Tempest in the Highlands (The Scottish Relic Trilogy)

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  To the memory of Warren Smith and Allan H. MacLaine:

  Two great educators who inspired in us an abiding love of Shakespeare and Scottish literature.

  Prologue

  Shrine of the Cloak

  Monyabroch, Scotland

  May 1544

  “Fire.”

  Miranda sat up in panic. On the cot beside her, her mother rocked stiffly, her eyes staring off into the smoky darkness of the hostel. The word had come from Muirne MacDonnell’s lips, but she was locked in a fixed, trancelike state.

  “Fire . . . burning,” Muirne whispered, unaware of the dozens of other pilgrims sleeping around them.

  Miranda touched her mother’s face. It was hot. Feverishly hot. For a moment she wondered if this was more of the sickness that had brought them here. For months now, they’d traveled to one holy shrine after another as the illness gripping Muirne worsened, putting her far beyond the healing abilities of the physicians they visited. They all claimed there was nothing to be done. She was dying.

  “Houses burning. Churches. Smoke. Edinburgh is in flames.”

  These were not the words of fever, Miranda realized. This was a vision, like so many she’d seen over the years.

  Only a handful of the travelers in this room were MacDonnells. Regardless of their kinship, she couldn’t rely on any of them for help. None knew of Muirne’s visions. Or how they came true.

  A single line of moonlight streamed past the edge of a shuttered window, cutting a swath across the sleeping women. But for occasional restlessness and soft snores, the chamber was still. Beyond the whitewashed stone walls on either side, room after room overflowed with pilgrims.

  Every spring they came to the Shrine of the Cloak. Crutches littered the floor between the sleeping travelers. Many traveled long distances. The lame, the blind, the sick, the desperate, the faithful. They all came to the shrine for help, believing one touch of the saint’s cloak would heal them.

  Miranda caressed Muirne’s face and pulled her mother against her, hoping to ease her gently from the spell. Time was an obscure element in these visions. Perhaps when she awakened, they’d know more of what she’d seen.

  Her gaze fell on an old woman sitting against the wall. Dark eyes watched them. Lips moved as she prayed her rosary.

  At eighteen, Miranda knew how dangerous it was to expose her mother to suspicion of being possessed, or worse, to charges of witchcraft. This was all explainable. She was having a nightmare, that’s all.

  Muirne clutched at her daughter’s arm, her eyes open wide. The next wave of the nightmare she was wrapped in was ready to consume her. “They’re here.”

  Any further thought of explaining fled. Springing from the cot, Miranda rushed between the beds to the shuttered window. Pushing it open, she looked out past the gate at the end of the inn’s courtyard.

  Muirne was right, as always. Even from this vantage point, she saw them in the distance, coming over a hill on the river road. A seemingly endless line of torches, a glittering serpent slithering through the night toward the shrine.

  Travelers around the room stirred. A woman raised her head in the darkness a few feet away.

  “Gather your things,” Miranda cried out. “Everyone. We must go. We must all leave here now.”

  Moving between the cots, she shoved the shoulder of one pilgrim, then the next, shaking them.

  “Wake up,” she shouted, going to the door and pulling it open. “Quickly. Gather your things and run to the north. We’re under attack.”

  Miranda helped an old woman to her feet.

  “Go and rouse the men,” she said to a girl. “Soldiers. English soldiers are almost upon us. They’ll burn the shrine, pillage the town. Kill us all.”

  A woman cried out from the window. “She’s right. I see them!”

  The room erupted in panic.

  Women streamed out the door and down the steps into the courtyard. From the men’s rooms came shouts as word reached them.

  A toddler wailed as people stampeded around her. Miranda lifted the child into her arms. A blind nun stumbled, pushed from behind. Miranda rushed forward, putting her body in the path of the chaos, giving the woman room to get back on her feet. The child’s mother found her, and the toddler dove into her embrace.

  Miranda turned around. The room was empty. She snatched their bag and cloaks and held tight to Muirne’s arm. “Come on, Mother. We must go now.”

  Surrounded by other pilgrims, they hurried through the village. As they went along, word spread quickly to other inns and hostels. Before they reached the northern edge of the town, crowds had begun to pour out into the muddy roads.

  Miranda and her mother reached the fields and started the climb into the hills. Folk spread out across the rising meadowland, and in the moonlight she realized that hundreds must have taken flight.

  As they reached the crest of the ridge that formed the river valley, Miranda stopped and looked back.

  Other pilgrims around them stopped and looked back, as well. The line of soldiers was already in the village. Torchbearers branched out in smaller streams, racing among the buildings. Almost immediately, the fires began to appear.

  “By the Virgin, they’re burning the shrine!” a voice cried out. “The devils are burning the shrine.”

  “Who sounded the alarm?” someone asked. “Who saw them coming?”

  The crowd grew quiet, and then a thin voice broke the silence. “Her.”

  Miranda recognized the speaker. The old woman praying her rosary at the hostel.

  “That one.” She lifted her bony finger. “Muirne from Tarbert Castle. The wife of the MacDonnell laird, Angus. She saw it in her dream.”

  Beneath the sinking moon, faces turned to look at them.

  Miranda’s stomach tightened. A lifetime of secrecy ruined.

  Wrapping her cloak around her mother and pulling it up over her head, Miranda said nothing but turned Muirne toward the west. Together, they moved off into the darkness for the long journey home.

  The English army burned and pillaged at will. Edinburgh, the abbey at Holyroodhouse, and the king’s palace. Leith, Cragmiller, Newbattle Abbey, the Chapel of Our Lady, Preston town and castle, Hatintown with its friary and nunnery, and many others. The invaders spared not castle, town, pile, or village until they had overthrown and destroyed them . . . and at great loss of life.

  One place stood apart in the rampage. Every pilgrim at the Shrine of the Cloak escaped. The miracle was attributed to a woman with the sight. A woman who had seen the future.

  Muirne MacDonnell.

  Chapter 1

  Tarbert Castle

  Kintyre, Western Scotland

  Four months later

  Though the fires in the tower were nearly out, the acrid smell of smoke hung thick in the air, burning the English ship captain’s lungs. Rob Hawkins glanced down the hill at the vi
llage and the harbor. Tarbert Castle would survive, he thought, but too many of its inhabitants had not.

  Frowning, he turned his attention back to the cleric.

  “Aye, his name was Evers.” The old priest was upset and growing more agitated with each question.

  Something wasn’t right, Rob thought. Why would Evers leave his army in the Highlands only to sail down the western coast of Scotland? Compared with all the bulging abbey vaults and coffers that he’d already emptied, this castle seemed to offer nothing. So why come here? Why kill the laird?

  But nothing made sense about this mission.

  When the messenger arrived from France, where Henry Tudor was fighting at Boulogne, the king’s orders had been explicit. Rob was to find Sir Ralph Evers—Governor of Berwick-upon-Tweed, Commander in the North, Warden of the East March, High Sheriff of Durham. And then he was to kill the man. Not reprimand him. Not charge him with some crime. Not bring him back to face justice.

  Find him and kill him.

  And in return, Rob would be rewarded with the ultimate prize for a privateer: a letter of marque, issued by the king, giving him free rein to attack and plunder the ships of enemy nations. And right now, King Henry was at war with almost everyone. And that meant the potential for tremendous wealth.

  Sense or nonsense, Rob had immediately weighed anchor and sailed north.

  “You’re absolutely certain it was Sir Ralph Evers,” he stressed.

  “It was him, I tell you. The devil himself. The Scourge of the Borders.”

  Rob turned to look at the wisps of smoke still rising from the tower. His men were working side by side with the locals to put out the last of the fires and tend to the wounded. Bodies of the dead had been lined up along the castle wall. He glanced out at his ship, the Peregrine, anchored in the harbor.

  He’d expected to be sailing farther north in search of his quarry. When he put in at Whitehaven for supplies, the commander there told him that Evers and his mongrel army had last been seen tearing through the Highlands in search of “the bloody Holy Grail, or some such thing.” But when they intercepted a small merchant vessel soon after leaving port, he learned that an Englishman had put Tarbert Castle to the torch not a day earlier. The brutality of the attack matched Evers’s style, and the MacDonnell stronghold was on his way. Rob had decided to stop. His decision had paid off.

  “And this,” he said to the priest, gesturing toward the tower and the corpses, “the killing, the looting, the fire. You say all this happened after he discovered the laird’s wife was dead?”

  “Aye. No one here will be mourning long for Angus MacDonnell. The man was a hard one, and as tough and tight as an old oyster. But his wife Muirne . . . that’s a woman who’ll be missed. Died not a fortnight ago.” The wiry cleric wrung his hands. “Och, nothing but anguish for us now. When the MacDonnell came as laird, we thought our lives would be better. They never were. But here, it’s come to this. It’ll be worse, for sure. Almost too much for my heart to bear.”

  Rob shook his head. “Did Evers know the laird’s wife? Was there some arrangement that went astray? None of this makes any sense to me.”

  “Nor to me,” the priest agreed, clutching the wooden cross at his belt. “But I know what I know.”

  And Rob only believed what he could see with his own eyes. Sir Ralph Evers had been a valuable commander in the king’s service, but something had gone wrong with the man. He seemed to have defected, but not to fight with Scotland or France or Suleiman of the Ottoman Empire. As far as Rob could tell, Evers was fighting on his own side. But he didn’t believe a man as seasoned and honored as this one would give up everything to go off on some mythical quest. So why hade he done it?

  To find and kill the man, Rob needed more answers.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “Why should I tell you anything?” the priest grumbled. “You say you’re a Scot, and your crew looks to have Scots and Portuguese sailors, but I know you’re an Englishman and don’t try to deny it. You’re the pirate they call Black Hawk.”

  “Pirate? Nay.” Rob glared at the old man. “My father is English. I’ll not deny that. But my mother was a Kennedy, born and bred in Moray. So I have Scots blood running in my veins that is as good as yours or anyone’s. And you be damned if you say I’ve done your folk any harm.”

  The cleric looked away from him, staring at the men working together across the courtyard. He nodded.

  “For your Kennedy blood, then, I’ll tell you. The Englishman came to Tarbert, invited by the laird. He was led into the Great Hall like a guest.”

  Rob tried to imagine what kind of deal Angus MacDonnell would have made with a renegade commander like Evers.

  The man pointed at the tower. “The laird was no fool. And that makes all this even harder to understand.”

  Rob waited, seeing there was more the cleric wanted to say.

  “When his men hauled me up from the village, I thought it was for a hanging. Mine.” He frowned at the memory. “The Great Hall was bloody with bodies. The laird himself was still sitting in his chair, dead as that stone. They dragged me straight to Evers, and I saw it for the first time. The face of Satan.”

  “What did he want from you?”

  The old man swayed slightly. “He wanted me to take him into the family crypt.”

  Rob’s gaze swept across the wreckage left behind by Evers. “The crypt?”

  The priest shrugged, shaking his head. “He wanted me to show him where the laird’s wife had been interred.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” The cleric grew pale. “I told him she wasn’t there. I told him how she died and that there was no body. But he didn’t believe me. When I swore it was the truth, I never saw such fury in a man’s eyes. I thought I was about to die. He kept after me. Asked so many questions. I don’t know what I answered . . . but then I happened to mention the daughter. I believe that saved my neck.”

  “No body? Wait.” The puzzle was getting more complicated. “What daughter?”

  “Miranda.” He hesitated. “There was never a more devoted daughter than that lass. And now she’s gone, too.”

  Trying to understand the cleric was like untying a knot of wet rope. “What happened to the daughter?”

  “Muirne MacDonnell had been sick for some time. Dying. Everyone knew it. Miranda always cared for her. Even took her on pilgrimages. Then, three weeks ago, the lass went off. Just disappeared.”

  “And no one knows where this daughter went?”

  “Not a soul, as far as I know,” the priest replied. “And we’ve all be missing that one, I tell you.”

  “Why?”

  “That lass has a way about her. Whenever there was a fire in a cottage, she was there. If a dog went mad, she was there. If the children were playing too close to the well, she was there. One day, she came running down to the village saying that schools of mullet were coming into the loch. Before you could say ‘Ave Maria,’ the harbor was alive with jumping fish. The folk ate well that whole winter because of her.”

  Rob shook his head. He didn’t want to be distracted. “But the daughter just disappeared, and then the laird’s wife died?”

  The priest clutched the cross again. “One evening—a few days after Miranda left—Muirne took a fisherman’s boat and rowed out into the firth. The next morning, they found the boat, but Muirne was not to be found.”

  “Maybe the daughter fetched her—or someone else did. How do you know she was dead?”

  “I cannot answer that. But the laird claimed that she fell in. Her illness had been growing harder for her to bear. Everyone knew she was growing weaker. If she fell out of the boat, by accident, she would have drowned for sure.”

  The old priest swayed unsteadily. Fearing he might collapse, Rob helped the man over to a bench along the kitchen wall.

  “And you told Evers this. You told him Muirne MacDonnell wasn’t buried there.”

  “That’s so.”

  “But he
still went into the crypt?”

  “Aye.” The priest frowned. “And something happened in there.”

  “What do you mean?” Rob fought the frustration rising in him, but he needed to find out where Evers had gone from here.

  “All I know is, the last thing he asked before he went in was where Miranda might have gone. She was the one he wanted next. No one had the answer. But when he came out, he called his commanders together. I heard him myself. They were setting sail for Mull. They were going to Duart Castle. You’d think he got his answer from the dead.”

  Chapter 2

  The great black bird swept down, skimming the blue-green waters. The hawk banked and rose, riding the invisible breezes. As it circled upward, Miranda realized her feet were shackled to a high pedestal of rock, surrounded by glistening sea. She struggled against the trap, but there was no relief.

  The winds began to buffet her, whipping her cloak. Suddenly, the black hawk dove, pulling up at the last instant and landing gracefully on the smooth stone surface. Its wings disappeared and it transformed before her eye into a man. She stared at the tangle of black hair hanging to his shoulders. The tall powerful frame towered on the rock. His hazel eyes focused on her.

  She felt no fear. He had come and she’d expected him. This had to be Rob Hawkins, as her mother had foretold. Muirne had said that their destinies were entwined. He was the only one who could free her of these bonds.

  As he stepped toward her, the sea swelled, dashing them both with salt spray. He reached out to her.

  Before their fingers touched, the color of the sky behind him changed to a stormy gray. In the distance, the air crackled with flashes of lightning.

  Suddenly, the sea surged up the sides of their rocky perch, and a wave as tall as Ben Nevis rose above, hung a moment, and then crashed down, carrying him off into the roiling waters.

  She screamed in despair, her eyes searching for him. But he was gone.

  He’s going to drown.

  Miranda MacDonnell sat up in panic, staring through the dim light at blackened timbers. The wood seemed to be weeping. She was wet, lying in a net hammock. The vision was slow to recede. She couldn’t move her feet.