Table Of Contents
Part 1 Chapter 1
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Other Series By Ranay James
About The Author
Copyright
The McKinnon: The Beginning
Book One-Part 1
The McKinnon Legends
A Time Travel Series
By Ranay James
Copyright 2015 Ranay James
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Acknowledgments
To my husband—Thank you for supporting my vision and being my partner through life.
To my fans—You are the final and most important piece to seeing my dream come to life.
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Part 1 Chapter 1
Elderage Castle, England
Christmas Eve
1486
“Wake, child! Run! Run, Morgan, go!”
Morgan heard the frantic voice of her mother yanking her as if by a physical force from a deep and dreamless sleep. Already the fire was spreading at an alarming speed, and toxic black smoke was so thick that she could hardly see the hand in front of her face. She labored just to breathe as the fingers of death reached for her, wrapping around her legs in a certain death grip.
“Run!” She heard the voice again.
“Mamma! Da!” she screamed for her mother and father as the ceiling began to collapse around her. “John? James? Rhiannon?” She called for her younger brothers and sister as she crawled along the stone floor. They had been sleeping in the same bed with her yet now were nowhere that she could see. The flames were gaining ground, licking at her gown, and embers singed her hair as she found the chamber door.
“Turn right, Morgan, and run as fast as you can.”
She unflinchingly followed her mother’s voice.
Morgan ran down the hallway, then traversed the stone stairs. The heat was so intense that the stone burned the tender skin on the bottom of her feet, yet she was heedless of the pain.
“Turn left, now!” her mother’s voice demanded of her.
Morgan instantly obeyed, finding herself only a few feet from the main entry door. Flames completely engulfed the opening in a deadly inferno of burning wood and molten metal.
“Trust me, child. Go through that door.” Morgan felt, rather than heard, the voice in her head.
Morgan’s sense of survival was almost too strong to follow her mother’s demand.
“Trust me, go! There will be a way provided. Go or die!”
Morgan took a leap of faith. Bounding over the last three steps of the staircase, she made a dash for that flaming door. Only feet from the massive blaze, the door barring her exit fell, crashing outward as a massive timber fell from the ceiling. This unburned beam was the bridge she needed to escape through the gap left by the missing entryway.
Out into the night, Morgan ran on bare feet until she could no longer feel the searing heat. Turning to look back, she called to her family and screamed at the top of her lungs, forcing her voice to rise above the roar of the firestorm.
Had her family survived? She saw no one in the outer bailey as she ran through the outer gates, trying to escape the fire that was rapidly spreading to all the outbuildings and stables. It was as if the whole of the castle was deserted and she was the only living soul.
She saw her father stumble out of the castle carrying her mother, and relief flooded through her. She ran to him where he had fallen, burned and dying.
“Mamma, Da! Oh God, somebody help them!” she cried, looking around for any hope of assistance for the father she adored and the mother she loved beyond life itself. There was no help for either of them as she watched her adored father take his last breath holding his beloved duchess, whom he had died to save.
His efforts had been in vain.
Alison Pembridge, Sixth Duchess of Seabridge, fought the hands of death pulling her into the spirit world. She had one thing she had to do before leaving this physical earth behind her.
“Morgan, listen to me.” Alison struggled to speak past the pain and damage to her lungs from the searing flames. “I love you, heart of my heart.”
“Mamma, save your strength. You’ll be fine. I’ll make you better, I promise. Just don’t die, please. I’ll take good care of you.”
Morgan’s young mind couldn’t fathom what was actually happening. Her brain wasn’t allowing her to see this for what it was. Alison knew that. Reality would find her lovely daughter soon enough.
Alison had foreseen this night long before she had married the dashing and charismatic Morgan James Pembridge, Sixth Duke of Seabridge. She couldn’t change things or stop the hands of fate. She had tried to spare her children the pain of what this night had brought to them all. As a mother, she had failed. Destiny had brought them here, regardless of her efforts to change the flow of time and how this event would unfold. It simply had been out of her control.
She had also foreseen other events, and she had to pass on to her daughter what she could while there was still time.
“Listen to me, child. You must be strong. You’re now the Seventh Duchess of Seabridge. It’s your destiny, and the path ahead will make you strong if you don’t let it kill you. Only you can find the inner strength to survive, Morgan. Take heart, the great sorrow will pass and great triumph will follow. Remember the contract I showed you?”
Morgan nodded as tears streamed, cutting a clear path down her soot-covered face.
“Don’t forget it, Morgan, and just as you heard my voice tonight, know I will always be there to guide you in times of greatest crisis. I… love… you.” Alison’s hand fell away from her daughter’s face.
“Mamma? Mamma!” Thirteen-year-old Morgan watched as the light went out of her mother’s emerald green eyes.
Morgan screamed as her uncle Lester Brentwood picked her up and carried her away from her parents’ bodies.
“Nay! Put me down! Let me go!”
She fought him as she saw a man dragging her father farther from the flames.
Lester needed indisputable proof his stepbrother, sister in law, and the children were dead.
“Morgan, listen to me. They’re gone! They’re all gone except you and me.” Lester watched as Elderage, his ancestral home, went up in flames. “I’m taking you back to Seabridge. Then I’ll go to King Henry. As your father’s only brother, I’m your only living relative, Morgan. You’re now my responsibility.”
Morgan was numb and too distraught to notice that a wagon, a covered carriage, and several horses were already ready to leave. She had suffered the greatest loss a child could experience, but she clung to her mother’s words. “I will guide you in times of crisis.”
Morgan could feel her mother near as she folded herself up into a ball on the uncomfor
table seat of that carriage and allowed her mind to go blank.
This would be the first of many times in the next seven years she would retreat into herself out of self-preservation.
To survive, one does what one has to.
For Morgan it was to become a way of life.
Chapter 2
Seabridge Castle
England
Spring 1493
It had been over seven years since that fateful Christmas Eve. Morgan, now a young woman of twenty, stood, taking a deep breath for courage.
“You can do this,” Morgan whispered, her words disappearing into the darkness of the secret passageway.
“You must do this, my child.” Her mother’s voice came back, echoing softly on the drafty air.
In spite of the damp and chill lingering in the midnight air, Morgan found herself wiping away a bead of sweat inching its way down her temple. Escape was her focus, and having planned this moment of escape for years, she knew with utter certainty it was now or never. She wasn’t about to let a little thing like fear keep her from obtaining the one thing she hadn’t had in seven years.
Freedom.
She could smell freedom. She tasted it on the stale salty air as it bubbled up from the depths of the castle.
Her uncle had indeed returned her to Seabridge after the death of her family; however, he had seen that she remained locked away here, neglected and abused. His subjects were too afraid of him to help her. Morgan was held captive in the castle, simply too isolated for anyone to even realize she was a prisoner in her own home, beaten, starved, and alone in her torment.
“You can do this, heart of my heart.” The soft encouragement of her mother’s ghost answered her trepidation. She closed her eyes against the blackness that would lead her to the damp bowels of the castle. Plunging through the secret door of the tower room, Morgan quickly felt for the lever.
By fortune she had found the doorway five years earlier.
Morgan remembered the day clearly:
Desperate for warmth, Morgan pulled the tapestry off the wall and wrapped it around herself.
Huddled and shivering against the opposite wall, she stared, transfixed, for days on end. Then, as if by magic… One moment she was looking at bare stone and the next she saw it: gaps in the mortar that were too regular to be caused by age alone. She sprang to her feet, flinging the moldy tapestry behind her. Hope spurred her to push and prod and smooth her hand across the rough-hewn surface, searching for the key to open this hidden door. The heady promise of freedom sharpened her focus, and it wasn’t long before she found a loose chunk of mortar that, when lifted, let the door swing inward.
That black maw had terrified her, and she quickly closed the door again, hanging the tapestry back in its place lest someone else discover the secret.
She had never taken it down, no matter how cold she had felt.
In the years following that grand discovery, Morgan’s sheer willpower and determination fueled her exploration of the narrow passageway that some long ago ancestor had been insightful enough to build. Had she been a man, she would have had to turn sideways to traverse the path. Over time her courage grew as the cobwebs cleared, and remains of long-dead rodents were crushed beneath her feet. Finding other entrances, she began raiding other rooms for items she thought would help when she finally made her bid to escape. She kept them hidden in a stolen sack just inside the passageway of her cell.
Picking up the sack of items she had managed to collect on her nightly excursions, she dug through them to find trousers, a shirt, and a knife, which she placed soundlessly on the floor of the passage. Slipping off the ragged dress, Morgan quickly used the scraps as undergarments to bind her breasts. Then she pulled on one of the two sets of stolen clothing. With no one to care or help to tend her needs, there had been no opportunity for a haircut. In seven years her hair had grown past her waist. She knew it had to go. It was crucial to her disguise as a stable boy.
She awkwardly sawed across the long braid where it was gathered at the base of her neck until the last of the strands broke free. The weight of it transferring from her head to her hand felt like a different kind of freedom.
Placing the severed tresses into a second sack once used for seed, she prayed the confinement would keep any of the long dark strands from inadvertently making their way under the opening and giving away the existence of the door. If she had to abort this escape attempt, she needed to ensure her secret was safe. Not that she would have a reasonable explanation for how she cut her hair without a proper tool, should she have to return unsuccessfully in this attempt. Tying a knot in the top of the sack, she placed it to the side, leaving it behind along with any remaining self-doubt.
From this point to the next, Morgan would be in complete darkness, knowing that each of the chambers had slits in the walls for secret viewing. She couldn’t risk someone seeing a light source shining through the walls, alerting someone to her presence.
It’s neither here nor there, she thought. She didn’t need the light, knowing every passageway as intimately as she did.
When she began to venture out over five years ago, there had been several narrow escapes. Almost immediately, tales began to circulate of certain parts of the castle being haunted with the spirit of her long-dead mother. A few servants came forward claiming to have seen the ghost of the Sixth Duchess wandering the castle at night, searching for her dead children. Some had gone as far as to say the duchess had spoken to them through the walls.
Her uncle had dismissed all this as the ranting of the ignorant. Morgan had taken full advantage. Knowing none of the superstitious folk would venture to the places they thought to be haunted bought her time to roam the castle more freely. Morgan smiled, the thought giving her courage. The only thing wandering the corridors of Seabridge was her, and she had no intentions of dying anytime soon.
She moved slowly, feeling her way along the passage, careful not to give her presence away to the occupants in the chambers just inches away. Step by agonizing step, Morgan kept her breathing even and silent just as she had practiced.
Inching her way closer to her first destination, Morgan felt for the latch located at the top of the door. This passage exited into the solar, opening less than two feet from the desk that had once belonged to her father.
Stopping at the panel, which, to the unknowing eye, looked like the third in a trio of bookcases lining the wall behind the desk, she placed her ear to the cool surface to listen for evidence of anyone in the chamber. With her uncle still in London for the Easter celebration, she doubted there was any activity in this part of the castle, especially at this hour. Yet caution was still the rule. She hadn’t survived this long by being reckless.
Silently, the latch released, and, holding the panel from springing open, she cracked it ever so slightly. Peering through the crack in the panel, Morgan could see there was no one in the solar. Breathing a sigh of relief, she slipped through the opening.
Crouching down behind the desk, she silently closed the bookcase behind her, gently placing pressure until hearing the soft click of the latch. In the silence of the night it sounded very loud, yet no one came to investigate. She had cleared another hurdle.
The second escape hatch was a scuttle hole low on the wall in the opposite corner, which opened out to a landing for a set of very narrow stairs leading down into the maze of tunnels beneath the castle. Feeling along the wall for the edge she knew was there, Morgan pressed another stone designed to move with ease. Again, an engineering wonder that a massive stone could be moved by a slip of a woman. She looked around the darkened room for what she hoped was the last and final time.
This was the same room she had once played chess in with her father. That wonderful time seemed ages ago, before the fire consumed her family at her uncle’s estate, leaving her sole heir to the family fortune, the dukedom called Seabridge. She had become the Seventh Duchess that fateful night which claimed the lives of her father, mother, twin sister, and
brothers. In a flash, she had become the ward of her father’s stepbrother, her only known living relation.
The man was evil, and over the seven years that she had been under his care, he had placed his share of emotional and physical scars upon her. With good reason, she had grown to suspect he had killed her family for his own personal gain. If she stayed, Morgan knew he would eventually kill her too.
“No more. It ends tonight,” she vowed as she stared into the void left by the stone. Morgan inhaled the stale, cold air bubbling up from the frigid depths of the castle. She knew it was the smell of liberty.
Morgan stared into the darkness. Only three hundred yards of underground tunnel separated her from the edge of the paddocks and her means of escape. She had spent years exploring the miles of tunnels, hoping she would find the one tunnel that opened past the castle walls. After years of searching, she had been victorious, not only in finding the bolt hole, but also in finding the contract between her father and the king.
And none too soon, Morgan thought.
She was aware King Henry had refused Lester’s petition to marry her the previous summer. Lester unsuccessfully argued there was no blood relation between them. Her grandfather’s second wife was Lester’s mother, and he was ten years old when they married. It had not mattered to the king. Henry really didn’t care if her father and Lester had shared neither the same father nor mother. Lester wasn’t of noble blood. His mother only married into it. Morgan, by contrast, was a not so distant relative to the king and royal family. The king had given her uncle a royal “Nay!” and sent him packing. She overheard some of the house servants laughing at his ousting by the king, feeling it was less than he actually deserved. Morgan agreed.
At the time, her triumph had been very short-lived.
Lester must have vowed that if he couldn’t marry her to secure the dukedom and titles for himself, he would marry her to someone he could control. Consequently, he had paraded her in front of a score of potential husbands as if she were a piece of property to go to the highest bidder.