The Angel Stone

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The days seemed to move faster once William and I had made our pact to work together to defeat the nephilim. We may not have been a romantic couple, but we were united in a shared mission. He proved to be a far better roommate than most of the ones I’d had in college, one of whom had borrowed my clothes and left them in stained clumps on our suite floor, and another who hacked into my Facebook account and posted spurious nude photos on it. William was courteous and neat, sleeping each night on a sheepskin pallet by the fire, which he rolled up when he left in the morning. Most mornings he rose before I did and headed out to milk the cow. When I heard him go out, I got dressed and made our breakfast. He’d have built the fire up and drawn a pail of water from the well, so all I had to do was set the oatmeal to cooking over the fire and make the bannocks, which I’d discovered were the mainstay of the local diet.

Soon after William left with the flocks, Nan would appear on the doorstep with her basket of wool and sundry gifts of food. I had the feeling that she waited until William was gone to give us some privacy, although I’d tried a number of times to make clear to her that our relationship was platonic, lest she get the idea that I was planning to stay in Ballydoon or that I was taking advantage of her nephew.

“I’m not blind or daft,” she complained one day when I’d pointed out for the eleventh time the pallet where William slept. “I can weel enough see that a city-bred lass such as yourself would have no truck with a simple country boy such as young William—although he’s a good lad now that he’s gotten his silly notions of being a pirate out of his head.”

I laughed and broke the thread I was spinning, which I was trying to get to glow again. We’d spun baskets full of wool, attempting to replicate the glowing multicolored thread I’d spun the first day, without success. Nan had me trying a hand spindle now. “You knew about that?”

“Och, aye, when he was a wee boy he used to make ships out of bits of wood and scraps of my best linen and launch them on the Boglie Burn while singing shameless sea chanteys he’d picked up hanging around the tavern.”

I laughed at this image of a young William, which brought to mind how Liam would collect twigs and stones on his walks in the woods and bring them back to Honeysuckle House. The story also reminded me of a song I’d heard Bill singing once.

“Did any of those chanteys sound like this …” I hummed the tune. The words had been in another language I couldn’t reproduce.

The thread broke in Nan’s fingers and her face softened. “Och, that’s no sea chantey but only a lullaby my sister used to sing to him when he was a bairn.” Picking up her thread, Nan began to sing, keeping time to the rhythm of the song with the foot pedal of her spinning wheel. She sang it first in Scots and then in English.

“Hush, hush, my bonnie sweet lamb.

Tho’ my ship must sail in the morning,

I will be with you

When the salt spray fans the shore,

I will be with you

When the wind blows the heather,

I will be with you when the dove sings her song,

Sing ba la loo laddie, sing ba la loo dear

Hush, hush, my bonnie sweet lamb.”

Nan’s eyes were shining when she came to the end of the song. For a few moments, the only sound in the room was the pedal knocking against the floor and the whir of the spinning wheel.

“What happened to her?” I asked. “William’s mother … your sister.”

“Ah, Jenny. The pest carried her away, along with William’s father. William was only a wee lad. I took him to live with me and did my best, but it’s never the same, is it?”

Having lost my own parents when I was twelve, I knew that well. “At least he had you. I went to live with my grandmother after my parents died, and she was not half so kind. I can see you really care for William.”

“How could I not, him looking so much like my poor little sister.” Nan’s voice grew hoarse, but instead of lapsing into silence, she sang the lullaby again, this time in a stronger voice, as if she were singing it for her lost sister. I thought of Bill singing that song more than three hundred years later—remembering it across time and all the shapes he had assumed—and felt an electric charge that ran from the back of my neck to the tips of my fingers and down the thread I was spinning … which began to glow a brilliant crimson. I looked over at Nan to see if she’d noticed. She had stopped spinning and was staring not at my thread but at hers. It was glowing a deep emerald green.

“The color of Jenny’s eyes,” she whispered. “That’s what I was thinking on.”

I plucked a length of the scarlet thread from my bobbin, and Nan, understanding, unspooled an equal length of hers. We held them alongside each other—the red and the green thread, my love for Bill and hers for her sister—and they clung like socks just out of the dryer and then coiled around each other, forming a multicolored thread. Nan gave it a tug.

“It’s strong,” I said. “Stronger than one by itself.”

“Aye,” Nan said. “But to make that tartan, we’ll need more than the two of us.”

Nan left early that day, telling me she had an idea or two of who she might ask to spin with us. We had to be careful with our choice. Any one of the women might turn us in to the witch hunters for doing magic. “Folks are scared,” she said, “but some are also weary of being scared. And there are those whose mothers or daughters are amongst the accused, who will take the risk to save them.”

After Nan left, I decided to walk out to meet William as he came down with the sheep. I’d watched him often enough to know where to find him, and I needed the air and exercise. I was excited about the progress Nan and I had made but a little tired of being indoors, doing “women’s work.”

I wrapped my shawl around my shoulders against the cold and tucked its ends into my skirt, as I’d seen Nan do. I walked briskly across the meadow and up the path William took into the hills, my bootheels crunching the dried stalks of heather. The air had a bite to it, with a tang of peat smoke and snow coming. There was already snow on the mountaintops rising above us in every direction. Ballydoon was in a valley—or a glen, as it was called here—protected by those steep mountains. One road connected it to the outside world. Behind me, to the north, the road curved between two hills and led to Edinburgh. In front of me, the road twisted through the village of Ballydoon and then headed toward England. Looming over it, above a dark ravine that looked like a gash in the hillside, was Castle Coldclough. Its stones, turned black with time, seemed to have grown out of the native rock, but it didn’t look as if it belonged in the peaceful valley—it looked like a malignancy that had grown on the hills. Even the ravine below it, cut so deep in the rock that it served as an impassable moat between the village and the castle, looked as though nothing had ever grown in it—as if the earth had shriveled under the cold hard stare of the nephilim’s castle.

“Do ye know what Coldclough means?”

I turned to find William standing behind me.

“The word makes me imagine a beast with icy claws,” I said, “but I don’t suppose that’s what it really means.”

“A clough is a narrow ravine,” he said, pointing to the deep rift below the castle. “That bit o’ land afore the castle has always been a queer place, colder than everything else surrounding it, even the higher mountaintops. The sun never reaches the bottom, and nothing ever grows in it. Some say it’s where Lucifer landed when he fell to earth.”

I shivered looking at it, and William unwound his scarf from his neck and draped it around my shoulders. It held the warmth from his body and the smell of dried heather. “No wonder the nephilim chose it for their stronghold,” I said. “We’ll have to go through it to reach them.”

William shook his head. “You’ll no’ find anyone from these parts willing to step foot in it, even with your magic plaid. How is that progressing, by the by? Have ye worked out how to make it?”

“We managed two different color threads today,” I said, turning away from the view, grateful for a change of subject. I told him about our progress as we walked back to the cottage. “Nan’s going to find some more spinners, and then she’ll teach me how to weave and knit.”

“Och, are ye saying you don’t know how to knit!” William exclaimed, looking scandalized. “I can teach you that.”

“You know how to knit?” I asked.

“And spin and sew,” he replied. “What do ye think a shepherd does with himself in the evenings? Are ye telling me Liam and Bill sat on their hands all night and did not make themselves useful?”

“Well, Liam was always restless,” I admitted, recalling the way he’d pace around Honeysuckle House, “but Bill was quite good with his hands.” I blushed, remembering the feel of those hands on me. “We didn’t have much time together, but in that little time he was always fixing things.” I remembered Bill removing a splinter from my finger and telling me he was sorry he had hurt me. “I think he came back that way to make amends for what had happened before … for hurting me.”

“And well he should have,” William proclaimed heartily. “To tell ye the truth, the two of them sound like a pair of dunderheads. If they could not keep ye, they did not deserve ye.” William huffed and turned to walk back to the cottage.

When we reached the house, he produced a handful of dried heather and put it in the jug on the table. After dinner, while we sat by the fire, William taught me how to knit. I was so clumsy at it that he had to hold both my hands in his to guide me. I thought about whether these hands on mine were the same that had once touched me—or would someday touch me—until my head felt dizzy with trying to figure out what I wanted from those hands. He may have felt the same. After a few minutes, he let go.

“It’s the fault of these big clumsy needles,” he grumped. “Delicate hands like yours need finer needles. I’ll make you a pair.”

He spent the rest of the evening carving a pair of fine wooden knitting needles out of a branch of hawthorn wood, while I practiced knitting. It kept my eyes off his agile hands turning the wood and my mind from imagining the touch of those hands on me.

The next day I opened my door to find Nan and three other women—at least, I assumed they were women. They were all swathed so heavily in shawls and scarves that they looked like woolly mummies. When everyone was unwrapped, Nan introduced me to Beitris, a plump middle-aged woman and Nan’s cousin on her mother’s side from o’er Erceldowne way; Una, an ancient-looking crone; and Aileen, Una’s daughter-in-law, who disclosed a baby beneath her copious wrappings. If Nan had told them that they’d come to weave a magic tartan, they didn’t let on. Beitris remarked it was good to be out of the village and the prying eyes of the witch hunters.

“They’ve taken Bess MacIntire, have ye heard?” Beitris said. “Dorcas MacGreevey accused her of bewitching her husband. If you ask me, it wouldna take a witch to make a man stray from a dried-up stick like Dorcas.”

Aileen looked scandalized. “But it’s a mortal sin to commit adultery! Surely Dorcas’s husband wouldn’t do it unless he’d been bewitched.”

Una snorted. “Poor lass, ye think that because you’re new married and my Ian’s fair besotted with ye.”

Aileen blushed prettily at mention of her husband’s affection for her and jostled the baby, whom she managed to nurse while spinning, a feat I couldn’t help but admire. I leaned forward to peer at the baby’s plump face, his pink mouth pursing like a sea anemone.

“What a pretty baby,” I said. “What’s his name?”

“Ian, like his da,” Aileen replied, her cheeks turning as pink as her baby’s mouth. She leaned forward so I could see him better, and a fold of his swaddling cloth fell over his face. Instinctively, I pushed it away, stroking the velvet softness of little Ian’s cheek.

“What a handsome young man,” I cooed.

Pleased, Aileen jostled him again and began to sing—the same song that Bill had once sung, the one William’s mother sang to him as a baby. Little Ian laughed and crowed at the song and at being bounced up and down. We all laughed, and the atmosphere in the room lightened. When we’d all gone back to our spinning, I noticed a faint shine to our threads—Aileen’s was the pink of her baby’s cheeks, Beitris’s was a vivid yellow, Una’s a dark navy, Nan’s a forest green. And mine was heather purple—the color of the flowers William brought home for me. I looked around to see if the women noticed, and Beitris winked at me. Una and Nan nodded, but Aileen seemed oblivious, humming her lullaby to baby Ian.

Throughout the rest of November and the beginning of December, the spinners came to the cottage. Beitris always had news of who’d lately been accused of witchcraft and who was rumored to be next. Nan would shake her head and suggest we dwell on cheerier topics. Baby Ian always provided a few items of good news in the form of a new tooth, sitting up for the first time, and, on an overcast day in mid-December, his first step. All our threads turned bright gold when that happened.

Nan observed that the thread glowed after I touched the spinner. “It’s your magic combined with our feelings,” she said. But the results were erratic and unstable. The thread would glow for a bit and then grow dull. If the spinner became angry—as Aileen did once when Una chided her not to let baby Ian suck his thumb—the thread might suddenly break. Once, when I was thinking about how William had brushed against me the night before, my thread went up in flames. Even Aileen seemed to notice that, and Nan gave me a guarded look and stayed after the others had left.

I was afraid she’d guessed what I’d been thinking about, but when we were alone she said instead, “It’s almost the time of the trial, and we don’t know how to make this tartan of yours. We don’t have enough thread.”

“I’m not even sure we’re going about it the right way,” I said, discouraged. “The Stewarts in my time were able to weave the tartan out of thin air. They didn’t need wool and spinning wheels and looms.”

“It’s queer you don’t know how to do it, seeing as you’re the one who taught them.”

“The whole thing is queer,” I said, exasperated. “How could I have been the one who taught the Stewarts how to make the tartan when they already knew how to make it when I met them?” When I thought about the tangle of time, my thoughts became as snarled as knotted yarn.

“Aye, ’tis a puzzle. But that’s not all I wanted to talk to you about. I’ve noticed the way William looks at you when he comes home, and I saw how you were looking when your thread caught fire. Were you thinking of William—or were you thinking of the creature he became?”

“I don’t see how that’s your business,” I snapped.

Nan gave me a level look. “It’s my business because I care about the lad and I would not see him trifled with after all he’s gone through. He’s been the plaything of one woman already.”

I bristled at being compared to the Fairy Queen, but then I met Nan’s steady gaze and saw the genuine concern there. In her eyes, I might be just as much a threat to William’s happiness as was the Fairy Queen.

“I was thinking of him,” I admitted. “I’ve come to care for him. How could I not? He’s a sweet boy and he will become the man I fell in love with—and lost.”

“But you still intend to go back to your time when you’ve gotten what you came for, aye?”

“What choice do I have?” I cried more shrilly than I’d meant to. “My friends are waiting for me back in Fairwick.”

“Do ye know for sure they are, lass?” Nan asked. “From the stories I’ve heard about travelers in Faerie, there’s no telling when you might come back. Perhaps it will be a moment after you left or a month or a year or two hundred years, like Oisin when he returned to his country to find his castle in ruins and all the folk he knew long dead and gone. And then, when he stepped foot on the ground, he turned into an old man and died.”

“I know the story,” I said. “Do you think I haven’t wondered about that? No, I have no idea what will be waiting for me when I get back to Fairwick—or even if I’ll be able to get past the Fairy Queen’s curse to get there—but I can’t just abandon my friends no matter how I feel about William.”

Nan’s face softened. “Aye, I thought as much. Then I beg you to be careful not to break the poor lad’s heart.”

When William came home that night, I did not walk out to meet him. After dinner, I picked up my knitting to keep my hands busy and kept my eyes on my stitches to keep from meeting his gaze. When he asked about the spinning, I told him, “Well, we’re going to start weaving tomorrow. We’ll have the tartan soon, and then we’ll use it to get the angel stone from the witch hunters.”

William got up to poke the fire, hard enough to make it nearly go out, then with his back to me said, “Good. I’ll start collecting a few lads brave enough to carry your tartan to the castle.”

“Are there men willing to risk it?” I asked, knitting faster to resist the urge to knead the tightened muscles in his back.

“There are sons and husbands of the accused,” he answered. “What kind of man would not be willing to risk his neck for the woman he loved?”

Without waiting for an answer, William walked out the back door, muttering something about needing to check on the sheep, leaving me to wonder why William was willing to risk his own neck carrying the tartan to Castle Coldclough.