Authors: Jeanette Baker
Legacy
Copyright © 1996, 2011 by Jeanette Baker
Cover and internal design © 2011 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover illustration by Phil Heffernan
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Originally published in 1996 by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc., New York.
Mairi Maxwell of Shiels (1271–1298)
Parents: Patrick Maxwell and Jane Sutherland. Married David Murray in 1296. Gave birth to his son, James, 1297. In 1293 gave birth to a daughter, Margaret Plantagenet, by Edward I of England.
David Murray (1267–1314)
Parents: Murdoch and Grizelle Murray. Married Mairi Maxwell in 1296. Had one son, James, 1297.
Jeanne Maxwell (1488–1513)
Parents: Donald Maxwell and Flora MacDonald. Married John Maxwell in 1509. Gave birth to twins, Andrew and Isobel, 1510.
John Maxwell (1482–1513)
Parents: Andrew Maxwell (mother unknown). Married Jeanne Maxwell in 1509. Had two children, twins, Andrew and Isobel, 1509.
Katrine Murray (1726–1746)
Parents: George Murray and Janet Douglas. Married Richard Wolfe in 1745. Gave birth to a son, Alasdair, 1746.
Richard Wolfe (1715–1765)
Parents: Susan Maxwell and Alasdair Wolfe. Married Katrine Murray in 1745. Had one child, a son, Alasdair, born 1746.
Christina Murray (1956– )
Parents: Donald Murray and Susan Maxwell.
Ian Douglas (1958– )
Parents: Evan Douglas and Kerry Maxwell.
Moot Hill, Scotland
1298
“Hurry.” Mairi’s voice broke the hush of moonless darkness. “We must be back at Traquair before morning.”
In silence the two men hoisted the large irregular stone into the cart and tied it down with rope. Then they settled the other, nearly identical stone in its place on Moot Hill.
Mairi could barely make out the burly, black-clothed figures through the dense fog. When at last she saw one of the men jump into the cart and take up the reins, she breathed a sigh of relief. It was nearly done.
“’Tis finished.” The voice at her elbow startled her. She turned to her loyal retainer. A look of worry marred Peter’s usually cheerful expression and not without cause.
He would return to Scone Castle at dawn when crofts and villages stirred with the first light of a new day. Wearing the livery of the Maxwells, he would lift the counterfeit stone from its resting place, secure it to the cart, and, in full view of curious eyes, carry it through Dollar and Stirling, past Edinburgh and Linlithgow, across the moors and through the borders until he reached the gates of Traquair House. He would answer questions along the way. No one would doubt that Scotland’s Stone of Destiny had been taken to the stronghold of the Maxwells.
With a smile that lit her entire face, Mairi raised her hand in farewell.
“Take care, m’lady,” Peter warned. “Keep to the woods. There are brigands on the roads.”
Her journey back to Traquair was made without incident. It took three men to drag the stone up the narrow stairs and then down the long, twisting tunnel into the burial crypt. When they were finished sealing the door, Mairi handed each of them a pouch containing five gold coins. “Godspeed,” she whispered in a choked voice. “Perhaps, if the Bruce is victorious, we shall meet again.”
The men looked at one another and shifted uncomfortably. “Dinna fash yourself m’lady,” the oldest spoke gruffly. “There is naught for us here. Wales is no’ such a bad place.” He grinned. “The gold will help.”
Mairi nodded and stepped aside. “Godspeed and stay out of sight.”
Night had already fallen by the time Peter reached Traquair House. Again it took three men to carry the boulder through the entry into the small hall. Mairi covered it with a cloth and left the room, locking the door behind her.
She held out her hand to her henchman. “I am in your debt, Peter. You have served me well. How can I ever thank you?”
“Bless you, m’lady. What you do is for Scotland. ’Tis I who should thank you.”
She pressed a pouch of gold coins into his hand. “Make haste. Send word when you reach Wales.”
He nodded and would have said more, but the tight look of pain on her face stopped him. “Farewell, lass,” he said softly. “May we meet again in heaven.”
Peter had served the Maxwells for as long as she could remember. She turned away, unable to watch him walk through the hall and out the door. All that was left was to wait for Edward.
He would come. She knew it as surely as she knew the familiar sound of her child’s cry. After five long years, she would once again look upon his face. Only this time it would be different. It would not be her lover’s face that she saw. It would be the face of Scotland’s enemy, her enemy. There would be no tenderness in his expression, his mouth would not curve with laughter, and his eyes, those incredible eyes that could glow with warmth and passion, would be the cold, ice-flecked blue of the North Sea.
Mairi shivered. She was afraid. He had threatened to kill her if she married David. There was no one to prevent him from doing so. Her husband was an outlaw, hiding in the Highlands with Robert the Bruce.
Edward had bided his time and waited for such a moment, waited for David to choose sides, knowing as surely as a hawk knows the lee of the wind that he could have chosen no other way. Even were David here at Traquair, there was nothing he could do. Once Edward issued a command, it was executed.
The royal herald had come two days before to the very gates of Traquair House, proclaiming that the king would ride into Scotland with an army of men to take up Scotland’s Coronation Stone, the Stone of Destiny, and bear it into England as a reminder that Edward Plantagenet was king of all Britain.
It was not the words themselves that drove a wedge of ice into Mairi’s heart, but the handwritten message that followed, sealed with the royal crest and written in the bold, flowing script she remembered so well. “
Lest you believe I have forgotten, know that I have not. We will meet again, Mairi Maxwell of Shiels.
”
She did not really believe he would kill her. He was not a man to vent his wrath on women and children. No, Edward would not harm her by taking her life. He would take his vengeance in another way, a way so purposeful, so calculating, so impossible to withstand, that her immortal soul would be forever jeopardized. And then, to assure that David would not avenge his wife’s honor, he would take her child.
David Murray’s son would be a powerful hostage in Edward’s fight against Robert the Bruce. Mairi prepared herself for the greatest deception of her life, knowing that the man she would face was a master of the art.
For days she waited, her nerves frayed and stretched to the breaking point. At meals she forced food past her unwilling lips, knowing that without sustenance the weakness she carried with her from childhood would prevent her from feeding her son. At night she lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling until her exhausted body, crying out for rest, wiped all conscious thought from her mind. She was up before dawn, listening for the sound of armored horsemen at the Bear Gates.
They came at nightfall. Mairi was in the nursery, watching the rise and fall of her son’s small chest as he settled into sleep. His eyes were closed, and she smiled in appreciation at the long black lashes and wispy new hair growing in above his forehead. He was David’s son, but no one with eyes could deny his Maxwell strain. Mairi smoothed the soft down on his head. The heir she had borne David Murray was extraordinary. That, at least, she had given him. If only for this child and nothing else, her blood would be well spent.
The boy was beautiful in the flame-lit wild way of his mother’s people. Black lashes rested like half-moons against his cheeks, and beneath his shuttered lids were eyes the same startling gray as Mairi’s own. They were Maxwell eyes inherited from his Celtic ancestors. Dark skinned and fine boned, that mysterious, warlike race had long ago marched into the mists of time, leaving their legacy in every man, woman, and child in Britain. Some, like Mairi, had the high cheekbones, square jaws, and sharply chiseled features. Others had small frames and pale olive skin. But they all shared the eyes, those eyes that smiled back at her from the face of her babe.
Mairi smoothed his blanket with a trembling hand. Dear God, how could she do it? How could she not? For the babe and for Scotland, she must go through with it. She must battle a legend using only words. God help her if she failed.
Innerleithen, Scotland
1993
I had never heard of Traquair House until the spring of my thirty-eighth year. Looking back with the clarity hindsight so often brings, I now realize my oversight had more to do with fate than timing. For an ordinary tourist, the lapse wouldn’t have been unusual. But I was Christina Murray. By no stretch of the imagination could I be considered an ordinary tourist.
For nearly eight hundred years the hills surrounding the Innerleithen Valley have shielded Traquair House from the world. Fifty minutes from Edinburgh, off Highway 709, between Selkirk and Peebles, the turn is easy to miss. Most travelers, intent on reaching the sites of the capital, pass by the poorly marked detour with barely a second glance. For me, there is no such excuse. For me, to have missed Traquair House borders on the absurd.
For fifteen years Gaelic antiquity has consumed my life. Even now, in moments of depression, when I seriously entertain the notion of giving it all up and opening a gourmet coffeehouse or a used bookstore, I have only to close my eyes and relive that first semester at the University of Edinburgh.
I was nineteen years old, a student in the foreign exchange program on my way to visit Holyrood House, when I stopped in at the museum on the Royal Mile. It was such a small out-of-the-way place, I didn’t expect to find anything important. But Scotland, I was to learn, is filled with surprises.
Reverently I ran my hands over the protective glass containing the Scots’ Covenant where the bold scrolling signatures of Montrose and Argyll leaped out at me from the aging parchment. A sword from Philiphaugh stood propped against the wall, and a well-leafed prayer book said to have been used by John Knox sat forgotten on a corner bookshelf.
Farther down the street, in the graveyard of Saint Giles Cathedral, I traced fifteenth-century death masks with trembling fingers and watched angry clouds gather above my head. For the first time I knew what it was to taste rain on the wind, to see the Grampians, gateway to the Highlands, and, in the distance, the clear light-struck waters of the Firth of Forth pooling silver blue into Leith Harbor. My eyes burned from holding back tears. The cobblestoned streets of Edinburgh welcomed me as if I had come home for the first time after a long and empty journey.
That was the beginning. After that first trip, I returned to Scotland once a year. My knowledge of British landmarks became second to none. I learned to navigate every twisting country road between Stonehenge and Dunnet Mead better than I could the streets where I was born, and my driving time from Heathrow to Edinburgh, at night without streetlights, was clocked at just under six hours.
Now, after twelve years of teaching at Boston College and five more of coursework, I was ready to begin my dissertation. My academic reputation was at its peak and my personal life just beginning to rebound from its downward spiral when Ellen Maxwell’s letter arrived. The incredible realization that, in all my years of research, I’d never even heard of Scotland’s oldest manor house made her invitation appealing. Someone like myself did not just overlook an eight-hundred-year-old manor house.
From the moment I climbed the gravel path to the top of the hill and looked down on Traquair House, it became my obsession. If any of it had happened differently, if the plane ticket from Ellen Maxwell’s solicitor had come at another time, if Stephen and I hadn’t gone through with the divorce, if I’d taken the grant or answered the summer school advertisement, the whole confusing tangle of the Maxwell-Murrays and the Stone of Scone might have remained unsolved for all eternity.
My introduction to Traquair bordered on the macabre. After a brief word of welcome, a servant ushered me up the stairs to an enormous bedroom and then disappeared. It was my first and only meeting with Lady Ellen Maxwell.
She lay still as death, stretched out under the sheets of an enormous four-poster. I moved closer to the bed, prepared for the worst. It wouldn’t be the first time I had seen a corpse. There is something about the absence of life that can’t be mistaken. It’s the fundamental missing piece, that mysterious primal core of the human condition that no scientific laboratory or skilled mortician can successfully reproduce. The nuns at Mount Holyoake would have labeled it a spirit or, better yet, a soul.
Life force
is the best I could come up with. Looking down into Ellen Maxwell’s face, I knew she wasn’t there yet.
Beside the bed, IVs attached to tubes led to her frail wrists. A pitcher with a glass straw sat on the nightstand near a bouquet of sage and purple heather. It had all the elements of a hospital room except for the smell. It didn’t smell like a sickroom. This room smelled of pine and spice and the moors near Jedburgh. Who was Ellen Maxwell and why had she summoned me, so peremptorily, to her sickbed?
I frowned and felt the skin between my eyebrows fold into accordion pleats. Consciously, I relaxed, forcing the muscles back into smoothness. Lately, since the divorce, I’d become critical of my appearance. There was nothing more damaging to a woman approaching middle age than frown lines.
The sound of soft breathing reclaimed my attention. I stared down at her face. Despite her age, vestiges of beauty still showed in her features. Her skin was smooth and paper thin. The veins in her temples stood out like blue lines against a white road map. Her hands were immaculate and surprisingly youthful, with long, thin fingers and raised oval nails. Patrician hands.
Somehow I knew that those hands had never felt the sting of cleanser against an open cut. They had never wielded a broom, scoured a pot, scrubbed a floor, or pushed a vacuum. Looking down at that haughty, aristocratic face, I felt a flash of resentment and was instantly ashamed. The poor woman was bedridden and old, and despite the fact that she had money, no one, no matter how indigent, would willingly exchange places with her.
The nurse entered the room, smiled at me, and leaned over the bed. “Lady Maxwell,” she said in the precise, clipped tone of London’s Mayfair district, “Miss Murray is here all the way from America to see you. Don’t be stubborn now. She’s been traveling a long time.”
Like birds’ wings, Ellen Maxwell’s eyelashes fluttered against her cheeks. With great effort, the lids lifted, and eyes, foggy from their drug-induced sleep, stared up at me. Several minutes passed as she struggled to focus.
“She’ll be fine now,” the nurse said. “You may speak to her if you like. Only her body is paralyzed. Her mind is sharp as a tack.” She nodded and patted my shoulder before leaving the room.
Ellen’s dark eyes, now lucid with intelligence, moved over my face, carefully analyzing each feature. It wasn’t a comfortable sensation. Never before or since have I been so calculatingly scrutinized. Feeling somewhat self-conscious, I stared out the window, allowing the old woman to look her fill. I was about to speak when the atmosphere in the room changed. Something was wrong, terribly wrong. Perplexed, I looked down at the aged face and felt the smile freeze on my lips.
Ellen Maxwell was terrified. There could be no mistake. Her body was rigid, her hands curled into claws. Every muscle in her too-thin face was strained by a hideous contortion. Her forehead was knotted, her nostrils flared. Her lips were pulled back, exposing teeth clenched in a feral grimace. Violent tremors rocked her frame, and her breath came in harsh, laboring gasps. A wrenching moan escaped from deep within her chest, a sound so primitive and guttural, so completely filled with despair, that it shattered what was left of my fragile control. I knew with terrifying certainty that Ellen Maxwell’s agony had everything to do with me.
“What is it?” I managed to whisper, bending over the bed. “What’s wrong?”
The anguished eyes fixed on my face pleaded for mercy. I backed away and then turned and ran to the door, throwing it open. “Help!” I shouted down the empty hallway. Where was the nurse? Why had she left us alone? The inevitable tears I had never been able to control welled up in my eyes and spilled down my cheeks. “Someone please help me,” I begged.
Behind me, a door opened. The nurse’s sturdy, white-clad figure crossed the threshold where I stood and walked quickly to the bed. She placed expert fingers on the sick woman’s wrist and then against her throat. Frowning, she leaned her head against those lips still frozen in their snarling grimace. Finally she stood, shook her head, and pulled the sheet over Ellen Maxwell’s head. “Poor dear,” she said softly. “The strain was too much for her. We’ve been expecting this for quite a while. I’m sure the diagnosis will be heart attack.”
“Do you mean she’s dead?” My voice cracked. “Just like that?” Visions of Hollywood emergency room scenes and frenzied doctors shouting for digitalis, while heart monitors bleeped their reassuring vertical lines, signaling the victim’s return to life, flashed through my mind.
“I’m afraid so, miss,” the nurse said regretfully. “It was only a matter of time. She didn’t want to be kept on with life support. It was her last wish that she meet you before she died.”
“But why? I didn’t even know her.”
“I couldn’t say. Perhaps your questions will be answered by her solicitor.”
Desperate for fresh air, I found my way down the stairs, past a maze of rooms, to the front door. A soft Scots brogue stopped me.
“Can I help you find anything, miss?”
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I recognized the stone-faced maid who’d ushered me inside when I’d first arrived. I considered telling her about Lady Maxwell but decided against it. It certainly wasn’t a stranger’s place to break the news of an employer’s death. “I needed some air and thought I’d take a walk,” I answered instead.
“I don’t blame you. The weather is lovely. Why don’t you take the path toward the Bear Gates. It’s a charming walk, and maybe you’ll find a docent who can give you a tour.”
“A docent?”
“Traquair House must make a living, Miss Murray. There’s a small restaurant and gift shop around the corner. In the summer, the company rooms are open all week for tourists.” She looked at me strangely. “Have you never been to Scotland before, miss?”
“Many times,” I replied. “I can’t imagine how I could have missed Traquair House.”
“Perhaps it was meant to be.”
“What do you mean?”
“We Scots believe in
the sight
. Some things are best left to the hand of fate.”
I almost smiled, then thought better of it. “If I meet anyone, who shall I say sent me?” I asked instead.
“Kate, miss.”
“I’d be grateful if you would point me in the direction of the Bear Gates, Kate.”
“Just walk the path, and you’ll find them. Enjoy your day, Miss Murray.”
I stared at her back as she walked away. For an instant, she’d reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t recall who it was.
The late afternoon sun warmed my head and calmed my frayed nerves. Drawing a deep, cleansing breath, I walked up the hill to the end of the gravel path. From there I turned back to look at the house. Never, in all my travels through Scotland, had I seen anything quite like Traquair House. It was as if time had rolled back, and I, Christina Murray, an unwelcome stranger, had intruded on the ancient fief of Maxwell.
The grounds were steeped in a halo of welcoming light. Four stories high with a gabled roof and rounded towers, Traquair looked more like a large manor house than a fortress. I knew from reading the brochures Ellen had sent that the original structure dated back over eight hundred years when Alexander the First signed a charter in the common room and that the modern wings weren’t completed until 1680.
In times of peace, Traquair had been a pleasure ground for royalty, in war, a place of refuge for Catholic priests. The lairds of Traquair had remained loyal to Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Jacobite cause without counting their personal cost. Imprisoned, fined, and banished for their beliefs, their home still stood, a sentinel to a nobler, more gallant age.
Something moved on one side of the far tower. A workman climbed down the scaffolding and disappeared behind the house. So much for romanticizing. In spite of all my efforts to the contrary, practicality had its own insidious way of invading my fantasies. Living in a home over eight hundred years old had some disadvantages after all. Traquair’s repair bills were probably stupendous.
It was obvious that the house had been well maintained. Stucco covered the original stone and mortar, but the dozens of rectangular, small-paned windows looked like the real thing. The grounds were exquisite with acres of manicured green lawns reaching past the gates to a forest of pine and black oak. A maze with shrubbery over twelve feet high grew in the back garden, and everywhere I looked squirrels and cotton-tailed rabbits stared at me from a healthy margin of safety.
Traquair House had been home to the Maxwells since the beginning of Scottish history. Once again I marveled at how I could have bypassed such a wonderful relic from the past. A simple diversion of ten miles on the way to Edinburgh would have brought me directly to the front gates.
My nose felt numb. Grateful for my wool pants and lined jacket, I slipped my hands into my pockets and increased my pace. Scotland was always cold. While the rest of the world celebrated the advent of summer, the first green shoots of spring were barely visible in glens north of the Firth of Forth. Even here in the borders where the temperature was ten degrees warmer, winds blew with the promise of snow and ice-covered lochs showed no inclination to thaw.
With my shoulders hunched and my head buried in the collar of my jacket, I would have walked right past the gates if Ian Douglas’s voice hadn’t stopped me.
Years later, I would recall the timing of that moment with pristine clarity. I would remember the crisp air and the leaden late-afternoon sky. I would smell the clean scent of pine, taste snow on the wind, and see stalks of gorse, golden and russet, growing wild beyond the tilled fields of Traquair. I would speculate on the odds of our meeting at all. What would have happened to the two of us if I’d explored the garden maze or the brewhouse instead of the gates? What if I’d taken a wrong turn or walked in the opposite direction?