Chapter 8 #2
“What now?” Shawna heard the gruff demand come from Gawain.
“Alistair—” Lowell began.
“Don’t worry. I’ve got my cousin,” Alistair said.
“We can’t just leave!” she protested.
“Shawna,” Alistair said, “we can do no more.” He started forcing her along the pathway.
They had barely left the caved-in area of the shaft before one of the miners hurried up to them.
“Come out, come out, quickly now. The boy is outside. Sweet Jesus, little Danny Anderson is just outside the shaft.”
“What?” Gawain thundered. “’Tis true, he’s outside. The wee lad is alive.”
“How?” Shawna breathed.
“God alone knows,” the miner said. “For ’tis sure, there’s not a one of us can tell!”
Shawna tore out of the cave. Mark Menzies, as coal blackened as the rest of them, was kneeling down in the grass, a distance from the shaft, with the boy, while he was surrounded in an outer circle by miners and their families.
A blanket had been placed around Danny, and his little face was smudged beyond recognition.
His dark hair was soaked and plastered to his head.
Shawna went running to the pair in the deep grasses, falling to her knees before the child, lifting his hair from his forehead to study his enormous blue eyes.
“Danny, Danny…you are alive!” Impulsively, she hugged him tightly, then managed to sit back again, studying him. “Danny, how did you get out?”
“The beastie,” Danny said solemnly.
A cup was pressed against Shawna’s hands. Someone had brought warm, milk-laden tea. She forced it to the little boy’s lips, which were almost as blue as his eyes. He sipped the warm tea and his shivering somewhat subsided while his eyes remained on Shawna.
She was suddenly determined the boy wasn’t going back into the mines. She didn’t give a damn what happened in the rest of Scotland, Great Britain, or the world at large. They would be sending no more children into the mines at Craig Rock.
He finished the tea, returning the cup to her.
Shawna looked up as a hand reached down to take the cup from her.
Gena Anderson was standing there by her side, looking down at her and the boy solemnly.
Shawna felt a twinge of guilt. The boy was supposedly one of Gena’s own brood of sisters and brothers, a child of Fergus and Charity Anderson, but Shawna was convinced that Gena was actually the child’s mother.
She should step away and let Gena take the little boy into her arms to comfort him, but Gena didn’t seem to mind the attention she paid him.
“Danny, lad. What beastie was this that could pluck you from the tunnel?” Mark Menzies asked.
“The beastie that lives in the cave,” Danny said, as if explaining that the sun rose each morning. “He talks. He heard m’cryin’ he said, and he told me to come with him. I did, and he lifted me through the earth. He’s a huge beastie, but he’s not a mean one.”
“The tunnel is haunted by some spirit or creature!” came a woman’s fierce cry. It was Charity Anderson.
A shawl thrown over her graying hair, she broke through the crowd, kneeling by Shawna to give her a reproachful glare and take the boy tightly into her arms.
Danny seemed to struggle a bit against that hold, and Shawna quickly sat back.
Charity Anderson was not an attractive woman, she never had been, though she and her husband had produced a handsome enough brood.
Charity possessed a long, horse-like face.
Her eyes were gray blue against her ashen coloring.
Her hair had once been her only claim to beauty, but she cared nothing for it now, and it was merely wild and unkempt and gray.
There was a strange look about the woman now.
She half smiled, and yet she was grim. Her look seemed to say that Shawna might be the great lady, but she was the lad’s mother, and she was taking him, and that was that.
Shawna stood, aware that people around her had started whispering, and some were speaking more boldly.
“’Tis true, the damned mines are cursed in some way!” cried a miner.
“Haunted,” agreed another.
“Haunted, be damned!” Aidan suddenly cried out in aggravation.
“My cousin is right!” Alistair decreed. “My god, are you all daft? If any spirits reside in that mine, they are surely the most benign in all the world. A shaft caved in, yet all three men caught were dug out of it, and even a little mite of a lad caught in a narrow exploratory tunnel was miraculously saved—by some beastie. Sweet Jesus, if we’ve ghosts or the like, we’ve got the nicest group of the damned creatures in all of Scotland! ”
It occurred to Shawna then that there was no mystical creature within the mine shafts.
David Douglas had found the boy, and David had saved him. David—who had risen out of the water like an ancient selkie just in time to save her. David, who managed, with incredible stealth, to be everywhere.
For Danny’s sake, she was grateful. Incredibly grateful.
The silence that had fallen was suddenly broken by Mark Menzies.
“Aye, men, if we’ve a spirit, it’s a kind one, and that’s a fact!”
“Aye! And we’ve a lady of the house willing to blacken herself like any man on behalf of us all!” cried out one of the injured miners, who still hobbled near her cousin Aidan.
“Aye, to our lady!” went up a shout.
The men were suddenly closing in around Shawna. She caught Alistair’s grin of approval before she found herself being lifted and set atop her horse. “Will you drink with us at the tavern, Lady Shawna?” Mark Menzies asked.
A drink at the tavern was a customary event when any possible tragedy at the mines was averted.
Just as a drink at the tavern was customary if tragedy was not averted. The lords of the manor always drank with the miners after a funeral service.
“Indeed, I shall be glad to drink with you,” Shawna said. “But I am dusty as pitch—”
“’Tis part of the celebration,” Mark said, winking.
“Then we shall drink,” Shawna assured him.
The tavern was not large enough to accommodate all those who came to it, but many of the men and their wives took their ales and stouts out to the grass and the tables beyond the walls of the establishment to make way for everyone.
Shawna managed to wipe some of the coal from her face, but not all, and she found herself smiling as she saw the faces of her family around her.
Alistair was certainly comical in his coal coloring, but Aidan made her laugh out loud, he was so encrusted with the coal dust.
She was proud of her family. Each and every man of her kin had been in the mine, working, digging, determined none should die.
When she was given an ale, she met Gawain’s eyes across the crowded tavern.
She lifted her glass to her fierce, crusty great-uncle and was pleased to see his smile of approval in return.
She swallowed down some ale, then realized that she was standing by a stranger, a man in dull, brown friar’s garb.
He was very tall, but also very old, with thick silver-white hair and one of the thickest, richest beards she had ever seen.
“’Tis honored I am to stand by the lady of the land,” he said, his voice throaty and accented with the lilt of an Irishman. “And on a day of such high excitement. Tell me, how is the lad who was trapped?”
Shawna smiled her relief. “The lad is fine.”
“A miracle.”
“Quite possibly.”
“Yet, I’ve heard y’have strange spirits about the place?”
Shawna swallowed down a long draught of ale, then looked at the stranger. “Nay, we’ve no spirits here…friend. I’m sorry. I don’t know you. What is your name?”
“Brother Damian,” the man supplied.
“And what are you doing here, traveling our Highlands?”
“Pilgrimage,” Brother Damian said. “Please, tell me more about your spirits.”
“We don’t have spirits.”
“Ah, but my lady, you are a superstitious lot! You have a Night of the Moon Maiden—so I’ve heard tell.”
“We enjoy feasts and merriment and happily celebrate some of the ancient holidays,” Shawna informed him, somewhat annoyed.
It was one thing to admit to Mark Menzies that they certainly were superstitious, far closer at times to very old ways than they were to contemporary society.
But their thoughts and beliefs were a part of them, and she would not be mocked by strangers traveling through their Highland craig.
“We enjoy our entertainments, Brother Damian, but we have no spirits here, no pookas, ghosts, or the like. I imagine that the boy found his way through some opening within the tunnel. He is very young. Little more than a babe and certainly imaginative. Far too young to work the mines.” She hesitated and set down her ale.
There was a point she meant to make here and now.
“In fact,” she said softly, more to herself than to the visiting friar, “there will be no more children of his age working here!”
“Ah, and you are the lady here, so it is your decision, is it?” the man inquired. He drank down a long swallow of his own ale, then set down his glass. He shrugged at her. “One hears things as he travels. The mines are owned in large part by a Douglas, are they not?”
It wasn’t her place, in truth, to run around making decrees regarding what was largely Douglas property. “The current Laird Douglas is in America, Brother Damian, not often able to see to his affairs. He trusts my judgment.”
“And that of your fine, courageous kin.”
“Indeed. Why do you ask?”
“As I said, one hears things…well, quite frankly, there is still talk of the great fire that raged here so many years ago. The Douglas heir killed, consumed in flame! Perhaps he comes back to haunt his land, seeking justice.”