The Betrayal of Maggie Blair - By Elizabeth Laird Page 0,36

risen hours ago. I sat up, filled with the dread of my dream. The horrors of yesterday came back to me at once, and I shivered at the danger I was in. I sat up and looked out between the bushes that grew in front of the cave.

Scalpsie Bay lay calm and peaceful in the morning light. The oystercatchers—Christ's birds, whose cross was painted black on their backs—were wheeling in the air above the shore. Smoke drifted up through the turf roofs of the farmhouses, making them look like steaming loaves of fresh bread. Above the slow shhh-shhh of the sea, I heard a woman calling to a child. Life was going on around Scalpsie Bay. It was as if a hole had opened, and I'd dropped right through it, and it had closed over my head.

I didn't dare make a fire to cook my oats into porridge, and I was hungry again. I looked longingly down at our cottage. It seemed forlorn, even on this bright morning.

And then I saw that people were moving along the lane in ones and twos, a steady stream, going toward Rothesay. They've gone to see Granny die. They've gone to gloat.

At that moment, I wished my dream had ended differently, that I'd let myself become a witch and could call the powers of Hell down upon them.

But not to little children, I thought. Not to babies. And not to their mammies and daddies either.

I had to admit, too, that I would have followed the crowd if things had been different. I would have walked to Rothesay out of sheer curiosity to see the hanging and burning of a witch.

I could choose to hate and curse and make people fear me as Granny had done, or I could go another way. I'd made my choice already, in my dream.

***

I saw Tam coming late in the afternoon, when the sun was already halfway down to its sinking place behind the mountains of Arran. His bonnet bobbed like a bluebell above the bracken. He was half running on bent legs, looking over his shoulder.

I waited till he was close enough to hear me.

"Tam! I'm here! Up here!"

He bolted up the slope and dived down behind the bush where I was hiding.

"Maidie, I've found you! I was afraid those fools would be back from Rothesay and catch me looking for you. Look at you, now, with your hair all cut off ! A handsome lad, you are, without your skirts and all."

I shook his arm.

"Granny! Is she...?"

He looked away.

"Best not to think about all that."

"Tam, you've got to tell me! Did they..."

"Yes. If you must know, she's gone." His pale, red-rimmed eyes filled with tears. "Hanged and burned, down on the shore, with all of them loons hooting like donkeys."

"Did she say anything?"

He laughed, but it choked on a sob.

"Did she? Oh, yes! Told everyone who'd listen that the Devil had come flying into the tolbooth in the night and broke down the door and snatched you away, so there was no point in looking for you on this island or anywhere else on the earth. Looking after you, you see, even at the very end."

Oh, Granny! I thought, seeing her, stern and defiant in her last hour, as magnificent as a queen.

"She wouldn't let them drag her to the gallows, but she walked to them freely, and the hangman, the butcher from Kingarth, Dickie Greig, he says to her, 'Don't curse me, mistress, for what I have to do,' and she shoots back to him, 'I'm done with cursing, you silly wee man.' She couldn't resist adding, 'But when you get home, ask your wife where she was last Wednesday night.' And that was funny, Maidie, because everyone knows what Sally Greig's been up to with the apprentice, except for Dickie, so the whole crowd cracked out laughing. Then poor old Elspeth, she looked up at the rope that was going to hang her, and her legs gave a bit at the knees and she went pale, but she wouldn't let anyone touch her and just shook herself and walked up the step to it. That Inverkip fool of a minister had been preaching and praying himself hoarse all morning, and he set up a psalm singing, and Mr. Robertson wasn't liking it at all. He was shaking his head and staring at the other fellow with his face all shut up like a clamp. Then he goes up to Elspeth and says kindly and gently,