The Angel Stone: A Novel (20 page)

“We saved each other,” William replied, with a look that made me blush—and that enraged Jeannie.

“And in all this did ye forget that ye were betrothed to me, William Duffy?”

William tore his eyes from me. “Nay, Jeannie, I didn’t forget, but I dared not hope that ye’d remember me in all the long time I’d been away. And I knew that surely a lass as beautiful and well favored as yourself would have married another in these seven years.” William ended with a hopeful look that he quickly masked as a sorrowful one, but Jeannie had turned bright red at what I imagined was an unwelcome reminder of her spinsterhood. If she’d been ready to wed seven years ago, she must be in her mid-twenties by now—in this period, an old maid.

“Weel,” she said, tossing a lock of her gold hair over her shoulder. “It’s not that I didn’t have my share of suitors, but I held out hope that you would come back. And now …” Her red lips parted to reveal a dazzling smile. “Ye have. My father—and brothers—will be glad to see ye, William. You’ll come with me now. I’m sure your”—she gave me an icy stare—“
lady friend
can be accommodated at the tavern.”

William glanced at me imploringly, willing me to come up with some story that would save him from his fiancée, but I was too angry at him for not telling me about her last night to feel inclined to help. Fortunately for him, someone else came to his rescue: a middle-aged (although I realized that middle-aged here might mean thirty) woman who looked strangely familiar.

“I’ll no’ have ye takin’ my nephew away before I have a chance to box his ears for making us all worry these long years.”

“Aunt Nan!” William exclaimed. The woman’s hair was longer and not yet gray, her blue eyes unclouded by cataracts, but she was identical to Mac Stewart’s nan, whom I’d met at Shady Pines Assisted Living a few weeks ago—or, rather, three hundred plus years from now.

“Nan Stewart?” I asked.

She narrowed her keen blue eyes at me. “Aye, do I know ye? You look a bit like Katy Brodie.”

I realized my mistake. This woman must be an ancestor of Mac’s grandmother. I didn’t want the village thinking I was Katy, which I assumed must have been the name the fairy girl had gone by. “No, it’s just that William’s spoken of you.”

William gave me a quizzical look. The number of falsehoods being bandied about was making me dizzy. Nan Stewart may not be Mac’s nan, but she was the closest thing to a sympathetic face in the crowd. I nudged William. “And I’m sure he wants to explain to you where he’s been. Don’t you think we should go with your aunt
now
?”

“Aye, a good idea—”

“You’re not going anywhere, William Duffy,” Jeannie announced, with a stamp of a pretty, slippered foot, “before ye tell me whether or no’ you have come back to fulfill your promise and marry me.”

“Aye, I’d like the answer to that question, as well.” A broad, grizzled gentleman dressed in finer clothes than the rest of the townspeople had appeared at Jeannie’s side. Her father, no doubt. “Or should I be summoning my lawyer to draw up charges of breach of promise?”

I looked at William and noticed that he had turned a slightly greenish hue. I felt sorry for him until he opened his
mouth and said, “I cannot marry ye, Jeannie, as I’m already wed to this lady here.” He took my hand and held it up so that the sun struck the emerald and diamond ring I wore on my right hand—the ring Liam had given to me.
The emerald is the color of your eyes when we make love
, he had told me when he put the ring on my finger. I felt a strange stab of disloyalty as William claimed it as proof of our engagement, a feeling that mingled with the rather petty enjoyment of watching Jeannie’s face turn livid with jealousy, and that finally resolved into pique that William had claimed me as his own in the marketplace without consulting me.

“If that be the case, then you will be hearing from my lawyers. And,” Jeannie’s father added over his shoulder as he steered his outraged daughter away from the square, “the kirk session will be interested to hear this story of pirates. To me, it sounds suspiciously of witchcraft.”

William opened his mouth to reply, but his aunt put a warning hand on his arm and answered instead. “I’m sure the lad only did what was right, Hamish MacDougal. As for the kirk, I haven’t heard yet that being kidnapped by pirates is proof of witchcraft.” She steered William, who still gripped my hand, in the opposite direction from where Jeannie and her father had gone, leading the way down a narrow alley. When we’d gotten away from the square, I turned on William.

“How could you claim me as your bride in front of all those people without asking me first?” I demanded.

William’s mouth dropped at my question. “It was all I could think of to keep from having to marry Jeannie MacDougal. After last night I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“Last night I didn’t know you were engaged to another woman!”

“I didn’t know it myself! I had no idea that Jeannie MacDougal
would be waiting for me all these years. Her father is the richest man in town and an elder of the kirk. When I was courting her, she was the most sought-after girl in all of Ballydoon. I’d have thought she’d wed a month after I vanished.”

“Clearly she isn’t as fickle as you are.”

“Fickle? Me? I didn’t notice you worrying overmuch last night about your Bill or Liam.”

“What are you talking about? Bill and Liam were
you
!”

“I don’t see how they can be me if I don’t remember them and I have been in Faerie all these years—”

“Fucking everything that moves!”

William’s eyes flew open wide at the expletive. “Only because the Fairy Queen made me!”

Nan, who’d reached her front door, wheeled on us. “Do the two of ye dunderheads want to be taken as witches right this minute with all your talk of fairies?” she cried. “Do you not know that traffic with the fairies is considered an admission of witchcraft?”

I did, in fact, remember something of the kind from a class I’d taken on the European witch hunts. From 1597, when James VI proclaimed in his work
Daemonologie
that any occurrence of the supernatural came from the devil, witch hunters throughout the first half of the seventeenth century prosecuted anyone who admitted—often under torture—that they’d had contact with the
gude neighbors
. The furor culminated in a massive witch hunt that claimed more than three hundred lives …

“In 1659!” I said aloud. “Nan’s right. The country’s on the verge of one of the worst witch hunts in Scottish history.”

Nan stared at me for a moment, then wordlessly turned, opened her door, and pulled me through it into a small, neat, homey parlor with cushioned chairs by a fireplace, a spinning wheel, and bunches of fragrant herbs hanging from the low
roof beams. She locked the door behind us, drew the lace curtains at the windows, and poked her head into an adjoining room—presumably to check if we were alone. Then she took me by both hands, drew me down onto a bench in front of the hearth, and stared hard into my eyes.

“Who are ye?” she asked. “You do look a mite like that demented girl who wandered out of the Greenwood, but I can see you’re not her. How do you know what will happen in the future, and how did you know me? Are ye one of …” She licked her lips and looked nervously around the room. “One of the fair folk?”

I looked up at William, who was hovering nervously above us. “Nay, Auntie, she’s the one who saved me from them.”

“So that
is
where ye’ve been. I thought it might be the case when ye went missing and that girl showed up in the village the next day.”

“Was her name Cailleach?”

“Aye,” Nan said, eyeing me suspiciously. “That’s what she said her name was, but it’s not a Christian name, so we called her Katy. She was not right, puir thing. She was ravin’ about having lost her way to a door and that all her folk would die. I asked her about William, and she just wept the harder and told me he’d been taken by the Queen of Elphame and it was all her fault. I didn’t know, though, if she were raving or telling the truth—and I knew that, if it were the truth, if she kept on like that she’d be taken as a witch. I looked after her until Malcolm Brodie, whose own wife had died the year before leaving him with two motherless bairns, fell in love with her and married her. We thought she’d settled down when she had her own bairn, but then the witch hunters came and she ran away. We never did see her again.” She looked at me. “If you’re not her, what are you? Witch or fey?”

I considered lying, but I felt an instinctive trust of Nan, perhaps because I knew her descendants in the twenty-first century and there were no people more trustworthy than the Stewarts. “A bit of both,” I replied, and then proceeded to tell her my story as honestly as I could, translating the details of the twenty-first century into terms a seventeenth-century woman would understand. She listened patiently, stopping me only when I got to the part about the nephilim. She made me go back and describe them.

“Aye, I know their ilk. I believe that some of the witch hunters may be those devils. Their kind have been abroad in the country for many years now. They are the ones behind the war on the auld folk and all who hold the old ways. They have outlawed the minstrels and tale-tellers—all those who tell the old stories—because it’s in those old stories that lie the secrets to destroy them. They’re the inquisitors who trick hapless old women into telling tales of the little folk and then accuse them of consortin’ with the devil, because they are afraid that any who know the old ways will know how to destroy them.”

“That’s what Nan Stewart—your descendant—told me. She said that I had to find the angel stone that would destroy them, but I don’t know where to look. The girl you call Katy must have had it. Did you ever see her with a milky-white tear-shaped stone?”

“Aye, she wore it in a brooch just like the one you’re wearing.” She pointed at the pin on my shawl and then flicked her eyes toward William and saw the one that he was wearing. “When the witch hunters came and Katy ran away, she left the brooch for her daughter, little Mairi, but it no longer had the stone in it. Malcolm thought she must have taken it to sell. The witch hunters stayed six months, turning neighbor against
neighbor, sister against sister. By the time they were done, twenty-four men and women were hanged for witchcraft. And now they’re back again. They’ve taken my cousin Mordag—”

“Mordag?” William asked. “Why, she’s a harmless old woman. We stayed in her cottage last night.”

I thought of the unfinished bowl of oatmeal and the spinning wheel knocked over on the floor and the beautiful woven blankets I’d slept under. Although I’d never met Mordag, I felt a pang for the woman being yanked out of her quiet life by those monsters. “Where have they taken her?” I asked.

“To the dungeons of Castle Coldclough,” Nan replied with a shiver.

I felt a chill, remembering how the dark ruin seemed to loom over the village, casting a malignant shadow.

“We’ll rescue her,” I said. “Once I have the angel stone, we can use it with your magic plaid.”

Nan snorted and plucked at my ordinary and decidedly
un-magical
plaid shawl. “A magic plaid, what nonsense! I’ve never heard tell of one of those.”

It was hard to disguise my disappointment. “But your descendant told me that her family used the plaid against the nephilim. She said a fairy woman taught them. Are you sure Caill—I mean Katy—didn’t teach you?”

“Nay, she couldn’t even spin or knit or weave. Whenever she tried, the wool tied itself into knots. As for the stone … well, you’ll just have to stay here until you find it, I suppose. In the meantime, I suggest the two of you stay out of sight. That pirate story you spun in the town square fooled no one, and this lass looks enough like Katy Brodie that folks will say she’s a changeling. If the witch hunters get ahold of you, it won’t take them long to discover you’re not who you say you are.”

The idea of being interrogated by a seventeenth-century
counterpart of Duncan Laird made my knees go weak. I was remembering the details of that class I’d taken on European witch hunts and the horrific torture devices they used to extract confessions. I suddenly had had enough of the seventeenth century. It had been foolish to think I’d be able to find the angel stone with no clue to its whereabouts. And as for William … I looked at him regretfully. He might look like the incubus, but he wasn’t the man I’d fallen in love with in the twenty-first century.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “There’s no guarantee that I’ll ever find the stone here. After all, it’s just a fairy tale …” My voice cracked on the last words. What was any of this but a fairy tale? My life, my love for Bill—it was all a fairy tale that had evaporated into the mists. “I have to get back and help my friends.” I turned away from the look of hurt in William’s eyes and, like my ancestor before me, fled Ballydoon.

I ran through the narrow alley, my bootheels echoing on the cobblestones. When I reached the square I turned to look back, but William hadn’t followed. I squelched the pang of disappointment, raised my shawl over my head, and hurried through the square, ignoring the curious looks of the few remaining stragglers. Most townspeople had scurried back behind their shutters, but a few old women lingered by the market cross in the center of the square, gossiping—probably about the scene I’d played a part in earlier. They’d go back to Jeannie MacDougal, no doubt, and tell her they’d seen William Duffy’s
queer wife
fleeing the town alone. Jeannie would decide I’d fled in shame at finding myself married to a man who’d been betrothed to another—or that William had repudiated me in favor of his beautiful first love. It irked me that she would interpret my leaving as proof of my shame and her own superiority, but I couldn’t worry about that—or whether or not William and she would end up married. I could look it up in the history books when I got home.

I hurried fast out of the town, fueled at first by my urgency to get home and then by the need to keep warm. The sunny
day that William had extolled on our way into town—it already felt centuries ago—had become gray and overcast. When I got to the top of the hill, it was raining. By the time I reached the stone cross, I was soaked. I glanced up toward Mordag’s cottage, where William and I had spent the night. The memory of the warmth of the fire—and the heat of his hands on my body and his mouth on mine—flashed through me. He wasn’t Bill. He wasn’t the man I had fallen in love with, but leaving him behind seemed a final admission that I would never see Bill again. Even as I’d seen Bill’s throat cut, watched his blood seep into the ground, I’d clung to a remnant of hope that something of him remained in Faerie that I could reclaim.