Mercy Read online

  "Mo cbridhe," Jamie murmured, his eyes wide and dry. He stood suddenly, woodenly, and grabbed for Allie's arm. "Please," he begged, "get me out of here."

  With a quick glance at Cam, Allie started to walk Jamie from the open grave. Father Gillivray recited the prayers quickly, and with Jamie already gone, everyone began to disperse. The cemetery workers began to shovel earth back over the casket, making a neat rounded hump in the spot where there had been a gaping hole.

  Cam watched it all with his hands in his pockets, figuring that this could be his penance for missing the church service. He'd make sure everything was finished all right. He watched the two men prop their shovels against a nearby oak and wipe the sweat from the backs of their necks. Then he turned around to see Mia standing behind him.

  He stared at her as if he were not going to be allowed to look at her again. He waited, his fists clenched, until the broad black hat tilted enough so that he could see her eyes. When she looked up, his stomach dived in a roller-coaster drop, as it hadn't since he was in high school.

  It was totally inappropriate to feel this way, here and now, but Cam could sense the heat of his body rising in fits and starts. Ah, he thought, as he remembered again to breathe, she's lit from the inside.

  Mia did not say a word, but stepped up to the grave and lifted one of her floral arrangements. Carefully unwrapping the wire around the single red rose, she pulled its stem from the Oasis that anchored the flowers and handed it to Cam.

  He twirled it between his fingers and brushed it against the side of his hand. Allie didn't like roses much--called them plebeian--but he'd always found them pretty. He liked their texture, smooth and downy as a woman's skin.

  With great care he pulled the green stem base from the rose so that a flutter of petals settled into the palm of his hand. He lifted these to the wind and let them swirl and dance in the air, coming to rest on the packed dirt.

  "What does it mean?" Mia asked.

  "What does what mean?" Cam said, startled, a million possible answers rushing through his mind. "Those words. Mo chridhe."

  Cam shook his head, pretending he didn't know. But in Wheelock, everyone knew a little bit of Scottish Gaelic, especially the endearments a mother or lover might use. He walked Mia back to the center of town in silence, his mind branded by the image of

  Jamie MacDonald on his knees in front of the grave, as if he were praying; Jamie MacDonald leaning toward the body of his wife and whispering, My heart.

  He had managed to crawl to a ditch when the English cannons stopped firing, and now he was facedown in a puddle, using all his strength to roll onto his back so that he would be able to breathe. Not easy, with both his kneecaps broken and his eyes running red with blood that streamed from a gash at his scalp.

  He was still holding his sword, though. He grimaced, thinking that at least he wouldn't be forsworn. He'd given his word to fight the English until he could not stand, and that was completely beyond his power right now.

  Cameron prayed for a quick and timely death.

  He had wished for his own death only once before, on the day he'd acquired his illustrious reputation. He'd been fighting beside his father, and the left arm that had surprised so many right-handed Highland enemies had also been the reason his father had been wounded: when Cameron had raised his left arm to strike, a gap had been created where there was usually a shield.

  His father had been run through the gut, and had asked Cameron for his help. There had been no question that his father was going to die, but he was too weak to take his own life quickly. And so Cameron had loaded the ball into his father's pistol; had held it to his temple while his father pulled the trigger.

  He had not killed his own father, but that was only a technicality.

  On the day that his father died, he had run back to fight the Campbells clothed only in his long white shirt and the impenetrable weave of his fury. He'd wanted to die, right there next to his father. He had not wanted to be the one who would have to go home and break the news to his mother and his brother and sisters. He did not want to be the laird of Carrymuir.

  He was only sixteen, and he killed forty Campbells himself that afternoon. He did not even receive a flesh wound.

  He'd carried his father's body home in his arms.

  The bards that went from castle to castle began to weave tales about the magic of Cameron MacDonald's left arm. When the storytellers came to Carrymuir, Cameron would leave the room. No matter how many Campbells or English soldiers he killed, it could not bring his father back. He kept trying and trying, but not even this day, this slaughter at Culloden, could do it.

  Cameron glanced up to see hooves circling toward him at an astounding speed, and he closed his eyes, praying and preparing himself, hoping he'd be knocked unconscious first.

  A man rolled from the horse not three feet away from him, and the horse magically stopped dead in its tracks. Cam turned and found himself staring at the dusty red coat of another English soldier, holding a gun.

  He smiled. "Go ahead, mo charaid," he said, throwing his arms wide. "Put me out of my misery."

  The soldier's eyes widened. He looked at the pistol and then down at his own midriff, which was saturated with blood. "I hope you linger for days," the Englishman said flatly, and he pulled the trigger on himself.

  It was several seconds before Cameron's ears cleared from the blast at such close range. He could reach the pistol, and he could also reach the reins of the soldier's horse, which stood patiently, stomping at the muddy ground from time to time.

  Cameron looked from one to the other, and then back again. He closed his eyes, and he saw his father's face, and he started to cry.

  Who would have known that given the choice, he would not take the easiest path after all?

  Angus woke up to the fading hoofbeats, his heart pounding, his head spinning. He ran his hands lightly over his limbs, checking his knees, which were spiny and knobbed with arthritis but otherwise hale. With a muffled swear at the soaked, sweaty condition of his bedsheets, he pulled himself from the bed and set off down the hall to the linen closet.

  He heard the sounds through Jamie's closed door, and his first thought was that Cameron MacDonald had galloped straight from his own mind into Jamie's, but then he shook his head at the impossibility. Ghosts, real ones, didn't behave such as that. No doubt the laddie was remembering the funeral earlier today, or even having a visit from Maggie. Angus laughed at this; they'd have to have breakfast sometime, the four of them--Angus and Jamie and the two ghosts that frequented the house.

  Gathering clean sheets into his arms, Angus tiptoed down the hall toward Jamie's door. He pushed it open gently, swearing as it creaked on its hinges. Jamie lay on top of the sheets, his hands fisted, his body twisting from side to side.

  For a moment Angus stood in the doorway. Then Jamie let out a little cry, the kind that sounds like a whimper to someone awake, but, in one's dreams, is a scream.

  The linens hit the floor with a soft sigh as Angus crossed the room and crawled into the bed with Jamie. He wrapped his arms tight around the boy and tried to keep him from tossing and shaking any more. Jamie was not seeing his Maggie, that much was clear. More likely he was seeing himself.

  And no sooner had Angus let this thought enter his mind than Jamie buried his face in Angus's neck, clinging to his uncle as if his life depended on it, and gave himself up to his grief.

  Allie had read somewhere that husbands and wives spend less than four waking hours together, and this statistic terrified her, since with Cam's crazy scheduling, she sometimes went a whole day without talking to him. She had read another statistic that said women use twice as many words in the course of a day as men do, and she wondered if this was because women were garrulous by nature, or because it took twice as long to make men understand what was being said.

  She didn't remember how, but both of these surveys tied in, somehow, to divorce.

  She considered it her personal duty to keep herself activel