Yes! It was writing, but she didn’t have all of it. She tried again, taking several pictures while sliding the phone all the way in and then inching it out. When she finished, she had a set of photos that she could overlay and stitch together. Once they finished uploading to her laptop, she sat at the table and tried to puzzle out the carvings.
French, not Gaelic, which told her either the piece was brought over from France, or the person doing the carving was educated and upper class, though given the type of cabinet and the rough finish, probably not nobility. Truly an apothecary? Or a clan’s healer? The carving would give her a clue. She went to work with her photo editing software, and before long, had a clear image of the entire inlaid carving. Its block of wood wasn’t a perfectly mortised fit, which was why the drawer stuck. But perhaps by the time the space had been chiseled out of the upper frame, and the carved block set in, the owner no longer cared, knowing the end was near. The lines defining the block’s edges were clearly visible, as were the words that someone felt were important enough to hide within this chest hundreds of years ago.
Though she could puzzle out some of it, she opened a translation program and sat back in shock when she read the result.
Steal this safe from Scottish soil and cursed be your poor generations with love, like mine, lost too soon. 1746
Dear God. Holt’s mother was right. The family was cursed, and this cabinet was the reason. Caitlin’s heart beat a wild staccato in her chest. It made sense that it belonged to a Jacobite family, a Jacobite healer, since she thought it most likely for a woman to pronounce a curse for a love lost too soon— one who’d been lost at Culloden, perhaps?
The cabinet must have been stolen by an English soldier or noble, sent back to England and from there to America generations later—poorgenerations later. In this context, that had to mean poor of children, of descendants. Of a future, with only enough to carry on the family name and the curse. An heir, few more. And love lost too soon. Holt knew his family’s tragic history two or three generations back, but she strongly suspected if she could trace it into the late 1700s, the same pattern would appear. The 19th century Christmas stereographic pictures of one adult with one or two children certainly fit.
There was only one way she could think of to end this curse. Holt had to get this cabinet back to Scotland.
* * *
Holt pushed his chair back from the desk in the office. He was fortunate his videoconference had just ended. Caitlin stood on the desk’s other side, fairly vibrating with what she was trying to tell him. He could see her lips moving and hear her voice, but the sounds she made were nonsense. Babbling. A curse carved into a cabinet. Passed down in his family. The source of all the deaths and disappearances…all the heartache…for the last couple of centuries?
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“Aye it does!” Caitlin objected, her accent noticeably thickened. “Ye are no’ Scottish, so ye didna grow up with this sort of thing. But I did. I’ve seen it.”
“A nearly three-hundred-year-old curse?”
“Aye, and the ghost left behind in my cousin Ian’s estate to guard family treasures just like those,” she argued, pointing up toward the attic.
“Treasures?” Holt scoffed. “They don’t look like treasures to me.”
She started to pace from one side of the desk to the other. “No’ to ye, no’ nowadays, but in the eighteenth century, in a family where men were either killed at Culloden or hunted down and killed afterward for being Jacobite or having Jacobite sympathies…hell, for being Scottish? Aye. When the victors raped the women, killed their bairns, stole the clan’s wealth and possessions, and carried the lot back to their estates in England? A curse would make a great deal of sense.”
“That’s the long, sad tale you refused to tell me at our first dinner the day I arrived? Good God, that is awful.” He paused for a moment, staring aside, unable to think if he looked at her. She was incandescent in her excitement— and indignation over the history she related. But what, really, did it have to do with him? “I know I told you what my mother thought, but I don’t know if I can believe this cabinet is the source— or if the curse is real.”
She stopped and put her hands flat on the desk, leaning toward him. “Ye did see most of those photos. Do ye recall the ones with the sad, wee bairn or two and a single adult? Believethem.”
He gestured for her to sit down, surprised when she straightened, then dropped into a chair without argument. “You can’t be certain when or where they were taken, or who the people are in them.”
“Maybe not, but why else would they be here?” She slapped the arm of the chair, then leaned forward, elbows on knees, waving her hands as she talked. “The person who carved a curse into the very thing that likely provided income for her family did so because she knew it would be stolen. The English might have burned everything else her people owned, but they would save that cabinet. At the time, it was probably full of valuable herbs and compounds used by a healer. Things that could have helped wounded clansmen recover. Things the English would have wanted to deny the Scots. And to use for their own wounded.”
“That seems reasonable.” Holt hated to admit it, but what she found in the cabinet was the first tangible connection to the curse his mother had believed to be real. Maybe not proof, but it made him think.
“In Scotland, healers were often wise women— women with special sight or intuition, and training in herbs, potions, portents— passed from mother to daughter. So that curse she carved into what was likely the healer’s most prized possession had teeth. And still does, as recently as your parents’ generation. If I were ye, I’d take it very seriously, and I’d fly that cabinet back to the Highlands as fast as I could get it loaded on a plane.”
That seemed extreme, but he wasn’t about to say that out loud. “It’s really got you spooked.” He couldn’t doubt she believed every word she was saying. What if she was right?
Caitlin sat back and crossed her arms. “If he’s still alive, would you ever want to meet your father?”
The whiplash change of subject floored Holt. “Why? He hasn’t bothered to be part of my life.”
“How could he if he doesn’t know you exist?”
That stopped Holt cold for a long minute. Then he shook his head. It didn’t matter. He had no idea who his father was. His mother said he’d died, and with his mother and great-aunt dead, the family who might have known his father’s name were out of reach. “If he was alive, why would I disturb the life he’s lived without me. He might have another family?—”
“Aye, ye might have brothers and sisters and cousins and more. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”
“Would it? How would I know?” Christ, she’d pressed her lips into a thin, taut line. An uncomfortable feeling flooded Holt’s belly. Guilt for upsetting Caitlin? “Look, this is all too new— and weird. Can we leave it be for a while? You have other pieces and the catalog to finish. You said you wanted to get home before Hogmanay. Let’s not get tied into knots over one cabinet.”
She sighed, then stiffened. “Fine. But in the meantime, you should make arrangements to send it back.”
“Send it back where?”
