The muscles tightened beneath my hands and he flinched away from me. “Ye shouldn’t be touching me! I would not carry the pest to you.”
I sat and took both his hands in mine. “First of all, Ian was here when he came down with it. If I was going to catch it, I would have caught it from him. But I don’t think I will,” I added quickly when I saw the look of worry in his eyes. “I traveled a lot with my parents when I was little, and I was vaccinated against a whole host of diseases.”
“Vaccinated?” he asked. “Is that some kind of magic?”
“No, it’s science, but it is sort of magical when you think about it. It’s a type of medicine that prevents you from getting certain diseases. I can’t be sure that I was vaccinated against whatever this is, but my mother was a witch, so I think she might have strengthened those vaccines with magic. I just don’t think I’m going to get this—and neither are you. Before you left today I wove a kind of protective spell around you. I think it will keep you from getting sick. It’s the tartan that Nan and I have been trying to weave.” I touched the glowing plaid that still mantled William’s shoulders. “You can’t see it?”
William glanced over both shoulders, looking comically like a dog trying to chase his tail. “Nay, I canna see anything but the dust I picked up on the road … only …” He held up both arms and looked from one to the other. His right arm, which hadn’t been covered by the tartan, was coated with a fine brown dust, but his left arm, which had been covered, was clean.
“It kept the dust off you,” I said. “And I think it will keep the pest off you, as well. If only I had been able to make it before. Perhaps I could have saved baby Ian—”
“Do ye think ye could make this sort of cloak for other folks?” he asked, cutting short my litany of regret.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. I’d been asking myself the same question the whole time he was gone. “The Stewarts in my time are able to protect Fairwick with their tartans. I think that’s because they consider the whole village their responsibility. I suppose if I felt that way about Ballydoon …”
William snorted. “I wouldna blame ye if ye didna love the place. It’s no’ been verra friendly.”
I shrugged. “Nan and Una have been kind. And Beitris. That’s a start. And Nan cares about the village. If she can weave the tartan, then together we may be able to protect more people—and if we can save the village from the pest …”
“Then we can take the tartan to Castle Coldclough and destroy the witch hunters,” William finished for me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
We waited until midnight to return to the village. The fewer people who saw us going near the houses of the sick, William explained, the better. Even if we managed to help them, suspicion of witchcraft might fall on us, and if we failed and people died, we’d be blamed for that.
We went first to Nan’s house. When we knocked on the door, the curtain over the window twitched, then we heard something heavy being moved away from the door and a bolt being drawn. Finally the door opened and Nan motioned for us to come in quickly. The room was so dark that at first I thought she was alone, and then I made out a crooked old woman huddled by the hearth, bent over her knitting in the faint light of the dying embers. When I got closer, I saw that it was Una. She appeared to have aged ten years since I’d seen her. She was still knitting the blanket she’d been making for baby Ian.
“I’m so sorry about wee Ian,” I said. “He was a sweet little boy.”
“Aye, he was a braw lad,” she said, wiping an eye with the back of her hand, “but Aileen willna let me sit vigil o’er my own grandson.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, feeling foolishly unable to think of any better words.
Una clucked her tongue. “Dinna fash yourself, lass, there wasna anything you could have done.”
Una’s words, excusing me as if I had only been unable to prevent a jug from breaking, brought tears to my eyes. I looked up at Nan and she saw the look of panic in my face.
“Come down to the root cellar with me and help me mix a draft to ward off the pest,” Nan said.
William moved to the seat I had vacated and offered to help wind the yarn that lay in loose skeins at Una’s feet. I followed Nan to the root-cellar door, where I looked back to see William holding a skein of yarn like some henpecked husband from a sixties sitcom and Una placidly wrapping the yarn into a ball. I could hear the soft murmur of Una’s voice and make out the name Ian repeated like a refrain. While engaging in a mutual chore, Una could more easily share her memories of her dead grandson. I noticed that a bit of the glow from the tartan I’d woven for William was carried along the thread and into Una’s hands. The glow seemed to bring some vestige of life and warmth back to Una’s face—at least she no longer looked like a corpse.
“The tartan you cast over William is moving to Una,” Nan said softly from behind me. “Can ye show me how to cast it?”
“I can try,” I said, following Nan down into the cellar. “It starts with the desire to protect someone …” I looked at Nan and thought about how all these weeks she’d come to my house to teach me how to spin and weave, even though associating with me—a stranger who’d appeared out of nowhere—would open her to the charge of witchcraft. She had risked her safety for me and to save her village. She cared about Ballydoon the way I cared about Fairwick. I held out my hands and she held up hers, our fingertips touching. I thought about my friends back in Fairwick and my students and what would happen to them if they were left at the mercy of the nephilim. My hands grew warm and sparks leapt from my fingertips, but they fizzled in the damp cellar air, unable to cross the divide between us.
“Think about those you wish to help,” I told Nan.
“Aye, what else do ye think is on my mind—a recipe for sheep dip?”
I laughed in spite of the gravity of the situation, and multicolored motes danced in the air. I could hear William humming upstairs as he helped Una wind the yarn. It was the lullaby I’d first heard Bill sing, the one William’s mother lulled him to sleep with when he was a baby. Now he was singing it to poor bereaved Una. Would Una want to hear a lullaby, I wondered, after losing her grandson? But after a few minutes I heard Una’s voice join in, weak and quavering at first but growing stronger. Nan, too, began to hum the tune and then sing, her eyes shining in the dim cellar. I knew she was thinking of her sister but also of William and baby Ian and all the others whom she had loved and lost. I began to sing it, too. I thought of Bill crooning this song more than three hundred years in the future. I thought of the words of a simple child’s lullaby connecting the two men—the one I had loved and the one Nan loved—across time. As I sang, the colored threads leapt from my fingers to Nan’s—a luminescent skein binding us together.
The glow lit up Nan’s face, washing away her fatigue and grief. “It feels … alive!” she said with wonder, a small, tentative smile beginning. “Sometimes when I am spinning a thread from wool, I can feel the life of the sheep it came from and the sun that beat down on it and the grass and heather it chewed and even the bees that buzzed about the flowers. This thread …” She spread her hands wide apart, and the threads separated from mine and formed a skein, much like the one that William held upstairs for Una. As Nan pulled her hands in and out, the skein thickened. “This feels as if it contains all of life in it—the sun and the moon, the barley growing in the fields, the creatures in the wood, each beating heart in the village …” As she named each type of life, I saw a new-color thread spring to life. I reached out and pulled a thread of each color from her skein.