The Betrayal of Maggie Blair - By Elizabeth Laird Page 0,121

this? You said blessed are the persecuted, but they don't look blessed to me.

My mind reeled back to the terrible moment on the cliff. I could see again the waves dashing onto the rocks below and hear the screaming birds. What had really happened then? Had Jesus heard me and sent Musketeer Sharpus to rescue me? But I seemed to remember that I'd called out to Granny too. Had she used some strange power to reach out to me from beyond the grave?

Something had happened, I felt sure, that I didn't understand. There had been a kind of power there among those beating white wings.

"He will give his angels charge over thee," I had heard Uncle Blair quote. "They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone."

I thought I'd seen an angel once before, but it had only been Tam, when he'd opened the door to rescue us from the tolbooth in Rothesay. I couldn't imagine Musketeer Sharpus as an angel, any more than Tam, but God's ways were mysterious, I'd often been told. Maybe Neil Sharpus was a messenger from Heaven, in spite of being a servant of the tyrant king, and so plain and awkward as well.

I wanted to thank Jesus but didn't know how to do it properly. While I was thinking about this, I saw Musketeer Sharpus stepping through the sleeping people toward me. I watched him carefully as he approached, wondering if the light around his head was shining from him, or if it was the glow of moonlight that was now coming in through the barn door. As he came nearer, I smiled at my silliness. There was nothing angelic about Musketeer Sharpus. He was just a soldier, with a scarred face and a broken nose and thin, straggling fair hair. Then I saw that he was holding an egg in his hand. I began to fumble in my pocket for a coin.

"No need for that." He frowned at my uncle's hands with shocked pity in his eyes. He gave me the egg and hurried away.

***

I don't know if my remedy really did have the power to heal, or if it was the fresh air and the better food that Musketeer Sharpus helped me to provide for my uncle, but at any rate as the days passed and the sad cavalcade of prisoners straggled down the road to Edinburgh, Uncle Blair's hands began to heal. I could see that they would never be quite right. The flesh was too twisted and distorted to mend completely. But at least he wouldn't lose his fingers.

Slowly, our company grew. A few other friends and relatives of the prisoners, hearing of their release, had hurried to meet them and help them if they could. They paid for better food and washed some of the stinking clothes. One or two prisoners were even spirited away, to disappear to freedom in the hills.

Most of the prisoners were farmers like Uncle Blair—men used to hard work, to the rain and the cold. I watched them as they trudged stoically on, thin and ragged, their arms bound, unable to brush the tormenting midges from their faces or ease the ache in their shoulders.

"Why?" I burst out one morning to Uncle Blair, as I watched a soldier kick at a man who had stumbled to the ground and was trying to get up without being able to use his arms. "How can you bear all this? How can it be worth it?"

He turned shocked eyes on me.

"Do you still not understand? After all this time, don't you see what wickedness God is asking us to resist?"

I kept my head down and swiped rebelliously at the bracken growing by the path. Uncle Blair sighed and said patiently, "Who is the true head of the church, Maggie? God or the king?"

"God," I said unwillingly.

He nodded but said nothing more. I looked sideways at him and saw that his thoughts had moved on, to some painful place of trouble.

"What is it, Uncle?" I asked at last.

He sighed.

"The worst is yet to come, dear girl. At Leith, when this journey is nearly over, we will all be asked once again to take the Test."

My heart sank. I knew what this meant.

"One by one," he went on, "they'll question us again. How many times have they asked us, and how many times have we refused! 'Do you accept that the king's Majesty is the only supreme governor of the church?' That's