Rob is a most tragic and romantic figure. He has been a Sailor now for fifteen years, and when he spent last winter with us, he indicated privately to me that he might wish to settle on the land permanently. He certainly has money; being a Captain’s Mate has been most profitable for him. But he told me the business was becoming risky, with the current trouble between the Colonies and the Crown. He even mentioned running a Royal Blockade or two. I shiver with excitement at his tales of Adventure on the High Seas! In addition, he told me that with privateering about to be authorized by Congress, the waters are getting a bit crowded. I am not so certain that a man who has seen so much of the world and been on a ship that long would make a very good farmer, but maybe he simply needs a good woman to make him stay put. Perhaps the oldest of Tom Kerr’s daughters would be suitable, although it seems that a man of thirty-six years would not have much to say to a girl of seventeen, especially not one as meek and horsy-faced as Betsy Kerr – may God forgive me for being so uncharitable. I shall give the match some thought anyway. Rob needs a woman.
November 16, 1775 -
Sally’s daughter Morag came to see me today. She somehow managed to burn herself while cooking, and has the most awful red welts and blisters upon her hands. I blended a mixture of equal parts cornmeal and slippery elm bark, and added some water, thus making a heavy paste. I applied it to poor Morag’s hands, and she claimed as she left that they felt better already. I told her that to be sure the burns did not scar, she should take a stone from her yard and toss it into the hearth. Later, she must remove it with tongs, and while the stone is still hot, toss it into the cool stream that runs beside her father’s house. The stone will take the burn with it, and Morag’s skin should heal well.
Robert MacFarlane attempted, without much luck, to steady his horse. He had spent little time on one in his life, and this particular horse seemed quite aware of the fact. It reared for a second time, trying to turn and go back down the mountainside, rather than continue up. It had taken him four weeks to ride this far from Richmond, rather than the two it took last year when Ian and Angus met him at the wharf. They hadn’t come this year, though, not after the last time when Sarah was taken by Indians. He didn’t mind the slow pace, though. It gave him time to enjoy the colorful beauty of the mountains. Once the horse was under control, Rob inhaled deeply, taking in the sweet morning air, so different than the salty spray he was accustomed to breathing. By mid-day he should be at Ian’s place up on the ridge.
Ian had left Glasgow with their parents and the other families. Rob and Ian’s mother died on the ship, giving birth to yet another stillborn child. Rob was at sea at the time, on a spice cutter in the Orient, and it had been nearly a year before he learned of his mother’s death.
What would Ian say when Rob told him of the old Shawnee he encountered on the wharf in Richmond? The old man was shackled; the officers guiding him said that he and his son were charged with the kidnapping a white woman; they had sold her into slavery to the Iroquois. They were taking the old Shawnee to be hanged in the public square. His son had already met his fate, tarred and feathered by the locals before even reaching the fort.
“D’ye speak any English?” Rob had asked, walking beside the condemned man, who nodded. “My brother’s wife was taken a year ago from a settlement on a ridge in northern Bedford County. Her name was -- is Sarah. D’ye know her?”
The old man looked at him, a twinkle in his eye. “She was with us for a long time. But now she is gone, that one.”
Rob was horrified. “Dead?”
The Shawnee shook his head. “Not dead. Just gone. Two moons ago she tricked my son. He did not watch her well enough. She went into the caves, and did not come out.”
Rob pressed on. The town square was close, and he knew he wouldn’t have much time before the old man was dragged up to the scaffolding. He could hear the shouts of the crowd.
“Where? Where did she go into the caves?”
The old man smiled. “I will tell you where, but it does not matter. She has gone through the ho’a tehewenna, the Spirit Door. The settlers call it the Faeries’ Gate. No person has ever returned from the Spirit Door. She is gone,” he repeated, holding his head up proudly as he walked into the morning sun.
Rob grabbed the old man’s arm, much to the consternation of the soldiers. “Tell me where,” he hissed in a soft voice. The procession was stopped now, at the foot of the gallows. Rob stepped between the scaffolding and the old Shawnee.
“Please,” he murmured.
“I am called Grey Fox,” the old man said proudly. “My sons and I stole the woman you seek. She was brave and killed my oldest son when we took her. Then she tricked my younger son. We were on the mountain of the Tears. There is a cave there. She ran through the Spirit Door, and now she is gone. You will not see her again, I think.”
He climbed the steps, ignoring the catcalls of the crowd. “My name is Grey Fox. If you see any of my people, tell them that I died well.”
He moved to the noose, then, and the soldiers placed it around his neck. The old man refused the blindfold they offered him. Rob had not wanted to watch; he had seen men hang before. Grey Fox had been right.
He had indeed died well.
Now Rob was faced with the task of telling his brother that Sarah may have actually been alive all this time, or at least had been until early September. Who knew how Ian would feel about that? Would he even want her back? There were plenty of horror stories about women taken by the natives, who had escaped their captors only to be rejected by their families upon returning home. Twenty years ago, the entire settlement of Draper’s Meadow had been nearly wiped out by a Shawnee raid. When one of the Draper girls found a way home by following the New River, her friends and family had ostracized her. Her own husband had wanted nothing to do with her. Rob knew that a month before Sarah was taken, there had been a decisive battle between the Shawnee and Governor Dunmore’s troops at Point Pleasant. This was intended to end the troubles with the natives, but apparently no one had bothered to tell Grey Fox and his sons about it.
Well, the best he could do was to pass the information along to Ian, and let his brother decide for himself what to do. After all, this time it was Ian’s wife who had disappeared.
Haver Springs
The Present
Cameron awoke with a start. It was still dark. She had fallen asleep reading Mollie Duncan’s journal. Cam was fascinated by the details of the narrative. She had thought most women in the 1700’s were illiterate, especially women who settled out in the wild frontier of Virginia. But Mollie and Sarah’s father educated his daughters well enough, teaching them to read and write. He had been gravely wounded at Culloden Moor at the age of fifteen, in fact, nearly killed. When he later married, he swore to teach his children so that if he were ever to die in battle, they would have more than just his name as an inheritance. After the death of his wife, he and Tom Kerr and a group other families emigrated from Scotland to the Colonies. Cam decided Hugh Duncan must have been quite a man. She couldn’t wait to tell Troy about the journal.
Troy Adams was enthusiastic about her findings. “I can’t believe you had one of Mollie Duncan’s journals in your display box and didn’t even know it! She’s your great-great-great-something aunt!” he exclaimed.
Cam blushed. “I didn’t realize she was an historical figure.”
Troy shook his head. “She wasn’t, that’s what makes her so fascinating. She was just an everyday woman trying to survive in the wilderness. You should talk to Wanda Mabry.”
The name didn’t mean anything to Cam. “Who is she?”
“She was one of my instructors out at Bedford Community a couple of years ago. She majored in Appalachian folklore, or something like that. Kind of a weird gal, but she knows all about the families that have been here for hundreds of years. I’ll swing by her place and see if she’s available. She would love to see Mollie’s journal,” he added.
“I could just call her,” offered C
am, but Troy shook his head.
“No phone. Would you believe she only just got electricity a few years ago? Wanda thinks the mountains need to be left alone, and the only reason she got power hooked up in the first place was to run her welder. I need to stop in and say hello anyway, so I’ll see if she’ll have time to meet you.”
The day sped by quickly, although the crowds today didn’t seem quite as willing to barter over prices as the weekenders had been. Cam couldn’t keep her mind off the journal, and intended to talk to Wanda Mabry as soon as possible.
Troy stopped in at lunchtime to bring her a tuna sandwich from Alice’s, and to let her know the people at Vital Records had been able to turn up nothing about a Sarah MacFarlane with a husband named either Angus, Ian or Hamish. “I’m not surprised, though,” he confessed. “I really don’t think we’ll find anything on her at all. Every once in a while someone will wander in out of the hollers, confused like that. Most of the time they go back again as suddenly as they came, and no one is the wiser. Oh, by the way, I ran out to Wanda’s this afternoon.”
“And?” Cam waited expectantly.
Troy grinned boyishly. “She says she’ll be thrilled to talk to you. And she wants you to bring Mollie’s journal.”
Cam was surprised when she saw Wanda Mabry’s house. She had expected a college instructor to live in a well-manicured, neat house. Neat was not a word anyone would use to describe Wanda Mabry’s cabin. It sat on the side of a hill, and appeared to have somehow been built into the mountainside. It was definitely lopsided. The roof was tarpaper, with pieces missing here and there. The front porch was cluttered with several large metal objects, all of which were rusty.
“What are those?” asked Cam as Troy pulled up the gravel driveway.
“Wanda’s sculptures,” he smiled. “On her way back from classes every day, she picks up scrap metal along the road. Then she brings it back here and welds it into yard art. That’s why she decided to get electricity, remember?”
Cam looked at the jumble doubtfully. “If you say so.”
Troy laughed. “Oh, ye of little faith. I bet you could take some of those back to your store and sell them by the end of the week. People are into that whole junk art thing.”
Wanda had appeared out on the porch, picking a path to the steps. Cam smiled. The woman looked like the stereotype of the 1960’s radical hippie girl, but couldn’t have been much older than Cam herself. She wore brown leather sandals, a long denim skirt, and a big multicolored sweater that Cam suspected she had made herself. A long purple crystal hung on a thong around her neck.
“Yoo hoo! Greetings,” she called, waving at them. As Cam got out of the car she was forced to avoid stepping on one of the many cats that suddenly surrounded her ankles, purring and rubbing against her legs.
Wanda pushed a handful of straight red hair out of her eyes. “Come on in.” They followed politely, and Cam could hear the strains of Fleetwood Mac playing softly from somewhere within the house. “Y’all want some mint tea? I grew the mint myself.”
Cam and Troy both declined. The house smelled faintly of patchouli, and there was a large wooden table in the kitchen, covered from end to end with potted plants, small glass jars, and a ceramic mortar and pestle.
“What’s all this stuff?” Cam asked.
Wanda grinned. “I’m sort of an herbalist. One of my hobbies. That’s comfrey, there, and figwort, and witch hazel bark.”
Cam was intrigued. “What do you do with it all?”
“Not a lot, yet,” Wanda admitted. “I’m studying the medicinal uses of plants. Did you know that you can make a nice relaxing tea with steeped mistletoe leaves, but if you eat them straight they can be fatal?”
“Er, no, I wasn’t aware of that,” said Cam faintly.
“Me either, until I did some reading. That would be an embarrassing mistake to make, wouldn’t it? I did my thesis a few years back on the use of folk magic and herbal healing in Appalachia, and that was when I really started to get into it. May I see Mollie’s journal?” Wanda asked, and Cam handed it over obediently. “Make yourself at home.”
Wanda leafed through the book carefully, sipping her tea. She sat cross-legged on the floor, and Cam watched her as she skimmed through the pages, occasionally stopping to scribble on a scrap of paper. She periodically made small satisfied noises, or would laugh softly, or hum along with the faint sounds of “Gold Dust Woman” from the other room. After what seemed like forever, she closed the diary and looked at Cam, blinking owlishly.
“Cameron,” she grinned. “Y’all should have brought me this years ago.”
Chapter Three
“Okay,” Wanda Mabry began, in her best college-lecture voice, pushing her wire-rimmed glasses back up on her nose. “Let me start by saying this is definitely authentic. Not that I thought y’all would try to bullshit me or anything, but there are certain people in your business that would stoop to forgery. Not mentioning any names, of course.”
Cam grinned at her. Wayne Sinclair was undoubtedly the name Wanda wasn’t mentioning. “Good. So it really is Mollie Duncan’s journal.”
“Correct. Troy, honey, flip that light on for me. You gotta jiggle the switch. Okay, now we know from Mollie’s letters that are held at the county archives that she is, surprisingly, a very literate woman.”
“Wait, wait,” interrupted Cam. “Troy said something about those as well. What are the letters?”
Troy explained, “Mollie Duncan kept up a correspondence with her brother-in-law, Robert MacFarlane. He was a pirate or sailor or something, but then he settled down out on MacFarlane’s Ridge with his brother and the other families. The letters were in the possession of a granddaughter of Mollie’s long after her death.”
“He wasn’t a pirate, that’s a myth,” corrected Wanda. “Robert was a merchant sailor who became a farmer when the Revolutionary War began. Mollie’s letters to him occasionally make a reference to her journals, but this is the first one that’s actually been found,” added Wanda.
“How many are there?” asked Cam.
Wanda shrugged. “Nobody knows. They may not even exist anymore, which would be a crying shame.”
“And Angus?” Cam asked.
Wanda waved a hand. “Interesting man. Angus Duncan was a patriot, a delegate to the Continental Congress. Moved around quite a bit, apparently, because his name turns up here and there. He married at some point, and was the ancestor of Isaac Duncan, and your grandmother, Emily Duncan Clark.”
“Okay,” murmured Cam. “What about the Faeries’ Gate?”
Wanda’s eyes brightened. “Oh, now, that’s a legend that goes back a long time, but only the old-timers seem to have heard about it. I’ve been following that one for years. The Shawnee called it ho’a tehewenna. The door to the spirits. Y’all hang on, I’ll be right back!”
She disappeared through a beaded curtain. The sweet harmonies of Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham were replaced by the haunting guitar chords of Ry Cooder.
Troy nudged Cam. “See? I told you she would know!”
Wanda returned with a fat three-ring binder in her hands. She sat on the floor by the coffee table and spread the notebook open. It was full of newspaper clippings. “Okay, listen to this. October, 1995. College student Kelli Jeffers goes hiking for the weekend, never is seen again. Her car is found in the parking lot at Fairy Stone State Park. No signs of foul play, she’s just gone. September, 1992. Forty-two year old Linda Sloane, a mother of three from New Jersey, disappears as well. Her car is also found not far from Fairy Stone. Again, no signs of foul play.”
Cam looked at Troy, but he was staring at Wanda.
Wanda paused. “There’s more. In fall of 1996, a man wandered into the town of Stuart, Virginia. He was delusional, so the police took him in. He had no identification on him at all. He ranted and raved about Indians trying to scalp him, and raping his wife and burning his house. They were going to keep him in the drunk tank over night, and then send him off to a psy
ch ward in the morning. During the night, the man hung himself with the rope he had been using to hold up his pants. Ready for the kicker?”
Cam nodded, wondering how this was relevant.
Wanda continued. “When the coroner did the autopsy, he found that the man’s clothing was over two hundred years old. Not only that, the deceased had scars on his back that were consistent with flogging.”
“Flogging!” exclaimed Troy. “You mean like with a whip?”
Wanda shook her head. “Actually, the coroner said it looked more like a cat-o-nine-tails. You know, like they used on ships back in the old days.”
“Two hundred year old pants?” murmured Cam. She thought about the girl she had found in her garage, who had called herself Sarah MacFarlane. Her clothes had been old-looking, to be sure, and she had worn moccasins on her feet.
Wanda went on. “There are no less than a dozen reported disappearances in this part of Virginia over the past few decades. There are also nearly as many cases throughout the years of people who have turned up out of the blue, ranting and raving, dressed in old clothes.”
“Well,” asked Troy, “what has happened to all of those people?”
The woman glanced at the notebook thoughtfully. “They have nearly all been institutionalized or committed suicide, all but one or two that I know of.”
The three of them stared at each other for a long while. Cam spoke first. “So, what exactly are you saying, Wanda?”
Wanda Mabry leaned back into the cushions, blinking her big cat eyes at him. “It’s just a theory that I’ve had for a while, you understand. What if the Faeries’ Gate is actually some sort of portal?”
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