Heather Song (8 page)

Ranald stood where he was and moved no closer.

“Who put the curse on my house, Alicia?” he said. His voice, too, was unlike I had ever heard it—soft but commanding. He was staring straight into her eyes.

It was obvious he had heard the gist of our conversation.

“I…I don’t…Why would I know?” she mumbled.

“Who, Alicia? Were you there? Did you hear it?”

Slowly Alicia nodded.

“
Who
put the curse on my house, Alicia?” Ranald persisted. The command in his tone was unmistakable.

Alicia seemed trying to speak. Her features were contorted, her eyes blinking, her mouth twitching strangely. Some terrible otherworldly battle was taking place, with Alicia in the middle of it.

At last her lips began to tremble. Finally she uttered a single word. It was but faintly audible.

“
Olivia
,” she whispered. The moment the name passed her lips, her body collapsed and I grabbed for her.

I nearly fell backward from the sudden weight. Ranald hastened to my side. We eased Alicia to the ground, where I knelt to support her. Her eyes were closed.

I glanced up at Ranald with a bewildered look on my face.

“She will come to herself shortly,” he said. “She will be spent. Get her home where she can rest, but do not speak of this unless Alicia brings it up herself. Otherwise, today’s work is done. When she is ready, give her something to eat.”

And with that, leaving me more perplexed than ever, Ranald Bain walked across the meadow toward his cottage. A minute after he was out of sight, Alicia’s eyes began to flutter. She groaned, I helped her slowly to her feet, and, holding on to steady her, we began making our way home.

A
licia clung limply to my side all the way back to the castle. She was completely compliant, did not seem anxious about whether Ranald was around, and said nothing.

We reached the castle. I took her to her bedroom, then returned downstairs to the kitchen to fix her a light snack. She was able to eat but two or three bites of apple and oatcake. Within minutes she was sound asleep on top of her bed in the clothes she had worn for the walk.

I left her with much to reflect on. I had never seen such a dramatic change come over anyone as what I had witnessed in Alicia. I was glad Alasdair wasn’t back from his meeting in Fochabers. Normally I would have gone straight to him and told him everything. But this wanted thinking out. I wasn’t absolutely sure I should even tell Alasdair. As much as I loathed the idea of keeping something from him, I did not want to say or do anything that might in some way compromise his thoughts toward Alicia. She had been devoted to him for years.

When Alasdair returned about three-thirty, I fixed tea and took a tray with some oatcakes out to the rose garden and we sat down together. By then I was ready to talk. He told me about his meeting, then asked how I had passed the day. I told him that Alicia and I had walked to the Bin with a light picnic lunch.

“Two jets took off from Lossiemouth when we were at the summit,” I said. “They screamed overhead so loud and close, it was terrifying. The ground shook!”

“I remember hearing them, too,” Alasdair said, chuckling. “Growing up around here, you get used to it. Of course all the boys love it and dream of being pilots one day.”

“Did you?”

“Sure. We all did.”

“Alicia loves airplanes, too. She told me her father actually was an RAF pilot.”

“Really—I didn’t know that.”

He thought a moment.

“Funny, isn’t it,” he mused, “how you don’t know people as well as you think. We were around one another all the time as children, but I never knew anything about Alicia’s parents.”

“Oh?”

“She was in my sister’s little clique of friends.”

“So she knew the castle as a girl, then later became your housekeeper.”

Alasdair became thoughtful again. I was afraid he would go back into that peculiar mood that had come over him at seeing me having tea with Alicia and the other women two weeks earlier. Luckily he didn’t.

“Alicia was first hired by my father, as I recall,” he said, “when I was down at Oxford if I’m not mistaken. Then I came back and had all my trouble. As she had never married, she stayed on. She maintained the place with a semblance of order during my absence, as well as after I returned. I don’t know what I’d have done without her.”

“Why did she not marry?” I asked. “She is attractive, bright, capable.”

“There were several young men, as I recall,” replied Alasdair. “I don’t actually know, to tell you the truth. I was in England during those years. Now that I think of it, she was involved with Max for a time—Olivia’s husband, you know. I didn’t know the circumstances. I was much too sophisticated in my own eyes to pay much attention to my sister’s love life. But now that I think of it, it seems Alicia and Max might even have been serious at one time. Suddenly it was off, and the next thing we knew it was Olivia walking down the aisle on our father’s arm. I was still in England and only came north for the wedding and was then away again. When I next returned a year and a half later, our father was dead, I was the new duke, and my thoughts were too full of Fiona to think much about Olivia’s childhood friends. I’m sorry for bringing her up, my dear,” he added with an apologetic smile.

“Don’t mention it,” I said. “You may talk about Fiona as often as you like. She is part of your story and is Gwendolyn’s mother, and therefore I am interested.”

“But still, that is the past and I prefer to look ahead. In any event, our mother, too, was unwell. And faithful Alicia Forbes was by then her housekeeper and has been with me ever since.”

“How much longer did your mother live?”

“Another two years. I was on the Continent at the time of her death.”

Alasdair paused and shook his head. “I have much to repent of to both my parents, if such things are allowed in the next life,” he said after a moment. “I’ll leave the theology of that to Iain. But I do have many regrets that bite more deeply the older I grow. I was not with them for either of their last days on earth. I know they longed to see me, but I was too absorbed with my own self at the time.”

He let out a long sigh. “Life is full of regrets,” he added slowly. “At every age, it seems, we are stupider than we have any idea. It is only the future that reveals the truth about the past, and then continues to reveal it again and anew with every passing year. What would Iain say? Probably that if God forgives us, we have to learn to forgive ourselves…and then move on.”

I could not help smiling to hear Alasdair speaking of God as if through Iain’s thoughts. I nodded. “I think that is very much like what he would say.”

“It is easier said than done,” said Alasdair.

“Probably
all
forgiveness is easier said than done,” I added.

We sipped at our tea and I took another oatcake.

“You know, it is a curious thing, now that I think of it,” said Alasdair after several minutes. “Alicia isn’t the only one of Olivia’s friends who never married. I’d never thought of it before, but there is Adela, of course…and then Tavia and Cora—that is incredible now that I think of it.”

“I didn’t know whether Adela was married or not.”

Alasdair shook his head, still thinking. “Oh, I’d forgotten about Fia,” he said. “Didn’t you say she was taking lessons from you, too?”

“Yes, she just started.”

“And of course there’s Winny Bain, who died before she was old enough to think about marriage. It’s more remarkable than I realized.
None
of them ever married.”

“An amazing coincidence.”

“Or perhaps
more
than a coincidence,” added Alasdair cryptically.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing…There couldn’t possibly be anything to it. It’s just that Olivia’s group of friends was…I don’t know, different. Separately the girls were all pleasant and perfectly normal, but when they were together, something changed. There was a bond between them that didn’t seem entirely healthy. I don’t know how else to describe it. When other children saw them together, roaming about on a Saturday or during the summer, they ran away. Even boys gave them wide berth. That’s why seeing you with them the other day disturbed me. I am sorry—it just hit me hard.”

“Think nothing more of it. But were people actually
frightened
of them?”

“Yes, I think they were. Especially the younger children. You remember what I told you before, about her rhyming curses.

“‘Look on the path—a slithering snake…

Tonight Alasdair will tremble and quake.

Trolls, goblins, and monsters, kelpies, and witches…

will gnaw your insides like unscratchable itches.

Spiders, lizards, and black slimy leeches…

are Alasdair’s friends and crawl up his breeches’—”

“Alasdair, stop, please…I don’t want to hear any more of them.”

“Sorry, but the fact is that Olivia’s group of friends—Alicia and Adela and the others—were all drawn into that to such an extent that they didn’t dare cross her.”

“All I know is that it sounds weird!” I tried to laugh as I said it. But it wasn’t funny. Obviously whatever Alicia had heard about Ranald and his house still held her in its grip. What I had seen on her face was no childish game but genuine fear. It was far more serious than being afraid of a snake.

“It was weird!” said Alasdair. “But even if half of it was imaginary, Olivia spread great evil around this community because people came to believe that she possessed the second sight and was in league with dark forces.”

I
hoped
I
wasn’t feeling the effects of Olivia’s hexes!

Whatever the cause, I tossed and turned half the night thinking about spiders and snakes and wolves and monsters. It was awful.

The mind can play terrible tricks on you during the night. Mine certainly did. Over and over Olivia’s silly chants played themselves in my brain until I thought they would drive me completely mad.

Never was I so glad to see morning come.

I can’t say the sunrise brought any resolution other than the usual effect of the coming of light—that all the perplexities and doubts and fears and imaginary goblins that seemed creepy and terrifying in the middle of the night no longer appeared so sinister.

One resolution, however, did come with the morning. All this about Olivia and hexes and curses could not be ignored, hidden, swept under the carpet and not talked about. I knew what Iain would say—that the surest solution to any quandary is light.

Olivia’s world was a world of hidden things…innuendo, suspicion, subtlety, doubt, fear, threat, secrecy. It was a world of darkness. It could not be allowed to infiltrate our lives again. Olivia’s ways must not creep back and work new evil in Buchan Castle as they had for so many years in the past. Alasdair was at last free from all that. I wasn’t about to let that evil come slinking back into our lives.

Light must prevail.

The reminder of Olivia’s threatening ditties and Alasdair’s being able to laugh about them himself, as much as they had swirled through my waking nightmares all night, had been a good thing—getting them out in the open where they could be exposed for the nonsense they were.

Obviously, however, they weren’t nonsense in Alicia’s mind.

Whatever Olivia had said about Ranald Bain still terrified her, even if her terror had been primarily for me. In Alicia’s mind, the words still contained power. Because of that, as Alasdair said, they still exercised a control over her, though Olivia herself was miles away in Aberdeen.

I scarcely saw Alicia the rest of the day after our walk. She slept most of the afternoon, got up for an hour, had something to eat, then went to bed for the night.

The following morning she was quiet and subdued. Whether she was embarrassed over what had happened or a rift had come between us, I couldn’t tell. She was distant, untalkative, and went about her day’s duties saying hardly a word. Strange as it is to say, I felt Olivia’s presence. I had spent enough time with Alasdair’s sister to recognize subtle similar feelings now.

The predicted storm hadn’t hit yet, though the wind had begun to whip up and clouds hung over the Firth that clearly meant business. But what I needed to do couldn’t wait.

Midway through the morning I sought Alicia where she was cleaning in the pantry.

“Alicia,” I said, “I am going up the Bin again. This time I am going specifically to visit Ranald Bain. I am going to have tea with him inside his house. I am going to play his harp. I would like you to come with me so you can see that there is nothing to any silly curse.”

The progression of expressions that came over Alicia’s face as I spoke were contorted and strange—first no expression at all, then a flash from her eyes of something very much like anger. For an instant I almost thought I was looking at
Olivia’s
eyes, angry that I would dare go against her warnings about Ranald. That expression gave way quickly to one of horror and disbelief that I would actually challenge the curse, as if inviting it on my own head. But with my last words, suddenly she began shaking her head violently, with a return of the terror I had seen the day before.

“I won’t do that,” she said. “I am afraid for you, too, Marie. Don’t do it, I beg you. No good can come of it. He is an evil man.”

“Alicia, stop it,” I said firmly. “He is
not
an evil man. I don’t know what lies Olivia has told you, but he is as gentle and kind as any man I know.”

“It’s all a trick to lure you into his house…and then the curse will come upon you!”

“Alicia, there is no curse.”

“There is, I tell you. I heard it.”

Her words took me aback. Even after her exchange with Ranald, it wasn’t what I had expected.

“
What
did you hear, Alicia?” I asked.

She looked away.

“Alicia.”

Still she would not return my gaze.

I reached out and placed my hand on her shoulder.

“Alicia,” I said, “look at me.”

Slowly she turned her head, as if battling having to look at me. Her features were wincing and contorting visibly. I stared straight into her eyes.

“Alicia,” I said, “I want you to tell me what you heard.”

Her lips began to quiver, just as they had under the force of Ranald’s stare. Then slowly, in a strange, almost gravelly voice, she spoke what she had heard from Olivia.

“The curse of madness will be the stain…of all who enter the house of Bain.”

The moment the words were out of her mouth, her body wilted. As she collapsed in weakness, I eased her to a nearby chair. Shuddering from what I had heard, I turned and left her.

I wandered out of the castle in a flurry of emotions. If ever I needed Alasdair’s arms around me to reassure me, it was at that moment. But he was not at home. And could Alasdair resolve my confusion? He was part of it—as were all who had been within Olivia’s orbit.

Even now, Alicia was still under her influence. The force of Olivia’s personality, the force of her powers of persuasion, were not so easily escaped.

I wandered through the rose garden, confused and bewildered.

I realized that there was no way I could force Alicia to visit Ranald Bain. The curse still held her in its grip. Until she
wanted
to, she would not be free from it.

But
I
had to talk to Ranald.

Five minutes later, after dashing off a quick note to Alasdair, I was setting out up the Bin.