Chill Read online

  When Chris Morton had married her husband and come to live in this big looming house on Sheriffmuir, she had heard vague stories about a ghost known as the Weeping Woman and a curse she was supposed to have put on the family, but had given no thought to it. She didn’t believe in ghosts, categorically did not. Old houses often carried stories with them, rumours of past tragedies, which left their mark on a place. So she had dismissed the story of Catherine Morton and thought nothing more about it … until the day her husband died. Then the story came back to her with renewed force, and it no longer seemed so innocent but something which might just have had some impact on their lives … It was one of the reasons why she had been so keen for the Cunninghams to take up residence in the cottage. She liked the idea of the company, not just for herself, but for her children too. Now, with the roads blocked and the moor covered in a blanket of immovable snow, she was more than ever glad of that extra company, particularly if the ghost of Catherine Morton was beginning to make her presence felt again.

  A few days later the icy grip over Sheriffmuir began to weaken its hold and it looked like the promised thaw might arrive at last. Fiona and Samuel got their chance to return to Lynns Farm as planned.

  Mr MacFarlane came out to meet them this time.

  “Back again?” he commented gruffly, but they could tell from the look in his eye that he was not displeased to see them.

  “Let me get something for you. Come along in now,” and they followed him into the house.

  They’d brought the pages of the journal to show him, and he took them gingerly in his hand, and laid them on the table. He read through them in silence.

  “Well,” he said. “This is quite a find.”

  The pages – crisp as a moth’s wing and brindled with age – betrayed such a personal and intimate glimpse into Catherine Morton’s domestic life that it made painful reading. “Any museum would be very interested in these, right enough. Could be quite valuable. I’m sure the archive in the Museum of Scotland would be glad of them to add to the information they already have.”

  “We wondered if you knew where she’s buried?” Fiona said.

  “It’s her corpse you’re after, now, is it? Poor woman.”

  “We just wondered, that’s all …”

  “Can’t leave it alone, can ye? Like terrier dogs with a bone, worrying away at it until you’ve got what ye’er after. Am I right?”

  Fiona and Samuel lowered their eyes.

  “You don’t think she might be buried along with all the other Mortons, down in the family vault?” the old man countered.

  “Something told us she might not be. I don’t know why,” Samuel muttered.

  “You’ve a brain on ye, lad. You seem to be good at guessing your way around the place. Aye, perhaps it’s a sixth sense ye’ve got there.”

  Mr MacFarlane sipped his tea and stared through the glass door of the stove. “Well, you’re right as it happens. She and her baby were buried at Dunadd.”

  Samuel’s eyes lit up but Mr MacFarlane held up a restraining hand. “Wait. They lie buried in an unmarked grave, according to my family anyway. Whether it’s true or not, well …”

  “Then how will we ever find her?”

  Mr MacFarlane shrugged. “It’s not impossible. There should be some family records, I would have thought. Ironically enough, they are in fact the only Mortons to be buried at Dunadd. Maybe she liked it so much she just couldn’t bear to leave it, hey?”

  He paused for a moment. “She was one of those rare Mortons who knew Sheriffmuir well, and loved it for itself … not because she owned it.” He added, glancing at Fiona, “There are one or two Mortons born like that, now and again … once in a while you come across one.”

  Fiona lowered her head shyly, accepting the compliment.

  “I wish we knew where she was buried,” Samuel went on. “We thought we could lay something on her grave, say some prayers, a little ceremony perhaps. We were hoping to do all this on the anniversary of their deaths – Catherine and her baby, I mean.”

  He looked at them. “13th January? That’s tomorrow.”

  “We know.”

  “It’s a nice thought but …” He shook his head and sighed. “I wish I could help.”

  He seemed to hesitate and then said, “Come with me.”

  They followed him up the dark narrow stairs to a small landing. A big chest of drawers stood at the top in the shadows. He opened one of the drawers carefully.

  “I’m reluctant to part with this. But if it’ll help …” He brought out a small silver dagger, with a twining serpent wrought around the handle and blade. “She gave it to him, as a gift.” They looked at him in disbelief. “It’s been in my family for generations.”

  Fiona took it, and studied the beautiful carvings on it.

  “It’s beautiful. We can’t take this. It’s too precious,” Fiona said. “It must be worth a lot of money.”

  The old man shook his head slightly, and gave a knowing look. “There are some things more important than money. Aye, it’s precious to my family, right enough, but let’s just say this. If you find her grave, then bury this dagger along with her things that you found in the ebony box – that would mean a lot to my family, such as it is. If you don’t find her grave, then you can return it to me, safe and sound.”

  A moment of understanding passed between the three, as the children realized how much trust he was placing in them.

  “Thank you,” was all they could say.

  As they left, he stood at the door of his farmhouse, watching them go.

  “Good luck,” he called.

  They waved and disappeared into the trees surrounding the farm, the precious dagger stowed away in Fiona’s rucksack.

  The Curse of the Mortons

  Slowly they made their way back to Dunadd. They were tired and weary, thinking of all the sad things they had learnt.

  As the pieces of the story slotted together like a jigsaw, a very black picture emerged. Dunadd had a past, a history, in which a young woman had suffered unspeakably at the hands of her own family.

  “I wonder what Catherine and Patrick were like when they grew up?” Fiona said wistfully.

  Samuel shrugged.

  “They both died so young in the end,” she mused sadly. “Nineteen years old, she must have been.”

  They walked on in silence for a while, retracing their steps to the waterfall. “It’s funny. They’re just dead people really. They lived so long ago, and yet I feel as if I know them. Their story seems so … recent.”

  It was true. Because of the diary, they felt as if they knew her.

  At the waterfall Fiona and Samuel looked around them sadly, remembering that this was the place where the couple had secretly met and married, where Patrick had placed the silver ring on her finger. This was where they had been discovered.

  As soon as they arrived back at Dunadd Fiona and Samuel went straight to the library, but when they got there they found it was locked. Fiona rattled the door handle in frustration.

  “She’s started locking it again,” she moaned.

  “The key!” Samuel hissed. “Let’s get it!” So they hurried down the stairs to the kitchen. There was no one about. Fiona whipped open the drawer of the dresser where her mother kept her bunch of keys, while Samuel stood guard at the door.

  “Great!” Fiona cried, a look of despair on her face. The key to the library, the one key they were looking for, had been removed.

  “What are we going to do now?”

  It seemed that no matter how much Fiona and Samuel might want to resolve the mystery of the Weeping Woman and attempt to put her spirit to rest, everyone else was against them.

  They needed to find some family records, anything that might point them in the direction of Catherine Morton’s unmarked grave – but the one place where they might hope to come across any information of this sort was out of bounds. They were forbidden to go there, and without the library, they were lost. There was no way the
y could locate her grave by the following day.

  Samuel hadn’t given up hope yet.

  “There must be a way round this,” he reasoned. “Mr MacFarlane didn’t give us the silver dagger for nothing. He’s placing his trust in us.”

  “What’s the use?” Fiona muttered. “It’s like he said, the past just is; it can’t be changed.”

  “So that’s it then, is it?” he accused her. “We just give up?”

  “Well, what else do you expect me to do?”

  Samuel wandered off, frustrated by Fiona’s willingness to abandon hope so easily. He knew it was difficult for her. This whole thing affected her family much more directly than it did him, but that was all the more reason for them to keep trying.

  He found his mother in her work studio, surrounded by her own mess, fiddling with bits of wire.

  “What’s up?” she asked, as he strolled aimlessly between the workbenches, touching this and that.

  He shrugged. “Nothing much!” Just the end of the world, he added inside his own head, but didn’t bother to say it out loud. How could he confide in his mother all that he and Fiona had discovered over the past couple of weeks, since that night at Christmas when he had seen the Weeping Woman in the mirror over the fireplace. She would never believe him. It was all madness. Perhaps Fiona was right, and they should simply give up. What was it to him, anyway? He and his mother would probably move again in a couple of years’ time, and he could forget all about Dunadd and its problems, leave it all behind.

  He turned away, his head full of things he couldn’t possibly say to his mother. She watched him for a while, shrugged, then bent to her work again.

  A little later Samuel walked back across the courtyard, having made up his mind. He found Charles in the kitchen, making himself a sandwich.

  “Is Fiona about?” he asked.

  Charles looked at him darkly and shrugged. “How would I know?”

  Samuel sighed and walked past him into the dark hallway beyond. Fiona was sitting on the stairs, her shoulders slouched against the banister.

  “What’s up?” he asked her, sitting down on the stair beside her.

  She looked listless and fed up. “Nothing much!”

  “Listen. I’ve been thinking,” Samuel began.

  “Oh yes?”

  “What about if you asked your mum for help?”

  “You are joking, aren’t you?”

  She lifted her head and stared at him. “She’s locked me out of the library and hidden the key, forbidden me to visit Mr MacFarlane, and wears a face like thunder nowadays, and you think if I asked her, she might be prepared to help?”

  She looked incredulous.

  “Well, when you put it like that … It’s just she might know where any family records are kept. There’s no harm in asking.”

  “Oh yes there is,” Fiona murmured. “She’d eat me alive!”

  Chris Morton was grooming one of the horses when Fiona crept up behind her in the fusty warmth of the stables. It was dark inside, only a triangle of light piercing the shadows from the open doorway.

  “Mum …” she began.

  “Fiona, you startled me,” she said, then carried on dragging the curry comb over Emperor’s quivering flank.

  “You should be doing this, you know,” she said, half to herself.

  “Sorry, I’ve just been a bit busy lately.”

  “With Samuel. Yes, I had noticed.”

  “There was something I wanted to ask you …” she began, taking her life into her hands.

  Her mother stopped grooming. “Is it about Mr MacFarlane?”

  “Not … exactly …” But she didn’t sound convincing.

  “Then I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Mum, please, there was something I wanted to ask you. We think there might be a way to resolve it all.”

  “Resolve it?”

  “We want to put her to rest, Mum. But in order to do that we need to find her unmarked grave. Mr MacFarlane thought there might be some family records …”

  Chris Morton shook her head and sighed at the mention of that man’s name. “I’m never going to hear the last of this, am I?”

  Fiona stood her ground.

  “I’m sorry, Fiona. It’s not on. I just want you to forget what Mr MacFarlane told you.”

  “But!”

  “No buts, Fiona. Subject closed.”

  Fiona turned away and left the stables, hiding her look of devastation. She didn’t want her mother to realize how much it meant to her.

  Still nursing her disappointment, she knocked on the door of the cottage. Samuel opened it holding a piece of half-eaten toast in his hand.

  He looked at her hopefully, but she shook her head.

  “Any good?”

  “Nope,” Fiona said dismally. The two sat silently in his room, staring at the objects on his desk, the ring and the piece of tartan, the ebony box, the fragments of the journal and the silver dagger entrusted to them by Mr MacFarlane. It seemed as if they would never be able to use these things to help Catherine Morton. And if they couldn’t use them, the curse would remain in place, hanging over Dunadd like a sword awaiting its time to fall.

  Later that afternoon, as Granny Hughes was preparing vegetables for the evening meal, Fiona wandered into the kitchen looking gloomy.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Granny barked. “You’ve a face on you that would sour milk!”

  Fiona didn’t answer, but wandered through into the hallway. Her mother appeared from one of the side rooms.

  “Fiona?”

  She looked up.

  “I’ve been thinking … I still don’t think it’s a good idea, but … there is something in the library, an amateur family history written by a man called Sir Douglas Morton, in 1889.”

  Fiona couldn’t believe her ears.

  She waited, holding her breath.

  “It’s never been published, but was written in longhand in manuscript form, and bound in vellum. It’s a great thick tome, full of useless and boring information, like the names and dates of births and deaths, that kind of thing. You can look through it if you want. I’ve put it in the drawing room for you.”

  “Thanks, Mum,” she cried.

  “Handle it carefully. It’s very old. And when you’ve finished with it, let me know. Don’t try to replace it on the shelf or anything.”

  The room looked cold and cheerless. There was no fire lit, and the radiators creaked ineffectually. The boiler was too old and inefficient to heat the house properly. Fiona and Samuel approached the table where Chris Morton had left the big heavy-looking book for them. Now that they were able to finally inspect some genuine family records, they felt nervous, apprehensive about what they might find.

  Fiona drew the book towards her, and carefully opened its crackling spine. The pages were very thick, yellowed with age, and brittle. She blew the dust from its cover.

  They spread the volume on the floor between them, and leant forward. Mrs Morton had been right. A lot of it was very dreary, boring details of births and deaths, who had married whom, where and when. Eventually they found the name Catherine Morton, and read out what it had to say. “Youngest daughter of Sir Charles and Lady Cecilia Morton. Born at Dunadd on the nineteenth day of April 1696. Died on the thirteenth day of January 1716.” There was no mention of her dying in childbirth, and no record of her stillborn son. There was also no acknowledgement of her secret marriage to Patrick. As far as her family were concerned, she had died a Morton, unwed.

  They sat back on their heels and sighed. “This still doesn’t tell us anything more about Catherine. And it certainly doesn’t tell us where she might be buried.”

  “No, but read on …” Samuel murmured.

  They read a brief description of the death of Sir Charles Morton, who died only a couple of years after his daughter. He met his end in a riding accident. He rode his horse into the ravine near the waterfall one evening, which was considered strange as both horse and rider knew the moo
r well and were aware that the ravine was there. Mysteriously, the horse simply broke into a gallop and plunged them both to their deaths. It was never known why the pair had made such a fatal mistake.

  As they read on, they learnt that Catherine’s brothers had also died young. One in a hunting accident three years after he was married, leaving a widow and twin boys behind, the other drank himself to death. Samuel stared at what they had read and then looked at Fiona.

  “D’you think we could be looking at the curse of the Mortons?” Fiona had gone very pale. “This frightens me,” she murmured.

  Glancing through the family history, its thick pages crackling under their fingers, they saw that since January 1716 there had been a string of untimely deaths among male members of the Morton family. Very few of them had lived to a ripe old age and died peacefully in their beds, although in many cases they did leave young children behind, otherwise the family name would not have survived. The records obviously only went as far as 1889, the year in which the manuscript was written, and Sir Douglas Morton the writer had been too dull to make the same connection as the children were now doing. He, after all, did not know the full story of Catherine Morton and her curse, but Fiona and Samuel did and their hearts stood still. Although the account stopped at the year 1889, and they had no way of knowing if history had continued to repeat itself in the years after this, there was also the evidence of the recent past – the death of Fiona’s father.