Page 7 of The Changeling

It did not occur to me to question that we were born a whole day apart. It made sense to me that Sorcha, so rosy and round and golden-haired, was a dawn baby, and I, so pale and delicate and dark- haired, was a twilight child.

Our cottage was built of grey stone and heather thatch, with two rooms downstairs and two above, connected by a spiral staircase in its own round tower. The lower rooms each had a fireplace at the gable end, with a tall stone chimney that warmed the rooms above.

The west end served as our sitting room, with Mam’s spinning wheel and loom set up by the window where she would get the best light. She looked out onto the sparkling rivulet of water that ran under the roots of the old hawthorn tree by our front gate, festooned with bright scraps of cloth, each one a prayer or a wish.

The east end was Nan’s domain, the kitchen with its big oak dresser stacked with jars of honey in every possible shade of gold, and ceramic crocks filled with bark, berries, bones, dried toadstools, fir cones, hag-stones, hips, haws, mistletoe, mandrake roots, and menstrual blood. Great bunches of sweet-smelling herbs hung from the rafters and a heavy door led out into the walled garden, where her bees were kept safe from thieves and her hens from foxes. Herbs, flowers and vegetables grew in wild profusion, wherever they cared to set root, and dandelions, chickweed and nettles were as lovingly tended as the cabbages.

Nan slept in a wooden box bed in the kitchen, saying her bones were too old now to climb the steep twisting steps. But Sorcha and I knew that she had given up her bedroom for us. We shared a bed covered with a thick patchwork quilt that Mam had pieced together from scraps of old kirtles. Mam was always busy at some work or another, making us new chemises or darning my stockings.

‘She should darn her own stockings,’ Nan would say. ‘Maybe then she’d take more care.’

‘I dinna mind,’ Mam would reply. ‘Poor wee lambkin, she has enough to bear.’

For I was not sturdy like Sorcha. I’d been born with thin crookit legs, and could not run as fast as she could, nor walk very far without getting tired. As I grew older, I gradually grew stronger, but it was always me that Mam worried about catching a chill or getting my feet wet.

Every evening, after work, Mam spent a few hours playing with us. She taught us songs and clapping games and cat’s cradle, and we gathered wildflowers to make faery crowns while she told us all the funny things the Graham children had done that day. Rory never wanted to go to bed and told her sleep was his enemy. Robbie worried about the baby in his mam’s belly, in case she was scared of the dark, and wanted Lady Marjorie to eat a candle. And when Margrit was told she would not go to heaven if she kept on being so wilful, she said she would kick St Peter in the shins till he opened the pearly gates for her.

The first time I saw Robbie, Mam and Sorcha and I were playing near the faery stones in the meadow below the Knock when Lord George and his sons trotted past, the two boys on matching chestnut ponies. I was spinning around, my arms spread wide, till I was so dizzy I’d fall over. When Mam saw the laird and his sons, she rose and curtsied, calling to us both to do the same. Sorcha obeyed, pretty and neat in her movements as always. But curtseying was difficult for me – I couldn’t stand on one leg and bend my knee without wobbling. So I bowed like a boy, making a dramatic flourish of my hand. Lord George lifted his hat and rode on, Rory by his side, but Robbie turned his head and stared back at me. I put my thumbs above my temples and waggled my fingers at him, sticking out my tongue.

He laughed.

I laughed back. As he trotted away, he turned in his saddle to keep looking at me.

‘Caiti, you shouldna be so rude to the laird’s son,’ Mam reproached me. ‘Robbie is a dear laddie and willna take offence, but his father wouldna like it at all.’

‘How do you ken which one is Rory and which one is Robbie?’ Sorcha asked, plumping back down on one of the faery stones.

‘Rory was first born and so he is a wee bit taller and sturdier. Robbie is the gentle one. He’s always rescuing hurt beasties. He has a sick hedgehog in a box in his room right now!’

I liked the thought of a boy who rescued wild creatures, and so I began to look out for the Graham twins and see if I could tell them apart. After a while it was easy. Rory was always charging ahead at full speed, and Robbie was usually wandering behind, looking about him curiously and noticing everything.

The faery ring was a circle of rocks in the middle of the meadow below the Knock. One was grooved with circles and spirals, and pointed to the west. To the north-west, some distance away, was an ancient standing stone called the Carlin. It was much taller and leaned slightly backwards, and the side that faced the Shaggie Burn and the Highlands had been carefully smoothed. If you stood in the faery ring on Midsummer’s Eve, and faced the setting sun, the shadow of the Carlin stretched straight towards you like a finger. We went every year, to see the sun sink down behind it, and to lay flowers to honour the turning of the year towards winter and the time of rest. When Mam was a little girl, she had found a glowing blue glass bead there. She had worn it ever since, strung on a red cord about her neck. Nan said it was a charm-stone, a powerful protection against bewitchment.

Lord Patrick once tried to pull the faery circle apart, thinking it some ungodly pagan temple. He brought a team of men and horses to drag the stones away. The horses shied and reared, and refused to go near. Lord Patrick ordered them whipped. One of the rocks shifted and crushed a man’s foot. After that, none of them would go near the old stones. So Lord Patrick took a hammer to the rock carved with symbols, only to almost lose an eye from a splinter of stone.

After that, he too left it alone, simply ploughing about it and allowing it to be overgrown with nettles and brambles. I asked Nan why he wanted to destroy the faery ring, and she said it was because his great-great-great-grandfather was a warlock. ‘He’s afeart he’ll be tarred with the same brush,’ she told me.

‘Is that true?’ I demanded. ‘Was one of his kin really a warlock?’

Nan nodded. ‘Och aye. A most famous one too. His name was Sir Michael Scott, laird of Balwearie Castle. He studied in Oxford and Paris, then travelled in the land of the Moors and learned much from them. It is said he foresaw he would die from a stone falling on his head and so wore an iron cap at all times. But one day he took his hat off in church, and a stone fell down from the archway and hit him on his head.’

‘Did he die?’

‘Indeed, he did.’

Knowing Lord Patrick’s ancestor was a warlock made me wary of him, and I always tried to behave like a good bairn when he could see me, keeping my eyes down, my heels together and my hands clasped. It would not take long, though, and I’d begin to hop on one foot and hum, or twirl my hair into a tight ringlet, or take out the flute I’d made from an elder twig and play a tune.

‘Bairns should be seen and not heard,’ Lord Patrick said one day.

‘She’s like a wee thrush or a blackbird,’ Mam replied hotly, ‘making music the whole day long. It’s a joy to hear her, my lord, and she should no more be silenced than any other of God’s creatures.’

‘A whistling woman and a crowing hen are fit for neither God nor men,’ was his dour answer, and the look he gave Mam was very cold. She set her jaw and said nothing, but afterwards told me not to listen to him, and sing my heart out whenever I wanted.

‘No’ where Lord Snot can hear, anyway,’ Nan said. ‘He’s a man that canna bear anyone to be happy.’

When the soft twilight settled down over the meadows, we went back to the cottage, each clinging to one of Mam’s hands. We all had chores to do, for Nan believed a woman should be able to do anything a man did, from chopping firewood to fixing the thatch to whittling our own bowls.

After supper, Nan told us stories. The tale of a harpist who pulled a blackthorn from a wolf’s paw only for the beast to transform back into a man, or how the Cailleach, the blue-faced hag of winter, brought frost and snow with one thump of her staff. The Cailleach protected all the wild beasts of the forest, bringing mist to cover their tracks and rain to wash away their scent. In summer she turned to granite, Nan said, like the Carlin stone in our meadow, but in the dark of winter, when all the world was asleep, the blue-faced hag put off her cloak of stone and went walking once more, which is why wee lassies should stay snug and warm in their beds.