“. . . never mind where I’m calling from. I just wanted to tell you that I’ll be back sometime late this afternoon, tomorrow morning at the latest. What I have for you is big, Mr. Pilkington—the story I was telling you about. Part of it at least . . .”
Again her producer spoke.
“Right . . . but I can’t give it to you over the phone. I’ll tell you this much—the Stone of Scone has been found.”
Even Andrew from where he stood some distance away heard Pilkington’s exclamation.
“What!” came the echo of his voice.
“I’m sure it will be all over London before the day’s out,” Paddy went on. “But, Mr. Pilkington—I was there. I saw the whole thing. So unless you want me taking my story elsewhere, you’ll wait for me and not give it to Kirk.”
Paddy glanced toward Andrew with a smile.
He winked and nodded as if to say, “Good for you!”
“Right . . . yes, thank you, Mr. Pilkington. I also want to talk to you about my expenses. I’ll see you later today.”
Paddy hung up and laughed. “The poor man—he didn’t know what to say.”
“What could he say? You had him over a barrel!”
They sat down to their breakfast of eggs, sausage, tomatoes, mushrooms, toast, and tea, but they had only begun when the telephone rang once more. Andrew jumped to answer it.
“Yes, Inspector, hello,” he said. “Are you back in England?”
Andrew nodded.
“Yes . . . I see—so, what’s the news on the Stone?”
As Andrew listened, Paddy watched his face. He nodded, taking in the information, then after a minute or two broke into a great laugh.
“Just an Irishman I met at O’Faolain’s,” he said.
Again the inspector spoke.
“. . . who I am—no, not an inkling. I didn’t give him my name . . .”
More laughter.
“All right, then . . . you’re right, he probably is in for a surprise . . . thank you, Inspector. Cheers.”
He hung up and walked back to the table with a smile on his face.
“The Stone is recovered,” he said to Paddy as he sat down. “But the compound was deserted. The Stone is under guard and the whole place sealed off. Inspector Shepley said the Irish police are cooperating nicely. The Stone will be on its way back to Edinburgh in a day or two.”
“What was so funny?” asked Paddy.
Andrew began to chuckle.
“Shepley said, ‘By the way, what was your car doing out there?’ He said they found a car with UK plates in a ditch alongside the road about four miles out of Carlow. ‘When I checked the registration,’ he said, ‘who should I find out is the owner but Andrew Trentham himself!’”
Paddy laughed.
“And inside the car, literally asleep at the wheel, and without a scratch on him, was a drunken Irish farmer.”
Andrew broke into laughter again.
“When they finally managed to wake him up, all he could say was, ‘Got t’ keep the druids from gettin’ the laddie . . . fool the druids . . . ye can count on me.’—I guess he didn’t find the police station!”
“Now I really have an angle for my story that Kirk Luddington won’t know anything about!” laughed Paddy.
“There is only one trouble with that,” said Andrew. “Our friend Mulroney doesn’t like television people any more than he does druids!” said Andrew.
“Then you’ll have to tell him I’m with you.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” laughed Andrew.
Later that morning they drove into Carlisle. Andrew had Paddy drop him off at the hospital. They said good-bye. Paddy then continued south to London, and Andrew went inside to check on his father and mother.
Fourteen
A week later Harland Trentham brought his wife home to Derwenthwaite. She was able to walk, though somewhat unsteadily. Her left arm hung limp at her shoulder, and she had still not spoken since the stroke. The doctors could offer no clear prognosis as to further recovery, although they discussed treatment with a number of therapists.
Andrew remained at her side nearly every minute of the next week, attending to her every need, reading aloud, bringing her tea, helping her gradually accustom herself to a life that was dramatically altered. She seemed most relaxed when he was at her side and seemed always glancing about waiting for him when he was not.
Andrew could not have been more grateful for the opportunity to link hands of ministration with the prayers he had breathed that life-changing night on Iona. What the strong woman who had always been so in control thought of being waited on, it would have been difficult to say. She seemed to adapt to the change with more grace than might have been expected.
During the third day of the second week, Andrew came upon his mother about eleven o’clock in the morning, standing with her new cane before the second-floor window and gazing out upon the lawn and the lake in the distance. He had seen her watching him from this particular window many times. On this occasion, however, she was not gazing outside at him, but inside at herself. The window had become a mirror.
“Here, I’ve brought you some tea, Mum,” said Andrew as he walked into the room.
At first she did not respond. He wondered if she had heard him. Slowly she turned. A most unusual expression was on her face. With her good hand, she motioned toward the coffee table. Andrew set the tea tray down. Now she motioned to the chair beside it, indicating that she wanted him to sit down. He did so. Moving carefully, she took a seat opposite him on the settee.
Andrew waited, not sure what his mother wanted.
At last she began to speak, slowly and softly, almost unintelligibly to begin with. He was so elated at the first sounds from her lips that he nearly jumped up to run for his father.
But his mother waved her hand importunately for him to remain where he was.
“. . . must finish . . . want to say,” she whispered.
Andrew calmed and sat back. The expression on his mother’s face was clearly one of struggle to get out every word.
“I know,” she began, “wasn’t easy . . . all of us . . . Lindsay . . .”
As she continued to speak the words seemed to come easier, though her voice remained slurred and soft.
“. . . Stroke hit . . . second or two as I fell . . . saw my life passing—like they say . . . saw how I had compared . . . so many years . . . unfair . . . you’re right—burden of expectations . . . so clear . . . saw vividly. Yet I knew something dreadful had happened . . . losing consciousness . . . as I fell, I prayed . . . a split second . . . would have the chance to tell you myself . . .”
She turned her pale though still elegant face toward him, and her eyes filled with tears. “Then . . . woke up . . . you were looking into my face . . . so happy, but couldn’t say anything . . . lips wouldn’t obey my brain. . . . Then you said what you did . . . probably wondered if I heard . . . I did, every word . . . all I could do was cry.”
As he listened, Andrew felt the tears rise in his own eyes as well. Though neither of them saw him, Harland Trentham in the corridor had heard his wife’s voice and now stood listening at the doorway, his eyes in the same state as his son’s.
“I am proud of you, Andrew,” continued his mother, her voice continuing to strengthen. “You are a son any mother could be proud of . . . should be proud of, not just for what you have accomplished . . . for the man you are . . . man of character. Your father always knew it . . . thinks so much of you. I was afraid to think about it . . . for fear I would forget Lindsay. Maybe I was afraid to let myself be proud of you, thinking it would not be right of me toward her . . . don’t know why . . . suppose I’ve been a mixed-up woman for many years. You have been a good son to your father and me . . . as good and honoring a son as you could be. I am so sorry for not realizing it and for not telling you . . . suppose I did realize it . . . didn’t know that I did . . . never said anything to you. Forgive me.”
Andrew was already on his feet
. He sat down beside her on the settee and took his mother in his arms.
“I do forgive you, Mum,” he said. “I’ve already forgiven you. We’ll be all right now.”
“Thank you,” she whispered. “I love you, Andrew.”
“I love you, Mum.”
Outside the door, the one who loved them both stood choking back his tears.
Fifteen
The following afternoon, after a joyous twenty-four hours in which husband, wife, and son had been able to converse together again with newfound freedom and mutual respect and love each toward the other, Andrew sat down in his favorite reading chair in the library. His father was somewhere upstairs. His mother was sleeping comfortably in her room. For the first time in years, the house felt completely at peace in every way.
On Andrew’s lap sat one of Duncan’s books in which he had been reading. He had been saving this particular story for just the right time. He had, of course, heard the captivating tale from Duncan’s own lips, but he had never actually read it through from beginning to end in the worn and treasured old volume.
He heard a sound. He glanced up. His father entered the library.
“You know, son,” said Harland Trentham, “ever since you brought up our ancestral line and asked me about those old portraits, I haven’t been able to get that old Highlander up in the gallery out of my mind. I was up there just now. Now I know why his eyes got into you that day. I must confess, he’s had the same effect on me. Every time I go through the gallery now, I sense him gazing down at me. Whenever I let his eye catch mine, something sweeps over me—a sense of mystery. I don’t know. . . . I can’t explain it. Do you know what I mean, son?”
“Yes, Dad,” Andrew smiled, “I think I do.”
“And now that I think about it, I do remember being told as a child about there being a Scots branch on the old family tree. There must be something to it if it has such a strange power.”
“I’ve got an old book here you might like to read—one I borrowed from Duncan.”
“You don’t say? I would like to see it.”
“Here, let me show—” began Andrew, starting to hand it to him.
“No,” replied his father. “I’m not in the mood to read just now. I’ll look at it tonight. What’s it all about?”
“Tales of old men and women,” replied Andrew, resuming his seat. “Duncan used to let me look at it and tell me stories from it when I was a boy.”
“What do they have to do with the chap up in the gallery?”
“I’m not sure. I haven’t gotten that far along in the story.”
“Hmm . . . I wonder who the old Highlander is anyway.”
“I don’t know, Dad. But I am going to find out. I have the feeling we’ve only begun to unravel the mystery of our family tree.”
“Well, let me know what you find out, Andrew, my boy.”
“I will, Dad. I am determined to find what legacy that old kilted Highlander has left us.”
“Well, you’ve got my curiosity up now. I think I’ll go out with the horses . . . what do you say if tomorrow you and I make sure your mother’s all right, then saddle up Hertha and Kelpie and ride out to see Duncan together?”
Andrew nodded.
“Good idea, Dad. I’d like that.”
His father turned and left the room. In another few seconds Andrew heard the front door open and close.
With his heart full, a tray of tea and oatcakes on the stand beside him, and the whole lazy afternoon ahead, this was the moment he had been waiting for.
Andrew opened the faded front board of the book and flipped the pages back to where lay his leather marker. He took a satisfying sip of tea, then began.
“It was a rugged, mountainous glen,” he read, “through which tumbled the small river for which it was named. . . .”
Two hours later, Andrew Trentham still sat, the teapot long empty, a few crumbs of oatcake on his shirt, his mind miles and centuries away. . . .
Once they were through the snow to the safety of the cave, Ginevra quickly pulled off Brochan’s boots, rubbed his feet with her hands, then wrapped them in the dry plaid of her clan, left for her by the son of Glencoe’s new chief. Here they would rest, and she would do what she could to nurse the wounds of the man she loved.
Back in the glen of death, Major Duncanson did not arrive until seven. Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton, finding the Devil’s Staircase impassable in the blizzard, did not get through until eleven.
By then the killing was nearly done.
The regiments under the major’s and the lieutenant colonel’s charge did little more than round up the rest of the cattle, loot what goods they cared to steal, and then set what remained of the glen’s villages ablaze. A few halfhearted attempts to track the survivors into the surrounding snow-covered mountains followed, but without much result. Thirty or forty bodies were found but left where they lay, already frozen.
Both Duncanson and Hamilton were furious with Campbell of Glenlyon when they learned that both of MacIain’s sons had escaped. He had entirely failed in the orders given him—less than a tenth of Glencoe’s population was found dead.
Only some thirty-eight had actually been murdered by guns, bayonets, knives, swords, and fires before most escaped. Many more, however, had perished in the freezing storm, driven from their beds but half dressed and without provisions adequate to hide out for long in the hills.
The several escape parties, as well as some who had taken the soldiers’ cryptic warnings to heart and made off into the hills the night before, managed to meet later in the glens of Appin. There did Ruadh Og again see his father, telling him what had happened . . . and to whom he owed his life. In Appin the remnant of clan MacIain settled. They would rise again from the ashes of devastation and spilled blood of that fateful winter’s morning in the glen called Coe.
But the clan never returned to make Glencoe its home. The blood of MacIain stained the ground of the place for all time. Henceforth would Glencoe be a desolate shrine to the rape of a people and a promise of freedom unfulfilled.
Once she had her patient comfortably resting, Ginevra returned the next day to the glen that had been her home. Thankfully the bodies of her mother and younger brother had been buried with the rest of the dead.
In the rubble of a certain cottage of Achtriachtan, Ginevra discovered the charred harp of bard Ranald of the Shield. Half its strings had snapped, and its body was badly blackened. Yet the shape of oak and willow was intact, and the strength of its wood still firm. She carried it with her to Brochan’s hideaway and sat by his side through the cold nights of winter, attempting to make what music she could, with harp and voice, to cheer him.
Neither of the two were ever seen again by the people of the glen.
Years later, high upon the slopes of Aonach Mor, a small deserted stone cottage was discovered that none in the region knew of. It had apparently not been in use for some time.
The only item in it of apparent interest was a very old and well-worn tartan blanket, which was carried back to the village in Appin, where dwelt a certain Ruadh Og MacIain, brother to the present chief of the small clan.
When he saw it, Ruadh smiled. Well he knew that this tartan was worn only by the family of the chief and had once, many years before, been his own.
In after years the only reminder of those previous times, faintly heard occasionally on the edge of a lonesome Highland wind, was the thin ghostly whine of the final lingering mournful tones, as of an aeolian harp, of the departed dead of Glencoe.
To some it sounded as if an invisible finger were plucking the melancholy strains of the dead bard’s lament to the lassie with the spirit of the Highlands in her soul.
We gaze into yer eyes—only blue looks oot.
We see only the twinkle o’ stars, the pale o’ dawn . . .
A vast empty sky. Tell us gien ye can.
Wha are ye, lass?
Tell us gien ye can.
Epilogue
SIX MONTHS LA
TER
This is Patricia Rawlings reporting live from outside the Palace of Westminster. . . .”
The little-known American journalist had finally landed a scoop big enough to justify her being put on live camera before the nation. A cold winter drizzle stung her cheeks but could not dampen her spirits as she looked into the camera and began her report.
These were the most talked-about stories to break since Luddington’s reporting of the Queen’s abdication. And the fact that Rawlings herself had been instrumental in Scotland Yard’s finally solving the two related cases meant that Pilkington had had little choice.
Suddenly the young woman who had awkwardly put her foot in her mouth at this same spot before her reportorial colleagues was, for a few days at least, the most famous journalist in London. Her daring sleuthing in both the matter of the Stone of Scone and the solving of a murder had made of her, if not exactly a hero, then certainly a newswoman who would have plenty of offers on the table by next week had her BBC producer not given her the air time she wanted. She was already being talked about as potentially the next Jill Dando.
All at once Rawlings’ American accent had become a trump card rather than a liability.
So here Paddy was—while Luddington cooled his heels in the crowd—her heart pounding in fear lest some Yankee blooper pop out of her mouth, and doing her best to look calm and collected as she conveyed details to a listening world.
“After secret machinations behind these very walls,” Paddy continued, “involving Liberal Democratic leader Andrew Trentham and parliamentary colleagues from several parties—”
As she spoke, Paddy could not prevent a momentary glance toward Andrew, where he stood among the crowd of notables present.
“—late yesterday afternoon, investigators at last broke wide open the case involving last year’s murder of the Honorable Eagon Hamilton. As suspected, the murder was connected with the theft of the fabled Stone of Destiny, which was recovered early last summer from the Celtic Druidic Center in County Carlow, Ireland, and is now once again safely in the Crown Room of Edinburgh Castle.”
Legend of the Celtic Stone Page 59
