Three
I shivered and pulled the covers up to my neck. The cozy fire crackling in the fireplace wasn’t enough to warm my entire room. Traquair had central heating, but the cost was too phenomenal to even think of turning it on in June. At least my feet weren’t cold, thanks to the warming pans Kate had insisted on slipping between the sheets.
It was late, and I should have been tired. But I couldn’t sleep. All I could think about was Katrine Murray. After dinner, I’d insisted on returning to Ian’s home to view the infamous portrait. I suppose she might have appeared differently in the glaring brightness of electric light, but the attic had no electricity.
Softened by the flickering glow of candles, the hollows under her cheekbones deepened in purple shadow, Katrine Murray was beautiful. Her black hair was unpowdered and pulled off her face to surround her head in a cluster of curls, one lying temptingly against the swell of her white breast. Her bodice was very low and edged with lace in the fashion of the day. Wide skirts flared out from an amazingly tiny waist. Her nose was small and straight, her cheekbones pronounced, her mouth turned up in a tantalizing smile. But it was her eyes that held me. They were large and light, a clear lucid gray, framed with feathery black lashes.
They were my eyes and they looked out from my face. Or at least it had been my face twenty years ago. This girl from the past, at the height of her beauty, knew the full extent of her power. She had not yet experienced doubt or disillusionment or loss. Looking into the eyes of that undeniable ancestor whose genes had passed down two hundred years, through generations of Murrays, to show up in the face of an innocuous American, I felt a strong and inexplicable desire to weep.
Ian seemed to understand what I was feeling. He said very little on our way back to Traquair. I didn’t mind that he didn’t speak or that he didn’t kiss me good night. All I could think of was getting my hands on Janet Douglas’s diary.
Kate had left a pot of hot milk on my nightstand. It had a strange pleasant flavor, unlike anything I’d tasted before, something between cinnamon and sage. I drained the pot, turned out the light, and drifted into an unsettled sleep. At least I think it was sleep. There could be no other explanation for the events I experienced that night. I remember it began with the cold. Not the kind of clean cold that comes from being outside in the wind chill of January in Boston. This was a clammy cold. The kind that works its way deep inside aching bones.
I stood on a narrow, dangerous stairway in a chamber that I’d never seen before. The walls were granite and very close together, hewed unevenly by a negligent craftsman with crude tools. The dripping dampness increased my feeling of dread. I rubbed my arms, wondering why I had chosen to wear nothing more than a cotton nightgown with thin straps. The only light came from a glow farther ahead, down the stairs. Bracing myself with my hands on opposite sides of the wall, I carefully inched my way, one step at a time, toward the light.
I can’t begin to describe the near misses on those slippery steps, the growing tension, the aching muscles in my shoulders and arms as I braced my body weight for what seemed like hours during that dark, twisted descent into the unknown. All I could do was follow the light. Instinctively, I knew wherever it led was my destination. There were moments when I looked up from the next treacherous step, when the stairwell straightened for a bit, that I thought I saw shadows and the fluttering of a dark cloth or it could have been a blanket.
Finally it was over. There were no more stairs. Turning sideways I managed to squeeze through a narrow opening and stepped into a cave-like room lit by foul-smelling torches mounted on the walls. I looked around. The hair on my neck lifted as I recognized where I was. The tiny altar with a statue of the Virgin Mary set above a large irregular stone, the flickering candles, the faint subtle hint of herbs, the square stones set inside the granite walls, and the death masks, peaceful and expressionless, etched into the granite. There could be no mistake. I had been led into a crypt, a family burial chamber. Goose bumps appeared on my arms and I panicked.
I can’t explain my trauma regarding the whole idea of death. I have no idea how long I’ve felt this way or where it even began. I only know that for as long as I can remember I’ve lived with the recurring nightmare that walls are closing in on me. With every heartbeat, they move closer and closer until, with one last sobbing breath, one painful scrape of nails against stone, one horrified memory of light and life and effortless breath, I feel the unbearable pressure crushing my chest. Then I feel no more.
My heart slammed against my ribs. I slid to my knees, my hands shaking. I would have closed my eyes, but something stopped me. A movement in the darkness. The panic receded. I wasn’t alone. A slender figure, shrouded in a dark, feminine cloak, the hood pulled up to shield her face, moved out of the shadows and faced me. She said nothing.
“Who are you?” I whispered. I couldn’t be sure, the cloak hid so much, but there was something familiar about the way she moved. “Please, speak to me.”
She moved aside and gestured toward the altar. I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”
With an impatient shrug of her shoulders she turned, walked to the altar, and placed both hands on the stone. I don’t know how long I watched her standing, her face hidden, her hands on the pyrite-studded sandstone. I was no longer cold. The woman changed position. She knelt, pressing her lips against the stone. Then I saw it. Rays of light, warm and breathtakingly beautiful, dim at first and then growing steadily brighter, illuminated the rock. There was no window, no outside light, no artificial source. It came from inside the stone. In that piercing, crystal-bright moment, I realized what I was looking at. This was the Stone of Destiny, Scotland’s Stone. The stone that was supposed to be sitting under England’s Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey. It had been there since the thirteenth century. But what was it doing here?
Forgetting my fear, I stood and walked toward the woman and the miracle of light. She stood and turned to meet me, dropping the cloak. I stopped, riveted to the freezing granite under my feet. Framed in long black hair, gray eyes stared back at me from a clear, finely featured face. It was my face and Katrine Murray’s. No, definitely not Katrine’s. This woman was older, closer to my own age than the lovely girl in the portrait. Her hair was braided with gold thread and hung, thick and black, past her knees. A twisted red girdle gathered the draping folds of her white dress around her hips, and the deep, square bodice showed a slender neck and sloping shoulders.
It wasn’t her face that separated her from women like Katrine Murray and myself. It was her expression. This woman had known suffering. There was pain in the trembling lips and desperate lift of her chin. Pain and pride. But it was her eyes that revealed the depths of her despair. Those clear gray eyes were filled with a longing so complete, it consumed her. I knew without question that whatever trials I’d experienced in my life, they were nothing compared to the heartbreak this woman with her white gown and ravaged face carried with her.
Her features were so like my own it was like looking into a mirror, and yet she was nothing like me. This was a woman who would stop conversation when she entered a room. The smooth, graceful glide of her walk, the imperious wave of her hand, the richness of her hair, the passion brimming from her light-filled eyes. This woman had conquered fear. She stood before me with the bearing of a queen, straight backed, her head held high. Like Helen of Troy and Eleanor of Aquitaine, this was a woman who had it within her to change the course of history.
“Who are you?” I asked again, refusing to allow her identity to remain a mystery.
She tilted her head, as if considering my question. Then she turned back to the stone, motioning me to join her. I hurried forward. We stood together, two women so alike and yet nothing alike. Together we knelt. Together we placed our hands on the stone.
The pulsing began in my fingers. Spreading like a wave, it moved to my temples, down to my throat and across my chest, until I could no longer separate it from the pounding of my heart. There was an explosion of light, a sensation of heat. The room rocked and then disappeared.
And then I was alone, standing at the Bear Gates of Traquair House in broad daylight. Horrified, I realized that I was still in my nightgown.
Even now, when I try to recall my experience, I find it difficult to explain with any clarity at all. There is nothing by which to compare it. It had the essence of a dream, but it was far more than that. I had full awareness of the events without the power to participate or influence their outcome. But I wasn’t spared the ability to feel. I felt everything: the horror that surrounded me, the hot tears that blinded my eyes and burned my cheeks, the rage at my inability to alter the course of fate, the fierce pride that welled up inside of me when I realized who this woman was.
From early childhood, I have always been a dreamer, remembering events with clairvoyance found only in those particularly susceptible to hypnotism. But never before had I experienced such total omniscience. I was everywhere, knowing all things, without the ability to interfere, like a novelist who has lost control of her book to Hollywood screenwriters. That must be why I heard the angry crowd advancing on Traquair House before anyone else was aware of it.
I could still see it in my mind just as it happened in my dream. The blood pooled out between the stone slabs into the courtyard, welling and eddying up to my knees, soaking my nightgown. A dark, ugly purple-red, it crept to the level of my neck, then my chin, and finally my lips until I was drowning in the warm animal smell and taste of it.
I will never forget the dark-eyed woman whose face looked frighteningly familiar. She cursed the women of the Maxwell line, damning them to tragic deaths and ghosts who walked in the night until the Stone of Destiny was restored to its rightful resting place.
Recalling the horrifying events never fails to make my skin crawl, but I can’t help looking back and remembering every lifelike and terrifying detail. The events are clearly etched in my mind as was the knowledge that whatever Mairi of Shiels was, a traitor to Scotland she was not. But how could I, an insignificant American, prove her innocence and why, after seven hundred years, should it be so important that I do so?