The Angel Stone

hunt. No wonder everyone was hiding behind locked doors. However, Jeannie’s tirade drew a few cautious souls out of their homes to see what was going on. Meanwhile, William was stumbling for an explanation for why he’d skipped out on his fiancee (whose existence he’d conveniently forgotten to mention last night) and disappeared for seven years.

“Jeannie, I was kidnapped the night before our wedding by …” I saw a frantic look in his eyes. Did he dare tell his fiancee and the assembled townspeople that he’d been taken by fairies? Did the citizens of old Scotland still believe in fairies?

“… by pirates,” William concluded.

“Pirates?” Jeannie echoed. “Do ye think I’m daft, William Duffy, that I’d believe sech a story?”

William looked unsure of how to answer that question, so I stepped in for him.

“Actually, pirates were quite active in the … er … right about now. The Barbary corsairs were— are—still raiding European coastal settlements, more commonly in Spain, France, and Italy but also in England, Ireland, and Scotland, well into the late seventeenth century. In fact, in 1631, a Dutch corsair captured nearly an entire village in Ireland and sent them to North Africa, where most lived out the rest of their lives as galley slaves or in harems—”

“Aye,” William interrupted, “that’s where I found this poor lass, enslaved in a sultan’s harem. So, you see, she can’t be the girl you spoke of who married Malcolm Brodie. I was about to be slain when she came to my rescue and pleaded for my life. Only because she was the sultan’s favorite was she successful. Together we escaped and came back here!”

I wasn’t sure that I relished being made a harem slave, even in a fictional account. Fortunately, I had recently reread a Dahlia LaMotte book called The Barbary Beast, in which an Irish girl was abducted by an English corsair who sold her into a sultan’s harem. I recalled the details of the plot now to give me a more active—and virtuous—role.

“Yes, I was sold into a sultan’s harem, but I was able to fend off the sultan’s advances by telling him part of a story each night, which again and again I left unfinished, with the promise that I would tell him the end of the tale the next night if he, er, left me alone. I did this for one hundred nights, until I was able to escape with”—I almost said Jack Wilde, the Barbary pirate of LaMotte’s book, who had secretly listened to the Irish girl’s tales and fallen in love with her wit and eloquence, but I caught myself—“William.”

“I thought ye said she saved you,” Jeannie said coldly.

“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 fiancee, 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?”