“Aye.” Angus nodded. “We’ll need a carriage. I brough’ only horses.”
Katrine straightened. “I’ll come immediately.”
“Katrine,” Richard protested. “You can’t be serious. Of course you must go, but ’tis nearly night. A few more hours won’t make a difference.”
She shook her head, her rain-colored eyes filled with tears. “I must leave now, Richard. Please understand.”
In the end, he let her go. It was after dark when the travel coach, emblazoned with the Wolfe crest, pulled out of the courtyard into the long driveway. Richard watched from the steps as the square-shaped cab pulled by six horses turned past the gates and disappeared into the mist. With a bleakness born of resignation, he knew that, given Katrine’s poor health, his child had only a prayer’s chance of surviving the journey.
***
Katrine’s heart lifted as she crossed the borders into Scotland. It was early February and bitterly cold, but she was home. Her brother was dead and nothing would ever be the same again, but she was finally home. That, in itself, was nothing short of a miracle. Here she would heal. She would speak to her mother and learn the source of the frightening nightmares that sucked the sleep from her exhausted body.
Janet Murray took one horrified look at her daughter’s emaciated figure with its large belly and another at her face, where the skin was stretched so tightly across the bones that the girl’s every heartbeat was evident in the blue veins pulsing at her temples, and refused to answer any questions. Instead she ordered her to bed. It wasn’t until later, weeks later, after fortifying broths and soothing plasters and honey-sweetened teas had added pounds to Katrine’s slender frame and filled out her cheeks, that she relented and told her about Alasdair.
He had fallen at Falkirk on the seventeenth of January. The battle was a victory for the prince’s army, but the advantage was not taken. In the confusion of a winter dusk, Alasdair was marched to Edinburgh, and hanged to death on the gallows. There was nothing anyone could do. Stirling surrendered to the prince, but the castle remained in government hands. Charles was at Inverness waiting out the winter weather. The duke of Cumberland, second son of the English king, had reached Aberdeen on the twenty-seventh of February. His army had received five thousand German troops under Prince Frederick of Hesse.
Katrine knew the duke from her London season. He was a heavy, pompous young man in his early twenties with a tendency to overrate his own importance. Still, he was an experienced commander, and the fact that he was in Scotland to command the English troops did not bode well for the Jacobites.
“You should not have returned to Scotland at this time, Katrine,” her mother admonished her. “What were you thinking?”
“I had to come,” Katrine replied softly. “Even if it weren’t for Alasdair, I still would have come. Ever since the standard was raised at Glenfinnan, I planned to return.”
“What does Richard say?”
Katrine bit her lip. “He was against it at first, but I think he was at the point of changing his mind. My illness frightened him. Of course, when Angus brought the news of Alasdair, he couldn’t refuse.”
“Angus went on his own,” said Janet. “I would never have sent him. You were safe in England.” She rose from the side of the bed and walked to the window. “I fear it is all at an end for the clans, Katrine. Your father is convinced that the retreat from London disheartened the troops. He has lost his hope of victory.”
“I did not come home for Scotland or for the Jacobite cause, Mother.”
At the odd note in her voice, Janet turned toward the bed and frowned. “What is it, Katrine? Why did you arrive here thin and pale, on the brink of death?”
Her eyes were huge and filled with terrible purpose. “’Tis the nightmares. They wake me night after night, always the same. Tell me, Mother. Tell me truly. Am I accursed? Am I destined to live the rest of my life with this fear of the night and my own sleep?”
Janet closed her eyes. Oh God, no. Please, no. What have we done, George and I? She looked again upon her daughter. “What is it that you see, Katrine?”
“I see two women from the past.”
“Women?” asked Janet sharply. “There is more than one?”
Katrine nodded.
Her mother sat down beside her on the bed. “Tell me of your dreams.”