”

  “So you went back.”

  “Aye. I went back. And I will die again every time I think of it.”

  There were tears now, and Joanna saw them coursing down the wrinkled face.

  “If I had thought the first time was a penance for my past sins, this time was the punishment for even living. When Duncan heard I had returned, that I was in the kitchens, he came to me and dragged me into the scullery. Aye, right out there...with the others looking on! I begged, I cried, I pleaded with him. It all meant nothing to him. He raped me again, and more brutally than before. And what is worse, I remember--even as I lay sprawled beneath him, thinking my flesh had been torn asunder--I remember thinking, fool that I was...that perhaps there was a way to make some peace with him...for the bairn. When he was done with me, I told him that I was carrying his child.”

  Mater raised a shaky hand and stabbed away the tears that hung on her sharp, bony chin.

  “Duncan laughed. It was a vile, drunken, disbelieving laugh, and he told me that he would take care of it. And then he left me there.” She let out a mirthless laugh. “I never even had a chance to gather myself together. I looked up and saw your grandmother standing by the door. Aye, that was Duncan’s way of taking care of it. He’d gone to his wife and told her to see to it.”

  “Did she help you?” Joanna asked, choking on her question.

  “Help me? Aye, she helped me. Lady MacInnes was young, and did not yet know Duncan the way she would someday. She called me a whore.” Mater held Joanna’s hands tightly in her own. “She called for one of Duncan’s men. He dragged me out the front entrance to the Great Hall and threw me down the steps into the courtyard.”

  “Nay...” Joanna whispered raggedly, unable to hold back her tears. “It cannot be so.”

  “Aye. ‘Tis the truth. Every word.”

  “I know of my grandmother’s hatred for you. ‘Tis then that it all started?”

  Mater nodded. “Aye, she has always blamed me. Seeing me there and knowing it was not the first time, since I carried his child.”

  “Still, for her to carry her hatred for so many years.”

  “A woman does not forget.” Mater paused and her eyes took an unnatural brightness. “But ‘twas what I said later, when I was thrown out that she holds against me. I fell down the stone steps and landed on my belly in a bloody heap beneath the great iron cross that hangs above that door. I could feel the warmth of the rushing blood against my legs, the pain, and I knew that already I’d lost my child. But then I looked up at the moon, and when I saw the iron cross, I remembered the tales of the women who were buried in the vault. The ones that the women of the abbey still venerated. Everything came together in my mind then. I was a victim, just like them. I was lying sprawled in my own blood, as they had in theirs.”

  Mater’s hands squeezed Joanna’s hard. She was sure that the old woman did not even know that she was hurting her.

  “I cursed her then. The wind came up, strong and fresh, and I cursed your grandmother. I should not have done it, but ‘twas she who stood above me.”

  “She had hurt you.”

  “Nay. ‘Twas Duncan who hurt me. Only he. As the years have passed, I have never held a grudge against your grandmother. She was hurt as well. He used her, too--I know that--and tortured her like any other woman.”

  Joanna stared, tears streaming from her eyes, her heart ripped from her chest.

  “I cried out to God against their lust and their brutality. I shrieked the curse of Ironcross Castle. The wind whipped at those who looked upon me, and I brought back that curse with my cries. I invoked the Power. ‘Twas then that she started hating me. ‘Twas then that she began fearing me.”

  Margaret stirred slightly, but settled again on the straw bedding.

  “Twas then that I became Mater.”

  CHAPTER 32

  As the first rays of morning sun were breaking across the sky, Joanna wrapped herself in her cloak and stepped into the darkness of the passages behind the panel door in her chamber.

  She needed to go to the vault. She had to see it again.

  In the past, she’d treated the crypt as a place of evil. To Joanna, it had been the unhallowed ground of fiends and their rituals. But now Joanna understood it to be a place of goodness, a sanctuary, a temple from which the women drew sustenance as well as peace.

  She needed to go there and experience that herself, look at it with a new eye, feel it with an open heart. And she needed to go there to
undo all she had prepared. After hearing the abbess’s story, a story in which her own grandfather had played the most horrible part, Joanna simply could no longer see herself as Mater’s judge and executioner.

  Their talk last night had ended with Joanna asking about the ritual. Mater had explained it as the prayers that their sisters offered to keep away the violence and the lust of the lairds. Prayers! That’s all she had said. But Joanna did not believe prayers were capable of killing people.

  Not that Duncan had not deserved to die after all the misery he’d caused so many women. But what could explain the other deaths--of his sons, and Joanna’s mother, and the servants who had perished as well?

  Perhaps what Gavin had said before had been true. The power of the curse was at work, but perhaps the human hand controlling that power was not Mater after all.

  Making her way through the darkness of the tunnels, Joanna desperately hoped it was so. Indeed, since their talk together last night, Joanna had decided that no MacInnes would bring any more harm to the old woman.

  Mater had suffered enough.

  ***

  The moon rested atop the crenellated ramparts of the Old Keep as they rode into the courtyard. Leaving his steed with the stablemen, Gavin stared at the giant iron cross, gleaming in the torchlight over the door of the Old Keep.

  They wanted women. They were warriors. They deserved them...or so they thought.

  Wild-eyed and drunk, they rode out--you know the look, laird, the old leper priest had said--and across the gorge their lust-crazed shouts rang to the skies. The moon, full as a nine-month bride, lit their way. The men, drunken, possessed, riding across hills and into the valley of the virgins.

  When the church roof at the abbey blazed up, the flames scorched the very sky. The light from the fire could be seen from Elgin to Aberdour.

  Binding the women, they dragged them out and tossed them like deer across the saddles of their waiting steeds. A few of the villagers and the chaplain of the abbey protested, and the warriors cut them down like dogs. And so they rode back, bloody and hot with killing and lust. Back they came to their laird, full of themselves, boasting, cruel.

  Tossing aside his great drinking horn, the laird stood on the steps of his keep, smiling like some pagan king, his feet spread and his huge fists on his hips. Above him, the great iron cross shone brightly on the wall of his new keep, and a great fire burned in the courtyard before him. The women were wild, thrashing against their bonds and crying out as, one after another, the warriors dumped them from the backs of the horses into the dust.

  A virgin. Aye, a virgin. How long had it been, the laird thought, the throaty bark of his laugh cutting through the night. Ah, a virgin to bury himself in! That’s what he’d sent them after!

  Strip them all, he commanded. I shall have my choice of them. That one! Nay, that one! By the devil, I shall have all of them!

  There in the courtyard, beneath the full moon and the cross of our faith, they stole the maidenheads of the innocent saints of that abbey.

  ‘Twas a horrible night, a night of evil that this laird wrought.

  And then the women cried out, cursing him. Torn and bloodied, but still proud and strong, they spat in the dirt of that courtyard and cursed. Invoking the power of God, the power of the cross, the power of the moon and the earth herself, they cursed him and all who followed him, unrepentant.

  The laird had them struck down. His men beat and kicked them. Before that iron cross, they inflicted again and again their foul lusts upon those guiltless women.

  But then, when he thought they were finally broken, the laird heard the women’s voices rise. Louder and louder they moaned and wailed until their laments drowned out the foul laughter of those monsters. The voices rose higher and higher until they touched the moon, and that white glowing orb turned crimson with shame.

  They all stared, those warriors. Then someone shouted, The cross! The laird looked on it, the once shining iron now red with innocent blood. Spitting in the dirt, he drew his sword. He would show them. The bloodlust gleamed in his wild eyes. He raised his sword over the first woman. He would hack her body into a thousand pieces and burn her in that fire. Then he would do the same to all of them. He was laird of Ironcross Castle. He would not be cowed by these witches’ tricks.

  But before his sword could descend, the wind came. As the women’s voices continued to wail, the wind grew wild, sweeping across the loch and blasting the walls of the castle. Never before had anyone seen such power.

  The laird staggered and fell, and the warriors backed away. They watched as the gust swirled about the women, watched as their bodies writhed as if possessed, watched as the sparks of the bonfire swept around them, watched as one by one, the women dropped lifeless to the ground.

  Then, as quick as it came, the wind died, leaving behind only the bodies of the women.

  Without a sword riving them in two, without a dagger cutting their throats, all from the abbey were dead. And with them the laird--his neck broken, his unseeing eyes staring up at the full moon.

  No one knows who took the bodies and buried them in the vault beneath the keep--have you seen the crypt, laird? the priest had asked. It does not truly matter who put them there. However it was they came to rest there, the Highland women knew where they lay, and they began to appear. Every full moon, every year, they would come.

  They would come. And they would remember!

  Gavin stared at the red stain that covered the giant cross above the door. How much was legend and how much truth, the ancient priest had shrugged, was anyone’s guess. But the lairdship of Ironcross Castle passed on to other, ill-fated men, and eventually it came to Duncan MacInnes.

  The old leper priest had looked hard at Athol and then at Gavin. He knew more of Duncan that he cared to recall, he’d said. And he remembered the laird’s death.

  Gavin crossed the courtyard and ducked through the arched passageway into the kirkyard. Past the graves of former lairds, past the unmarked remains of countless others, he stepped into the little church.

  He stood there for a long while as thoughts of dead innocents flooded through his mind. Thoughts of the women of the abbey, of those who had died so senselessly in the fire. Thoughts of his own family.

  For the first time in his life, Gavin allowed his grief to spill out of him. Kneeling before the wooden cross in the darkened chapel of Ironcross Castle, he wept.

  ***

  He was standing there when she opened her eyes. The moon was streaming in, bathing her bedchamber in a bluish glow. Gavin had come to her.

  And it was obvious what he had in mind.

  Shamelessly, she let her eyes take in every bit of his glorious and naked body as he approached the bed.

  His voice, a low growl, started her body tingling with anticipation. “I was waiting for you in my chamber, but you did not come.” With one hand he grasped the blankets and cast them aside.

  She thrilled at the way his eyes traveled the length of her body. It was as if her thin shift could prove no barrier to his scorching gaze. “I wondered if perhaps you had no wish to see me. You went off...without saying a word...I didn’t know you were back.”

  Gavin lowered himself beside her. One of his hands reached out and touched the neckline of her shift, running his fingers lightly over her skin, sliding downward over the smooth linen. She bit her lip, gasping with pleasure as his fingers gently squeezed her hardening nipple.

  “I am here to apologize for that.”

  “Oh, is that what you are here for?” Joanna’s gaze flickered over the fully aroused manhood pressing against her thigh.

  Gavin smiled, following her eyes. “Aye. The old priest...well, Peter’s concern that he was at death’s door forced my hand. He was the only one, I thought, who would tell us the truth about Ironcross Castle and its past.”

  “And did you learn...?”

  “Later,” he ordered, pulling at the single tie at the neckline of her shift. Then, with a mischievous look, he slid
the thin material down her body. Joanna moved slightly, and Gavin quickly tossed the garment to the side. “I haven’t been forgiven, yet.”

  “But I...”

  “Nay, lass. We will have plenty of time to talk about the priest after you have granted me your pardon.”

  Joanna shivered at the gleam in his eyes. “I...”

  “I wronged you, and I deserve to suffer the penance of your choosing,” he continued with mock-seriousness, draping a leg over her belly. “I must make amends. Force me work hard, Joanna. I will sweat for your mercy.”

  He traced the curve of her breast.

  “I am no expert...oh.” She gasped as his mouth settled on her nipple. “I am no expert in methods of punishing a man like you. And besides, in seeking forgiveness, I have always believed we were given tongues for a reason.” She stopped as Gavin raised burning eyes to her face.

  “You are right, my love,” he said huskily. Flicking his tongue over her nipple, he slowly moved down along her belly, the tip of his tongue scorching her skin as he went. When he reached the mound of curls, he raised his head. “But as far as methods, perhaps I can help.”

  “You had better,” she said thickly, already consumed by the whirlwind of colors and light that were firing through her brain.

  “Lie still, and do exactly as I tell you. That will be my greatest punishment.”

  She looked into his dark, clouded eyes and saw the glints of humor. She didn’t know how far this game would go, but if she had her way--and she would have her way--the impending torture would be sweet, exquisite...and mutual.

  “Spread your knees,” he ordered.

  Although she had given herself to him many times in these past days, her face still flushed with heat. But looking at his surly expression, Joanna knew she had no choice. So slowly, with a pleasure she knew approached wantonness, she opened herself to him.

  “I am twisting in pain,” he said hoarsely, dipping his head and tasting her.