The Witch's Daughter Read online

  But follow she did, quiet and bright-eyed and eager. When they reached the bay, she hid among the dunes and watched. Tim found a piece of planking at the water’s edge and began to build a sand car for his sister. He threw up a mound of damp sand and she sat inside it, while he patted it into shape around her. After a little, his enthusiasm for this project clearly died and he began to cast longing glances towards the great rock in the middle of the bay. Then, turning his back on temptation, he began to dig more energetically, until the car grew as big as a Rolls Royce or a Cadillac. Janey got out and he showed her how to make wheels. She became absorbed in this task, and Tim’s eyes returned to the rock. He stood, looking at it, his hands in his pockets, and then squatted down beside his sister and seemed to be talking to her urgently. Perdita saw Janey nod her head. Tim stood up and began to run towards the rock.

  Perdita waited, her heart thumping. Janey was decorating the bonnet of the car with shells, and singing to herself. When Tim had disappeared round the far side of the rock, Perdita came out from the dunes and crept closer. About ten yards away from Janey, she stopped, pursed her lips, and made a sound like a bird. Janey put her head on one side and laughed. ‘I thought you’d come,’ she said.

  Perdita went to her and stood close, so that Janey could touch her skirt.

  ‘Go on,’ Janey said. ‘Say something. You can talk, can’t you?’

  Perdita nodded. In her dream last night she had talked to Janey, but now the words seemed trapped in her throat.

  ‘Are you dumb?’ Janey said, and gave her skirt a little tug.

  Perdita trembled. Then she bent to whisper ‘No’ in Janey’s ear, and at once jumped back out of the child’s reach, shy as a savage.

  Sensing her timidity, though not understanding the cause of it, Janey spoke coaxingly. ‘What’s your name?’ She waited, her head on one side. ‘Please—won’t you tell me your name?’

  Perdita gave a little gasp, and told her.

  Janey smiled. ‘That’s pretty. How do you spell it?’

  ‘I … I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t know?’

  ‘I can’t …’ Perdita began. Then excitement seized her. She crouched beside Janey. ‘Can you read and write? Can you teach me?’

  Janey said slowly, ‘Braille—I can do Braille. But that’s not …’

  ‘Letters,’ Perdita said. ‘Can you show me letters?’ She was shivering with eagerness. She picked up a flat shell and thrust it into Janey’s hand. ‘Look—write in the sand. Write my name.’

  Janey hesitated. ‘I’m not very good at ordinary letters. I mean, I know the shape, but writing’s hard. You can’t feel what you’ve done.’

  ‘You can feel in the sand,’ Perdita said. ‘Please, Janey …’

  Janey put down the shell. ‘I can do it best with my finger, I think.’ Slowly and carefully, she drew a rather shaky P in the sand.

  Perdita looked at it. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘P. P for Perdita.’

  Perdita laughed. ‘Let me …’ She copied the P, over and over. Now your name.’

  Janey grinned suddenly. ‘J,’ she said. ‘J is for Janey. And for Jam. And A is for Apple. That’s how you learn …’ She wrote her name in the sand and Perdita watched her, repeating what Janey said. ‘N is for Nuts. E is for Egg. Don’t you go to school?’ Janey asked.

  ‘No. They won’t let me,’ Perdita said, and at once Janey wanted to know who ‘they’ were and why they should stop her going to school, but Perdita was too impatient to get on with her lesson to say more than, ‘Oh, Mr Smith thinks I’ll carry tales. He likes to be private. Please, Janey—oh please write some more. Write me your brother’s name.’

  ‘T,’ Janey began. ‘T for Tomato, I for Ink, M for Mother …’

  ‘Tim,’ Perdita said. ‘Tim.’ She repeated his name loudly and excitedly because she had just understood how the sound of the letters went together to form the word, but Janey who could not really understand that this might be an entirely new discovery for anyone, thought she must be calling him.

  ‘Is Tim coming back already?’ she asked. ‘He said he was going exploring up on the big rock. Can you see him?’

  Perdita looked towards the rock—the same rock she sat upon every week, when she watched for the steamer. A blustery wind had blown clouds up from the west, covering the sun and making the day much colder, but Perdita felt cold for another reason. ‘I can’t exactly see him,’ she said, and then began to tremble. ‘He’s hurt,’ she said. ‘I can feel that he’s hurt …’

  *

  The great rock was like a castle, a fortress. The basalt rocks formed towers and turrets. Standing at the seaward end of the rock, Tim felt like a feudal chieftain, scanning the green sea for enemy ships. It would be a marvellous place to defend. Inside the outer ring of rock, there was a sheltered expanse of purple heather and soft turf, patterned here and there with flowers. There was even a water supply—necessary if you were going to defend a fortress: small streams making their way towards the precipitous edge and tinkling over in tiny waterfalls. Tim scrambled down a little way and lay on his stomach to look over the battlements of his castle. Along to his left, water was falling from higher up onto a rocky promontory with a patch of grass beside it. It looked inviting, and Tim had a sudden desire to see if he could reach it. The sides of the rock looked sheer, but there was a narrow ledge, two or three inches wide, leading to the waterfall.

  He let himself cautiously down, until his toes touched this ledge. Then he flattened himself against the side of the rock and inched sideways like a crab. He was almost at the waterfall when a stone rolled beneath him. He threw himself sideways, twisting his ankle. For a terrifying second, his foot seemed to give way beneath him and he might have fallen, if his frantic fingers had not found a handhold, a crack in the rock. Precariously clinging, he looked down and saw the dislodged stone bounce on the jagged rocks beneath him and disappear in the churning sea …

  He felt sick. Sea, rock and sky seemed to turn about him and he closed his eyes until the giddiness passed. Then he forced himself to open them and forced himself to move, clinging like a fly to the rock, one terrifying step, then another, until he reached the flat ledge of grass he had been making for.

  He collapsed upon it, cold and sweaty from fear and the pain in his foot. The pain was like knives, like fire, shooting up his leg, up his whole body. There was a whirring in his head and he seemed to be swimming away into darkness …

  *

  Something hard and cold touched his face. He opened his eyes and saw a girl’s face above him. She wore something round her neck, dangling on a piece of string: it was this that had swung forward to touch his face as she bent over him. As he stirred, she gave a little cry and would have jerked away if he had not caught hold of the string and held her fast. Her eyes dilated with a wild look: he made a great effort, pulled himself up and threw her down beside him. She lay under the weight of his arm, shivering like a trapped bird.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to hurt you. But you mustn’t go away.’

  Janey, he thought, Janey. How long had he been unconscious? The thought frightened him. Janey was sensible, she had promised to stay exactly where he had left her, but she was only nine and time dragged when you were waiting. Suppose she wandered off, looking for him? He had told her the danger, but had she understood it? How could you really understand the danger of rocks and sea, when you were blind?

  He said, ‘You mustn’t run away, you’ve got to help.’ The girl said nothing, just lay staring at him with wide eyes that were the same colour as her green scarf. He wondered, for a desperate minute, if she was deaf—or mad. ‘My sister, Janey,’ he pleaded. ‘She’s alone on the beach. She’s only little and she’s …’

  She swallowed. He saw the movement of her throat. She said, with what seemed tremendous effort, ‘Janey’s all right.’ And then, as if in speaking to him she had broken through some barrier, she relaxed and smiled, shyly. ‘She’s my friend.�
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  He looked at her. ‘I know,’ he said suddenly. ‘You’re the girl on the beach.’

  He let her go and lay back on the grass. ‘My foot hurts,’ he said.

  She knelt to look. His ankle was swollen like a fruit, tight inside the skin of his sock. She removed his shoe and then, very gently, peeled off the sock. She took off her green scarf, soaked it under the waterfall, and wrapped it round his ankle. The cold was soothing. She examined his face anxiously and said, after a minute, ‘Can you walk on it?’

  ‘I can try …’

  She helped him up and he stood, leaning on her and looking back along the face of the rock. And then down at the sea. ‘I can’t do it,’ he said.

  She smiled. ‘I know a better way. On the other side of the waterfall. You’ll have to lean on me.’

  He looked at her doubtfully. She was small, no bigger than Janey, but when she pulled his arm round her shoulder and stood steady to support him, he could feel she was strong as a little pony. Round the back of the fall, a broad shelf jutted out from the rock. Hopping, leaning on her, Tim managed to pass behind the gleaming curtain of water to the other side, where an easy, natural path snaked upwards through the battlements of rock. The cold water bandage had eased his foot considerably and, by the time they reached the heathery crown of the rock, Tim was able to limp along without support.

  He began to feel he had made a fool of himself. ‘It was just bad luck I twisted my ankle,’ he said. ‘T’wasn’t a difficult climb—I’ve done lots of climbs that are much more difficult than that. Why, Dad and I climbed down the big waterfall to Carlin’s Cave. That’s terrible dangerous. It’s so dangerous I shouldn’t think anyone else has ever been there …’

  There was a surprised look in her green eyes. ‘I’ve often been,’ she said simply. ‘It’s a bit hard, the waterfall way, though it’s the quickest way home, but you can go round the headland, that’s not hard at all. It doesn’t take long, from the bay. Will Campbell beaches his boat there when he goes lobster fishing and sometimes Mr Smith meets him there, and they go lobster fishing together. I think it’s a bit silly, really, because Mr Smith never eats lobsters, but Annie says he just catches them for sport, and for sending to his friends.’

  Tim was too occupied, getting down off the rock, to pay much attention to her.

  *

  ‘She knew you’d hurt yourself,’ Janey said. ‘We were writing in the sand and then she stopped and said you were hurt.’

  Tim, resting on the beach and nursing his aching foot, looked at Perdita curiously. He thought her a very odd girl. ‘How’d you know?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t call or anything.’

  ‘I just knew,’ Perdita said, hanging her head and speaking very low. ‘I got this feeling …’ She stopped. She couldn’t explain it. ‘Annie says it’s the Second Sight,’ she said.

  Tim stared at her blankly. He looked pale and very tired, and because this was something that always made Mr Smith laugh and cheer up when he was tired, Perdita said, ‘She says I’ve got the Second Sight because I’m a witch’s daughter.’

  But Tim didn’t laugh. He frowned. ‘There’s no such things as witches.’

  Janey said, crossly, ‘You don’t know that, do you?’ She caught her breath. ‘Witches can fly. Can you fly, Perdita?’

  Perdita hesitated. She wasn’t certain. When she was alone sometimes and shut her eyes, she thought she could. She remembered the feeling but now it seemed unreal, like a dream.

  ‘I’d like to fly,’ Janey said. She stood up and spread out her arms like wings. They were sitting in the lee of the great rock, but once Janey moved out of its shelter, the wind was so strong she could almost lean against it. It blew her hair and snatched her clothes. She danced, whirling her arms, staggering against the wind. ‘The wind makes you fly,’ she cried. ‘I’m flying now, in the wind. Is this how you fly, Perdita?’

  ‘It’s just an illusion,’ Tim said.

  Janey collapsed on the ground. ‘I did fly,’ she cried. ‘I felt myself flying—over the land and over the sea.’

  ‘It feels like that,’ Tim explained. ‘But it’s an illusion, like I said. Like … like when you look up at a mountain and it seems to move because the clouds are going so fast.’

  Janey, who had never seen mountains or clouds, could not understand this. But Perdita did. She looked thoughtful, suddenly, and then she stood up as Janey had done, and spread out her arms to the buffeting wind. She remembered what flying was like, or thought she remembered: sitting on the rock in the bay, she had flown with the gulls in the air. Now, though she tried hard, the feeling was slipping away from her. ‘It’s just the wind blowing,’ she said.

  She opened her eyes and sat down. Tim was smiling at her, and she said, rather crossly, ‘I can see through walls, though, and round corners.’

  ‘Not really,’ Tim said. ‘I mean, scientifically speaking, that’s nonsense. It’s a sort of guessing.’

  ‘Second Sight’s knowing, not guessing.’ Perdita looked obstinate. ‘You don’t see with your eyes.’

  ‘I know what’s happening and I can’t see at all,’ Janey said triumphantly. ‘So I’ve got Second Sight, too. Only not as good as Perdita. I didn’t know something had happened to you, and she did.’

  Tim drew a deep breath. ‘There’s a scientific explanation for everything,’ he said, and wondered what the explanation could be. ‘She knew the rock is dangerous,’ he said. ‘She knew I’d been gone a long time …’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking about you. Not for one minute.’ Perdita sat bolt upright, her green eyes bright and angry. She was angry, because, in spite of being underfed and badly dressed she was, in a way, extremely spoiled: no one in her whole life had ever contradicted or disbelieved her as Tim was doing now. There had been no one to do so, except old Annie MacLaren and she believed in witches herself.

  ‘I’ve got Powers,’ Perdita said. ‘Annie says so. She says my mother was a witch.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WHAT IS A DIAMOND?

  ‘SHE WAS DROWNED in the loch, the poor, dear soul,’ Annie MacLaren said. ‘Such a young, pretty thing, and the poor bairn only a few weeks old and not even christened. It was the minister named her. Call her Perdita, he said. An outlandish name, I thought.’

  ‘Pretty, though,’ Mr Smith said. ‘And her father?’

  Sitting back in her chair and smoothing the rheumaticky knobs on her hands, Annie MacLaren looked into the fire. ‘Drowned, too. He was a fisherman, his boat went down and his poor young wife never got over it. My brother found her, wandering in the bog with the baby, and we took her in. No one else would. Of course, she was a foreigner …’

  ‘You mean she came from another island?’ Mr Smith hid a smile: old Annie was not often in a talkative mood, and he didn’t want to offend her.

  ‘No. She was Spanish or Italian—one of those people. She’d been a waitress in Glasgow and never got used to our ways. She kept away from people and they kept away from her. They said,’—she gave Mr Smith a suddenly sharp look—‘they said she was a witch.’

  ‘Kept herself to herself,’ Mr Smith said. ‘You don’t have to be a witch to do that.’

  ‘Maybe not. But they said she turned the milk sour. People kept their children away. Not that I listened to their talk, but she was strange, there’s no doubt. Never talked, walked the hills alone … It was grief, my brother said, but women have lost husbands before and not acted like that.’

  ‘A foreign girl, in a strange land?’ Mr Smith said softly, but Annie, who was a little deaf, did not hear him.

  ‘She went into the loch one night in the mist,’ she said. ‘People say the Lake Horse took her.’

  ‘The Lake Horse?’

  ‘It’s a story.’ The old woman spoke with some restraint, and then added, ‘Though some have seen it, mind. A great horse, galloping on the water.’

  ‘A story to frighten children.’ Mr Smith laughed. ‘Or to keep them away from the loch?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Annie sa
id, very dryly. ‘And maybe not. Who’s to know?’

  He felt her sudden antagonism: to win her back, he said, ‘Anyway, you kept the child. That was good of you, Annie.’

  ‘We’d no choice,’ Annie said. ‘Who else would take her? Not that I regret it. She’s like my own bairn, even if she is a bit …’ She drew breath and spoke firmly. ‘Whatever her mother was, or was not, the child has gifts.’

  ‘She’s sharp as a needle. Keeps her ears and eyes open. Isn’t that all, Annie?’

  ‘Not all, no. She saved my life once. And in such a way—oh, I daresay you’ll not believe it.’

  She spoke irritably, as if she found him unbearably foolish.

  ‘Try me,’ Mr Smith said.

  ‘It isn’t fancy.’ Annie’s voice held a warning and Mr Smith composed his face so that whatever she said, he wouldn’t smile. ‘Outside our croft, we had this big tree. One end of the washing line was tied to it. I was out one evening, taking the line down, when she came out. She’d been fast asleep only a minute before—she was only little, then, and I’d tucked her up in bed—but there she was in her nightgown, calling me. She said Come away, come away Annie. I ran, thinking she was frightened, and just as I got to her there was a great crack, and the tree fell, where I’d been standing. I picked her up and took her in, thinking it was my good luck she had had a bad dream and woken, and I asked what had frightened her. She looked up and smiled and said, I wasn’t frightened, Annie, I just didn’t want the old tree to hurt you.’

  The kettle hissed on the fire and a clinker dropped. Mr Smith sat silent. Of course it could be explained away, nothing easier. Old Annie would not deliberately lie, but fright could have distorted her memory—even put words into a child’s mouth that had never been spoken. I’m glad the old tree didn’t hurt you, Annie. That was the only change needed to turn the story into a simple tale of coincidence and good luck. On the other hand, the child—the little witch, he thought with a sudden grin—was disconcerting. She had a way of looking at you with that wide, green stare … It wasn’t surprising that a foolish old woman should believe she had special ‘powers’. He might, if he stayed here much longer on this lonely island, come to believe it himself …