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
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
