“Go on with you,” he said. “This is not a good time.”
“Would you like your walk shoveled?” I asked him.
“A slip of a girl like you? You couldn’t even lift the shovel.” I imagine there is a tone, an expression, that would make this response affectionate, but Mr. McBean affected neither. He opened the door enough to tower over me with his blue nose, his gluey face, and the clenched set of his mouth.
“Bobby would help me. Thirty cents.”
“Thirty cents! And that’s the idlest boy God ever created. Thirty cents?”
“Since it’s to be split. Fifteen cents each.”
The door was closing again.
“Twenty cents.”
“I’ve been shoveling my own walk long enough. No reason to stop.”
The door clicked shut. The whole exchange had taken less than a minute. I stood undecidedly at the door for another minute, then stepped off the porch, into the yard. I walked around the back. I got there just in time to see the cellar light go on. The window was open. Bobby was gone.
I stood outside, but there was a wind, as I’ve said, and I couldn’t hear and it was so bright outside and so dim within, I could hardly see. I knew that Bobby was inside, because there were no footprints leading away but my own. I had looked through the window on other occasions so I knew the light was a single bulb, hanging by its neck like a turnip, and that there were many objects between me and it, old and broken furniture, rusted tools, lawn mowers and rakes, boxes piled into stairs. I waited. I think I waited a very long time. The light went out. I waited some more. I moved to a tree, using it as a windbreak until finally it was clear there was no point in waiting any longer. Then I ran home, my face stinging with cold and tears, into our living room, where my mother pulled off my stiff scarf and rubbed my hands until the pins came into them. She made me cocoa with marshmallows. I would like you to believe that the next few hours were a very bad time for me, that I suffered a good deal more than Bobby did.
That case being so hard to make persuasively, I will tell you instead what was happening to him.
• • •
BOBBY DID, INDEED, manage to wiggle in through the window, although it was hard enough to give him some pause as to how he would get out again. He landed on a stack of wooden crates, conveniently offset so that he could descend them like steps. Everywhere was cobwebs and dust; it was too dark to see this, but he could feel it and smell it. He was groping his way forward, hand over hand, when he heard the door at the top of the stairs. At the very moment the light went on, he found himself looking down the empty eye slit of a suit of armor. It made him gasp; he couldn’t help it. So he heard the footsteps on the stairs stop suddenly and then begin again, wary now. He hid himself behind a barrel. He thought maybe he’d escape notice — there was so much stuff in the cellar and the light so dim — and that was the worst time, those moments when he thought he might make it, much worse than what came next, when he found himself staring into the cracked and reddened eyes of Mr. McBean.
“What the devil are you doing?” McBean asked. He had a smoky, startled voice. “You’ve no business down here.”
“I was just playing a game,” Bobby told him, but he didn’t seem to hear.
“Who sent you? What did they tell you?”
He seemed to be frightened — of Bobby! — and angry, and that was to be expected, but there was something else that began to dawn on Bobby only slowly. His accent had thickened with every word. Mr. McBean was deadly drunk. He reached into Bobby’s hiding place and hauled him out of it, and his breath, as Bobby came closer, was as ripe as spoiled apples.
“We were playing at putting a Stuart on the throne,” Bobby told him, imagining he could sympathize with this, but it seemed to be the wrong thing to say.
He pulled Bobby by the arm to the stairs. “Up we go.”
“I have to be home by dinner.” By now Bobby was very frightened.
“We’ll see. I have to think what’s to be done with you,” said McBean.
They reached the door, then moved on into the living room, where they sat for a long time in silence while McBean’s eyes turned redder and redder and his fingers pinched into Bobby’s arm. With his free hand, he drank. Perhaps this is what kept him warm, for the house was very cold and Bobby was glad he still had his coat on. Bobby was both trembling and shivering.
“Who told you about Prince Charlie?” McBean asked finally. “What did they say to you?” So Bobby told him what he knew, the Disney version, long as he could make it, waiting of course, for me to do something, to send someone. McBean made the story longer by interrupting with suspicious and skeptical questions. Eventually the questions ceased and his grip loosened. Bobby hoped he might be falling asleep. His eyes were lowered. But when Bobby stopped talking, McBean shook himself awake, and his hand was a clamp on Bobby’s forearm again. “What a load of treacle.” His voice filled with contemptuous spit. “It was nothing like that.”
He stared at Bobby for a moment and then past him.
“I’ve never told this story before,” he said, and the pupils of his eyes were as empty and dark as the slit in the armor. “No doubt I shall regret telling it now.”
• • •
IN THE DAYS of the bonnie prince, the head of the McBane clan was the charismatic Ian McBane. Ian was a man with many talents, all of which he had honed and refined over the fifty-odd years he had lived so far. He was a botanist, an orientalist, a poet, and a master brewer. He was also a godly man, a paragon, perhaps. At least in this story. To be godly is a hard thing and may create a hard man. A godly man is not necessarily a kindly man, although he can be, of course.
Now in those days, the woods and caves of Scotland were filled with witches; the church waged constant battle. Some of them were old and haggish, but others were mortally beautiful. The two words go together, mind you, mortal and beautiful. Nothing is so beautiful as that which will fade.
These witches were well aware of Ian McBane. They envied him his skills in the brewery, coveted his knowledge of chemistry. They themselves were always boiling and stirring, but they could only do what they knew how to do. Besides, his godliness irked them. Many times they sent the most beautiful among them, tricked out further with charms and incantations, to visit Ian McBane in his bedchamber and offer what they could offer in return for expert advice. They were so touching in their eagerness for knowledge, so unaware of their own desirability. They had the perfection of dreams. But Ian, who was after all fifty and not twenty, withstood them.
All of Scotland was hoping to see Charles Edward Stuart on the throne, and from hopes they progressed to rumors and from rumors to sightings. Then came the great victory at Falkirk. Naturally, Ian wished to do his part and naturally, being a man of influence and standing, his part must be a large one. It was the sin of ambition which gave the witches an opening.
This time the woman they sent was not young and beautiful but old and sweet. She was everyone’s mother. She wore a scarf on her hair and her stockings rolled at her ankles. Blue rivers ran just beneath the skin of her legs. Out of her sleeve she drew a leather pouch.
“From the end of the world,” she said. “Brought me by a black warrior riding a white elephant, carried over mountains and across oceans.” She made it a lullaby. Ian was drowsy when she finished. So she took his hand and emptied the pouch into his palm, closing it for him. When he opened his hand, he held the curled shards and splinters of a unicorn’s horn.