Mr. Crook called for me, as arranged, promptly at seven the next morning. “So as we’ll catch the dew on the buttercups, eh, lass?” he said, twinkling
with elderly gallantry. He had brought a motorcycle of his own approximate vintage, on which to transport us into the countryside. The plant presses were tidily strapped to the sides of this enormous machine, like bumpers on a tugboat. It was a leisurely ramble through the quiet countryside, made all the more quiet by contrast with the thunderous roar of Mr. Crook’s cycle, suddenly throttled into silence. The old man did indeed know a lot about the local plants, I discovered. Not only where they were to be found but their medicinal uses, and how to prepare them. I wished I had brought a notebook to get it all down, but listened intently to the cracked old voice, and did my best to commit the information to memory as I stowed our specimens in the heavy plant presses.
We stopped for a packed luncheon near the base of a curious flat-topped hill. Green as most of its neighbors, with the same rocky juts and crags, it had something different: a well-worn path leading up one side and disappearing abruptly behind a granite outcrop.
“What’s up there?” I asked, gesturing with a ham sandwich. “It seems a difficult place for picnicking.”
“Ah.” Mr. Crook glanced at the hill. “That’s Craigh na Dun, lass. I’d meant to show ye after our meal.”
“Really? Is there something special about it?”
“Oh, aye,” he answered, but refused to elaborate further, merely saying that I’d see when I saw.
I had some fears about his ability to climb such a steep path, but these evaporated as I found myself panting in his wake. At last, Mr. Crook extended a gnarled hand and pulled me up over the rim of the hill.
“There ’tis.” He waved a hand with a sort of proprietorial gesture. “Why, it’s a henge!” I said, delighted. “A miniature henge!”
Because of the war, it had been several years since I had last visited Salisbury Plain, but Frank and I had seen Stonehenge soon after we were married. Like the other tourists wandering awed among the huge standing stones, we had gaped at the Altar Stone (‘w’ere ancient Druid priests performed their dreadful ’uman sacrifices,’ announced the sonorous Cockney tour guide accompanying a busload of Italian tourists, who all dutifully took photographs of the rather ordinary-looking stone block).
Out of the same passion for exactness that made Frank adjust his ties on the hanger so that the ends hung precisely even, we had even trekked around the circumference of the circle, pacing off the distance between the Z holes and the Y holes, and counting the lintels in the Sarsen Circle, the outermost ring of monstrous uprights.
Three hours later, we knew how many Y and Z holes there were (fifty- nine, if you care; I didn’t), but had no more clue to the purpose of the structure than had the dozens of amateur and professional archaeologists who had crawled over the site for the last five hundred years.
No lack of opinions, of course. Life among academics had taught me that a well-expressed opinion is usually better than a badly expressed fact, so far as professional advancement goes.
A temple. A burial ground. An astronomical observatory. A place of execution (hence the inaptly named “Slaughter Stone” that lies to one side, half sunk in its own pit). An open-air market. I liked this last suggestion, visualizing Megalithic housewives strolling between the lintels, baskets on their arms, critically judging the glaze on the latest shipment of red-clay beakers and listening skeptically to the claims of stone-age bakers and vendors of deer-bone shovels and amber beads.
The only thing I could see against that hypothesis was the presence of bodies under the Altar Stone and cremated remains in the Z holes. Unless these were the hapless remains of merchants accused of short-weighting the customers, it seemed a bit unsanitary to be burying people in the marketplace.
There were no signs of burial in the miniature henge atop the hill. By “miniature,” I mean only that the circle of standing stones was smaller than Stonehenge; each stone was still twice my own height, and massive in proportion.
I had heard from another tour-guide at Stonehenge that these stone circles occur all over Britain and Europe—some in better repair than others, some differing slightly in orientation or form, all of purpose and origin unknown.
Mr. Crook stood smiling benignly as I prowled among the stones, pausing now and then to touch one gently, as though my touch could make an impression on the monumental boulders.
Some of the standing stones were brindled, striped with dim colors. Others were speckled with flakes of mica that caught the morning sun with a cheerful shimmer. All of them were remarkably different from the clumps of native stone that thrust out of the bracken all around. Whoever built the stone circles, and for whatever purpose, thought it important enough to have quarried, shaped, and transported special stone blocks for the erection of their testimonial. Shaped—how? Transported—how, and from what unimaginable distance?
“My husband would be fascinated,” I told Mr. Crook, stopping to thank him for showing me the place and the plants. “I’ll bring him up to see it later.” The gnarled old man gallantly offered me an arm at the top of the trail. I took it, deciding after one look down the precipitous decline that in spite of his age, he was likely steadier on his pins than I was.
I swung down the road that afternoon toward the village, to fetch Frank from the vicarage. I happily breathed in that heady Highland mix of heather, sage, and broom, spiced here and there with chimney smoke and the tang of fried herring, as I passed the scattered cottages. The village lay nestled in a small declivity at the foot of one of those soaring crags that rise so steeply from the Highland moors. Those cottages near the road were nice. The bloom of postwar prosperity had spread as far as a new coat of paint, and even the manse, which must be at least a hundred years old, sported bright yellow trim around its sagging windowframes.
The vicar’s housekeeper answered the door, a tall, stringy woman with three strands of artificial pearls round her neck. Hearing who I was, she welcomed me in and towed me down a long, narrow, dark hallway, lined with sepia engravings of people who may have been famous personages of their time, or cherished relatives of the present vicar, but might as well have been the Royal Family, for all I could see of their features in the gloom.
By contrast, the vicar’s study was blinding with light from the enormous windows that ran nearly from ceiling to floor in one wall. An easel near the fireplace, bearing a half-finished oil of black cliffs against the evening sky, showed the reason for the windows, which must have been added long after the house was built.
Frank and a short, tubby man with a clerical dog-collar were cozily poring over a mass of tattered paper on the desk by the far wall. Frank barely looked up in greeting, but the vicar politely left off his explanations and hurried over to clasp my hand, his round face beaming with sociable delight.
“Mrs. Randall!” he said, pumping my hand heartily. “How nice to see you again. And you’ve come just in time to hear the news!”
“News?” Casting an eye on the grubbiness and typeface of the papers on the desk, I calculated the date of the news in question as being likely around 1750. Not precisely stop-the-presses, then.
“Yes, indeed. We’ve been tracing your husband’s ancestor, Jack Randall, through the army dispatches of the period.” The vicar leaned close, speaking out of the side of his mouth like a gangster in an American film. “I’ve, er, ‘borrowed’ the original dispatches from the local Historical Society files. You’ll be careful not to tell anyone?”
Amused, I agreed that I would not reveal his deadly secret, and looked about for a comfortable chair in which to receive the latest revelations from the eighteenth century. The wing chair nearest the windows looked suitable, but as I reached to turn it toward the desk, I discovered that it was already occupied. The inhabitant, a small boy with a shock of glossy black hair, was curled up in the depths of the chair, sound asleep.
“Roger!” The vicar, coming to assist me, was as surprised as I. The boy, startled out of sleep, shot bolt upright, wide eyes the color of moss.
“Now what are you up to in here, you young scamp?” The vicar was scolding affectionately. “Oh, fell asleep reading the comic papers again?” He scooped up the brightly colored pages and handed them to the lad. “Run along now, Roger, I have business with the Randalls. Oh, wait, I’ve forgotten to introduce you—Mrs. Randall, this is my son, Roger.”
I was a bit surprised. If ever I’d seen a confirmed bachelor, I would have thought the Reverend Wakefield was it. Still, I took the politely proffered
paw and shook it warmly, resisting the urge to wipe a certain residual stickiness on my skirt.
The Reverend Wakefield looked fondly after the boy as he trooped off toward the kitchen.
“My niece’s son, really,” he confided. “Father shot down over the Channel, and mother killed in the Blitz, though, so I’ve taken him.”
“How kind of you,” I murmured, thinking of Uncle Lamb. He, too, had died in the Blitz, killed by a hit to the auditorium of the British Museum, where he had been lecturing. Knowing him, I thought his main feeling would have been gratification that the wing of Persian antiquities next door had escaped.
“Not at all, not at all.” The vicar flapped a hand in embarrassment. “Nice to have a bit of young life about the house. Now, do have a seat.”
Frank began talking even before I had set my handbag down. “The most amazing luck, Claire,” he enthused, thumbing through the dog-eared pile. “The vicar’s located a whole series of military dispatches that mention Jonathan Randall.”
“Well, a good deal of the prominence seems to have been Captain Randall’s own doing,” the vicar observed, taking some of the papers from Frank. “He was in command of the garrison at Fort William for four years or so, but he seems to have spent quite a bit of his time harassing the Scottish countryside above the Border on behalf of the Crown. This lot”— he gingerly separated a stack of papers and laid them on the desk—“is reports of complaints lodged against the Captain by various families and estate holders, claiming everything from interference with their maidservants by the soldiers of the garrison to outright theft of horses, not to mention assorted instances of ‘insult,’ unspecified.”
I was amused. “So you have the proverbial horse thief in your family tree?” I said to Frank.
He shrugged, unperturbed. “He was what he was, and nothing I can do about it. I only want to find out. The complaints aren’t all that odd, for that particular time period; the English in general, and the army in particular, were rather notably unpopular throughout the Highlands. No, what’s odd is that nothing ever seems to have come of the complaints, even the serious ones.”
The vicar, unable to keep still for long, broke in. “That’s right. Not that officers then were held to anything like modern standards; they could do very much as they liked in minor matters. But this is odd. It’s not that the complaints are investigated and dismissed; they’re just never mentioned again. You know what I suspect, Randall? Your ancestor must have had a patron. Someone who could protect him from the censure of his superiors.”
Frank scratched his head, squinting at the dispatches. “You could be right. Had to have been someone quite powerful, though. High up in the army hierarchy, perhaps, or maybe a member of the nobility.”
“Yes, or possibly—” The vicar was interrupted in his theories by the entrance of the housekeeper, Mrs. Graham.
“I’ve brought ye a wee bit of refreshment, gentlemen,” she announced, setting the tea tray firmly in the center of the desk, from which the vicar rescued his precious dispatches in the nick of time. She looked me over with a shrewd eye, assessing the twitching limbs and faint glaze over the eyeballs.
“I’ve brought but the two cups, for I thought perhaps Mrs. Randall would care to join me in the kitchen. I’ve a bit of—” I didn’t wait for the conclusion of her invitation, but leapt to my feet with alacrity. I could hear the theories breaking out again behind me as we pushed through the swinging door that led to the manse’s kitchen.
The tea was green, hot and fragrant, with bits of leaf swirling through the liquid.
“Mmm,” I said, setting the cup down. “It’s been a long time since I tasted Oolong.”
Mrs. Graham nodded, beaming at my pleasure in her refreshments. She had clearly gone to some trouble, laying out handmade lace mats beneath the eggshell cups and providing thick clotted cream with the scones.
“Aye, I couldna get it during the War, ye know. It’s the best for the readings, though. Had a terrible time with that Earl Grey. The leaves fall apart so fast, it’s hard to tell anything at all.”
“Oh, you read tea leaves?” I asked, mildly amused. Nothing could be farther from the popular conception of the gypsy fortune-teller than Mrs. Graham, with her short, iron-grey perm and triple-stranded pearl choker. A swallow of tea ran visibly down the long, stringy neck and disappeared beneath the gleaming beads.
“Why, certainly I do, my dear. Just as my grandmother taught me, and her grandmother before her. Drink up your cup, and I’ll see what you have there.”
She was silent for a long time, once in a while tilting the cup to catch the light, or rolling it slowly between lean palms to get a different angle.
She set the cup down carefully, as though afraid it might blow up in her face. The grooves on either side of her mouth had deepened, and her brows pressed together in what looked like puzzlement.
“Well,” she said finally. “That’s one of the stranger ones I’ve seen.”
“Oh?” I was still amused, but beginning to be curious. “Am I going to meet a tall dark stranger, or journey across the sea?”
“Could be.” Mrs. Graham had caught my ironic tone, and echoed it, smiling slightly. “And could not. That’s what’s odd about your cup, my dear. Everything in it’s contradictory. There’s the curved leaf for a journey, but it’s crossed by the broken one that means staying put. And strangers there are, to be sure, several of them. And one of them’s your husband, if I read the leaves aright.”
My amusement dissipated somewhat. After six years apart, and six months together, my husband was still something of a stranger. Though I failed to see how a tea leaf could know it.
Mrs. Graham’s brow was still furrowed. “Let me see your hand, child,” she said.
The hand holding mine was bony, but surprisingly warm. A scent of lavender water emanated from the neat part of the grizzled head bent over my palm. She stared into my hand for quite a long time, now and then tracing one of the lines with a finger, as though following a map whose roads all petered out in sandy washes and deserted wastes.
“Well, what is it?” I asked, trying to maintain a light air. “Or is my fate too horrible to be revealed?”
Mrs. Graham raised quizzical eyes and looked thoughtfully at my face, but retained her hold on my hand. She shook her head, pursing her lips.
“Oh, no, my dear. It’s not your fate is in your hand. Only the seed of it.” The birdlike head cocked to one side, considering. “The lines in your hand change, ye know. At another point in your life, they may be quite different than they are now.”
“I didn’t know that. I thought you were born with them, and that was that.” I was repressing an urge to jerk my hand away. “What’s the point of palm reading, then?” I didn’t wish to sound rude, but I found this scrutiny a bit unsettling, especially following on the heels of that tea-leaf reading. Mrs. Graham smiled unexpectedly, and folded my fingers closed over my palm.
“Why, the lines of your palm show what ye are, dear. That’s why they change—or should. They don’t, in some people; those unlucky enough never to change in themselves, but there are few like that.” She gave my folded hand a squeeze and patted it. “I doubt that you’re one of those. Your hand shows quite a lot of change already, for one so young. That would likely be the War, of course,” she said, as though to herself.
I was curious again, and opened my palm voluntarily. “What am I, then, according to my hand?”
Mrs. Graham frowned, but did not pick up my hand again.
“I canna just say. It’s odd, for most hands have a likeness to them. Mind, I’d no just say that it’s ‘see one, you’ve seen them all,’ but it’s often like that—there are patterns, you know.” She smiled suddenly, an oddly engaging grin, displaying very white and patently false teeth.
“That’s how a fortune-teller works, you know. I do it for the church fete every year—or did, before the War; suppose I’ll do it again now. But a girl comes into the tent—and there am I, done up in a turban with a peacock feather borrowed from Mr. Donaldson, and ‘robes of oriental splendor’— that’s the vicar’s dressing gown, all over peacocks it is and yellow as the sun—anyway, I look her over while I pretend to be watching her hand, and I see she’s got her blouse cut down to her breakfast, cheap scent, and earrings down to her shoulders. I needn’t have a crystal ball to be tellin’ her she’ll have a child before the next year’s fete.” Mrs. Graham, paused, grey eyes alight with mischief. “Though if the hand you’re holding is bare, it’s tactful to predict first that she’ll marry soon.”
I laughed, and so did she. “So you don’t look at their hands at all, then?” I asked. “Except to check for rings?”
She looked surprised. “Oh, of course you do. It’s just that you know ahead of time what you’ll see. Generally.” She nodded at my open hand. “But that is not a pattern I’ve seen before. The large thumb, now”—she did lean forward then and touch it lightly—“that wouldn’t change much. Means
you’re strong-minded, and have a will not easily crossed.” She twinkled at me. “Reckon your husband could have told ye that. Likewise about that one.” She pointed to the fleshy mound at the base of the thumb.
“What is it?”
“The Mount of Venus, it’s called.” She pursed her thin lips primly together, though the corners turned irrepressibly up. “In a man, ye’d say it means he likes the lasses. For a woman, ’tis a bit different. To be polite about it, I’ll make a bit of a prediction for you, and say your husband isna like to stray far from your bed.” She gave a surprisingly deep and bawdy chuckle, and I blushed slightly.
The elderly housekeeper pored over my hand again, stabbing a pointed forefinger here and there to mark her words.
“Now, there, a well-marked lifeline; you’re in good health, and likely to stay so. The lifeline’s interrupted, meaning your life’s changed markedly— well, that’s true of us all, is it not? But yours is more chopped-up, like, than I usually see; all bits and pieces. And your marriage-line, now”—she shook her head again—“it’s divided; that’s not unusual, means two marriages…”
My reaction was slight, and immediately suppressed, but she caught the flicker and looked up at once. I thought she probably was quite a shrewd fortune-teller, at that. The grey head shook reassuringly at me.
“No, no, lass. It doesna mean anything’s like to happen to your good man. It’s only that if it did,” she emphasized the “if” with a slight squeeze of my hand, “you’d not be one to pine away and waste the rest of your life in mourning. What it means is, you’re one of those can love again if your first love’s lost.”
She squinted nearsightedly at my palm, running a short, ridged nail gently down the deep marriage line. “But most divided lines are broken— yours is forked.” She looked up with a roguish smile. “Sure you’re not a bigamist, on the quiet, like?”
I shook my head, laughing. “No. When would I have the time?” Then I turned my hand, showing the outer edge.
“I’ve heard that small marks on the side of the hand indicate how many children you’ll have?” My tone was casual, I hoped. The edge of my palm was disappointingly smooth.
Mrs. Graham flicked a scornful hand at this idea.
“Pah! After ye’ve had a bairn or two, ye might show lines there. More like you’d have them on your face. Proves nothing at all beforehand.”
“Oh, it doesn’t?” I was foolishly relieved to hear this. I was going to ask whether the deep lines across the base of my wrist meant anything (a potential for suicide?), but we were interrupted at that point by the Reverend Wakefield coming into the kitchen bearing the empty tea cups. He set them on the drainboard and began a loud and clumsy fumbling through the cupboard, obviously in hopes of provoking help.
Mrs. Graham sprang to her feet to defend the sanctity of her kitchen, and pushing the Reverend adroitly to one side, set about assembling tea things on a tray for the study. He drew me to one side, safely out of the way.
“Why don’t you come to the study and have another cup of tea with me and your husband, Mrs. Randall? We’ve made really a most gratifying discovery.”
I could see that in spite of outward composure, he was bursting with the glee of whatever they had found, like a small boy with a toad in his pocket. Plainly I was going to have to go and read Captain Jonathan Randall’s laundry bill, his receipt for boot repairs, or some document of similar fascination.
Frank was so absorbed in the tattered documents that he scarcely looked up when I entered the study. He reluctantly surrendered them to the vicar’s podgy hands, and came round to stand behind the Reverend Wakefield and peer over his shoulder, as though he could not bear to let the papers out of his sight for a moment.
“Yes?” I said politely, fingering the dirty bits of paper. “Ummm, yes, very interesting.” In fact, the spidery handwriting was so faded and so ornate that it hardly seemed worth the trouble of deciphering it. One sheet, better preserved than the rest, had some sort of crest at the top.
“The Duke of…Sandringham, is it?” I asked, peering at the crest, with its faded leopard couchant, and the printing below, more legible than the handwriting.
“Yes, indeed,” the vicar said, beaming even more. “An extinct title, now, you know.”
I didn’t, but nodded intelligently, being no stranger to historians in the manic grip of discovery. It was seldom necessary to do more than nod
periodically, saying “Oh, really?” or “How perfectly fascinating!” at appropriate intervals.
After a certain amount of deferring back and forth between Frank and the vicar, the latter won the honor of telling me about their discovery. Evidently, all this rubbish made it appear that Frank’s ancestor, the notorious Black Jack Randall, had not been merely a gallant soldier for the Crown, but a trusted—and secret—agent of the Duke of Sandringham.
“Almost an agent provocateur, wouldn’t you say, Dr. Randall?” The vicar graciously handed the ball back to Frank, who seized it and ran.
“Yes, indeed. The language is very guarded, of course.…” He turned the pages gently with a scrubbed forefinger.
“Oh, really?” I said.
“But it seems from this that Jonathan Randall was entrusted with the job of stirring up Jacobite sentiments, if any existed, among the prominent Scottish families in his area. The point being to smoke out any baronets and clan chieftains who might be harboring secret sympathies in that direction. But that’s odd. Wasn’t Sandringham a suspected Jacobite himself?” Frank turned to the vicar, a frown of inquiry on his face. The vicar’s smooth, bald head creased in an identical frown.
“Why, yes, I believe you’re right. But wait, let’s check in Cameron”—he made a dive for the bookshelf, crammed with calf-bound volumes—“he’s sure to mention Sandringham.”
“How perfectly fascinating,” I murmured, allowing my attention to wander to the huge corkboard that covered one wall of the study from floor to ceiling.
It was covered with an amazing assortment of things; mostly papers of one sort or another, gas bills, correspondence, notices from the Diocesan Council, loose pages of novels, notes in the vicar’s own hand, but also small items like keys, bottle caps, and what appeared to be small car parts, attached with tacks and string.
I browsed idly through the miscellanea, keeping half an ear tuned to the argument going on behind me. (The Duke of Sandringham probably was a Jacobite, they decided.) My attention was caught by a genealogical chart, tacked up with special care in a spot by itself, using four tacks, one to a corner. The top of the chart included names dated in the early seventeenth
century. But it was the name at the bottom of the chart that had caught my eye: “Roger W. (MacKenzie) Wakefield,” it read.
“Excuse me,” I said, interrupting a final sputter of dispute as to whether the leopard in the Duke’s crest had a lily in its paw, or was it meant to be a crocus? “Is this your son’s chart?”
“Eh? Oh, why, yes, yes it is.” Distracted, the vicar hurried over, beaming once more. He detached the chart tenderly from the wall and laid it on the table in front of me.
“I didn’t want him to forget his own family, you see,” he explained. “It’s quite an old lineage, back to the sixteen hundreds.” His stubby forefinger traced the line of descent almost reverently.
“I gave him my own name because it seemed more suitable, as he lives here, but I didn’t want him to forget where he came from.” He made an apologetic grimace. “I’m afraid my own family is nothing to boast of, genealogically. Vicars and curates, with the occasional bookseller thrown in for variety, and only traceable back to 1762 or so. Rather poor record- keeping, you know,” he said, wagging his head remorsefully over the lethargy of his ancestors.
It was growing late by the time we finally left the vicarage, with the vicar promising to take the letters to town for copying first thing in the morning. Frank babbled happily of spies and Jacobites most of the way back to Mrs. Baird’s. Finally, though, he noticed my quietness.
“What is it, love?” he asked, taking my arm solicitously. “Not feeling well?” This was asked with a mingled tone of concern and hope.
“No, I’m quite well. I was only thinking…” I hesitated, because we had discussed this matter before. “I was thinking about Roger.”
“Roger?”
I gave a sigh of impatience. “Really, Frank! You can be so…oblivious!
Roger, the Reverend Wakefield’s son.”
“Oh. Yes, of course,” he said vaguely. “Charming child. What about him?”
“Well…only that there are a lot of children like that. Orphaned, you know.”
He gave me a sharp look, and shook his head.
“No, Claire. Really, I’d like to, but I’ve told you how I feel about adoption. It’s just…I couldn’t feel properly toward a child that’s not…well,
not of my blood. No doubt that’s ridiculous and selfish of me, but there it is. Maybe I’ll change my mind in time, but now.…” We walked a few steps in a barbed silence. Suddenly he stopped and turned to me, gripping my hands. “Claire,” he said huskily, “I want our child. You’re the most important thing in the world to me. I want you to be happy, above all else, but I want…well, I want to keep you to myself. I’m afraid a child from outside, one we had no real relationship with, would seem an intruder, and I’d resent it. But to be able to give you a child, see it grow in you, see it born…then I’d feel as though it were more an…extension of you, perhaps. And me. A
real part of the family.” His eyes were wide, pleading.
“Yes, all right. I understand.” I was willing to abandon the topic—for now. I turned to go on walking, but he reached out and took me in his arms.
“Claire. I love you.” The tenderness in his voice was overwhelming, and I leaned my head against his jacket, feeling his warmth and the strength of his arms around me.
“I love you too.” We stood locked together for a moment, swaying slightly in the wind that swept down the road. Suddenly Frank drew back a bit, smiling down at me.
“Besides,” he said softly, smoothing the wind-blown hair back from my face, “we haven’t given up yet, have we?”
I smiled back. “No.”
He took my hand, tucking it snugly beneath his elbow, and we turned toward our lodgings.
“Game for another try?”
“Yes. Why not?” We strolled, hand in hand, back toward the Gereside Road. It was the sight of the Baragh Mhor, the Pictish stone that stands at the corner of the road there, that made me remember things ancient.
“I forgot!” I exclaimed. “I have something exciting to show you.” Frank looked down at me and pulled me closer. He squeezed my hand.
“So have I,” he said, grinning. “You can show me yours tomorrow.”
When tomorrow came, though, we had other things to do. I had forgotten that we had planned a day trip to the Great Glen of Loch Ness.
It was a long drive through the Glen, and we left early in the morning, before sunup. After the hurry to the waiting car through the freezing dawn,
it was cozy to relax under the rug and feel the warmth stealing back into my hands and feet. Along with it came a most delicious drowsiness, and I fell blissfully asleep against Frank’s shoulder, my last conscious sight the driver’s head in red-rimmed silhouette against the dawning sky.
It was after nine when we arrived, and the guide Frank had called for was awaiting us on the edge of the loch with a small sailing skiff.
“An’ it suits ye, sir, I thought we’d take a wee sail down the loch-side to Urquhart Castle. Perhaps we’ll sup a bit there, before goin’ on.” The guide, a dour-looking little man in weather-beaten cotton shirt and twill trousers, stowed the picnic hamper tidily beneath the seat, and offered me a callused hand down into the well of the boat.
It was a beautiful day, with the burgeoning greenery of the steep banks blurring in the ruffled surface of the loch. Our guide, despite his dour appearance, was knowledgeable and talkative, pointing out the islands, castles, and ruins that rimmed the long, narrow loch.
“Yonder, that’s Urquhart Castle.” He pointed to a smooth-faced wall of stone, barely visible through the trees. “Or what’s left of it. ’Twas cursed by the witches of the Glen, and saw one unhappiness after another.”
He told us the story of Mary Grant, daughter of the laird of Urquhart Castle, and her lover, Donald Donn, poet son of MacDonald of Bohuntin. Forbidden to meet because of her father’s objection to the latter’s habits of “lifting” any cattle he came across (an old and honorable Highland profession, the guide assured us), they met anyway. The father got wind of it, Donald was lured to a false rendezvous and thus taken. Condemned to die, he begged to be beheaded like a gentleman, rather than hanged as a felon. This request was granted, and the young man led to the block, repeating “The Devil will take the Laird of Grant out of his shoes, and Donald Donn shall not be hanged.” He wasn’t, and legend reports that as his severed head rolled from the block, it spoke, saying, “Mary, lift ye my head.”
I shuddered, and Frank put an arm around me. “There’s a bit of one of his poems left,” he said quietly. “Donald Donn’s. It goes:
“Tomorrow I shall be on a hill, without a head.
Have you no compassion for my sorrowful maiden, My Mary, the fair and tender-eyed?”
I took his hand and squeezed it lightly.
As story after story of treachery, murder, and violence were recounted, it seemed as though the loch had earned its sinister reputation.
“What about the monster?” I asked, peering over the side into the murky depths. It seemed entirely appropriate to such a setting.
Our guide shrugged and spat into the water.
“Weel, the loch’s queer, and no mistake. There’s stories, to be sure, of something old and evil that once lived in the depths. Sacrifices were made to it—kine, and sometimes even wee bairns, flung into the water in withy baskets.” He spat again. “And some say the loch’s bottomless—got a hole in the center deeper than anything else in Scotland. On the other hand”—the guide’s crinkled eyes crinkled a bit more—“ ’twas a family here from Lancashire a few years ago, cam’ rushin’ to the police station in Invermoriston, screamin’ as they’d seen the monster come out o’ the water and hide in the bracken. Said ’twas a terrible creature, covered wi’ red hair and fearsome horns, and chewin’ something, wi’ the blood all dripping from its mouth.” He held up a hand, stemming my horrified exclamation.
“The constable they sent to see cam’ back and said, weel, bar the drippin’ blood, ’twas a verra accurate description”—he paused for effect—“of a nice Highland cow, chewin’ her cud in the bracken!”
We sailed down half the length of the loch before disembarking for a late lunch. We met the car there and motored back through the Glen, observing nothing more sinister than a red fox in the road, who looked up startled, a small animal of some sort hanging limp in its jaws, as we zoomed around a curve. He leaped for the side of the road and swarmed up the bank, swift as a shadow.
It was very late indeed when we finally staggered up the path to Mrs. Baird’s, but we clung together on the doorstep as Frank groped for the key, still laughing over the events of the day.
It wasn’t until we were undressing for bed that I remembered to mention the miniature henge on Craigh na Dun to Frank. His fatigue vanished at once.
“Really? And you know where it is? How marvelous, Claire!” He beamed and began rattling through his suitcase.
“What are you looking for?”
“The alarm clock,” he replied, hauling it out. “Whatever for?” I asked in astonishment.
“I want to be up in time to see them.” “Who?”
“The witches.”
“Witches? Who told you there are witches?”
“The vicar,” Frank answered, clearly enjoying the joke. “His housekeeper’s one of them.”
I thought of the dignified Mrs. Graham and snorted derisively. “Don’t be ridiculous!”
“Well, not witches, actually. There have been witches all over Scotland for hundreds of years—they burnt them ’til well into the eighteenth century
—but this lot is really meant to be Druids, or something of the sort. I don’t suppose it’s actually a coven—not devil-worship, I don’t mean. But the vicar said there was a local group that still observes rituals on the old sun- feast days. He can’t afford to take too much interest in such goings-on, you see, because of his position, but he’s much too curious a man to ignore it altogether, either. He didn’t know where the ceremonies took place, but if there’s a stone circle nearby, that must be it.” He rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “What luck!”
Getting up once in the dark to go adventuring is a lark. Twice in two days smacks of masochism.
No nice warm car with rugs and thermoses this time, either. I stumbled sleepily up the hill behind Frank, tripping over roots and stubbing my toes on stones. It was cold and misty, and I dug my hands deeper into the pockets of my cardigan.
One final push up over the crest of the hill, and the henge was before us, the stones barely visible in the somber light of predawn. Frank stood stock- still, admiring them, while I subsided onto a convenient rock, panting.
“Beautiful,” he murmured. He crept silently to the outer edge of the ring, his shadowy figure disappearing among the larger shadows of the stones. Beautiful they were, and bloody eerie too. I shivered, and not entirely from the cold. If whoever had made them had meant them to impress, they’d known what they were doing.
Frank was back in a moment. “No one here yet,” he whispered suddenly from behind me, making me jump. “Come on, I’ve found a place we can watch from.”
The light was coming up from the east now, just a tinge of paler grey on the horizon, but enough to keep me from stumbling as Frank led me through a gap he had found in some alder bushes near the top of the path. There was a tiny clearing inside the clump of bushes, barely enough for the two of us to stand shoulder to shoulder. The path was clearly visible, though, and so was the interior of the stone circle, no more than twenty feet away. Not for the first time, I wondered just what kind of work Frank had done during the War. He certainly seemed to know a lot about maneuvering soundlessly in the dark.
Drowsy as I was, I wanted nothing more than to curl up under a cozy bush and go back to sleep. There wasn’t room for that, though, so I continued to stand, peering down the steep path in search of oncoming Druids. I was getting a crick in my back, and my feet ached, but it couldn’t take long; the streak of light in the east had turned a pale pink, and I supposed it was less than half an hour ’til dawn.
The first one moved almost as silently as Frank. There was only the faintest of rattles as her feet dislodged a pebble near the crest of the hill, and then the neat grey head rose silently into sight. Mrs. Graham. So it was true, then. The vicar’s housekeeper was sensibly dressed in tweed skirt and woolly coat, with a white bundle under one arm. She disappeared behind one of the standing stones, quiet as a ghost.
They came quite quickly after that, in ones and twos and threes, with subdued giggles and whispers on the path that were quickly shushed as they came into sight of the circle.
I recognized a few. Here came Mrs. Buchanan, the village postmistress, blond hair freshly permed and the scent of Evening in Paris wafting strongly from its waves. I suppressed a laugh. So this was a modern-day Druid!
There were fifteen in all, and all women, ranging in age from Mrs. Graham’s sixty-odd years to a young woman in her early twenties, whom I had seen pushing a pram round the shops two days before. All of them were dressed for rough walking, with bundles beneath their arms. With a minimum of chat, they disappeared behind stones or bushes, emerging
empty-handed and bare-armed, completely clad in white. I caught the scent of laundry soap as one brushed by our clump of bushes, and recognized the garments as bedsheets, wrapped about the body and knotted at the shoulder.
They assembled outside the ring of stones, in a line from eldest to youngest, and stood in silence, waiting. The light in the east grew stronger.
As the sun edged its way above the horizon, the line of women began to move, walking slowly between two of the stones. The leader took them directly to the center of the circle, and led them round and round, still moving slowly, stately as swans in a circular procession.
The leader suddenly stopped, raised her arms, and stepped into the center of the circle. Raising her face toward the pair of easternmost stones, she called out in a high voice. Not loud, but clear enough to be heard throughout the circle. The still mist caught the words and made them echo, as though they came from all around, from the stones themselves.
Whatever the call was, it was echoed again by the dancers. For dancers they now became. Not touching, but with arms outstretched toward each other, they bobbed and weaved, still moving in a circle. Suddenly the circle split in half. Seven of the dancers moved clockwise, still in a circular motion. The others moved in the opposite direction. The two semicircles passed each other at increasing speeds, sometimes forming a complete circle, sometimes a double line. And in the center, the leader stood stock- still, giving again and again that mournful high-pitched call, in a language long since dead.
They should have been ridiculous, and perhaps they were. A collection of women in bedsheets, many of them stout and far from agile, parading in circles on top of a hill. But the hair prickled on the back of my neck at the sound of their call.
They stopped as one, and turned to face the rising sun, standing in the form of two semicircles, with a path lying clear between the halves of the circle thus formed. As the sun rose above the horizon, its light flooded between the eastern stones, knifed between the halves of the circle, and struck the great split stone on the opposite side of the henge.
The dancers stood for a moment, frozen in the shadows to either side of the beam of light. Then Mrs. Graham said something, in the same strange language, but this time in a speaking voice. She pivoted and walked, back straight, iron-grey waves glinting in the sun, along the path of light. Without
a word, the dancers fell in step behind her. They passed one by one through the cleft in the main stone and disappeared in silence.
We crouched in the alders until the women, now laughing and chatting normally, had retrieved their clothes and set off in a group down the hill, headed for coffee at the vicarage.
“Goodness!” I stretched, trying to get the kinks out of my legs and back. “That was quite a sight, wasn’t it?”
“Wonderful!” enthused Frank. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” He slipped out of the bush like a snake, leaving me to disentangle myself while he cast about the interior of the circle, nose to the ground like a bloodhound.
“Whatever are you looking for?” I asked. I entered the circle with some hesitation, but day was fully come, and the stones, while still impressive, had lost a good deal of the brooding menace of dawn light.
“Marks,” he replied, crawling about on hands and knees, eyes intent on the short turf. “How did they know where to start and stop?”
“Good question. I don’t see anything.” Casting an eye over the ground, though, I did see an interesting plant growing near the base of one of the tall stones. Myosotis? No, probably not; this had orange centers to the deep blue flowers. Intrigued, I started toward it. Frank, with keener hearing than I, leaped to his feet and seized my arm, hurrying me out of the circle a moment before one of the morning’s dancers entered from the other side.
It was Miss Grant, the tubby little woman who, suitably enough in view of her figure, ran the sweets and pastries shop in the town’s High Street. She peered nearsightedly around, then fumbled in her pocket for her spectacles. Jamming these on her nose, she strolled about the circle, at last pouncing on the lost hair-clip for which she had returned. Having restored it to its place in her thick, glossy locks, she seemed in no hurry to return to business. Instead, she seated herself on a boulder, leaned back against one of the stone giants in comradely fashion and lighted a leisurely cigarette.
Frank gave a muted sigh of exasperation beside me. “Well,” he said, resigned, “we’d best go. She could sit there all morning, by the looks of her. And I didn’t see any obvious markings in any case.”
“Perhaps we could come back later,” I suggested, still curious about the blue-flowered vine.
“Yes, all right.” But he had plainly lost interest in the circle itself, being now absorbed in the details of the ceremony. He quizzed me relentlessly on the way down the path, urging me to remember as closely as I could the exact wording of the calls, and the timing of the dance.
“Norse,” he said at last, with satisfaction. “The root words are Ancient Norse, I’m almost sure of it. But the dance,” he shook his head, pondering. “No, the dance is very much older. Not that there aren’t Viking circle dances,” he said, raising his brows censoriously, as though I had suggested there weren’t. “But that shifting pattern with the double-line business, that’s…hmm, it’s like…well, some of the patterns on the Beaker Folk glazeware show a pattern rather like that, but then again…hmm.”
He dropped into one of his scholarly trances, muttering to himself from time to time. The trance was broken only when he stumbled unexpectedly over an obstacle near the bottom of the hill. He flung his arms out with a startled cry as his feet went out from under him and he rolled untidily down the last few feet of the path, fetching up in a clump of cow parsley.
I dashed down the hill after him, but found him already sitting up among the quivering stems by the time I reached the bottom.
“Are you all right?” I asked, though I could see that he was.
“I think so.” He passed a hand dazedly over his brow, smoothing back the dark hair. “What did I trip over?”
“This.” I held up a sardine tin, discarded by some earlier visitor. “One of the menaces of civilization.”
“Ah.” He took it from me, peered inside, then tossed it over one shoulder. “Pity it’s empty. I’m feeling rather hungry after that excursion. Shall we see what Mrs. Baird can provide in the way of a late breakfast?”
“We might,” I said, smoothing the last strands of hair for him. “And then again, we might make it an early lunch instead.” My eyes met his.
“Ah,” he said again, with a completely different tone. He ran a hand slowly up my arm and up the side of my neck, his thumb gently tickling the lobe of my ear. “So we might.”
“If you aren’t too hungry,” I said. The other hand found its way behind my back. Palm spread, it pressed me gently toward him, fingers stroking lower and lower. His mouth opened slightly and he breathed, ever so lightly, down the neck of my dress, his warm breath tickling the tops of my breasts.
He laid me carefully back in the grass, the feathery blossoms of the cow parsley seeming to float in the air around his head. He bent forward and kissed me, softly, and kept on kissing me as he unbuttoned my dress, one button at a time, teasing, pausing to reach a hand inside and play with the swelling tips of my breasts. At last he had the dress laid open from neck to waist.
“Ah,” he said again, in yet another tone. “Like white velvet.” He spoke hoarsely, and his hair had fallen forward again, but he made no attempt to brush it back.
He sprang the clasp of my brassiere with one accomplished flick of the thumb, and bent to pay a skilled homage to my breasts. Then he drew back, and cupping my breasts with both hands, drew his palms slowly down to meet between the rising mounds, and without stopping, drew them softly outward again, tracing the line of my rib cage clear to the back. Up and again, down and around, until I moaned and turned toward him. He sank his lips onto mine, and pressed me toward him until our hips fitted tightly together. He bent his head to mine, nibbling softly around the rim of my ear. The hand stroking my back slipped lower and lower, stopping suddenly in surprise. It felt again, then Frank raised his head and looked down at me,
grinning.
“What’s all this, then?” he asked, in imitation of a village bobby. “Or rather, what’s not all this?”
“Just being prepared,” I said primly. “Nurses are taught to anticipate contingencies.”
“Really, Claire,” he murmured, sliding his hand under my skirt and up my thigh to the soft, unprotected warmth between my legs, “you are the most terrifyingly practical person I have ever known.”
Frank came up behind me as I sat in the parlor chair that evening, a large book spread out on my lap.
“What are you doing?” he asked. His hands rested gently on my shoulders.
“Looking for that plant,” I answered, sticking a finger between the pages to mind my place. “The one I saw in the stone circle. See…” I flipped the book open. “It could be in the Campanulaceae, or the Gentianaceae, the
Polemoniaceae, the Boraginaceae—that’s most likely, I think, forget-me- nots—but it could even be a variant of this one, the Anemone patens.” I pointed out a full color illustration of a pasqueflower. “I don’t think it was a gentian of any kind; the petals weren’t really rounded, but—”
“Well, why not go back and get it?” he suggested. “Mr. Crook would lend you his old banger, perhaps, or—no, I’ve a better idea. Borrow Mrs. Baird’s car, it’s safer. It’s a short walk from the road to the foot of the hill.”
“And then about a thousand yards, straight up,” I said. “Why are you so interested in that plant?” I swiveled around to look up at him. The parlor lamp outlined his head with a thin gold line, like a medieval engraving of a saint.
“It’s not the plant I care about. But if you’re going up there anyway, I wish you’d have a quick look around the outside of the stone circle.”
“All right,” I said obligingly. “What for?”
“Traces of fire,” he said. “In all the things I’ve been able to read about Beltane, fire is always mentioned in the rituals, yet the women we saw this morning weren’t using any. I wondered if perhaps they’d set the Beltane fire the night before, then come back in the morning for the dance. Though historically it’s the cow herds who were supposed to set the fire. There wasn’t any trace of fire inside the circle,” he added. “But we left before I thought of checking the outside.”
“All right,” I said again, and yawned. Two early risings in two days were taking their toll. I shut the book and stood up. “Provided I don’t have to get up before nine.”
It was in fact nearly eleven before I reached the stone circle. It was drizzling, and I was soaked through, not having thought to bring a mac. I made a cursory examination of the outside of the circle, but if there had ever been a fire there, someone had taken pains to remove its traces.
The plant was easier to find. It was where I remembered it, near the foot of the tallest stone. I took several clippings of the vine and stowed them temporarily in my handkerchief, meaning to deal with them properly when I got back to Mrs. Baird’s tiny car, where I had left the heavy plant presses.
The tallest stone of the circle was cleft, with a vertical split dividing the two massive pieces. Oddly, the pieces had been drawn apart by some means. Though you could see that the facing surfaces matched, they were separated by a gap of two or three feet.
There was a deep humming noise coming from somewhere near at hand. I thought there might be a beehive lodged in some crevice of the rock, and placed a hand on the stone in order to lean into the cleft.
The stone screamed.
I backed away as fast as I could, moving so quickly that I tripped on the short turf and sat down hard. I stared at the stone, sweating.
I had never heard such a sound from anything living. There is no way to describe it, except to say that it was the sort of scream you might expect from a stone. It was horrible.
The other stones began to shout. There was a noise of battle, and the cries of dying men and shattered horses.
I shook my head violently to clear it, but the noise went on. I stumbled to my feet and staggered toward the edge of the circle. The sounds were all around me, making my teeth ache and my head spin. My vision began to blur.
I do not know now whether I went toward the cleft in the main stone, or whether it was accidental, a blind drifting through the fog of noise.
Once, traveling at night, I fell asleep in the passenger seat of a moving car, lulled by the noise and motion into an illusion of serene weightlessness. The driver of the car took a bridge too fast and lost control, and I woke from my floating dream straight into the glare of headlights and the sickening sensation of falling at high speed. That abrupt transition is as close as I can come to describing the feeling I experienced, but it falls woefully short.
I could say that my field of vision contracted to a single dark spot, then disappeared altogether, leaving not darkness, but a bright void. I could say that I felt as though I were spinning, or as though I were being pulled inside out. All these things are true, yet none of them conveys the sense I had of complete disruption, of being slammed very hard against something that wasn’t there.
The truth is that nothing moved, nothing changed, nothing whatever appeared to happen and yet I experienced a feeling of elemental terror so great that I lost all sense of who, or what, or where I was. I was in the heart of chaos, and no power of mind or body was of use against it.
I cannot really say I lost consciousness, but I was certainly not aware of myself for some time. I “woke,” if that’s the word, when I stumbled on a
rock near the bottom of the hill. I half slid the remaining few feet and fetched up on the thick tufted grass at the foot.
I felt sick and dizzy. I crawled toward a stand of oak saplings and leaned against one to steady myself. There was a confused noise of shouting nearby, which reminded me of the sounds I had heard, and felt, in the stone circle. The ring of inhuman violence was lacking, though; this was the normal sound of human conflict, and I turned toward it.
