Only now when it was too late did he know it.
His body seemed to shrink. He no longer walked tall, with his plaid lifting on the breeze behind him. His beard grew wild and untrimmed; he wouldn’t let anyone touch him. His arms hung at his sides. His face was pale and drawn, his eyes were unfocussed.
‘He’s no’ the man he was,’ muttered his servants.
‘It’s the wee witch,’ the goblin-cook whispered. ‘Witches dunna die quiet and they dunna lie quiet. She’s haunting him.’
Some of the women said they’d seen her. Fin, deep in grief, heard them.
‘Wee Eyes! Come to me! Haunt me, I dunna mind, so ye’ll come!’ he whispered in the night.
His parents were safe, and neither of the other boys had been killed in the battle – they had fought bravely, and brought honour on the family that McLennan now rewarded. They went back to their burnt-out farmhouse and rebuilt it with their own labour and McLennan’s money. They cursed him, but what else could they do? Many of their neighbours were doing the same. Life had to go on.
Janet grew big and the family began to look ahead to the birth of the new baby, and to be a little happy again. Fin alone didn’t join in. He could only think of Wee Eyes, and of avenging her. He watched McLennan and, when he could, followed him about like his shadow. He always knew where he was.
One day, after yet another terrible night of dreams and fantasies, McLennan could stand it no longer.
‘I’ll away down there and take her out and bury her,’ he thought. ‘That’ll be the end of it. It’s because I didna give her decent burial that she wullna let me be.’
He took a torch and went down the steps to the dungeon. His knees were knocking and the torch shook in his hand, casting demonic shadows on the stone walls. The key was where he had left it, in the lock. He pulled the door open. He walked slowly to the corner where he’d last seen Peony.
She was gone.
All trace of her was gone. Even the bloodstain. Everything. Except the characters scratched on the wall.
‘I am with you till you die.’
McLennan felt his head swim. He hadn’t eaten or slept properly for weeks. Now he felt himself falling. He fell just where Peony had lain, and lay there in a dead faint.
Some time later, he woke up. It was a screeching sound that roused him. His torch had gone out – he was in darkness. But he knew that sound. It was the key turning in the lock of the dungeon door.
He jumped to his feet and threw himself against it. He cried out, as she had cried, ‘Och, dunna! Dunna! Dunna!’ He didn’t hear the sound of feet climbing the steps. And of course he never heard the distant splash of the key falling into the river.
But still, his death was not as difficult as perhaps he deserved. The scratched words on the dungeon wall came true another way. For McLennan the darkness of his dungeon was not empty, and although he languished there for many, many days, and lost his mind completely, in the end he did not die alone.
Epilogue
Fin’s little sister was born a few months after the laird of the castle disappeared.
She was a bonny child, with her father’s reddish hair but with curiously dark eyes, even from her birth. She brought a feeling of new life and happiness to the family, who all rejoiced in their first girl-child. They called her by a flower name, Heather, and they all doted on her. Fin carried her about with him whenever he could. The first time she looked up at him in a ‘seeing’ way, and smiled, showing she recognised him, Fin knew that he was going to love her more than anyone.
He told her fairy stories. The Little People he told about had long black hair, golden skins, and beautiful slanting eyes. He called them the Wee-Eyed Ones.
The years passed.
When Heather was old enough, one day Fin took her by the hand and led her to a secret place in a copse of trees. There was a little grave there. It didn’t have a cross. It had a rowan tree growing from it instead.
‘That’s my Wee Eyes, down there,’ Fin said. ‘I promised her, when she died, that I’d come back for her. And two nights after the siege ended, I crept back down there and brought her out. It was sooty-dark and I dared not carry a light, but I found her by touch, and brought her up the steps, crept out by the postern gate and carried her all the way back home here in the dark. And I buried her. She wasna a Christian so I had to make up some prayers, specially for her. I did right by her. And now we’ve a new laird who is better than the old one. And I’ve got you, and you’re going to have a good life. I’ll see to it, and that’s a promise I’ll keep, like I kept mine to her.’
And the little girl turned her strange dark eyes up at him, full of trust, and nodded as if she knew it all already.
Also by the Author
The Indian in the Cupboard
Return of the Indian
The Secret of the Indian
The Mystery of the Cupboard
The Key to the Indian
Angela and Diabola
Alice-by-Accident
And for Younger Readers
Harry the Poisonous Centipede
Harry the Poisonous Centipede’s Big Adventure
Harry the Poisonous Centipede Goes to Sea
The Farthest Away Mountain
I, Houdini
The Fairy Rebel
Bad Cat, Good Cat
Copyright
First published in Great Britain by Collins in 2002
This edition published by Collins 2003
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Text copyright © Lynne Reid Banks 2002
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