GLEN MOR, JULY 13th, 1746, 8:12 a.m.

They entered Glen Mor, leaving the sound of the waterfall for the silence of the track. Mordaunt rode without speaking.

The rain grew lighter and ceased: the sheer slate walls of the gorge crept closer and the crofts were visible. Brevet reined in with some inanity, and he swore at him to keep quiet. Brevet flushed and said, "I am a King's officer, sir, as you are, and I will not be spoken to like a dog." He spurred to the rear of the column and lashed out a command. The drum was silent.

Bayonets were fixed, although Mordaunt did not recall having given the order.

They had marched on dry bread and water, five miles on a cold morning at seventy-five paces to the minute. The air was unbearably sweet with the fragrance after rain, and a lark was mounting eastward into a torn sky.

Three children were driving cattle into a field white with weed: one was an adolescent girl, taller than the others, and they were all singing and shouting in high voices, driving the cattle with sticks while a dog ran bounding in the weed. Then they stopped, seeing the men and the horses, and the cattle were forgotten.

Mordaunt killed the girl first, to spare her what a slower death would mean.

The rest was never possible to recall in sequence, or with clarity. He remembered approaching the manse, the fulsome blood-red roses, the wall, the gate, the graves. His hands were running with blood, although he did not know how he had acquired it, and his clothing was spattered with blood: he seemed unable to speak or reason, as though in the grip of nightmare. A woman was screaming, and the sound was unendurable; a child cried, and was abruptly silent.

He stared down at the bleached knuckles on the hilt of his sword, blood congealing on the fullered blade, the lanyard soaked with blood. There was blood beneath his nails. His arm and his shoulder were trembling.

He covered his eyes with his bloody hand and there was silence... silence, and then, as though in nightmare or in madness, indistinguishable voices... an endless litany of voices, among them, unrecognized, his own.

Oh God... help me. Help me.

She was standing on the doorstep of the manse, as if going in or having just come out. She wore the dark red gown of the previous night. Her eyes seemed to hold his, and her lips moved, but whatever she was attempting to say to him he could not understand it: it might have been a plea for mercy, for intervention, or a curse. Then she broke away and began to run; the heavy mud in the street sucked at her ankles and was clinging to her skirts. He fired once, meaning only to delay her; she staggered as though at some impact, and then was running again.

The second and third shots were fired simultaneously, by himself and by another. He thought she died instantly.

He did not remember moving, or if any one was there to witness. The body lay with outflung arms, the right hand a bloody tangle of bone and sinew. The back of the head was wet, although her hair concealed the reason. He turned her face toward him.

One eye was open, the lashes fanned beneath the brow. Of the other nothing remained but a gaping socket, fragments of bone, the matter of the brain. The socket was steaming faintly, blood and vitreous fluid welling from it, running in tendrils over his wrist. And subtly, from the hair he held, rose the sweet, bitter perfume.

Smoke now. They were trying to fire the dwellings, but the heather thatching would not burn. A private soldier was standing at the manse gate with a torch. There was no sign of Brevet.

He came to his feet, loading mechanically. The ball struck stone with a scream, and he heard the incredulous curse. No one else disturbed him.

He knelt again, staring into her face, closing the remaining eye. The lashes and the mouth, except where her blood and the humours of the shattered eye had splashed them, were as beautifully drawn as when his lips had touched them. He stroked the strands away from her cheek and turned the spilling socket into her hair, then he covered the wounded hand with a fold of her gown, taking an exaggerated care with the fingers. The hideousness of her death concealed, he left her and went into the house.

He walked through it, the lanyard stiffened around his wrist, the grip biting into his palm. The kitchen. The light here was grey, and the same candles were on the mantel, burning: there was a kettle on a crane over the fire, boiled dry. The papers were still beneath the hearthstone.

He burned them and extinguished the candles, then he turned his attention to the child.

In the years and the nightmares and the imperfect recollections that followed, he never left her: in nightmare, others fired the house and he burned with her, as she would have burned; sometimes in dreams he killed her, as others would have killed her; sometimes, unspeakably, the dream of death was perverted by the memory of sexual abuse he had witnessed, and had been powerless to prevent. In his dreams, he died with her. He did not recall leaving the house.