The well looked like a gaping, bottomless black maw. Even worse than the dark, though, was the silence. He sank down onto his stomach, shading his eyes from the sunlight. Behind him adults chattered in a panic, trying to figure out which child was missing.
His eyes began to adjust, and slowly a thin white shape came into view, protruding from the still black surface of the well water. He felt like ice inside. An arm? A leg? Abruptly the shape registered, and air flooded back into his lungs.
“It’s a cow,” he said, looking up to meet Fiona’s horrified gaze, to see relief return blood to her face. “It’s Brian Maxwell’s cow.”
Fiona’s hands went to her mouth, her eyes bright with tears. “A cow?” she repeated, visibly shaking. “Are ye certain?”
He nodded, wanting to hold her. “I can see an upturned horn and part of the muzzle.”
“Oh, thank God,” she breathed. “Thank God.”
“How the devil did a cow end up in the well?” Niall Garretson demanded, the miller’s voice unsteady.
They’d all been shaken. Around Gabriel, relieved, half-hysterical laughter filled the air, coupled with speculation about how any cow had ended up at the bottom of a well. He sat as the big blacksmith pounded up, ropes coiled over his shoulder. “Any idea how to pull a cow out of here?” Gabriel asked him, gesturing.
“A cow? Thank Saint Andrew.” Tormod leaned over the lip beside him. “Horses and rope, I reckon. Someone’ll have to go doon there to get a line around her.”
Abruptly Brian Maxwell was there, peering over the side. “My red?” he asked, tears running down his freshly shaved face. “Oh no, lass. Ye ken she likes to wander, Yer Grace, but she’s a clever one, she is. She’d nae just jump into a well.”
Gabriel refrained from pointing out that the first time he’d encountered the red-furred cow, she’d been trapped up to her chest in a mudhole. That didn’t seem especially clever of her. “However she got in there, Brian,” he said, gripping the farmer’s shoulder, “we need to get her out. This is the village’s main water supply.”
The farmer nodded. “Aye. Aye, I ken. My Brady, he’ll do it. He’s a good lad.” A young man of about fifteen stepped forward, his expression grim.
It had been on the tip of Gabriel’s tongue to countermand that suggestion, and to announce that of course he would go down there himself. Strouth was his land, these, his tenants. The risk should be his. Before he could say it aloud, though, he caught sight of the villagers around him nodding their approval at the farmer’s words.
His pride didn’t like it, but his common sense understood. Brian had been negligent—again—and allowed his cow to escape her pasture. Brian therefore needed to make this right. He held out a hand to the boy. “Come up here, Brady,” he said. “We’ll tie a rope around you and lower you down. You’ll need to secure the second rope around both horns, and you’ll have to do it mainly by feel.”
The lad nodded. “I ken. Let’s get her oot before she spoils the water.”
Gabriel and Tormod tied the rope under the boy’s armpits while several others unhitched three pairs of horses from the waiting wagons and harnessed them together. When everything was ready, Brady sent his father a nod and then scooted off the well’s stone lip.
While Brian hung over the edge and motioned them to let out rope, Gabriel, Tormod, and two other villagers slowly lowered Brady Maxwell into the darkness. They played out nearly twenty-five feet of rope before the farmer announced that his boy was in the water.
More men lowered a second rope, and then what seemed like an hour later but must have been only a few minutes, Brady yelled that he’d finished. They hauled the boy up.
“There’s blood in the water,” Brady said breathlessly, as they freed him from the wet rope and Fiona threw a picnic blanket over his shaking shoulders. “I couldnae make oot how much, or where it came from.”
“Let’s get her up, and we’ll find out.”
With six horses, even the waterlogged weight of the dead cow moving straight up the inside of the stone wall of the well didn’t present much of a problem. A moment later and the bloated carcass with its twisted horns bumped heavily over the lip of the well and thudded to the ground.
“She’s well gone,” Tormod noted, wrinkling his nose at the smell. “She must’ve wandered into the village last night, tried to climb up fer some reason, and fallen in.”
“Aye,” Brian said mournfully. “Dogs always spooked her. She might’ve been affrighted.”
To Gabriel that didn’t seem particularly plausible. The red beast had been accustomed to wandering and likely to all the dogs in the village, as well. But if it hadn’t been an accident, then someone had dragged a dead cow into the middle of Strouth, dumped it deliberately into the well, and escaped—all without being noticed.
“It were the curse,” the farmer said, toeing the cow. “We all knew someaught would happen. If the bairns hadnae seen that twisted horn of hers, we’d nae have noted anything was amiss until folk started getting sick.”
Gabriel exchanged a glance with Fiona. Did she have the same questions? Was she wondering who might gain from poisoning the well water? “Let’s get this away from the village and burn it,” he said. “If some illness caused her to do this, I don’t want anyone eating the beef.”
“A good milking cow lost and nae a thing gained,” Brian muttered. “’Tis the curse, poor lass.”
“We’d all best leave the well be fer a few days,” Fiona said, putting her hand on Gabriel’s arm for balance so she could lean over and look into the depths. “The water flows doon there, but we dunnae ken how slowly.” She straightened. “There’s food still to eat, and enough’s been wasted today.”
Gabriel placed her hand around his arm again as they and most of the villagers wandered back to the picnic. Several of them crossed their fingers and spat over their shoulders as they passed the well. “We were lucky,” he murmured, low enough that only Fiona could hear him. “Twice over.”
“I nearly choked on my own heart,” she returned, “thinking it was a bairn who’d fallen in. But if they hadnae all gathered aboot to play here today, all we’d know fer a time is that Brian Maxwell’s cow went missing again.”
