The Devil's Promise

by Veronica Bennett

  Ignoring this barb and hoping to please her, I nodded. “Yes, of course. I am sure they are fascinating.”

  “Then I will tell you of a legend as old as time itself. The deepest rooted and most persistent of all Scottish folklore. The story of the faerie child.” She took off her spectacles and sat back in her chair, her expression softer than I had yet seen it. “It is believed,” she began, “that some children, often oddly behaved ones, sickly ones, and so on, are not human at all, but faerie children, changelings, left by the faerie folk in exchange for the human child. In a household where a changeling has been left, a payment must be made by the fairies to the devil every seven years.”

  “What sort of payment?” I asked.

  “It usually takes the form of a death or tragic occurrence in the human world,” replied Mrs McAllister. “This sort of belief is present in folklore all over the world, as people seek a way to explain unhappy events. In Scotland it is known as the teind, Gaelic for “tithe”, meaning a tenth part.”

  “I understand,” I said. “About tithes, I mean.” I had grown up in an agricultural area of midland England, surrounded by tenant farmers who followed the ancient practice of paying a tenth part of their profits to the parish. “And do people still believe this legend today?”

  “Aye,” nodded Mrs McAllister. “You will still see precautions taken against the stealing of a child, especially in the Highlands. Folk will leave scissors open where the child sleeps, or put a coat upside down over the cradle, particularly if the child is fair.”

  She paused and a silence fell. Jamie was deep in a book of poems and his father had the financial pages of The Times open; I was reluctant to break the spell Mrs McAllister’s words had cast upon me. But although I half knew the answer, I asked, “Is a fair-haired child more likely to be taken, then?”

  “Oh, yes! It is well known that the faeries are attracted by beautiful infants with blond hair.”

  She nodded towards her grandson. “Thank goodness, they have left ours alone, though Jamie’s hair was pure white when he was a wee one!”

  Doctor Hamish made a sound like “Hrmph!” He threw open the door and marched towards the dining room. “Bridie!” he called. “I can wait no longer! Bring me my luncheon!”

  Mrs McAllister and I followed, and Jamie brought up the rear of our little procession. I was sure he was looking at the nape of my neck, where I had placed a tortoiseshell comb when I had piled up my hair. Self-conscious, I did what the Princess of Belgravia would have done. I walked serenely, trying not to think about who might be scrutinizing me, and attending to Mrs McAllister’s small talk as if it were the most important thing in the world.

  That evening I wrote to my mother. I asked her to send winter underwear and a woollen shawl. I had to reload my pen nib several times, as the ink kept drying while I tried to think of suitable words to describe Jamie. In the end I told her that he was striking-looking, intelligent and mercurial. I did not tell her, however, that he and his father were at loggerheads. I told her that Mrs McAllister was an enthusiastic regulator of my behaviour, but not that I resented this. I was perfectly truthful about the hospitality of Doctor Hamish and gave her brief descriptions of Bridie and MacGregor. I told her about my room in the tower, my glorious view and Anne’s Garden, but not about the caves or what had happened there. And I certainly did not mention the other-worldly screams and the girl in the ragged dress. When I could think of no more to write, I went downstairs and left the envelope on the table by the front door, where the doctor had told me to leave letters for MacGregor to post.

  Dusk – the gloaming, as they call it in Scotland – was falling on Drumwithie. Clouds had gathered in the late afternoon and spots of rain had fallen on my window as I dressed for dinner. I had put on my only evening dress, of brown silk. It had a square neck, a straighter skirt than I wore in the daytime and a crêpe-de-Chine waistband that required stiffening with uncomfortable canvas stays. I had even made an attempt to curl my hair. But when I reached the dining room I realized I should not have bothered. Bridie had served the doctor, Jamie and me with cold venison sandwiches, pickled beetroot and a dish of lettuce and tomatoes. A bowl of fruit, from which both men helped themselves to apples and oranges, was the only dessert. Luncheon, evidently, was the main meal in this house. It was a long time since this traditional pattern of meals had been current at Chester House; we always ate sparingly at luncheon and “dressed” in the evening.

  I was embarrassed, but not surprised. Doctor Hamish had had the tact not to mention my appearance and Jamie had produced a sound like “Hrrzzah!”, which could have meant anything, but I admonished myself for not predicting what Mrs McAllister’s regular presence at luncheon signified. The doctor, whose profession required early starts, late returns on horseback, and an active day’s work in between, needed a good meal at midday. Anticipating another meal in the evening, at luncheon I had not eaten as much as I wanted of the excellent leek soup and chicken pie. Tomorrow, I would know better.

  All this went through my mind as I returned to the tower room. My writing things lay scattered on the table; I tidied them away. The blouse I had taken off, but would wear again tomorrow, hung on the outside of the wardrobe; I put it inside. My boots, which I had forgotten to take to the boot room, were in two different parts of the room; I set them together by the hearth. I poked the fire. I went to draw the curtains, but when I saw the magnificent colours of the sky, I left them open. Then I turned up the lamp and set it in the middle of the table.

  There was nothing left to do, so I sat down nervously in the armchair by the fire. I wished Jamie would come soon – it was five to nine, earlier than I had seen the vision last night, but darkness was falling quickly. I could see a clear reflection of the pool of lamplight in the window. I stared at it, my ears straining to hear either a woman’s voice or a knock at my door.

  I heard neither. But I did hear something else. At first I was unsure what the soft whooshing could be. I sat forward, listening, growing more fearful as the sound gathered momentum. It came to me suddenly that it must be the whipping of a wind, the sort of deep-winter wind that sweeps the landscape at the beginning of a storm. But the curtains hung perfectly still at the open window. The wind was something unreal.

  Then came another sound, layered within the storm. A sound as familiar to a girl from farming country as the wind-wail. It was the raucous, unearthly cackle of a pack of crows. I could hear the birds as plainly as if they were under my open window. Rising cautiously, I put my head out, expecting an increase in the birds’ sounds, to find them sitting on a nearby tree. But no trees grew near the tower.

  Fear overcame me. Almost ready to faint, I collapsed again on the armchair and covered my face with my hands. “Stop!” I shouted, as loudly as I could. “Please, please, stop!” I had no regard for anyone who might hear me or what conclusion they might draw. My only thought was to obliterate the noise by making a louder noise myself. “Leave me alone!” I pleaded. “I beg you, leave me be!”

  My ears were assailed for a few more moments. Then, suddenly, silence fell. I peeked between my fingers. I stood and turned full circle, alert for any noise or movement, but there was none. The room was empty. The circle of lamplight on the table, the boots by the fire, all was recognizable as ordinary, comforting real life. Yet I knew I had not been deceived, even though darkness and apprehension could play tricks on the nerves, and I had been nervous, up here in this oddly fashioned room, waiting for Jamie’s knock.

  “Jamie!” I opened the door wide, and called down the passage. There was no reply. I ran to the top of the stairs and leaned over the banister. “Jamie! Jamie, are you there?”

  I heard his footsteps on the landing and his yellow head appeared at the bottom of the spiral staircase, his face turned upwards in alarm. “What is it? What has happened? Are you all right?”

  “Will you come up? There is something up here! Well, it has gone now, but I definitely heard something!”

  While
I was babbling he was bounding up the stairs. “The vision, you mean? Did you see the vision? Damn! I’ve missed it!”

  He was babbling as much as I was. “Jamie, I did not see the vision,” I told him as we entered the tower room. “I heard the sound of a high wind, and then … it was so loud, it seems scarcely possible, but there was the noise of crows.”

  He was so surprised, he had to steady himself by gripping the back of a chair. “What?”

  “Crows. I know what they sound like because—”

  “Cat, do you know what you are saying?” He looked at me with a mixture of fear, wonder and triumph. “A gathering of crows is a sign of death!”

  I stared at him and he stared back at me, his eyes alight. “Do you not think I am right to be concerned?”

  “I do not know what to think.” I tried to compose myself. “It is too strange to understand. Before I entered this room last night I would have dismissed stories of the faerie folk and the Cait Sìth as nonsense. But you are convinced that these weird noises and this phantom girl have been conjured by my presence. That is such a frightening thought! Do you think they mean to hurt me?”

  Jamie sat down in the armchair. Careless of my best dress, I knelt on the hearthrug at his feet. Outside the still-open curtains, night had descended on the glen. I could hear the cooing of a wood pigeon, far away in some lofty tree. The world was silent, ready for sleep. But the world reflected in the window was not. The firelight cast weird shapes on the walls; the air felt smoky and close; my heart beat unsteadily in my breast.

  “No, I do not,” said Jamie, looking into the fire. “I think they have come to you for help.”

  “But what can I do?” I was bewildered. “If the girl is dead, what can anybody do?”

  “We must wait and see. She will come again, but not when I am here.” He looked at me with his glittering look. “The crows must have been sent to warn me off. I think only you must watch, Cat. Every night, alone.”

  1896

  Fourteen years previously

  B eyond the castle windows, spring was taking hold of Drumwithie. It was the first week of April. The air was mild and sweetened by a soft breeze bearing the scent of flowers. Last year at this time she had walked in the grounds while the boy ran about, coming to her with treasures – a pine cone, a raven’s feather, a smooth pebble. She and her husband had made an excursion to Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Scotland. But this year she could only imagine the breeze, and the boy’s delighted cries, and the scent of the flowers. She was too ill to go out.

  She lay on the sofa in her favourite room, the small drawing room that led off the Great Hall. It had smaller windows than the library, where her husband liked to sit, but she preferred the view. It was Saturday and the boy was free from lessons, but she did not know where he was; he had not visited her this morning. His father had probably taken him to Drumwithie, where everyone knew him. According to her husband, the stonemason’s wife had whispered a warning on her recent visit to the surgery. “Ye’ll have to watch that boy, Doctor. He has the look of the faeries on him.”

  Educated people had no time for such village superstition, of course. But the thought of the woman’s words troubled her. A golden-haired, green-eyed child. Sometimes, when the light caught the boy’s eyes in a certain way, they had the cast of other-worldliness on them. But a moment later, he would be her affectionate, seven-year-old darling again and she would shake such nonsense from her mind.

  She glanced at the fire in the grate. It was no longer roaring as it had been when Bridie had lit it this morning, but it still glowed red. A wild thought came to her: could memories be burned? What would she have to burn, to free herself? With trembling fingers she tore a scrap of lace from the trimming of her sleeve – it came away easily; she had been meaning to ask Bridie to oversew the fraying seam – and tossed it onto the coals, where it immediately flared. Its ashes were an obliteration. If she burned not only the lace from her sleeve, but the sleeve itself, the house gown, everything in this room … would the memories they contained be obliterated too? Or would the whole exercise be futile? This poison was in her head, borne silently for so long, and would only be destroyed if she were to destroy herself.

  Her eyes travelled to the portrait above the mantelpiece. A picture of her, yet not of her. Of a young woman who had married Hamish Buchanan and come to Drumwithie full of hope. Her mother had considered the match a triumph. What did she herself consider it? A prison sentence of the worst kind, when the prisoner does not know how many years she has left to serve?

  I KNOW

  WHO I LOVE

  Between nine and ten o’clock the next night, I made sure I was alone in the tower room. I watched and listened until the fire had died and the window showed nothing but blackness. But no voice came and no ghostly figure appeared. The same happened the next night and the one after that. When I had been at the castle a week, I gave up expecting any more visitations.

  “I must have been mistaken,” I told Jamie. “I feel very foolish.”

  He was scornful. “How could you be mistaken? You heard it and you saw it.”

  “It might have been a trick.”

  His scorn increased. “A trick? Who would play such a trick? And how could they do it? Be reasonable, Cat.”

  “I am being reasonable.” His condescension was making me feel worse. I was irritable enough to swipe at an unsuspecting branch of broom, scattering its yellow flowers. I had found Jamie in the garden. Not Anne’s Garden, but further from the house, in the untamed tangle MacGregor professed to be “trimming” whenever I saw him there, but which never showed any sign of improvement. Broom, heather and gorse encroached freely on it from the hillside, and the only discernible path was becoming more overgrown as the hours of daylight increased.

  “It is not reasonable to change your mind so completely in the course of a week,” insisted Jamie. He grinned suddenly. “Anyone would think you were a girl.”

  “You are so funny, you should go on the stage.” I sounded moody. I felt moody. I had been unsettled for days, anxious in case I saw the bedraggled girl again, more anxious because I did not.

  “Cat…” Jamie stopped, but he was behind me and I walked on, oblivious. “Cat! Listen to me!”

  I turned. For a moment I thought something had happened to my eyesight, making the landscape shimmer like an image in a dream. But what I saw was real. Jamie, who was clad in his usual ensemble of unconnected garments, stood in the knee-high undergrowth, a switch of gorse in his hand. He looked like a reaper in a cornfield. It was the late afternoon of a cloudless day and the sun had almost disappeared around the corner of the house. Jamie was standing where the shadow bisected the garden, half in and half out of the sun. Its rays landed a glancing blow on his hair, burnishing it to an even brighter gold. And behind him, rising perpendicular to the rock, taller from this angle than any other, loomed the ruined castle. So many colours played on its walls that I thought of Lord Tennyson’s famous lines, “The splendour falls on castle walls”, and rejoiced that I was alive to see what was spread before me. A beautiful place, a beautiful sky. And, I realized, a beautiful young man.

  “I am sorry,” he said. He was standing with his back to the light and I could not see his expression, but his tone was contrite. “I was facetious. But, please, do not doubt yourself. The spirit will walk again, when it chooses.”

  “Supposing it does not, in the whole time I am here?”

  “It will.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just do.” He began to walk towards me, and as he came into the shade I saw the earnestness in his face. “Believe me, it will.”

  “Because I am the Cait Sìth? Because of the gift you say I have?”

  He had reached me. He stood close enough for me to smell the perspiration in his shirt and the smoke in his hair. It was not a combination I cared for and I stepped back. But he stepped closer again. “Do not dismiss it,” he told me firmly. “We are mortal. Our time in t
he earthly world is short. But our spirits go on for ever – it is not only the Christian religion that teaches this – and some do not rest until they find peace. This is a restless spirit that is speaking to you and you must not deny it its moment. Do you promise you will not give up?”

  I nodded. I did not understand his conviction, but I could see I must honour it. “Of course. I will go on watching, every night.”

  “Very well.” He looked at the ground, swishing the gorse switch. “I will trust you to do so. And you must trust that she will come back.”

  We began to walk back towards the house. I fell into step beside him, struggling with a purposeless sort of agitation. Apprehension about this “restless spirit”, certainly, but more than apprehension. There was a tight feeling between my waist and my chest, as if a spring had been wound up and held firm, ready for the moment of release. But the moment did not come. All the way back through the wilderness, and then the neat part of the garden, over the bridge and round the corner to the boot room door, through the passageway to the Great Hall, the spring remained wound. Jamie strolled beside me carelessly. But I was more aware of his presence than I had ever been aware of anything. My senses had jumbled themselves up and settled again, as randomly as the pieces of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope. I could not tell which of them was responsible for my excited state, nor which aspect of Jamie had given rise to it.

  Girls at school had described their crushes, usually on friends of their brothers or on Herr Steiger, our German tutor, who had the double distinction on the school staff of being male and under forty. They would say their corset would feel too tight when the object of desire came into view or even into mind, and their heart would beat fast, and they would feel cold, but perspire in an unladylike way. Blushing also loomed large.

  No boy had ever inspired anything in me but mild friendship, usually short-lived. But something about Jamie had communicated itself to me in that moment when I had turned to him in the sunlight. I tried to breathe deeply, as my mother always told me to when I felt nervous, but found I could not fill my lungs. My heart had expanded so much it had crushed them.