“And do you know where to find this stone?”
I admitted I didn’t.
“Weel, then,” he said, his mood restored. “You’d best eat your parritch to keep your strength up. Who knows how long it will take to find one wee stone amongst all the stones in Scotland? But I know where we’ll start. We’ll go and ask my auntie.”
Besides a prodigious collection of vintage underwear and nighties, Mordag possessed no other clothes, so I had to put on my costume from last night. William found an old, much patched and baggy pair of trousers—that he referred to as breeks—which he wore with his nightshirt tucked in and a pair of misshapen clogs he’d found by the back door. No doubt we looked a strange sight as we headed down the road, but there wasn’t anyone to see us.
“Are there always so few people around here?” I asked.
“Well, it’s no’ the Royal Mile of Edinburgh, but there’s usually a farmer taking his wares into town.” He pointed down the road in the opposite direction from where we’d come last night. “This is the way to Ballydoon.”
We headed in that direction, William whistling along the way. Gone was the young man who’d been woken by nightmares.
“You seem happy,” I said, slightly envious that even in borrowed shoes he strode along with less effort than I did.
“Aye, and why not? I’m strolling along a country lane with a beautiful lass on a fine day.”
The sun had burned off the morning mist and was warming the air. A gentle breeze rustled the yellow birch leaves on the side of the road and the purple heather on the hillsides. Magpies chattered in the heather, sunlight glinting off the blue iridescent stripes on their wings. The road climbed at a slow and steady incline. At the top of a rise, we looked down at a small village nestled in the next valley. It was really only a few dozen stone houses around a town square with a market cross and an old church. The ruins of a castle perched on the opposite hill, casting its shadow over the stone houses—the ruin that William had identified last night as Castle Coldclough. It looked like the idyllic Scottish village one might see on the label of a single malt or a tin of shortbread. Or, I thought uneasily, like the bewitched village in that old Gene Kelly movie, which appeared only once every hundred years.
“Brigadoon,” I said aloud.
“Nay, this is Ballydoon,” William said. “At least, it was Ballydoon. There’s something queer about it.”
I gazed back down at the village. It seemed picture perfect to me, like a model under glass or a movie set—and then I saw what he meant.
“Where is everybody?” I asked.
“Aye,” he said. “That’s what I’m wondering. The sun’s been up more than an hour. The market should be full. The farmers should be bringing their wares into town, the good-wives should be washing down their front steps, having a gossip …”
“Do you think they’ve all left?” I asked, staring hard at the stone houses, as if I could pierce their thick walls with the intensity of my gaze.
“Nay,” he said. “There’s smoke coming from the houses. The folks are still there, they’re just staying close to home.”
I noticed now the trails of smoke rising from a few houses.
“What would keep everybody at home?”
“The pest,” he answered in a hushed whisper, as if the word could conjure such a thing. I shivered as though a shadow had passed over us, blocking the warm sunshine and blotting out the beauty of the day.
“William, do you know what year it is?” I asked.
He scratched his head. “Weel, it was 1652 when I left, so if it’s been seven years …”
I ran through my patchy knowledge of British history, trying to remember if there was still plague in 1659. Had there been an outbreak in Scotland at this time? But all I could recall was the date of Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, which took place in 1665. It was certainly possible.
“What should we do?” I asked. “Should we go back to Mordag’s?”
He turned to me for the first time since we’d seen the village. The fear I saw in his eyes was not reassuring, but there was something else—a flash of steel that I recognized from when Bill had gotten angry after Duncan Laird hurt me.
“Perhaps you should go back to the cottage and wait. My auntie who raised me is down there, and I need to know if she’s all right.”
“We’ll go together,” I said quickly. After all, we’d already braved the Fairy Queen and William changing into a monster. “You said she might know something about the angel stone.”
William nodded. “Aye, she’s a wisewoman.”
“Let’s go, then,” I said, putting on a bright smile that felt false on my face. Only as I followed William down the hill toward the village did it occur to me that wisewoman might not refer to his aunt’s sagacity. In these times, it was what witches were called.
As the dirt road turned to cobblestone, it remained deserted, but I sensed movement behind the closed shutters of the houses we passed, a stirring that might have been townspeople pressing their eyes to the cracks and peepholes—or rats scurrying in the walls, carrying plague.
“There are no quarantine signs to mark a house condemned,” William whispered. “And no reek of dying. There’s something else amiss.”
“Fear,” I said, sniffing the air. The clean scent of heather and running water was gone now, replaced by a metallic tang that I could taste at the back of my throat. “The people here are afraid of something, but what?”
As we continued, I saw up ahead a town square with several open-air stalls—perhaps a farmers’ market. But the stalls were deserted, save for a half-empty basket of rotting potatoes and a bit of undyed wool snagged on a wooden contraption set up in front of the market cross. As I looked around the abandoned square, William read a sign affixed to the front of the church. A bright scrap of cloth drew my attention to the far side of the square. Coming closer, I saw it was a crudely made rag doll. Black stitches marked its eyes; undyed wool made up its hair. I picked it up and winced as something stung my hand.
“Leave that!” William cried, grabbing my arm. “Let’s get out of here—”
“William? William Duffy? Is it really you?”
William’s grip on my arm tightened, and I felt his body tense. I could sense him on the verge of bolting, but then he steeled himself and turned around to face the speaker. She was a young woman, perhaps in her early to mid twenties; her long blond hair was pulled back on top but then worn loose in long ringlets flowing over a royal-blue cloak, which was clasped at the throat with a silver pin. Her eyes were Wedgwood blue and grew even larger as they fastened on William.
“It is you. We thought ye were dead. Instead you’re with”—her eyes swiveled to me—“another … woman.” She managed to inject a note of disdain into the word woman. She might as well have said slut.
“So there is someone alive in this godforsaken place,” I said. “Maybe she can tell us what’s going on. Do you know her?”
The girl’s eyes grew even wider. “Know me?” she asked, affronted. “I’m Jeannie MacDougal. William Duffy and I were—are—engaged to be married.”
“Engaged? But he’s only just arrived.”
“Aye, he vanished seven years ago. He left me standing on the kirk steps, feeling like a fool.” Her glance shifted from William to me, her china-blue eyes traveling from my unkempt hair to my stained and wrinkled green skirt, then to my muddy boots and back up again to meet my gaze.
“I recognize you! You’re the demented girl who wandered out of the Greenwood just after William vanished and whom Malcolm Brodie took pity on and married. But then you up and deserted him and your own bairn when the witch hunters came to town. You ran back to Faerie, didn’t you, where you’d left poor William? Weel, never you fear, William, the witch hunters are here in Ballydoon, and they’ll know what to do with this witch.”