The Moon Casts a Spell

by Rebecca Lochlann

  That very morning, the morning Faith brought him, Lilith had sung to the sea, asking for a companion. No— not a mere companion. She’d asked for her twin. She was lonely, in this harsh land, with people she couldn’t understand, these folk who bellowed, shouted, and smelled. They grated on her ears and mind. She longed for vividness, and the only place that was vivid to her was the sea.

  She knew she was only half of a whole. She asked the sea to either take her back, or bring her twin to keep her company.

  Not an hour after that, Daniel appeared.

  “What did it mean when I lost the soft hills,” she sang under her breath.

  “Time melts into mine, jewels and ancient forgiveness.”

  For as long as she could remember, she’d sung that song, but only when she was alone, only out on the bluffs. She didn’t know where the lyrics came from, whether she’d made them up herself when she was little, or if she’d heard them somewhere. It was a magic spell that always brought her something when she most needed it. It spoke of the future, too, of something that would happen, someday.

  A few days later, after they knew each other better, Daniel had confided that he’d come from a land beneath the sea, from a palace made of pearl and silver, gold and shell. He told her he lived there when he was waiting for her.

  “For me?” she’d asked.

  “Aye.” He’d nodded. “I’m a prince there. But I always want to come back to you. I’m miserable, until she allows me to come onto land and be with you.”

  “She?”

  “The queen of that place. My mother.” He’d touched the red, scabbed-over wound at the side of his left eye. “She marks me before I leave, so I won’t forget her,” he said. The wound had healed, but left a crescent shaped scar that severed his brow, curving outward then back in, coming to a final sharp point halfway down his cheekbone.

  From the moment she’d first seen his eyes, Daniel made her feel complete.

  As they grew older, Daniel stopped talking about the palace beneath the sea. Years later, when she reminded him of it, he scoffed and said it was never real, it was just a child’s story he’d made up, a way to endure the grief of his mother’s death. When she’d pointed at his scar as proof, he said the scar was from one of many thrashings his da had given him.

  She opened her hand and looked at the crescent moon necklace, winking in the sunlight. She relived Aodhàn’s story.

  The necklace was crafted in a legendary pool, a secret place, where the moon came when it disappeared from the skies. Though the queen is long dead, her great civilization lost, the necklace goes on casting her spell, century after century, for within it is forged the amaranthine light of the moon.

  Aodhàn spoke to her soul as well, though in different ways. He, too, made her feel complete. It frightened her, how he induced the same need, the same consummation, as Daniel did.

  Yet it also felt right.

  “Lilith?”

  She turned her head. The grass rustled beneath her ear.

  Time melts into mine.

  Aodhàn was approaching. He stood over her, looking down tenderly.

  “I’ve been thinking of the story you told me,” she said.

  He dropped down beside her, crossing his legs. “What story?”

  “About the queen, and her necklace. I feel like I know her. I dream of her. She has black hair. There are rivers of fire. There’s a man— a man like a lion.”

  She was holding the necklace by its chain, watching it turn in the breeze. When he said nothing, she looked at him and was shocked to see his eyes full of tears. He turned his head away, like he hoped she wouldn’t see.

  “Aodhàn,” she said softly, and put her hand on his chest. The pendant bounced against him then fell into the grass.

  For the first time, she saw him as a man, and not Aodhàn Mackinnon, the factor’s son.

  “I never see those colors around you anymore,” she said, to distract him from whatever had saddened him. “But for an instant, in the stables that night, after the lantern went out.”

  “It fades,” he said. “When it’s no longer needed.”

  She wondered what that meant, but followed another thought. “I still feel the lightning though. When we touch. It shocks, like in the winter, when you walk barefoot across a rug then touch a blanket. But it lasts longer.”

  He nodded and smiled, his eyes still brilliantly moist, his black feathery lashes clumped. “That’s the magic between us,” he said. “That’s why you were pulled to me from the moment you met me. It’s why you gave yourself to me when you were grieving. See?” He lifted his index finger and touched her cheek. A slight, trembling spark radiated from his finger into her blood.

  “I can make it stronger,” he said, his eyes darkening. His other fingers joined the first. They stroked over her cheek and down to the pulse in her throat. Her entire body lit up in a fiery shiver.

  “Say my name,” he whispered.

  “Why?”

  “Because I like what your mouth does when you say it.”

  “What does it do?”

  “It looks like you’re asking me to kiss you.”

  “Aodhàn.”

  “See? Ooo-ghan. It’s obvious.”

  “Aodhàn….”

  He bent down and kissed her, a kiss both tender and fierce, a kiss that said I have waited long enough. Lilith succumbed like a log burned through.

  When he lifted his face, she said, “I think I’d best only use your name when we’re alone.”

  He smiled.

  She knew then that she would marry him.

  Evie

  * * * *

  August, 1849

  XVII.

  “Are you possessed with a devil,” he pursued, savagely, “to talk in that manner to me when you are dying? Do you reflect that all those words will be branded in my memory, and eating deeper eternally after you have left me? You know you lie to say I have killed you, and, Catherine, you know that I could as soon forget you as my existence! Is it not sufficient for your infernal selfishness, that while you are at peace I shall writhe in the torments of hell?”

  “Poor Heathcliff,” Lilith said, scooping a whining Claire into her arms. “Stir the soup, my wee love,” she added.

  Lilith knew how to distract her three-year-old from angst. The child giggled as she turned the spoon in the pot, mimicking what she’d seen her mam do.

  “Aye.” Aodhàn closed the book and sent Lilith an accusing stare. “You women make us mad with your flighty moods— one moment asking for kisses, the next eyeing younger, richer men.”

  “Ah, poor, suffering Mackinnon.” Lilith lifted her brows. “Or should I say Aodhàn? I wouldn’t mind a kiss.”

  He rose immediately to comply. Lilith put Claire down and prepared to ladle the soup, scarcely more than a thin broth, into bowls. “Have you met the author? I swear he used you as his inspiration, for you are the full and complete incarnation of the devilish Heathcliff.”

  Aodhàn responded with wicked dark laughter.

  “Go and fetch Greyson and your grandmam,” Lilith said to Claire.

  Their brief light mood dissipated as they sat down to eat. Lilith knew before they finished there would be scratching on the kitchen door, folk begging for scraps.

  She always gave, and generously, though their own food supplies hardly surpassed the villagers’, but it was just another reason to hate her.

  There were some who blamed Lilith Kelso and Aodhàn Mackinnon entirely for the potato blight. More than a few believed God brought it as punishment for allowing their sin— no matter that the rot had spread to all the islands, and the mainland, and had already devastated Ireland.

  Lilith wondered if God would really punish so many for the sins of two— and if he would, what did that say about him?

  The same month the potatoes on Barra first turned to slime, Lilith gave birth to a daughter. She named the child Claire, after Daniel’s mother.

  Lilith knew many of Barra’s inhabitants did
n’t see this birth and the destruction of their main food crop as a coincidence. Nor did they appreciate the obvious happiness of the couple in the fine manor house when so many others were suffering, or how one of their own, an undeserving one at that, had managed to rise out of her assigned station in life. She knew what they all believed she’d done to win the heart of John Gordon’s factor.

  Kenneth Mackinnon got his wish to hold a grandchild, but not for long. He’d died two months after Claire was born. One of Lilith’s fondest memories was of the day he’d clasped her hand and said, “You are a good match for him. A good match.”

  Aodhàn took over as factor of Barra just in time to see the first of the worsening hunger and later, starvation, as everything seemed to align against the people. Even the herring vanished, and fishermen came home with half-empty nets. The bays were stripped of dulse, cockles, and anything else that could be eaten. Aodhàn wrote letter after letter to John Gordon, the island’s owner, but to say the man was parsimonious was too kind. It wasn’t until two died for lack of food and the government intervened that the man sent supplies and money for relief, and cancelled the overdue rents. It took many more desperate entreaties before he reluctantly paid for a hundred and fifty starving Barra residents to relocate to Glasgow, and added an offer to fund their further relocation to the Americas.

  Of course, the remaining villagers decided Aodhàn was lying about the letters. Many accused him of sitting back in his comfortable house waiting for them all to die, never mind that he would then be unemployed.

  “Mackinnon,” Lilith said suddenly. Her eyes opened wide.

  “Aye?”

  “I— I think I—”

  Aodhàn rose so swiftly his chair fell over backwards. “Is it time, then?”

  “Aye, must be,” she replied, and pressed both hands to her swollen stomach.

  Claire’s eyes grew big and round. Greyson rose, saying, “Is there aught I can do?”

  “Boil water,” Aodhàn said. He picked Lilith up in his arms, ignoring her protests, and carried her out of the kitchen. Faith stood and followed, pausing on the way upstairs to collect a stack of linens.

  Lilith labored all through the night. As the sky lightened in the morning, Faith announced she could see the head.

  Aodhàn took Lilith’s hand. “Push hard now,” he said, and within ten minutes, they had themselves another girl.

  Faith held the baby up and slapped it on the rump so it would cry.

  Claire climbed onto her father’s lap, grinning hugely when told she had a sister. All through the pregnancy she’d said she wanted no smelly boy, and shouted No! whenever she was told she might have to accept one.

  “She hurt!” Claire wailed upon seeing the wee wean.

  “No,” said Aodhàn. “She just needs a bathing, then she’ll be pink and clean. Now give your mama a kiss. She worked aye hard to bring you your sister.”

  Lilith did her best to smile at her daughter, but she was so exhausted that as soon as her mother had her wiped and dry, she drifted off to sleep.

  * * * *

  Faith and Aodhàn took Claire and the baby to the kitchen so Lilith could sleep in peace.

  Faith made tea and Aodhàn held his new daughter. Not at all sleepy, Claire sat on his lap as well, peering over the edge of the blanket. Aodhàn absently smoothed her tangled hair. It was so fine it caused endless shrieking every morning when Lilith tried to brush it.

  “I received a letter from the colonel yesterday,” he said.

  “Aye?” Faith’s expression didn’t change. She knew better than to hope by now.

  “He says if they won’t pay their rents he wants to send more of them away. Told me to make preparations, to charter a ship.”

  “Like as not away to die,” she said.

  “Don’t tell Lilith. I don’t want her fretting.”

  “D’you truly believe you can hide this from her?”

  The inevitable scratching at the door interrupted them before he could answer.

  “Please sir,” said the woman at the door. “My baby is near death.” She did indeed hold an infant, and it did look awful, too weak to even cry, as did the mother, who told them her husband was dead.

  Aodhàn brought them in and sat them at the table. He left them to Faith while he took the children away, Claire to her bed and the new one to her mother, for she was beginning to make soft, wambly sounds of hunger.

  Lilith was rubbing her eyes. She held out her arms for the baby. “What shall we name her? I picked Claire’s name. You choose.”

  He paused a long time. “What do you think of Evangeline?”

  “’Tis a mouthful!” she said, smiling.

  “She’s a Mackinnon. Fortune favors the bold.”

  “Can we call her Evie?”

  “Aye. Evie,” he said, and kissed them both.

  Barra is purged

  * * * *

  August, 1851

  XVIII.

  Lilith was awake when Aodhàn slipped out of bed, but she pretended to sleep on. He moved carefully, in near silence, and soon left their bedroom to creep down the stairs. Only then did she get up and go to the window, where she could look upon the stables.

  Two men were waiting for him. One of them held a lantern, the other the reins of an extra horse. With hardly any words exchanged, all three rode away into the darkness.

  Though Aodhàn tried to keep it from her, she’d always known what was happening on Barra. It couldn’t be hidden— not when so many folk were abandoning their homes in hopes of finding better lives elsewhere, or were coerced into leaving.

  Though he was only twenty-five, grey had begun to thread through Aodhàn’s black hair, and his nature, over the last five years, had gradually transformed from cheerful confidence to taciturn brooding. One evening, after Lilith handed out the last of their bread to a beggar, he said he would pack them up and leave, except he knew he was the only voice these people had with Colonel Gordon.

  Today was the date set for a mandatory meeting between the Barra crofters and Colonel Gordon, to be held at nearby Lochboisdale, on Uist. On Gordon’s orders, Aodhàn had relayed to the people that they would be fined if they didn’t attend. He hadn’t revealed this to Lilith, but she knew. Even though most wouldn’t gossip around her, she still managed to hear things, and little else had been talked about for weeks.

  She dressed, collected her two daughters, and went down to the kitchen to make tea and gruel. The girls were subdued. Perhaps their father’s mood of late had rubbed off on them.

  Faith was already there, the tea brewing. They sat together at the table.

  “There are some who won’t go to the meeting,” Faith said.

  “And some will refuse to pay a fine. What will the Colonel do to them?”

  Faith shrugged.

  “Why has this happened? We were never rich, but Barra provided. Now all has turned against us.”

  “More than a few say you’re the cause.”

  “I know. I’m the devil incarnate. They don’t care that you never go to church, but it’s different when it comes to me. Why did you stop?”

  “Because I knew it for what it was. Tripe.”

  Lilith smiled. She’d learned to be blunt from Faith. It was too late by now to change either of them. “Men in fancy robes, seeking power.”

  After a pause, Faith said, “You should think about going, though.”

  “Why? I don’t care what they think of me.”

  “You’ve weans to consider. And… there is more hatred towards you than you may realize.”

  Lilith understood her mother was warning her. “Is it something else besides not attending Mass or confession? Something other than marrying the cursed outsider?”

  Faith sipped her tea and paused again. She glanced at the girls, who were playing in the corner with wooden animals Aodhàn had carved for them. Two-year-old Evie came over to Lilith and crawled onto her lap with an elephant, her favorite of the toy beasts. She loved to talk and did so almost c
onstantly, unlike her mother at the same age. Lilith was the only one who understood it all, though.

  “Do you want to go to the bay and search for cockles?” she asked the child.

  “Aye.” Evie nodded.

  “Just be careful,” Faith said.

  * * * *

  Frantic pounding on the Bishop House door brought both Faith and Lilith from their laundry.

  Two dirty women stood there, dressed in rags. “Our men are being attacked!” one cried, supporting the other. “Up at Balnabodach!”

  “Who is attacking them? Why?” Lilith asked.

  “’Tis your husband, and the Sheriff, and his hired men!”

  “Our children as well,” the other said. “All are being beaten. Dragged away!”

  Her gaze, landing upon Lilith, was black with fury.

  “Watch the girls,” Lilith said to Faith.

  “What are you thinking of doing?”

  “Mackinnon isn’t beating anyone. I’m going there to see what’s really going on.” She returned the woman’s glare with one of her own.

  “Mam! Mam!” Evie clutched her skirts and refused to let go. She took the child, in the end, unable to leave her so upset.

  When she had a mare saddled, she tucked Evie in front of her and whipped the animal, sending it at a gallop to Balnabodach.

  * * * *

  She would never forget what she saw that day.

  Leaping off her horse on the summit of a hill above the loch, Lilith held her daughter and stared, aghast, at madness.

  Men, women, and children ran in every direction, screaming, shouting, fighting with armed soldiers. But all were sadly outnumbered, and even the men could hardly fight back in their weakened states. She watched one heavily armed mercenary sweep up a screaming toddler and toss him carelessly to one of his companions.

  Where was Aodhàn? Who was doing this? What was the intent? Was all this simply to collect a few fines? She could see nothing then, and blinked furiously, realizing she was sobbing.