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  The sleet and rain sluiced beneath the folds of his plaid, and the wet ground of the moor rooted his feet. Suddenly the mist parted, revealing a flash of a gold button here, a fluttering standard there, the steaming breath of a mounted soldier's horse.

  He looked to his left, and to his right, but for the first time in his life he did not know the men who were fighting beside him. His own men, his tenants and tacksmen and cousins, would be on the road to Carrymuir by now.

  Like him, they had seen the sea of ten thousand sassenachs, heard the rolling cannons, listened to the conflicting commands given to the Highland army. They had seen the zealousness on Prince Tearlach's smooth face and had known that they simply could not win.

  When, in the wee hours of the dawn, he had gone to strike his bargain with the Duke of Perth, he knew that his argument was purely a matter of logistics. He had agreed to lead his men, he told Perth. That did not mean he himself would be fighting.

  It was a technicality; any oath he'd made would naturally imply he'd be fighting alongside, since no laird would expect his clan to do what he himself would not. But in this case, he was willing to bend the truth to protect the others. And he knew when he offered the commander the choice of a ragtag band from Carrymuir or his own skill in combat, it wouldn't be much of a choice at all.

  He wondered, as he slogged across the moor for the third time, his leg bleeding from a lucky round of Sassenach grapeshot, whether any of these fools realized he did not want to be here at all. He didn't want to face one more bloody English soldier, or step on the still-heaving backs of Scots fallen four deep.

  He wondered what God was like. He hoped that heaven resembled Scotland.

  He murmured the paternoster over and over to hear the sound of his own voice. Seeing a sassenach just turning his way, he lifted his left arm high in the air. He brought the sword down at the man's neck, cleaving it wide, feeling the hot blood melt the sleet on his chest.

  Cameron MacDonald sank to his knees and vomited; tried to remind himself that he had given his word to fight to the death. He did not much relish dying, but aye, it was a fair trade. He loved the people of his town too much to see them suffer.

  And had he the chance, he'd do the same all over again.

  Angus MacDonald sat up in his narrow bed. Having heard the gossip during one of his lucid moments during the day, it did not surprise him when the ghost of his great-grear-great-great-uncle Cameron came to haunt him in the hollow of the night. And it surprised him even less that Cameron MacDonald I was, in death, no less unconventional than he'd been when he was alive. No rattling chains and slipping through doors, not for him. No, he came to Angus in the guise of a dream, a spectacular frenzy in which Angus seemed to be seeing through Cameron's own eyes as he thundered across a moor, waving a broadsword.

  "I shouldna have expected anything different," he muttered, talking to himself as he pulled on a pair of twill trousers and a pilled Shetland sweater. Once, when he'd been caretaker of Carrymuir, he'd seen the ghost of Mary Queen of Scots herself, sailing away from Loch Leven Castle dressed as a laddie, as she'd been when she escaped its prison hundreds of years before. It had left him with a queer feeling in his stomach and a beating in his head not unlike a hangover--sensations he felt right now.

  Angus knew that although most people would dismiss him as someone in the throes of Alzheimer's, he was really a victim of collective memory. It was a sort of reincarnation, a resurrection of some other clan member's thoughts. He happened to be privy to whatever was plaguing Cameron MacDonald I. And tonight, Cameron MacDonald I was not pleased with the actions of Cameron MacDonald II.

  "I dinna know what he can be thinking," Angus said, pulling slippers onto his feet, because they were the first footwear he could find in his bedroom. "Young Cam always has to be reminded about the way of things."

  Angus, in fact, had been the one to convince Cam to return to Wheelock and become police chief after his father's death. Almost exactly eight years ago, Cameron had come to Scotland to tell Angus about Ian's accident. At the time, Angus had been seventy-four, caretaker at Carrymuir all his life, although his wife had died twelve years earlier and all his relatives were living in Massachusetts. Young Cameron, who was a bit of a wanderer, had volunteered to sit at Carrymuir for several years to spell Angus, but Ian's early death had altered the plans. Cam had taken Angus to the tavern for a wee dram, knowing that he, like everyone else, would take the loss of a clan chief hard. He spread his palms over the scarred wooden bar and told him of the ice, the tractor-trailer, the bend in the narrow road. He said this all in a monotone, because it wasn't quite real to him yet, and he mentioned, as the doctors had, that his father had felt no pain. When he was finished speaking, Angus looked up at him, his eyes bright and dry. "Aye, well," he said, "so I'll be stayin' here a wee bit longer."

  To Angus's horror, Young Cam had wanted to trade. He'd stay at Carrymuir, he said, and Angus could go home and take over the clan. The thought had shaken Angus more than his nephew's death; you simply couldn't cross the lines of leadership like that.

  Even now, Angus remembered the shine of Cam's brow and the set of his jaw as he fought his own birthright. It's no' a real title, he had said. There's nothing I can do as chief that ye canna do better.

  PLACE:

  Wheelock Inn, Main St., Wheelock MA

  Angus had shrugged, finished off his whiskey, and stared at the boy. He wondered if Cam realized chat he had slipped into Angus's own Scots burr, not because of a familiarity with the pattern of speech in Carrymuir, but simply because it had been bred into him. "Duty is duty," Angus had said, "and a laird is a laird. And be there a clan or no', lad, ye canna doubt your own blood."

  Of course, stubbornness had also been passed down over the generations of MacDonalds, so Angus had accepted a compromise. Cam returned to Wheelock, but so did Angus, and the lands and grand house at Carrymuir were left to the Scottish National Trust.

  Every morning over his rainbow banquet of vitamins and heart medication Angus forced his mind back to Carrymuir, so that he would not wake up one morning and find that he could not remember it any longer. He pictured the strong stone house, the fireplace in the great hall, the sheep that spilled about the old crofters' huts like a current. He did not let himself dwell on the fact that Carrymuir, which had never been taken by Campbells or English or anyone else, was now overrun with tourists.

  But he did not have time for that now. Angus pulled his bathrobe on over his clothes, and at just after three in the morning, began to walk in his slippers the mile from his small home to the Wheelock police station, where once again he would be his great-nephew's conscience.

  INVESTIGATION REPORT Wheelock Township Police Dept. Case # 95-9050

  STATE vs. MacDONALD, James Reid White male, age 36, D.O.B. 3/14/59. Place of birth: Boston MA Ht. 6'4", wt. 200 lbs. green eyes, auburn hair

  CHARGES: Murder One

  DATE:

  September 19, 1995

  EVIDENCE: 1

  Pillowcase

  2 . Rug samples

  3. Shoes worn by suspect

  4. Samples of hair (victim)

  5. Samples of hair (suspect)

  6. Autopsy report

  7. Photographs of crime scene and victim

  8. Voluntary statement from suspect

  Allie brewed her own tea. It was a very English thing to do, and

  Cam sometimes laughed at her, saying she'd better keep quiet about it or all the good Scots would run her out of town. At first she did it because she was a stickler for detail. In the same way she could sense a stray frond of grass ruining an arrangement, she could taste the commonplace seeping from a bag of Lipton's as strong and as bitter as arsenic. But she'd learned to tolerate it and now she brewed her own tea only because Cam usually made a comment about it.

  Allie did at least a hundred things each day simply because of their effect on Cam. They bound him to her: she'd drop his shirts off at the cleaners without being asked, or lay out a