That psychic link was represented here as a slender bridge of stone overarching the fiery lake. Clinging fast to the lectern, Claire gave a wild, despairing cry - the cry of a soul in torment. Hearing it, Adam reached out to her - and began gingerly moving out onto the bridge.
Fire rose to meet him, raging round him with hurricane force. The blistering furnace of the flames erased all distinctions between body, mind, and spirit, leaving only pure agony, but he clung to his purpose and struggled on. Halfway across the bridge, he felt its fabric shudder under him. He tried to quicken his pace, flinching at each fresh explosion, but he was forced to a standstill only a few paces from the shore, choking on fire.
His whole being felt blasted and flayed. Beaten to his knees, for a moment he could go no further. The excoriating heat conjured up a tortured memory out of his own past. In as agonizing wrench of perspective, he was suddenly a fourteenth-century Templar knight, reliving fiery martyrdom at the instigation of the French king, Philip le Bel….
His chains held him fast to the stake as the flames licked hungrily up his legs, surrounding him with pain. Assailed by the stench of his own burning flesh, he flung himself against his bonds, hearing his own voice moaning in mortal -
"NO!"
With a supreme effort of will, Adam wrenched himself back to his present purpose, pressing his ring to his lips as he forced himself to remember who he was and what he was doing here. With a puissant lunge, he broke free of the chains and burst from the flames, at last gaining the refuge of the shore.
Claire was slumped over the lectern. Once more in command, Adam made his way to her side. No time now to wonder how he had been drawn so completely into her visualization - though a part of him knew it betokened contact with a far older soul than he first had thought. Could it be that Claire Crawford, like Peregrine when Adam first had met him, was a damaged fledgling?
He caught hold of her arm, intending to lift her clear and bring her back to her senses. But before he could invoke the necessary controls, his senses wrenched again and the scene around them blurred and vanished in an accompanying pang of dizziness. When Adam's vision cleared, he discovered that he had been cast into yet another scene conjured up from the well of Claire's personal unconscious.
Chapter Eleven
THIS one, at least, was more tranquil. Adam was standing alone on a gravelled path in the midst of a broad churchyard. On either side of him, the lush grass of early summer was broken up by grave slabs, with here and there a raised table-tomb to indicate the resting place of someone of more substantial means. In front of him the ground sloped away downhill toward the junction of two rivers, one broad and smooth, the other narrow and swift-running. At the lower end of the burial green, within the shelter of the yard's freestone wall, half a dozen ewes were placidly grazing while their lambs frolicked about in the sun.
The attendant church was large, stone-built in the cruciform plan of the late medieval period, with a high tower at its western end. The columns and friezes flanking the west door showed a gothic wealth of carving. Beyond the church, past the meeting of the waters, the noonday sun glanced off the crowstepped gables and grey slates of a modest-sized town. Between church and town, an L-plan tower-house jutted against the sky, encircled by a bawn wall of moldering stones.
The carts and wagons going into the town gave Adam his first clear indication that he was no longer operating within the confines of present time, and the wealth of detail suggested that this was more than a mere stage set devised by Claire's imagination to serve as backdrop for some romantic daydream. On the contrary, Adam realized with a rising wave of excitement that he was almost certainly dealing with a vision drawn not from fantasy, but from the memory of a historic personality - Claire Crawford's.
That Claire should possess a historic past was a discovery of no mean significance. Genuine experience of past lives was one of the hallmarks of individuals with Adept potential. That Claire herself seemed unaware of her historic past reinforced his earlier speculation that Claire might be a wounded fledgling - which made it all the more imperative that she should be healed and brought back into harmony with the Light.
Spurred on by this possibility, Adam surveyed his surroundings, trying to deduce where he might be, and when. Scotland, certainly; the crowstepped gables of the town roofs were a distinctive feature of Scottish architecture. And in a town of some consequence, given the presence of the tower house and the size of the parish church. Probably no later than the mid-seventeenth century, judging by the fact that the burial ground contained only grave slabs and table-tombs. Standing monuments, he recalled, had not become a feature of Scottish burials until shortly before the turn of the eighteenth century.
His interest deepening, Adam left the path in order to examine the inscriptions on some of the newer tomb-slabs. A preponderance of Scotts and Douglasses amongst the names suggested a location in the central Borders area. The most recent date he could find was 1640. Before he could begin to speculate further, the sound of a door opening behind him made him turn his head in time to see a tall, dark-haired woman emerge from the church porch with a flat basket of flowers looped over one arm.
She was dressed in a style that reminded Adam at once of portraits executed by the seventeenth-century Scottish painter George Jamesone. Her full-skirted gown was a blued-grey shade of plain, dark wool, but the quality of the cloth itself proclaimed her a member of the gentry. About her shoulders she wore a shawl of fine Flemish lace, with more lace frilling the cuffs of her full, elbow-length sleeves. The face beneath the sweep of a broad-brimmed chapeau was striking rather than pretty, and unfamiliar, but the eyes gazing out across the churchyard belonged to Claire Crawford.
She had three children with her, two small boys of perhaps five or six, and a girl who looked to be several years older. Shooing them off with a smile to go play with the lambs at the far end of the churchyard, this Claire-who-had-been left the path and picked her way decorously across the grass toward a handsome granite table-tomb on the south side of the church door. When she reached it, she paused a moment with her head bowed as if in prayer, then knelt and began arranging flowers in a stone sconce at the foot of the tomb.
Adam drifted over to join her. Halting a discreet distance behind her, he took a moment to glance over the Latin carved on the face of the tomb. Thomas Maxwell of Hawick, aged thirty-one, had been buried here with his three children: James, Margaret, and Eilidh, the last a mere infant. The year was the same for all four: 1636.
He needed nothing further to tell him how the four had died. Like the rest of Europe, Scotland had been visited by periodic outbreaks of plague from the fourteenth century onward. Prior to the turn of the seventeenth century, those outbreaks had been confined largely to the coastal ports, but with the stabilization of the English border in 1603, the increase of overland trade had brought the plague inland. One such outbreak had ravaged Hawick in 1636.
At that moment, the woman kneeling at the tomb glanced around and gave him an inquiring look from under the brim of her hat.
"Good day to ye, sir," she observed pleasantly, the lilt of the Borders in her accent. "I dinnae think I know ye. Are ye a stranger here?"
In his vision, Adam shook himself out of his reverie, amazed that she could see him.
"In a manner of speaking," he said. "My name is Adam Sinclair."
"And mine is Annet," she returned with a smile. "Annet Maxwell."