knees, my hands shaking. I would have closed my eyes, but something stopped me. A movement in the darkness. The panic receded. I wasn’t alone. A slender figure, shrouded in a dark, feminine cloak, the hood pulled up to shield her face, moved out of the shadows and faced me. She said nothing.
“Who are you?” I whispered. I couldn’t be sure, the cloak hid so much, but there was something familiar about the way she moved. “Please, speak to me.”
She moved aside and gestured toward the altar. I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”
With an impatient shrug of her shoulders she turned, walked to the altar, and placed both hands on the stone. I don’t know how long I watched her standing, her face hidden, her hands on the pyrite-studded sandstone. I was no longer cold. The woman changed position. She knelt, pressing her lips against the stone. Then I saw it. Rays of light, warm and breathtakingly beautiful, dim at first and then growing steadily brighter, illuminated the rock. There was no window, no outside light, no artificial source. It came from inside the stone. In that piercing, crystal-bright moment, I realized what I was looking at. This was the Stone of Destiny, Scotland’s Stone. The stone that was supposed to be sitting under England’s Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey. It had been there since the thirteenth century. But what was it doing here?
Forgetting my fear, I stood and walked toward the woman and the miracle of light. She stood and turned to meet me, dropping the cloak. I stopped, riveted to the freezing granite under my feet. Framed in long black hair, gray eyes stared back at me from a clear, finely featured face. It was my face and Katrine Murray’s. No, definitely not Katrine’s. This woman was older, closer to my own age than the lovely girl in the portrait. Her hair was braided with gold thread and hung, thick and black, past her knees. A twisted red girdle gathered the draping folds of her white dress around her hips, and the deep, square bodice showed a slender neck and sloping shoulders.
It wasn’t her face that separated her from women like Katrine Murray and myself. It was her expression. This woman had known suffering. There was pain in the trembling lips and desperate lift of her chin. Pain and pride. But it was her eyes that revealed the depths of her despair. Those clear gray eyes were filled with a longing so complete, it consumed her. I knew without question that whatever trials I’d experienced in my life, they were nothing compared to the heartbreak this woman with her white gown and ravaged face carried with her.
Her features were so like my own it was like looking into a mirror, and yet she was nothing like me. This was a woman who would stop conversation when she entered a room. The smooth, graceful glide of her walk, the imperious wave of her hand, the richness of her hair, the passion brimming from her light-filled eyes. This woman had conquered fear. She stood before me with the bearing of a queen, straight backed, her head held high. Like Helen of Troy and Eleanor of Aquitaine, this was a woman who had it within her to change the course of history.
“Who are you?” I asked again, refusing to allow her identity to remain a mystery.
She tilted her head, as if considering my question. Then she turned back to the stone, motioning me to join her. I hurried forward. We stood together, two women so alike and yet nothing alike. Together we knelt. Together we placed our hands on the stone.
The pulsing began in my fingers. Spreading like a wave, it moved to my temples, down to my throat and across my chest, until I could no longer separate it from the pounding of my heart. There was an explosion of light, a sensation of heat. The room rocked and then disappeared.
And then I was alone, standing at the Bear Gates of Traquair House in broad daylight. Horrified, I realized that I was still in my nightgown.
Even now, when I try to recall my experience, I find it difficult to explain with any clarity at all. There is nothing by which to compare it. It had the essence of a dream, but it was far more than that. I had full awareness of the events without the power to participate or influence their outcome. But I wasn’t spared the ability