fox. I poked my head out, smiling at my own silliness. It was reassuring to hear the snores of the men and the quiet slurping as the cows chewed their cud nearby. I turned over onto my side, wriggling to find a comfortable position.
Suddenly, the words of Granny's healing chant came back to me, and I whispered them as I fell asleep.
God teach me to pray
To put this ill away,
Out of flesh, blood, and bone,
Into the earth and cold stone,
And never to come again,
In God's name.
Chapter 15
I slept so deeply that night that it took a prod from Peter Boag's stick to wake me. The sun had been up for hours, and I saw that I had slept long after the other two had risen. Peter was holding a bowl of porridge out to me and smiling from ear to ear.
"Little miracle worker, you are," he said. "I knew it. You needn't have pretended. I wouldn't have let on. Here's your penny. You've more than earned it."
I must have looked like a halfwit, staring up at him, bemused and still half asleep.
"My earache," he said. "It's gone. Look!"
He bent his head, and I saw a trickle of thick yellow pus dribbling from his ear.
"The evil humor's coming out, you see? You've purged it."
"No!" I lurched to my feet and grabbed at my plaid, which had fallen away so that too much of me was open to view. "I never did anything! I don't know—"
"Oh, lassie, don't bother. Your secret's safe. I told you, I'll not tell anyone, and I mean it."
He thrust the penny into my reluctant hand and had turned away before I could stop him.
Well, I thought, as I tied it into my father's shirttail and took up the spoon to eat my breakfast, a penny is a penny when all's said and done, and after all I did say the charm right through before I went to sleep.
I should have felt glad, I suppose, that Peter Boag's ear no longer hurt him, but in fact I was dismayed. I wanted no strange powers, good or evil. I wanted only to be ordinary, a plain girl, living safe and respectable in a proper family. And a wife one day. And a mother.
***
We were lucky, on those long, slow days of the drove, because the weather was kind to us. A few sharp showers came tumbling out of sullen clouds that swept as fast as racing horses across the hilltops. But most of the time the sun shone, turning the lochs as blue as cut-out pieces from the sky and making the heather on the hillsides glow in purple splendor.
I was soon used to splashing through the streams and even wading across fast-flowing rivers, but I was glad that I never had to swim in deep water again. The farther we moved from the Isle of Bute, the less I feared discovery. I was not afraid to be recognized as we were rowed by ferrymen across the lochs and greater rivers, looking back at the cows who bobbed along after the boat, their noses stretched up out of the water. I was grateful, from the bottom of my heart, that I wasn't struggling along with them.
We seemed to have been on the drove for months, and I had become used to the pace and rhythm of it, but in fact only a week had gone by when Mr. Lithgow said, "Well, Maggie, we'll be in Dumbarton tomorrow, and you'll have to make your own way from there."
I'd known it was coming, of course, but still my heart sank at the thought. Mr. Lithgow must have been watching my face, because he said, "No need to look like that. It's just a wee sail across the Clyde from Dumbarton, and no more than ten miles south to Ladymuir. You can walk it in a morning easily."
I knew Granny would have thought me feeble, but I couldn't help saying, "How will I find my way, Mr. Lithgow? And what if I'm stopped for being a vagabond?"
"I've thought of that." He lifted his spare knitting needle to poke through his matted beard and scratch at his chin. "You'll show them your buckle, and you'll tell the ferryman and anyone else who asks that you're the drover Archie Lithgow's young cousin, and you're taking a message down to Mr. Blair about the cattle he wants to sell. You've taken color in your cheeks and legs this past week. You look more like a