THE TRAVELLER’S CURSE
Alice adjusted her dripping fringe in Lady Cathcart's mirror. Water streaked her cheeks and chin. An apple dangled between her teeth. She towelled her face dry, a shadowed outline made vivid by candlelight. It was Friday evening, two nights before Hallowe'en. Lady Cathcart had pulled out all the stops for her special party but dooking for apples had been Alice's suggestion. If she observed the ritual properly, she was supposed to see the face of her future husband in the glass. Alice punctured the cherry-red skin of the apple and without another glance at her reflection, returned to the drawing room.
A bejewelled hand caught her arm. "Well, did you see him?" asked Lady Cathcart.
Alice hadn't seen her bridegroom’s face but that of Mary, the tinker girl. Coal-black curls, a sleekit smile and sun-browned skin. She saw Mary everywhere; in mirrors, in dreams—louping through the fields like a hare. She had to see the girl properly, not as a figment, rattling on about ghosties, giants and burkers. She needed another story. Mary had promised her.
Alice swallowed her bite of apple. “No, Lady Cathcart, I didn’t. It must be a bad apple.”
Lady Cathcart beckoned to an elongated, green-suited gentleman.
“Alice, this is Sir Airlie. He was very keen to meet you when I mentioned you were an expert in occult matters. I told him what fantastic stories you regale us with, night after night.”
Sir Airlie’s hair and fingernails were too long. The camlet cloak around his shoulders comprised of a silk so green it could have been sewn from freshly budded leaves.
"There are few divination rites older than the apples," said the strange guest. "But I know them."
Alice felt his prophetic air dampened her own, hard-cultivated mystique. Lady Cathcart admitted the most peculiar folk into her company these days.
"Oh?" Alice took a second bite of her apple.
In a corner, the Duke himself presided over the apple tub, stirring the water, while youths knelt, hands behind their backs, attempting to catch bobbing apples with their teeth. Mary had a tale Alice knew would delight the Duke. If only Mary would give it to her, she might secure an invite to his Yule ball.
Sir Airlie continued, speaking in a sort of Highland accent. "If I want know to something about a person, I simply touch an object that belongs them, and their future lies before me like a tilled field."
He extended clawed fingertips but Alice held the apple clear of his bony grasp. Those skeely fingers could pry into someone else’s future!
"I'm afraid the apple doesn't belong to me,” she said. “It’s from Lady Cathcart's orchard. Besides, I know what direction my future points in—the traveller’s encampment."
“Not again, Alice,” said Lady Cathcart. “I only let them camp by the field so they don’t put a curse on me.”
Alice suppressed a smile. She knew the travellers were kindness personified but couldn’t have all her acquaintances visiting the camp. They wouldn’t find her stories half as entertaining once they’d heard Mary’s rendition.
“I’ll only stay for one story,” she said.
Sir Airlie leaned in. A whiff of mulch sprang from the russet locks. “The Lady’s apples and traveller’s tales? Be sure you take no more than you need."
Lady Cathcart nodded on Sir Airlie’s arm like a sock puppet. Why didn’t she check his impudence? He looked like a jester in his mossy cape and emerald breeks.
"I’ll tell you something without the help of a crystal ball,” said Alice. “Green is out. You look ridiculous."
That very hour, Alice hared across the stubble field behind Lady Cathcart’s mansion. The moonlight made grey matchsticks of the barley stalks. A blaze simmered at the far-end of the field. She reached the circle of bow tents, blood pricking in her veins. An orange glow pranced around the fire, hovering for a moment, then gliding sunwise around the blaze. Hypnotised, Alice wondered if at last she beheld a will ‘o wisp – those fairy beacons Mary warned her of. Voices cracked in cant, the travellers’ secret language. One by one their shapes solidified, a darker dark against the purpling gloam. The wisp was only the glow from their cuttie pipe, which they passed between them.
The cracks and pipe passing stopped as Alice entered their midst. She’d been in such a state to get away she’d forgotten her coat. October air nipped her skin blue.
“I’m looking for Mary,” she asked, hands clasped before her.
A crooked shape that might have been a man took the cuttie pipe from his mouth. “She’s no’ here. Annie, give Miss Alice your shawl, she’s shivering like a deer.”
Alice took this as an invite to sit down. She accepted the coarse shawl, knowing they took the refusal of hospitality as a black affront. Her pulse thrummed at how readily they admitted her to their inner circle, though they’d stop using the cant. In fact, their conversation died altogether. After ten minutes heavy silence, Alice remembered that they held the gentry in high regard and wouldn’t speak until spoken to. She’d have to say something first.
“Where’s Mary tonight?” she asked.
“Who knows where that lassie’s gotten to. I’d have more luck keepin’ tabs on field mouse,” said the man who spoke earlier. Mary’s father, Alice presumed.
“I was hoping she’d give me one of her wee stories,” said Alice.
No one replied. Somewhere in the dark, their pony pawed the ground.
Alice tried again. “She said she had a tale about a Duke with opals for eyes.”
“Did she now?” said Mary’s father.
Alice frowned. Mary rattled away like a waterfall; she couldn’t shut her up! But these old folks were harder than oysters to prise apart.
“Yes, she did,” said Alice. “I’d be very upset if I didn’t get my story. I’ve been looking forward to it.”
“That’s a shame,” said the father.
The other travellers were mute as fence posts, heads bent. Alice twisted the plaid in her hands. She should leave them to their night, but she wanted that story. The Duke had invited everyone to a portrait unveiling on Sunday morning, in his personal gallery. Afterwards he would return to Argyll. It would be her last opportunity to impress him.
Alice cast a sleekit look around the campfire. “I’d set my heart on hearing that story tonight.”
Mary’s father took a long, slow draw of the pipe. An owl hooed in the trees above them.
Annie, who gave Alice the shawl, answered. “Then what can we do but give it to you?”
The following morning, John the servant interrupted Alice’s breakfast. “Someone at the door for you, Miss.”
Alice scurried to the door. She wasn’t expecting anyone, but she always hoped...
Sloe-black eyes, ebony hair; not an apparition, but Mary herself.
“You might be able to frighten the old biddies, but not me,” said the traveller lassie. “I know what you’re up to.”
“Up to? I don’t know what you mean,” said Alice.
Mary elbowed her way into the hall, perfuming the air with tobacco smoke.
“Aye, you do. Preying on the old folks’ superstitions so you can get stories to pass off as your own. They’re not your stories though, are they?”
What a state Mary was in, pouting like a child. Sure, she might have pushed the old folks a bit, but where was the harm?
“I only asked for a story, Mary. There’s no need to look so scunnered,” said Alice. She tickled her friend under the chin. “Unless you want to keep them all to yourself?”
Mary grinned, revealing yellow teeth and small, sharp canines. “Oh, I won’t be scunnered for long. You’re going to stay away from me and my family.”
Dear God, what a smile. Alice edged closer to the sideboard, where the housekeeper’s bell was in easy reach, suddenly sharing Lady Cathcart’s fear that the travellers were friends to the fairies and could bring bad luck to their enemies.
“I’m sure this is a misunderstanding. You were going to give me that story anyway.”
Mary jabbed her finger into Alice’s chest, leaving a grotty mark on the blue sash. “They’re not my stories, or yours. They’re held in common, like the land under your feet.”
“Actually,” retorted Alice, poking Mary back, “the land under my feet is my own property, and you’re trespassing. I don’t have to take abuse from a tinker—I’m ringing for John.”
“Be my guest,” said Mary. “Ring for him. I’ll be done and away before he arrives.”
Done? What did she mean done? Alice flexed clammy hands. She reached for the bell, but Mary grabbed her wrist.
“John!” Alice cried.
For a scrawny girl, Mary had shocking strength, pinning Alice to the wall.
“Tink, am I?” Mary shouted.
Savage as a weasel, she bit Alice’s neck. Alice shoved, but Mary’s mouth clamped tighter to her throat. The skin broke and Mary’s thin lips pulled the blood out of her. Alice’s vision whitened; her knees buckled. A dull thud to her left—the chair being knocked over. Strong hands hauled her upright before she knew she’d crumpled to the ground.
“What’s wrong, Miss? What happened?” asked John.
Alice touched her wet neck. “She bit me,” she murmured.
“Who?”
Alice squinted. The dim, empty hall sharpened into focus. Mary had gone.
There were pineapples on the cornicing of her room. One hundred and forty. Alice had never noticed; she hadn’t lain in bed so long before. It must be evening by now. Twice the maid had knocked, then something was placed at her door. A medicinal nightcap, maybe. And yet, it couldn’t be too late, for the servants padded up and down the stair.
She crawled out of bed on hands and knees towards the window. Groping for the shutter she creaked it open. Alice winced at the bright light. It shouldn’t be so bright at this time of the night. And why was the street a clamour of activity? Clutching every bit of available furniture, she staggered to the dresser to study her reflection. Someone had put her in her nightgown. She tugged down the frothy lace collar to see Mary’s teeth marks, a black stamp on her neck. Alice dabbed an ointment onto the skin to conceal the wound. Christ, her eyes could belong to a corpse! Bloodshot and baggy, her skin dull and pale as her nightdress. The carriage clock clicked. Then the crisp chimes of the kirk bell. Eleven. Eleven! Not eleven ‘o clock on Saturday evening, but eleven o’ clock on Sunday morning. She was going to be late for the Duke’s portrait unveiling!
Through tinted spectacles, Alice detected a crimson smear and flash of emerald; Lady Lennox, arm in arm with Sir Airlie, gazed up at giant version of him, housed within a gilt frame. Alice rubbed her eyes. Surely Sir Airlie’s uncanny face wasn’t the latest addition to grace the Duke’s gallery?
Alice jostled through the murmuring crowd. By their distasteful expressions she assumed they didn’t care for the Duke’s new portrait either.
“They do stretch the boundaries of taste, these modern artists,” said Alice.
It was the first thing she’d said all day and her voice betrayed her, croaking like a toad. Lady Cathcart turned with a ruffle of skirts and shrieked.
Alice lowered her sunglasses. She hadn’t been able to leave the house without the light stinging her eyes, but the effect indoors was perhaps unsettling.
“Lady Cathcart, it’s me,” she said.
Lady Cathcart brandished her glove. “I don’t associate with vagrants. Shoo!”
Sir Airlie laughed. “Can’t you see? It’s Lady Alice.”
Alice turned her back on them, scanning the tittering crowd. “I’m a little poorly, that’s all.” She wasn’t here to impress social climbers like Shaw. A hazy, resplendent figure in sapphire velvet ghosted by, replete with silver buttons and eagle feather adornments.
Alice seized it. “Your Grace, I have a wonderful story for you. Once upon a time there was a Duke, not quite so handsome as yourself, mind, who had the most peculiar affliction…”
She hadn’t meant to clutch the Duke so desperately, but a peculiar fatigue weighted her limbs. Her erratic behaviour might work in her favour, however; the Duke being more than a little eccentric himself, allegedly employing a fairy servant to look after his daughter.
“Why are you in your nightdress, dear?” Lady Cathcart interrupted.
Alice released the Duke, smoothing her gown. She’d soon replace their sneers with rapturous smiles and wondering applause.
In Perthshire, there lived a man with opals for eyes…
At least, that was what Alice tried to say, but her throat constricted, she couldn’t get her words out.
Sir Airlie placed a taloned hand on her arm. “Come, I’ll walk you home.”
Even his eyes glowed with the bosky phosphorescence of the wood.
Alice choked and wrenched her arm away, dashing from the gallery. An empty hunger gnawed her insides.
On the street, Alice perched her dark glasses on her nose. October mist shrouded sky and street but her eyes couldn’t adjust; she needed darkness. She stumbled under the shade of the tobacconist’s awning. A reflection with blistered, colourless lips stared back at her from the window. A crop of reddish bumps formed on her cheek. She itched the back of her hand, where more bumps appeared, and found that her fine, almond-shaped nails had grown spindly protrusions.
“Perhaps you’ll take some advice?”
Alice squinted at the green shape before her, though she didn’t need eyes to recognise Sir Airlie. A smell of earth always accompanied him, as though he had crawled out of a grave or from under a hill.
“Someone’s put a bootchlach on you—a curse.” Airlie nodded at Alice’s reflection. “Only when you atone for your offence will it be lifted.”
“Curse!” Alice snapped, pushing past him. “I’m ill, didn’t you hear? Now stop following me or I’ll call the police.”
Back home Alice collapsed on the bed, muttering to herself.
“She’s infected me. I might have known tinker spit would be poisonous, they’re worse than dogs.”
The welts itched but she hadn’t the strength to scratch. Her belly groaned and she clamped her jaw around the pillow, imagining it Mary’s arm. She hallucinated that her eyes became opals and Mary plucked them out. Sunlight bored a blazing hole through the curtain and onto her skin. Impaled by light, Alice swooned; slept.
Bells tinkled as a hoof pawed the ground, firelight streaked the gloaming; the travellers hadn’t abandoned their camp yet. Alice groped on all fours across the ragged stalks of barley, night dress snagging. A sensuous billow of smoke clotted her mouth. She called Mary’s name; her throat produced a scratchy wail. Their pony shrieked, alert as a guard dog.
The woman, Annie, cast something in her eyes. “Away ghostie, away spook!”
Alice blinked. Cursed dust, a caustic powder? No, salt; protection against fairies.
“It’s me, Alice. I only want to speak to Mary.”
She couldn’t cross their circle, the crone wouldn’t allow her, beating her across the neck with a stick.
“We’ll be gone the morn,” said the father. “We’d be grateful if you left us be this night.”
Annie brandished her stick. “Don’t speak tae it, brother. It’s no more a grand lady than I am!”
The father positioned the wailing bairns around the shaggy, frothy-mouthed pony. “Grab a leg each, it’s iron-shod. Some awfy demon has taken Miss Alice’s spirit from her.”
Alice crawled closer. “I am Miss Alice. Your daughter’s cursed me.”
An iron skillet cracked off her shoulder. Alice yelped, then hirpled away like a beaten dog.
She passed the big house where the Duke holidayed. The light was on in the drawing room. She had no right, but Alice dragged herself up the lawn, wet and torn, to keek through the window. Mary stood in the centre of the room, singing and dancing. She wore her blue dress, entertained her friends. What’s more, she did it a thousand times better than Alice. Mary’s once stringy locks fell in light, chestnut ringlets around her shoulders. Alice beat the glass, but her fist was weak as a moth’s wing. She tried to sing, to cry out, but her throat tightened again.
Mary’s song became corrupted with fairy words as Sir Airlie’s baritone rolled from wall to wall. The Duke’s guests were dressed all in green. Their claps and whoops rattled the window glass. Rising from her curtsey, Mary looked through the pane, through Alice’s shivering flesh and beyond night’s veil, into a kingdom no one else could see.
Mistaken for a wraith and exorcised from her own house, Alice flitted byre to byre, suckling the cattle’s veins, as the caterans did in her grandfather’s time. Alice wiped cow’s blood from her lips. Where her body ailed, her nails had grown long and hard. In place of a knife, her fingers pricked holes in the bullock’s neck, from which she drank warm, syrupy blood. The hunger stopped the moment the heavy blood filled her stomach, tethering her weightless body to the earth. The word vampire echoed throughout the district. But Alice knew who the real parasite was! She’d watched Mary come and go from her former lodgings, wearing her clothes and singing her songs. She’d been invited to all the parties and balls. An invite to the Duke’s Yule celebration surely sat upon the sideboard. Alice clacked her hardened nails. It was time to pay Mary a visit and take back what was hers.
Closed shutters; darkened windows; no servants or dog yapping; the street itself blind and dim, a home without life, a house that admitted only darkness. Uncanny that vivacious Mary should turn her home into a place so forlorn, so empty.
Alice inched up the steps. She’d retained her key, and with the grace of a fankle-stringed marionette, unlocked the door and slithered inside. At once Alice sensed that the house wasn’t empty. They had been waiting. The cow’s blood cooled in her stomach.
Glinting, sloe-dark eyes swooped from the darkness with the words, “Lord preserve me and send this demon to hell.”
Mary glided from the dark entrail of the lobby. A sprinkling of salt scattered from her hands. Alice shrank, spider-like. How these commonplace things—salt and the word of God—wounded her. Vengeance’s flame guttered in her heart as she writhed upon the floor tiles. Her soul twisted inside out.
“Please, Mary. I only want your help,” she cried.
Her old friend knelt, her exhale blowing aside Alice’s scant locks. A pantomime of concern wrinkled the traveller lassie’s brow.
“You always want more,” she said.
Alice wheezed. It seemed Mary took more than her fair share of the air between them.
“Don’t be grippy Mary, an ounce of charity’s all I’m asking.”
Mary’s warm hands lifted her upright. She inspected Alice’s fingernails, pointed as stakes, caked with old blood.
“Alright. You can warm yourself by our fire, but only if you give us a story.”
Alice felt she’d stepped behind a veil, that Mary belonged to the house as naturally as its roof and lintels, and that she belonged only to shadows. She had brought the dark and emptiness here, not Mary.
“Us?” Alice asked weakly.
“Aye. My oldest friends are here the night. They’re fond of stories but they’ve heard all of mine.”
Alice hid her face behind the bony cage of her hands. She couldn’t go in there, a wraith among the radiance of high society.
“What can I give them? There’s nothing left, you’ve seen to that, Mary.”
“Will you no do this one thing for me?” Mary asked.
Alice bowed her head so that her remaining hair hid the welts on her face. Mary led her through the gloomy corridor to the sitting room.
“Don’t worry,” said the traveller, “they’re no’ like other folk.”
There they waited for her. Lips wet, fuller mouths than she thought decent in a country of tight-lipped Calvinists. She knew Sir Airlie was among the blurred shapes, polluting her home with his ancient mystery. Even if she told a tale to their satisfaction and Mary lifted the curse, things couldn’t return to the way they were. She felt she’d stepped into a new country. No, not a new country, but an inverse of her home; its gloaming, the world behind the mirror. Something subterranean had been dragged into the light.
A heavy fragrance soiled the room—earth, grave-soil. Mary sat Alice in an armchair. A strange damp coated the floral-patterned cushions. By a trick of the light, the embroidered flowers stretched to the false sun of the lamp.
Sir Airlie’s portrait hung above the fire.
Alice gibbered. “Take what you want, please. Just let this nightmare be over!”
She couldn’t tell how many were in the room, the lamp hurt her eyes. She begged it dimmed. A radiance persisted and she shielded her eyes. It was Mary, vital as fire.
“We want a story.”
“Something to make us laugh,” said an ironic voice.
They were Scottish accents, but unlike any Alice had ever heard. They didn’t come from east or west or bear the lilt of the north. These voices sounded from below-earth.
Stories—her only chance to escape this hideous limbo. Alice pursed her lips, mind bone-dry. “I got all my stories from Mary.”
But whoever these folks were, they didn’t want Mary’s repertoire, they’d heard it all before. They wanted something new.
Alice drew a breath of soiled air. She would give them all she had left; the story of how she came to her current predicament. What could be more amusing?