The Scottish Witch Read online

  The Scottish Witch

  The Chattan Curse

  Cathy Maxwell

  Dedication

  For my agent, Robin Rue

  Contents

  Dedication

  The Curse

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Margaret

  An Excerpt from The Devil’s Heart

  Lyon’s Bride announcement page

  About the Author

  By Cathy Maxwell

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  The Curse

  Macnachtan Keep

  Scotland, 1632

  The heart cannot lie, or so she had believed.

  Day after day, Rose of the Macnachtan stood at the tower wall staring in the direction of England, believing with all her heart Charles Chattan would return to her. At any moment she expected to see him ride galloping at full speed to Loch Awe’s shoreline to cross to the island on which Macnachtan Keep had been built and anxiously apologize.

  He could not marry that Englishwoman. He wouldn’t. She knew it to the marrow of her bones. Charlie loved her. They’d handfasted in a private ceremony of their own making. He would come for her.

  Her brothers and sisters all warned her he was faithless. They had never liked him. His mother was Sassenach, and Charlie was too English for their tastes. Her brother Michael had sworn to her that the Chattans worshipped gold more than any other value on this earth, but Rose had argued Charles was different from his parents.

  And so she waited, days turning into weeks . . . until, finally, it was the very hour of his marriage to the Englishwoman.

  Rose stood at her lonely post, watching the road from the south, waiting—until the bell in the kirk’s tower rang noon.

  Only then did she realize her family had been right. Charles had chosen another over her.

  The last clang of the bell reverberated in the air around her. The wind had picked up. It lifted her hair, swirled around her skirts, tickled her skin, mocked her.

  For a long moment she stood mesmerized by the line of silent, brooding pines ringing the clearing. She knew every trail of that forest. There was no movement, no rider coming for her.

  Her heart broke.

  The world lost all meaning.

  No one could live with the burden of such sharp, forlorn pain.

  His name choked her throat. Shame of her own trusting loyalty filled her. They had all been right and she had been a fool.

  Rose slowly turned. Below her was the stone courtyard. Her brother Michael was shoeing a horse. The blacksmith had died and his son was a poor substitute. Michael was determined to not give up on the boy, even if he had to shoe the horses a hundred times himself in teaching the lad what he wanted.

  Across the way, in the house’s solar, she knew her mother, sisters, and kinswomen would be plying their needles and enjoying a bit of gossip. How long had it been since she’d joined them? Not since that night she and Charles had secretly met and he’d told her he was leaving Scotland. His parents insisted he marry the Sassenach heiress. He had no choice in the matter.

  “But what of us? What of the vows we made to each other?” she had asked.

  Charles had not answered. Instead, he’d made love to her, and, trusting soul that she was, she had believed that was his answer. She was his mate, his chosen.

  Her hand rose to her belly. His seed might already be growing within her. A son, a son whose father would deny his parentage.

  Rose shared her mother’s gift of the sight. The book of spells and recipes that had been handed down from mother to daughter, always going to those who shared the gift, would one day be hers—but she’d already used that book. In desperation, she’d attempted a spell to bring Charles to her and she had believed it would work . . .

  Sometimes in life, there comes a point when the future holds no gain. When the darkness of reality triumphs over hopes and dreams. Love had betrayed her. It had humiliated her.

  The pride of the Macnachtan of Loch Awe flowed through her veins. Rose could not face a life of shame, or let it be whispered her child was a bastard.

  She climbed onto the tower wall. For one precious moment, she stood tall. March’s fresh, chilled wind chafed her cheek. Below her, life went on as usual.

  Rose glanced one more time toward the road that lay between herself and her love.

  Her heart had lied—Charles did not love her. “Life come hither; Life is mine,” she whispered feverishly. Her throat tightened. He hadn’t cared. Tears filled her eyes. She took a step off the wall into thin air.

  She fell.

  There was no doubt Rose of Loch Awe had taken her life because of Charles Chattan’s perfidy. There would be no saving her memory from the disgrace of suicide.

  Her mother, Fenella, wished she had the magic to reverse time and bring her daughter back to life.

  For the last three days she’d pored over her nain’s book. Certainly in all these receipts and spells for healing, for fortune, for doubts and fears, there must be one to cast off death.

  The handwriting on those yellowed pages was cramped and in many places faded. Fenella had signed the front of the book but not referred to it often, at least not once she’d memorized the cures for fevers and agues that plagued children and concerned mothers.

  She’d been surprised to discover Rose had also been reading the book. She’d found where Rose had written the name “Charles” beside a spell to find true love. It called for a rose thorn to be embedded in the wax of a candle and burned on the night of a full moon.

  They found a piece of the burned candle, the thorn still intact, its tip charred, beneath Rose’s pillow.

  Fenella held the wax in the palm of her hand. Slowly, she closed her fingers around it into a fist and set aside mourning.

  Grief made her mad.

  The Chattans were far from the Highland’s mountains and moors. Charles thought himself safe. He was not.

  There is no sacred ground for a suicide, but Fenella had no need of the church. She ordered a funeral pyre to be built for her daughter along the green banks of Loch Awe, directly beneath a stony crag that looked down upon the shore.

  On the day of Rose’s funeral, Fenella stood upon that crag, waiting for the sun to set. She wore the Macnachtan tartan around her shoulders. The evening wind toyed with her gray hair that she wore loose under a circlet of gold, gray hair that had once been as fair as Rose’s.

  At Fenella’s signal, her sons set ablaze the ring of bonfires she’d ordered constructed around Rose’s py
re. The flames leaped to life, and so did her anger.

  Did Chattan think he could hide in London? Did his father believe his son could betray Rose’s loving heart without penalty? That her life had no meaning?

  That Macnachtan honor was a small thing?

  “I want him to feel my pain,” Fenella whispered.

  Her daughters Ilona and Aislin stood by her side. They nodded.

  “He will not escape me,” Fenella vowed.

  “But he is gone,” Ilona said. “He has become a fine lord while we are left to weep.”

  At last the moon was high in the sky and the bonfires’ flames were hot and strong. They feasted on the wood, making it crackle and sending sparks and ash into the air.

  The time was right. Nain had said a witch knows when the hour is nigh—and this would be a night no one would forget. Ever.

  Especially the Chattans.

  The fires had drawn the curious from all over the countryside. They stood on the shore watching. Fenella raised her hand. Her clansmen and her kin fell silent. Her son Michael, laird of the Macnachtans, picked up the torch and held it ready.

  Fenella brought her hand down, and her oldest put fire to the tender of his sister’s funeral pyre.

  ’Twas the ancient way. There was no priest here, no clergy to call her out—and even if there was, Fenella’s power in this moment was too strong to be swayed. It coursed through her. It was the beating of her heart, the pulsing in the blood in her veins, the sinew of her being.

  She stepped to the edge of the rock and stared down over the burning pyre. The flames licked the skirt of Rose’s white funeral gown.

  “My Rose died of love,” she said. She whispered the words but then repeated them with a commanding strength. They carried on the wind and seemed to linger over Loch Awe’s moonlit waters. “A woman’s lot is hard,” she said. “ ’Tis love that gives us courage, gives us strength. My Rose gave the precious gift of her love to a man unworthy of it.”

  Heads nodded agreement. There was not a soul around who had not been touched by Rose. They all knew her gift of laughter, her kindness, her willingness to offer what help she could to others.

  Fenella reached a hand back. Ilona placed the staff that Fenella had ordered hewn from a yew tree and banded with copper.

  “I curse Charles Chattan.”

  Raising the staff, Fenella said, “I curse not just Chattan but his line. He betrayed her for a title. He tossed aside handfasted promises for greed. Now let him learn what his duplicity has wrought.”

  The moon seemed to brighten. The flames on the fires danced higher, and Fenella knew she was being summoned. Danse macabre. All were equal in death.

  She spoke, her voice ringing in the night.

  “Watchers of the threshold, Watchers of the gate, open hell and seal Chattan’s fate.

  “When a Chattan male falls in love, strike his heart with fire from Above.

  “Crush his heart, destroy his line;

  “Only then will justice be mine.”

  Fenella threw her staff down upon her daughter’s funeral pyre. The flames now consumed Rose. Fenella could feel their heat, smell her daughter’s scent—and she threw herself off the rock, following her staff to where it lay upon Rose’s breast. She grabbed her daughter’s burning body and clung fast.

  Together they left this world.

  Six months to the date after his wedding, Charles Chattan died. His heart stopped. He was sitting at his table, accepting congratulations from his dinner guests over the news his wife was breeding, when he fell facedown onto his plate.

  The news of his death shocked many. He was so young. A vital, handsome man with so much to live for. Had he not recently declared to many of his friends that he’d fallen in love with his new wife? How could God cut short his life, especially when he was so happy?

  The only clue to his being unwell was that he had complained of a burning sensation in his left arm. It had been uncomfortable but his physician could find nothing wrong with him.

  However, Chattan’s marriage was not in vain. Seven months after his death, his wife bore a son to carry on the Chattan name . . . a son who also bore a curse.

  And so it continued. They tried to stop the curse. Generation after generation attempted to break the witch’s spell, and did not succeed.

  Such was the power of Fenella.

  Prologue

  Camber Hall

  Glenfinnan, Scotland

  November 15, 1814

  What had started as a gentle mist was turning into sheets of rain when they least needed it.

  Portia Maclean charged up the attic stairs in a race against the leaks in the roof.

  “Cold, drafty, leaky house,” she muttered, stomping on each step in her frustration. There were two buckets up there that were probably full from the rain the day before. She had been hoping she could put off the chore of emptying them. Now she was on a race against Nature.

  The attic was not her favorite place. It smelled of must and was full of wooden boxes, crates, trunks and old furniture from what seemed to be centuries of previous tenants.

  Portia could not stand the smell of dirt and decay and she hated cobwebs. She always held her breath when she came up here and prayed she never saw any of the spiders she knew had to be lurking in the rafters. Spiders that watched her, waiting for an opportunity to jump down upon her.

  A shiver went through her at the thought, or at imagining any of the other multiple-legged creatures that lurked with those spiders.

  The first bucket was close to the staircase and was, as she had suspected, almost full. She pushed the bridge of her wire spectacles up her nose, waved away a wet cobweb dangling from the ceiling, and picked up the bucket handle with both hands. She lugged it to the small window overlooking the front drive. Humidity had swollen the wood—again—so she had to give the sash a few pounds of her fist for it to open.

  She poured the water out, returned the bucket to its place and went in search of the other in the far corner where the attic was darkest, even in the afternoon.

  Anxious to finish this unpleasant task so she could return to the fire in the kitchen, Portia wound her way around the accumulated boxes, trunks, tables and crates toward the steady drip of water dropping into the bucket. Here was where the roof leak was the worst.

  Portia found the bucket and made quick work of emptying it, closing the window when she was done. She was hurrying to place the bucket back under the leak when a streak of white blazed across her path.

  She stumbled backward in surprise, reaching out for the first available surface to catch her balance, and ended up tipping a precarious stack of junk down onto her. She fell to the floor in a crash of wood and billows of dust.

  Coughing, Portia needed a moment to grasp what had happened to her and to be certain she was all right. The noise of her fall had been so loud, she was surprised her mother and her sister hadn’t heard and come to check on her.

  Instead, all was quiet save for the rain on the roof. Her younger sister, Minnie, was probably down in the kitchen, and their mother . . . well, Lady Maclean might be in the bedroom almost directly below where Portia was now, but rarely stirred herself for anyone.

  Portia wiggled her toes and her fingers. Nothing was broken. She was all right . . . but what had that flash of white been? She was a practical woman and not given to flights of fancy, well, other than her very reasonable distaste of bugs. If she saw something, then there was something. But before she could investigate, she needed to dig herself out of this mess.

  She shoved a wooden crate off her legs. It had been filled with old shoes,
clothes and hats, none of it salvageable. She and Minnie had already investigated the attic last June when they’d first moved in. She lifted the box and set it on top of a trunk and was just turning to pick up the empty bucket off the floor, when a book fell onto the floor right in front of her.

  A book. There were never enough books to read in the house. It was a heavy, leather-bound book and so aged, the binding was falling off its spine. Portia forgot about the bucket and the leaks. She took the book and hurried back to the window so she could inspect it better in the light.

  The book was handwritten. The paper was yellow and brittle. She had to be careful with it. There were pages and pages of writing. Perhaps poetry? She adored poetry—

  “It’s recipes,” she said, disappointed. She frowned again, attempting to decipher the faded handwriting. Yes, recipes, but not the sort she was familiar with. “How to remove warts,” she read and then curled her lip in distaste at the instructions to make a mash of onions and potatoes and apply to the wart for no less than ten days. “The whole poultice will stink after that period of time,” she mumbled to herself. She turned a few more pages, and her imagination was captured. There were recipes for strawberry wine and what to say when surrounded by a toadstool ring to protect one’s self against evil. Who would have imagined toadstool rings were evil?

  “ ‘Queen of the Meadow, take this evil from this house,’ ” Portia chanted and then hummed her disbelief. She wasn’t superstitious. Toadstool rings were toadstool rings. They harbored no magic, or at least not the ones she tromped through.

  She flipped more pages and found one that was wrinkled and the ink smeared as if someone had shed tears over the recipe titled, “To Reclaim True Love.” The word “Charles” had been written in the margin. The name wasn’t in the same handwriting as the recipe, so perhaps this spell had been used. Perhaps some woman, years earlier, had pined for Charles.