The Angel Stone

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

We waited until midnight to return to the village. The fewer people who saw us going near the houses of the sick, William explained, the better. Even if we managed to help them, suspicion of witchcraft might fall on us, and if we failed and people died, we’d be blamed for that.

We went first to Nan’s house. When we knocked on the door, the curtain over the window twitched, then we heard something heavy being moved away from the door and a bolt being drawn. Finally the door opened and Nan motioned for us to come in quickly. The room was so dark that at first I thought she was alone, and then I made out a crooked old woman huddled by the hearth, bent over her knitting in the faint light of the dying embers. When I got closer, I saw that it was Una. She appeared to have aged ten years since I’d seen her. She was still knitting the blanket she’d been making for baby Ian.

“I’m so sorry about wee Ian,” I said. “He was a sweet little boy.”

“Aye, he was a braw lad,” she said, wiping an eye with the back of her hand, “but Aileen willna let me sit vigil o’er my own grandson.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again, feeling foolishly unable to think of any better words.

Una clucked her tongue. “Dinna fash yourself, lass, there wasna anything you could have done.”

Una’s words, excusing me as if I had only been unable to prevent a jug from breaking, brought tears to my eyes. I looked up at Nan and she saw the look of panic in my face.

“Come down to the root cellar with me and help me mix a draft to ward off the pest,” Nan said.

William moved to the seat I had vacated and offered to help wind the yarn that lay in loose skeins at Una’s feet. I followed Nan to the root-cellar door, where I looked back to see William holding a skein of yarn like some henpecked husband from a sixties sitcom and Una placidly wrapping the yarn into a ball. I could hear the soft murmur of Una’s voice and make out the name Ian repeated like a refrain. While engaging in a mutual chore, Una could more easily share her memories of her dead grandson. I noticed that a bit of the glow from the tartan I’d woven for William was carried along the thread and into Una’s hands. The glow seemed to bring some vestige of life and warmth back to Una’s face—at least she no longer looked like a corpse.

“The tartan you cast over William is moving to Una,” Nan said softly from behind me. “Can ye show me how to cast it?”

“I can try,” I said, following Nan down into the cellar. “It starts with the desire to protect someone …” I looked at Nan and thought about how all these weeks she’d come to my house to teach me how to spin and weave, even though associating with me—a stranger who’d appeared out of nowhere—would open her to the charge of witchcraft. She had risked her safety for me and to save her village. She cared about Ballydoon the way I cared about Fairwick. I held out my hands and she held up hers, our fingertips touching. I thought about my friends back in Fairwick and my students and what would happen to them if they were left at the mercy of the nephilim. My hands grew warm and sparks leapt from my fingertips, but they fizzled in the damp cellar air, unable to cross the divide between us.

“Think about those you wish to help,” I told Nan.

“Aye, what else do ye think is on my mind—a recipe for sheep dip?”

I laughed in spite of the gravity of the situation, and multicolored motes danced in the air. I could hear William humming upstairs as he helped Una wind the yarn. It was the lullaby I’d first heard Bill sing, the one William’s mother lulled him to sleep with when he was a baby. Now he was singing it to poor bereaved Una. Would Una want to hear a lullaby, I wondered, after losing her grandson? But after a few minutes I heard Una’s voice join in, weak and quavering at first but growing stronger. Nan, too, began to hum the tune and then sing, her eyes shining in the dim cellar. I knew she was thinking of her sister but also of William and baby Ian and all the others whom she had loved and lost. I began to sing it, too. I thought of Bill crooning this song more than three hundred years in the future. I thought of the words of a simple child’s lullaby connecting the two men—the one I had loved and the one Nan loved—across time. As I sang, the colored threads leapt from my fingers to Nan’s—a luminescent skein binding us together.

The glow lit up Nan’s face, washing away her fatigue and grief. “It feels … alive!” she said with wonder, a small, tentative smile beginning. “Sometimes when I am spinning a thread from wool, I can feel the life of the sheep it came from and the sun that beat down on it and the grass and heather it chewed and even the bees that buzzed about the flowers. This thread …” She spread her hands wide apart, and the threads separated from mine and formed a skein, much like the one that William held upstairs for Una. As Nan pulled her hands in and out, the skein thickened. “This feels as if it contains all of life in it—the sun and the moon, the barley growing in the fields, the creatures in the wood, each beating heart in the village …” As she named each type of life, I saw a new-color thread spring to life. I reached out and pulled a thread of each color from her skein.

“I was able to use my love for William to protect him, but you can use your love for the whole village to protect everyone in it,” I said.

“Mmppff.” Nan made a soft sound in the back of her throat. “I’m no’ so sure I love every soul in Ballydoon, but, aye, I love the place, and I know that if this madness has its way, it willna be the same for many a year. If I could weave a mantle of this stuff to protect all of Ballydoon, I would. But we canna do it just the two of us. Together we make the warp. We need someone to be the weft.”

“Who do you think we can trust that would be able to do it?”

Nan tilted her chin up to the floor above us. “Una could, only …”

“Do you think she’s too grief-stricken over baby Ian?”

“I dinna ken. It isna just the grief. When she knows there would have been a way to save Ian if we had known it afore …”

“Do ye think I’m that puir an auld woman as I would begrudge the life of my neighbors because I couldna save one of my own?”

Una’s voice came from the top step of the cellar. Nan and I looked up at her guiltily. Her shape in the doorway was backlit by a golden glow that I thought was the lamplight behind her, but when she came down the steps she brought the glow with her. The mantle I’d spun for William had spread over her. She walked toward us, her eyes on the threads spread out between us. When she reached us, she held out her hand and cast a thread that intertwined with ours. Another motion pulled it taut. I felt the threads between Nan and me grow heavier and brighter, strengthened by the power of Una’s love for baby Ian. Some might let their grief turn them away from the needs of others; some would use their grief to save others. I saw in the fierce determination of Una’s face that she would honor Ian by saving who she could. Her grief—and the memory of baby Ian—was our weft.

We worked until dawn, weaving four cloaks made of light. When we were done, we each draped one over our shoulders. William went to rally the men of the village. Nan said we ought to start with the miller’s house.

“There are others who are sicker,” Una protested, “who live closer and are more worthy.”

“We can’t go judging who we’ll save by how they’ve treated us,” Nan snapped.

“Verra well,” Una said, bristling, and quickened her step. When Una was a few paces ahead of us, Nan spoke in a low voice to me.

“There’s another reason we must start with the miller’s family. Perhaps you do not know that the miller’s surname is Brodie.”

“No, I didn’t, but why—” Then I remembered. “The same Malcolm Brodie who married the first Cailleach?” I asked.

“Aye,” Nan replied. “He’s no’ been a happy man since Katy left him, but he’s raised her bairn along with his two other children.”

“Mairi?” I asked. “Cailleach’s daughter?”

“Aye. I canna say I understand these matters, but if I understand what you told me, then I know that if Mairi dies …”

“I’ll never be born,” I finished for her, my mouth going dry. Nor my father or his father … “That’s why you want to start with the miller’s house.”

“Aye. You willna be of much help to us if ye vanish into thin air. I only hope we’re not too late.” She pointed to the small stone cottage that sat beside the river Tweed. The mill wheel that would ordinarily be spinning was still, and there was no smoke coming from the chimney.

Nan knocked on the door, but no one answered. Giving me a worried glance, she turned the knob, and the door yawned open with an ominous creak. Nan and I looked at each other again, but Una squared her shoulders and marched past us, the mantle around her shoulders blazing like a battle flag.

Hers was the only light inside the dim, fetid cottage. The hearth was cold, and heavy homespun cloth hung over the windows. On the floor by the fireplace, the same cloth was draped over a mound that looked like a sack of potatoes. But it wasn’t a sack of potatoes. I knew that even before Una knelt and pulled aside the cloth, revealing the blackened face of the miller, Malcolm Brodie.

“Puir lad,” Nan said, kneeling beside him. “He never had much luck. He lost two wives and now this had come on him.” I heard a low moan. I thought it came from Nan, but she looked up at the sound, as startled by it as I was. It seemed to be coming from directly above our heads.

“The loft,” Una said.

The ladder that ordinarily would have led up to the loft had fallen over. We righted it and Nan started up first. I followed her into the unlit upper story as if climbing into a dark cloud. A stinking cloud. The reek was so strong it seemed to have weight—a rank combination of excrement, vomit, and blood. When the odor entered my nose and mouth, it felt as if someone were stuffing fouled gauze down my throat. Taking one hand off the ladder, I drew the glowing tartan over my mouth and nose. The smell receded just enough to make it … well, I wouldn’t call it bearable, but somehow I did bear it. The glow from my tartan illuminated the scene in the loft. Three bodies lay on a straw pallet—the miller’s three children, one of whom was my multi-great-grandmother. I stooped—the slanted ceiling was too low for me to stand—over the first one and looked into the blackened face and staring eyes of a teenage girl. Too old to be Cailleach’s child, who would be only six now—the age of the girl who lay by her side. They had pushed their pallets close enough so that they could hold hands. Their fingers were still intertwined. The younger girl, Mairi, grasped in her other hand a cloth doll. Her eyes were closed, but when I knelt by her side, they flew open.

I sat back on my heels, startled by those light-blue eyes staring out of the darkened swollen face. Sightless eyes. She had been blinded by the disease.

“Mairi is alive,” I called to Nan and Una.

“Aye, and so is Tom, but barely.” Nan and Una were crouching over the miller’s son. In the glow of Nan and Una’s cloaks, his face was soaked with sweat. Nan took a fold of her tartan and used it to brush his tangled hair away from his face. He let out a low moan, his cracked lips working to speak, but all that came out was the sound Mmmmaaa, like the bleat of a sheep.

The girl stirred and strained toward the young man, her limbs trembling convulsively.

Mmmmaare … Tom moaned again. He was calling Mairi.

“He wants her,” Nan said, struggling to keep Tom from getting up, “but he’s too weak to move.”

“I’ll bring her to him.” I bent down to gather Mairi in my arms. A fold of the luminous tartan fell as I did. I wrapped it around Mairi, and her trembling stopped. The glowing threads pulsed and molded to her frail body like a cocoon. I felt her relax in the warm folds. What a strange thing! I thought. I was holding my own ancestor. As I started to lift her up, though, something tugged her back. The girls’ hands were still intertwined. Gently, I disentangled their fingers, but Mairi’s hand thrashed in the air like a fish flapping against dry land. It thudded against me with surprising force. Only when I intertwined my own fingers with hers did she stop flailing.

I carried her over and laid her by Tom’s side. As I put her down, a length of the tartan separated from the cloak around my shoulders and coiled around Mairi. It seemed to pulse in the same rhythm as Mairi’s shallow fluttery breath.

“Mairi,” Tom said, turning his head toward the little girl.

“She’s here,” I told him. “And I think she’s getting better.”

I wasn’t just saying it to comfort him. Mairi did look better. The swelling around her throat was going down, the bluish tinge in her skin was replaced by a flush of pink, her breathing had deepened, and the pulse in her wrist had strengthened. The tartan was healing her.

“Wrap your cloak around Tom,” I instructed Nan. “There will be enough to surround him and still cover you.”

She did as I said, with Una’s help, and encircled Tom’s body with the glowing cloth. Just as it had with Mairi, the piece of tartan detached itself from Nan’s cloak and then fitted itself to Tom’s body. Within minutes, color returned to Tom’s face and the black swelling at his throat receded.

“Thanks be to the Lord,” Una murmured, crossing herself. I was momentarily surprised by the gesture, as I’d come to think of Una as a witch who followed “the auld ways” instead of Christianity, but then I realized that there was no separation between the two for Una. She could follow the auld gods and the new, recite a psalm in Latin or a spell in Gaelic. It was all the same to her, but I didn’t think Reverend Fordick would see it that way.

I called her name, and when she turned to me I saw that, while the lines her grandson’s death had carved into her face were still there, now her skin was pink and her eyes had life in them. I took Mairi’s small soft hand, still intertwined with mine, and laid it in Una’s worn one. Like a bud opening, Mairi’s fingers released mine and opened up in Una’s hand. A tremor passed over Una’s face—a little struggle that I thought I understood. After losing all she had, caring about someone else opened her up to loss—the loss she’d already suffered and the possibility of more loss. I knew because that was what it felt like caring about William after losing Bill. I could feel her resistance in her old crabbed fingers. But then those fingers grasped Mairi’s hand with the fierceness of a much younger woman.

“Puir bairn,” Una cooed. “Una’s here to watch ye now. Close yer een and go to sleep.”

Obediently, Mairi closed her sightless eyes. So did Tom. I looked at Nan and she nodded. “It’s best ye bide here with the two of them to make sure they’re safe,” Nan said. “Callie and I will go visiting and see who else is sick.”

Una nodded but didn’t look up. She was gazing at Mairi’s face, stroking her tangled red hair back from her brow. As Nan and I went down the ladder, I heard Una singing softly. “Hush, hush, my bonnie sweet lamb,” she sang.

At the bottom of the ladder we were greeted with the body of Malcolm Brodie, my own great-something-grandfather.

“If I’d figured out how the tartan worked before—”

Nan tsked. “Aye, ’tis no use cryin’ o’er spilt milk, lass. Not when there are others who need saving. Half the village will have passed by here in the last fortnight to have their grain ground. There’ll be others fallin’ sick with the pest as we stand here ditherin’.”

The thought of more households besieged like this one turned me cold. How would we know where to go first? Would people die while we took care of others? We had no phones or Internet to track the contagion. And what if the pest was carried out of the town while we went from house to house? It could spread over all of Scotland …

“There’s too much to do for the two of us,” I said, turning to Nan. “We need help.”

“We can help.”

The voice came from the doorway. I turned and saw William, resplendent in his glowing tartan, like an electric Highlander. The plaid wasn’t the only thing that was glowing. His skin, hair, but most of all his eyes, burned with a fierceness I’d never before seen. What I saw in his eyes wasn’t magic or fairy dust—it was purpose and determination. This was the man he’d been meant to become before the Fairy Queen stole him.

“We?” Nan asked.

“Aye,” William replied, giving her a brilliant smile. “I’ve rounded up a few of the lads.” He stood back and Nan and I moved to the door. Outside was a small troop of Ballydoon men.

“What did you tell them?” I whispered to William.

“I told them we were going to save the town,” he replied. “They didn’t care how we do it.”

I turned to Nan, wondering if she was thinking the same thing I was—that if we told these men we were outfitting them with a magical tartan that could heal the sick and protect the well, we opened ourselves up to charges of witchcraft. Nan’s forehead was creased, her solemn blue eyes raking the faces of each man. She looked less like the kindly middle-aged woman I’d come to know than a general surveying her troops. Under her stern regard, the men straightened their shoulders and stood up straighter.

“James Russell Gordon McPhee,” she called, as if the men did indeed stand across a battlefield from her. A pimply, gawky lad stepped forward, surreptitiously wiping his nose. “Can ye be trusted with the Order of the Plaid?”

“Aye, ma’am.”

“And do ye solemnly swear to uphold the honor of the plaid and to never divulge the secrets of the plaid to any save your brothers in the plaid?”

“Nay … I mean aye, I swear it.”

“Mmppff,” Nan huffed, looking at Jamie McPhee dubiously. But then she cleared her throat. “I do hereby endow you with the Order the Plaid.” She plucked the edge of her own tartan and measured out an arm’s length of it into the air. It separated from her cloak without leaving hers any smaller. Then she swirled the glowing plaid over Jamie McPhee’s shoulders. At first he only looked confused, but then a change came over him. He held his head up higher and squared his shoulders. A glow came into his sallow cheeks and dark-brown eyes.

“God bless ye, lad,” Nan said softly. Then she moved on to the next recruit. She repeated the procedure with each man. When Nan was done, the shambling motley crew had been transformed into a glowing honor guard. Nan regarded them with a look of fierce pride. “I declare ye all to be brothers in the Order of the Plaid, Stewards of Ballydoon.”

I’d thought that the Stewarts I’d met in Fairwick had inherited their ability through family, but now I saw that the origin of their clan came from this small group of ordinary men who were willing to risk their lives to save their neighbors. Somehow it made them seem even nobler.

“There’s one more thing I must tell ye,” Nan said, the pride in her eyes wavering. “If we do this, the witch hunters will come for us.”

A tremor moved through the group, like wind passing over a field of grass, riffling their glowing tartans. It was only right for Nan to warn them of the danger, but I was afraid now that they would back down and disband. But then young Jamie McPhee stepped forward, his tartan glowing like a beacon.

“Then we’ll have to go for them first,” he said.