On the wall behind me was an old wooden oar, mounted for decoration. Quickly, I lifted it down and held it in front of me like a baseball bat.
Patrick stared at me. “What’s going on, Amy?”
“My name is Olivia,” I said, my voice firm. “I’m sorry, but you have me confused with someone else. Take us back to shore right now.”
His face dropped then, and he held his hands up. “Please accept my apologies,” he said, righting himself. “You have children. It must be their bedtime.”
When the engines roared back to life I felt a moment’s relief. But I didn’t let go of the oar, not even when he broke the silence.
He turned to me, and I was alarmed to see he was crying. “I’m ever so sorry,” he said, and the nervous, awkward boy was back with me, dabbing his eyes. “It’s just been so long . . . sometimes you can miss someone so badly you just want to believe you’ve found them, you know?”
IV
And so, at the age of seventeen, I was shipped back to Lòn Haven. I had no home to return to, no family, and only a little money, but I hoped that Amy was still there, and that she hadn’t forgotten me.
I walked from the dock to her croft, telling myself to keep my expectations low—she was likely married now, perhaps with a bairn. She might have moved away. She might have died.
In the distance, I saw a woman outside the croft, flinging out a blanket. She was tall and wore her long black hair in a plait. Finwell, I thought, astonished. But as I got closer, I recognized her movements. The turn of her head toward me, her gait as she started walking down the path. Then her voice as she shouted my name.
And in a second she was there, crying and shouting, her hands grabbing my clothes and pounding my chest.
“You left!” she shrieked. “You never said good-bye!”
I was too overwhelmed to speak. I opened and closed my mouth but only sounds came out, and I was crying. Suddenly she stopped pounding me with her fists and flung her arms around me, and I dropped my pack and held her, cupping her head to my shoulder. I had missed her so badly it had all but turned me inside out. I had missed her so badly that I hadn’t wanted to live. And yet, now she was here, and I never wanted to let her go.
We were both different. I suppose we had been children when last we spoke and now we were adults. The scrawny, feral girl I’d known was now a woman, taller, beautiful, the wild daring in her eyes cooled to wisdom and sorrow. She pulled me inside the croft before anyone else could see, so my return might stay a secret awhile longer.
“The island has changed since you left,” she said as she lit the fire. She served me oat bread and pottage as she told me what had happened. The year I’d been sent away, the sickness that Duncan had died from ravaged the island. Hundreds fell ill, including the laird, who was the first to die. All the judges who presided over the court that sent the twelve women to their deaths also died. Then Duncan’s sons, and his wife.
Fifty men, women, and children died, and those who recovered bore scars from their illness. Rumors began to spread about an event that had preceded the plague. Mrs. Dunbar, an old woman who had lost two grandchildren to the plague, spoke of a little girl who had come to her door. She was terrified; Mrs. Dunbar knew the child was not from the island, and she did not speak Gaelic. She bore a mark on her leg, a strange burn with numbers therein. Mrs. Dunbar persisted in trying to communicate with the girl, using charcoal and scraps of paper to have her draw where she had come from, so that she might be returned to her family. The little girl drew the cave deep in the broch that had become known as Witches Hide.
The child had disappeared, never to be seen again. The day after, the laird died. Mrs. Dunbar informed the Privy Council, who placed posters of the child around the village. There was no doubt that the child’s appearance was of the Devil, the witches’ curse coming to pass.
I heard the fear in her voice, but I did not yet register the change that had swept across Lòn Haven. I was still stunned to be back in Amy’s presence, and although she had wept in my arms, I didn’t dare ask the question that buzzed in my head.