We continued to the end of the wing, circling through the south wing, which she said wasn’t used for much of anything anymore on any of the upper floors, only the workrooms of the ground floor. From there we took a back circular stairway up to the second floor. Passing all the way again through the south and east wings, past maids’ and servants’ rooms, the cook’s apartment, then through the north wing, past the main staircase again, and up another flight of stairs to the third floor.
“That’s the duke’s apartment just there,” said Alicia as we turned onto the staircase.
I found the third floor the most interesting of all with some of its more private rooms—especially the armory full of swords and shields and guns and coats of mail, even two full sets of body armor. From the walls draped ancient faded tartans.
“Many of these swords were actually used at the Battle of Culloden,” said Alicia as we glanced about. “It makes them historic, I suppose, but the thought that some of them may actually have been used to kill people… I don’t particularly like this room. But the duke loves it here. I suppose it’s a man thing.”
We continued through the Game Room and several private sitting rooms that were wonderfully intimate and cozy. There were so many interesting places, but not enough people to enjoy them. The third floor comprised mostly bedrooms, all vacant now.
“There is one large apartment on this floor,” said Alicia, “the dowager countess’s apartment.”
“Who is she?” I asked.
“Who was she,” corrected Alicia with a smile. “She lived at Castle Buchan about a hundred years ago after her husband died and her son inherited. Some people think she is the green lady who haunts the place, but I don’t believe a word of it.”
We continued on, then backtracked, still on the third floor, all the way back around to the west wing, finally descending several flights of stairs into the kitchen, where Jean and Sarah were busy—probably with preparing lunch for Alasdair and me. Alasdair returned just as we had completed the circuit. I hadn’t exactly seen every room of the castle, but we had walked through most of its corridors and all of its wings, though we hadn’t ventured into the garret regions. I now had a much better sense of where everything was.
As glad as I was to see Alasdair, I was sorry for my visit with Alicia to end. For the first time I felt that there had been a true connection between us. I hoped it wouldn’t be the last time.
Chapter Fifty-two
A Boy’s Terror
Ghaist nor bogle shalt thou fear;
Thou’rt to love and heaven sae dear,
Nocht o’ ill may come thee near,
My bonnie dearie.
—“Ca’ The Yowes to the Knowes”
As Alasdair and I were eating lunch outside half an hour later, as it often did our conversation turned to Gwendolyn, and then to Olivia Urquhart.
“What is with those strange rhymes of Olivia’s?” I asked. “You’ve mentioned them before, and she’s done that once or twice when talking to me. At first I hardly noticed, then I realized she’d said something just as you described. What’s it all about?”
“It was Olivia’s way when she was young of frightening people—especially me!” Alasdair added with a little laugh.
“Were people actually frightened of the rhymes?”
“Yes, I think they were,” he replied. “Especially the younger children. There were rumors that if Olivia took a dislike to anyone she would put a curse on them.”
“Was there anything to it?” I asked. I suddenly felt cold and strange.
“I don’t know, maybe,” answered Alasdair. “Children are fascinated with weird occultish things like that. I don’t know that there’s much difference between Olivia’s conjurations and Reddy and me trying to frighten each other with pirate and ghost stories. That’s part of growing up, trying to scare your friends. Yet somehow there was more to it with Olivia. It was darker and more sinister. She could frighten me out of my wits even though I was older than she. At least she could until I was old enough to laugh it off. Once she could no longer control me with her hocus-pocus, it didn’t bother me. That’s when she began to hate me. What she couldn’t control, she hated. And what she hated, she tried to destroy. She was a cruel little girl.”
“What kind of hocus-pocus?” I asked.
“She was always making up limericks and ditties to frighten the rest of us and pretend she had special powers. That’s how the rhyming thing began. How did that one go… she used to say it to me whenever she got angry… let me think, something about her dancing on my grave.”
“Alasdair, that’s awful!”
“That’s how Olivia kept everyone in line,” he said. “She was always saying nonsensical things and speaking in rhymes. Sometimes when she and her friends were walking about, she would chant a hex as she went by someone’s house she didn’t like. All the children were terrified that she would mutter a rhyming incantation or perform some chicanery or another, and they would turn into a toad or fall over dead or get sick. That’s what I mean by hocus-pocus. Let me see, now I remember—‘Brother of mine, you’d better behave… or the younger will dance on the elder’s grave.’”
I shuddered at the words. “What did you do when she said it?” I asked.
“I tried to laugh. But to some degree she had me under her spell just as she did her friends. Whenever she wanted to bend me to her will, all she had to do was wag her index finger at me in warning and say, ‘Remember, brother, behave… don’t forget the grave.’ Then she would turn away with a wicked smile on her face and in a singsong voice chant the whole ditty again. There were dozens of them. She could make up a ditty on the spot to fit any occasion, every one laced with a threat. Such conjurations were her way of controlling everyone around her. No one could help being silently terrified that the next words out of her mouth would be about them. She had to be in control. By pretending she had magical powers she achieved her goal.”
“Was it only pretend?” I asked.
Alasdair was thoughtful.
“Not entirely,” he said slowly. “She truly could bend people to her will. There was no pretend in that. Yet some of her threatening incantations were so inane I can’t believe anyone took them seriously. They sound completely silly and childish now.”
“Like what?”
“Like, ‘Look on the path—a slithering snake… tonight Alasdair will tremble and quake.’”
He laughed as he said it. But I didn’t think it was funny.
“Or,” Alasdair went on, “‘Cross me not, brother, or aye… the next may be the day you die.’
“And then there were the perennial favorites, ‘Spiders, lizards, and black slimy leeches… are Alasdair’s friends and crawl up his breeches.’”
“That’s terrible!”
“She loved to plant seeds of creepy, scary thoughts. I can still hear her chanting the words—‘Witches, wolves, and a gathering of devils… will come to your room and make nightly revels.’
“She was fascinated with witches—‘Trolls, goblins, kelpies, and witches… will gnaw your insides like unscratchable itches.’”
“Ugh!” I said, shuddering again.
“They did, too… they gnawed at you,” Alasdair said, laughing. “And to top it off and make sure I lay awake thinking about such horrors, ‘Do you think you can keep me out of your dreams… I will haunt your sleep, and delight in your screams.’
“If I clasped my hands to my ears or yelled at her to stop, or worse, if I tried to run away, she had a rhyme to meet that need, too, ensuring that even my trying to escape would only worsen my plight in the end, ‘There is no use in trying to hide… my words will come back like an incoming tide.’
“Whatever you tried to do, her words would flow back into your brain and you would repeat them over and over to yourself. You couldn’t help it. You were powerless to stop them. Olivia’s voice possessed your thoughts. It might have been different had they been nice things—pleasant sayings, proverbs of truth, the
golden rule… whatever. But they weren’t. They were dark, frightening, and always placed Olivia in control of your thoughts. The way she manipulated those around her was devious, cunning. I don’t know what else to call it but evil.”
“How do you remember all those horrid ditties?” I asked.
“I don’t remember them all. There were hundreds. Such things poured out of her all the time. Once they lodged in your mind, many of them never went away. They still reverberate in my subconscious all these many years later. I tried to forget but couldn’t.”
“What horrible things to say to a child.”
“The young are not known for their sensitivity to the feelings and fears of others. Especially those like Olivia. They were childish little sayings,” Alasdair went on, “obviously not such as to appear in a collection with Shakespeare. But that she made them up on the spot to suit the occasion always struck me as remarkable.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“What was there to do?” Alasdair laughed. “Try not to anger her. If she said I was going to lie awake at night because a snake had crossed in front of me, I usually did. Or I would lie there trembling, afraid that witches, devils, and wolves were somewhere gathered in the blackness, or imagine spiders in my bed crawling up my legs. I couldn’t keep the words away. It was tormenting. They fulfilled themselves simply by lodging in my memory.”
“I can’t imagine the terror of it.”
“It wasn’t just the images she put in my head to haunt me either. She haunted me herself, in person.”
“What do you mean?”
“She occasionally snuck about the castle at night, and came into my room and moved things around, just to frighten me. More than once I woke up to see her standing over me. There were times I made absolutely certain that my door was locked, yet she still found a way in. Olivia could come and go like a wraith. I actually think she knew the castle even better than our father. She would stand over me in the dark and mutter incantations or throw bits of straw all over my bed while mumbling some old Highland curse.”
I shook my head in disbelief. I couldn’t think how awful it must have been to grow up with Olivia.
“I wasn’t the only one Olivia terrorized with her rhymes,” Alasdair went on. “The villagers avoided her. And she did mimic Shakespeare in her own way, too. She loved to recite the scene of the three witches. Maybe that’s where the obsession came from. Had she lived in an earlier era, I’ve often wondered if Olivia would have been branded herself. I cannot but believe that she did in fact possess occultish power.”
“Surely no one thought there was anything to it.”
“The Scots are a superstitious people. Hexes and curses and the second sight—they are deeply embedded into the national consciousness. Yes, people take that sort of thing very seriously.”
“Even now?”
Alasdair nodded. “It may not be talked about like a hundred years ago,” he said, “but it still lurks beneath the surface.”
“But… was there anything to it?”
Alasdair sighed and thought a moment. “The power of a curse or a threat can be as much in the eye of the beholder as in the curse itself. To one who believes it true, perhaps it becomes true. A curse is self-fulfilling if someone believes it. Look at me—I spent many a terrified night imagining wolves and spiders and demons.”
“But none of those things were really there. You said it yourself—you imagined them.”
“If I thought they were there, isn’t that just as bad?”
“No—imagining a spider isn’t as bad as a real spider.”
“What about a demon? Even if you imagine it, the fact that her words made me believe it, meant she was successful in implanting a real demon of fear. I was afraid. That demon controlled me. So what began as mere words became very, very real… you might even say factual.”
“I see your point. But that is pretty weird.”
“Even if half of it was imaginary, Olivia spread great evil around this community because people came to believe that she possessed the second sight and was in league with dark forces. Her words could haunt me for days, even weeks. I remember once we had a terrible row. She had taken something from my room, I can’t even remember what. When I found that she had it, I was furious and went after her. We tussled and fought. I wound up with a bloody nose for my trouble. She was uncannily strong for a girl and would strike at me with her legs and feet with abandon. Once she nearly broke one of my ribs with a kick from her foot. After that particular fight, in tears I stormed away full of threats to tell our father. But her voice at my back stopped me in my tracks before I was out of her room. ‘If you dare speak a word of this fight… demons will haunt your bed tonight.’”
I shuddered to hear Alasdair repeat the words.
“What happened?” I asked.
“It was exactly as she said. I lay awake most of the night, trembling in terror. Snakes, wolves, kelpies, vampires… she turned everything into something scary. Fear was her weapon.”
“Did you tell your parents?”
“Not a word. I was afraid to.”
“But where did it all come from?” I asked after a moment. “Why was she like that? How did she think of such things?”
“I don’t know,” sighed Alasdair. “She was always… I don’t know, different in a way. I suppose all children are cruel and selfish. But Olivia was mean. She—”
Alasdair paused. A faraway expression came into his eyes.
“There was something,” he said after a moment, “an incident I haven’t thought of in years. Our parents took us to visit our old Highland grandmother—she was my father’s mother and she lived on the far end of Skye. I know little of her history. So many stories circulated back in those days, as a child you had no idea what to believe. I hardly knew my grandfather—on my father’s side, my father’s father, the old duke. Most of the dark legends that swirled about in our family had something to do with him. He was a great traveler and seafarer and they say he mixed with strange and unsavory people from all over the world.”
Suddenly I remembered the stories I had heard from Mrs. Gauld about Alasdair’s forebears. I wondered how much of it was true and how much mere village gossip.
“The story goes,” Alasdair continued, “that he was on Skye for some druid gathering or other, probably the summer solstice. The druids are great for that sort of thing, but I never put any stock in it. When he returned to Castle Buchan, my father’s father, he had a new wife with him, a woman from Skye, a Celt with the second sight and other powers too, some said. The villagers were afraid of her and stories immediately spread that my grandfather had married a druid’s daughter, which made her a witch in their eyes. In time my father was born, but not long after the Celtic woman disappeared from the castle—at least that’s how the story goes. Some say she died, others that she was poisoned, others that she was pining for her beloved Skye and just went home to the island. Villagers are great for tales, but when I was growing up my father never talked about it. Whether his mother deserted him, I have no way of knowing. For all I know she lived here until he was old enough to be sent off to school. Maybe she and my grandfather divorced—I really do not know. But the story that came to be circulated was that she died or left and that eventually my father’s father went mad from some curse she had put on him for taking her from Skye, and that she had been haunting the castle ever since, roaming about the tower on the south side dressed in green, moaning and uttering strange chants and devilish incantations and rhymed curses.
“In any event, I always assumed her to be dead until one day we were informed that we were taking a trip to Skye to see my father’s aging mother, whom he had not seen, he said, in a long time. Why my father wanted Olivia and me to visit her, I never knew. If a quarter of the tales were true, I would think he wouldn’t have us anywhere near her. But she was his mother, after all, and his father was by then dead. Maybe he wanted us to know of our Highland roots, though they were roots I would have
preferred not be stirred up. Maybe the visit had nothing to do with us. Perhaps he was discharging some debt of his own to a mother he hadn’t seen in years. I honestly have no idea.
“One thing for certain—she wasn’t dead. I saw her with my own eyes on Skye… though now that I think about it, yes—actually, she was dressed in green. That is curious. And she was a strange one, too… spoke only in rhymes, nothing but strange sayings. There were little statuettes and odd things, carvings and peculiar designs on stones, all about both outside the house and in her room. Snakes, I remember—images of snakes everywhere. I have been terrified of snakes ever since. It was altogether a spooky place.”
I was getting chills and goose bumps as I listened!
“I was frightened the instant I laid eyes on her,” Alasdair went on. “I somehow knew that she was my grandmother, but that made no difference to the terror of the sight. She had things hung around her neck and bracelets around her thin wrists and was dressed more like a Gypsy from Eastern Europe than anything I ever associated with the Highlands of Scotland. I had a vague image in my mind of what a witch was like and she could hardly have fit it more perfectly. Ever after she became that image and haunted my nightmares for years. It is a terrible thing for one’s own flesh and blood to make your skin crawl, but she did mine, God forgive me.
“She was ancient beyond years, wrinkled with white hair shooting out from her head. We were five or six at the time. She took to Olivia immediately. She didn’t seem to have any use for men or boys. Olivia was the only one she wanted to talk to. She ignored my father, only occasionally casting on him a contemptuous look even though he was a duke and her own son and had come all that way to see her. She completely ignored me. To her I didn’t exist, though I was older than Olivia by a year.
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