Heartwishes Read online

  What we all liked about Winnie was that she was so very practical. Whenever we girls did something we shouldn’t have—usually because we were dared by one of those outrageous Welsch girls—it was Winnie who calmed us down and helped us figure out what was the right thing to do.

  I chose Winnie from among my many friends to go to England because she didn’t feel sorry for me at having been discarded by a man I truly loved. Winnie was just matter-of-fact about the humiliation I’d been subjected to. She said, “Robert Allandale is no better than what comes out of the back end of a horse.” She said it only once, didn’t dwell on it, didn’t elaborate, but that was enough. I knew how she felt and she wasn’t going to change her mind. Winifred Aldredge was as solid as I was—in those days—flighty.

  By the time we set sail for England, I had recovered enough that I could wave good-bye to our friends who came to see us off. Weeks later, when we reached Southampton, my head was full of the fact that my uncle had two sons who were of marriageable age. The oldest one, Julian, was to become an earl. Wouldn’t returning with him on my arm make Robert Allandale green with envy!

  I think I need to confess that it was I who stole the Heartwishes Stone. Even though I was only eight when he died, I was the child who knew the most about my grandfather Shamus of when he lived in Scotland. On cold winter evenings I would sit on his lap as he told me his old stories. My favorites were about the Heartwishes Stone. He told me how a witch had made it out of gratitude for a young, strong Frazier who had saved the lives of several people. Grandpa Shamus said that the Stone gave each person in the family a wish that would come true if it came from his or her heart.

  He told me how his father, Ursted, had wasted his wish. When Ursted was a young man, all he’d wanted, what he’d craved, was to marry the beautiful Mary McTern, daughter of the laird of the clan. Ursted thought that such a marriage would give him power in the clan, and would make others see him as important. He was sick of his family being considered as little more than pack mules. “Haul this, Frazier,” people would say. “Move this rock.” With his lust for respectability in his mind, Ursted took the Stone out of its lead case and made his wish.

  It must have come from his heart because the next day he found Mary McTern out alone and he took her by force. I don’t like to think what that poor girl went through. All the Fraziers are large and unnaturally strong. Mary knew that to tell her father what had been done to her would cause a war within the clan, so she kept the secret to herself. When she missed her monthly time, she went to her father and told him that she was in love with Ursted Frazier and wanted to marry him. The entire clan was horrified. Sweet, beautiful, educated Mary to give her life to the loud, ignorant, violent-tempered Ursted Frazier? It was said that the wailing of her mother could be heard a mile away.

  But Mary knew that the truth would cause people’s deaths, so at sixteen, she married the twenty-two-year-old Ursted Frazier. Afterward, when the man was still laughed at, still considered to have no wisdom, he took his anger out on his wife. She hid her bruises as best she could and told her parents she was happy with her lot. She was a good breeder and produced eight big, healthy sons. When they were old enough, Ursted took his anger out on them as well as on his wife.

  One by one, their mother told her four oldest sons about the Stone and they made wishes from their hearts. They were simple young men and all they wanted was to get away from their father and to get a good job somewhere far away. And that’s just what they did. But when Shamus, my grandfather, reached an age where he too could have left, he didn’t. He stayed behind to care for—and protect—his mother and his three youngest brothers.

  One night his drunken father didn’t come home. Grandpa Shamus never told me the details of what happened, and I’ve never wanted to imagine what could have occurred that night. But the result was that Shamus, his mother, and the three youngest boys were at last left in peace. However, their profligate father had left behind nothing but debts, and a house that was barely fit for habitation. The family was so poor that I don’t know how they survived.

  Grandpa Shamus said that to his mind, what was worse than the poverty, was that his entire family was the object of ridicule. His main enemy was his cousin, Angus McTern, who was to become the laird of the clan. As boys, they fought often and the clan always took Angus’s side. When the clan’s property was gambled away, Shamus said he rejoiced that Angus’s future of power and wealth had been taken from him. But the clansmen still looked to young Angus to be their leader—and they still laughed in derision at the Fraziers. “Big enough to be an ox, but not the sense of one,” he heard a man say when he was a boy.

  My grandpa said he “got the man back,” but he wouldn’t tell me what he did.

  It wasn’t until a young English woman named Edilean Talbot came to live in the McTern castle that Shamus decided to make use of the Heartwishes Stone. As he held the Stone in his hand, he said that he wished for gold and a lot of it.

  His mother, Mary, had seen that the Stone had a perverse way of making wishes come true, but also of making them go wrong. She’d had years of misery to think about her late husband’s wish, and she didn’t want that for her boys. She didn’t know if she was enough of a Frazier to be granted a request, but she tried to counterbalance Shamus’s unplanned wish. She took the Stone from him and said that she hoped he got the gold, but that she also wanted him to have a better life. By that, she meant for him to have love. That none of her sons had wished for love hurt her more than her husband’s beatings had. None of her sons had ever seen True Love, had certainly never felt it, and she very much wanted them to have it.

  Grandpa Shamus used to laugh when he told the rest of his story, how he’d come to America and ended up rescuing Angus McTern from certain death. “It was a day for rejoicing,” he said. I knew he meant that he celebrated at his cousin’s humiliation.

  I loved to hear of his courtship with Grandma Pru. He said she came to the old McTern castle looking for Edilean’s uncle, and when Shamus saw her, he loved her from the first moment. “She was riding a horse big enough to pull a loaded wagon,” he used to recall with eyes misted over with love. “And when she slid down, she was nearly as tall as me.”

  I’d heard Grandma Pru tell the same story, but she was more pragmatic. She said that the first time she saw Shamus Frazier, she wanted to throw him into the hay and have her way with him. “I was so very tired of girlish men!” Whenever I heard this story, I marveled that the two of them had found each other. She was the daughter of an earl, while he was little better than a stable lad. My grandmother was a large woman, not fat, but tall and big-boned. And even in youth, her face had not been pretty. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” she used to say, laughing, then slap her husband on the back so hard that, had he been a lesser man, he would have fallen.

  By the time I was seven, my grandparents were very old, but Grandpa Shamus said he wasn’t going to leave the earth until after his cousin Angus died. Angus’s wife Edilean died in 1817, and after that, Angus didn’t want to stay on earth. He died the following year. Grandpa Shamus used to say that he’d be filled with joy when Angus was gone—“my old enemy” as he called him—but he wasn’t. After Angus died, Shamus deteriorated fast, and when Grandma Pru died, Grandpa Shamus lived only three more months. “Everyone is gone now,” he told me as I held his hand as he lay in what turned out to be his death bed. “Enemies, friends, family, they’re all gone now. I think I’ll go and see them. I would like to play a trick or two on old Angus and see him get angry!” he said, laughing. He died three days later. Just went to sleep and never woke up again. My mother told me that he was smiling when they found him. My father, Colin, said that he was with Prudence so he must be very happy. “They weren’t much without the other.”

  On the afternoon my grandfather died, I was the one who asked after the Heartwishes Stone, as he had always kept it in the box with the family Bible. My father had told me the story was just a myth, but then he�€