Her father had remarried, and his new wife, Aileen, had softened him. Therefore, the marriage went unopposed. Such was the loss of community to the plague that had killed Duncan, and a blight the year after that, that I was largely unrecognized; our old neighbors had moved away, and the island community looked very different to the one I had known. I was hopeful that day, but not a day thereafter.
That winter was the toughest the island had ever faced. Deep snows wrapped the fields and crofts. And as the farmers struggled to keep the livestock alive, the elders sounded the alarm—a child had gone missing.
Little Blair Reid, all of seven years old, was known to play near Witches Hide, and now he was gone. The savage weather made searching difficult, but I joined the men who scoured the fields for fresh tracks. One evening, the church bells sounded—the lad had been found on the bay close to the broch. He was returned home, his parents overjoyed.
They bathed and fed him, but that night, his mother took ill. Her cheeks burned though she said she was cold, and the next day, she passed. That was when Angus Reid noticed the mark on his son. A mark on his hip, with numbers.
Folk said Angus had tried to conceal the mark, but eventually it had got out, and folk were scared. This was not a child, not Blair Reid at all, but a wildling, and if Angus didn’t act quickly, the whole family would be wiped out. Maybe the whole bloodline, which stretched far across the island and into the south. The winter deepened, storms beating down on the houses and tearing apart fishing boats. We were faced with starvation. Angus had only just buried his wife. Now he was tasked with taking his oldest son, or the wildling that mimicked his oldest son, to a tree in the valley to be killed, as the elders had instructed.
We heard the cries. Angus was taking the boy to be killed in the valley, and the boy’s grandmother was distraught, pleading for him to stop. As smoke drifted high across the village, rumors abounded that Angus had drugged the boy beforehand.
This time, I prayed the rumors were true.
I imagine that Angus’ grief sharpened his memory of Finwell’s curse. And he remembered Amy’s screams alongside her mother, proclaiming that the islanders would burn their own children just as the witches had been burned. As soon as Blair was killed, the winter storms lifted, as though the weather had been turned by the actions taken upon the wildling. Gossip began to be spread about Amy, how she was to blame for the curse, how I was the son of a witch, and now our wicked powers were conjoined in holy matrimony. And so the cycle went, story after story being passed around the island like the changing of the moon.
LIV, 1998
I
When we arrived back at the bothy, I closed the door and moved a heavy chair against the knob.
“What’s happening?” Clover wailed.
“Mummy, you’re scaring us,” Luna said, her voice trembling.
I moved quickly to Saffy’s bedroom, intent on telling her to pack her things. I knew it was late, and once again I was dragging my children out at night, fleeing another home and driving them to who knows where. But the encounter on the boat with Patrick Roberts had terrified me, and that terror had leveraged a clean vision of what I needed to do—I needed to leave. I needed to see a doctor. I needed to focus on getting well; not by folklore and not by shamanism, but by science.
But Saffy wasn’t in her bedroom. I squinted at the clock—it was after eleven o’clock. She should have been back from Machara’s house.
I looked at the list of phone numbers scribbled in pencil on a page that was Blu-Tacked to the fridge. There was a number for Sibyl, Machara’s mother. I called it.
“Hello?”
“I’m sorry it’s late, but is Sapphire there?”
“No. I’ve not seen her for a few days now. Machara’s here. I can ask her . . .”
I waited. She returned to the phone.