The Kelpie's Pearls

by Mollie Hunter

  'Not if they keep quiet and behave themselves like Christian people,' said Morag. 'You tell them that, young man, and I shall be obliged to you.'

  The bus driver went away back up the bank and did as Morag had told him, and there was something so dignified about the old woman sitting there in her black dress and calmly getting on with her knitting that the visitors did just what she had told them to do.

  Soon the loch-side was as peaceful as before with only the purr of the traffic on the road to disturb the silence and a steady murmuring sound like a hive of bees on a hot day, and that was the sound of all the people talking in whispers among themselves. And gradually, as the sun swung round to the west, the waters of the loch took on a darker blue and the setting sun laid a bright gold trail across it.

  It was in this path of sunlight that the monster appeared. One moment there was nothing but the blank gold of the ripples dancing, and the next, there was a dark spot among them. The dark spot rose above the water; three more dark patches appeared in line with it among the ripples. From the crowd there came a long sighing sound and somewhere among them a child's voice shrieked, ‘The Monster!’

  Morag sat watching it, entranced. It began to move in an easterly direction raising a great flurry of water behind it, its head swaying and the humps behind it rising and falling the way a snake's body does. Then it turned inshore and began to swim in a diagonal line to where Morag was sitting. It came to within thirty yards of her. She could see it clearly—the long neck, the short blunt head, the wide mouth. The sun struck sparkles of light from the greyish humps of its back and she thought, 'It must be scales like a fish that's on it surely, to make it sparkle so.'

  Then the monster altered course till it was swimming west, parallel with the edge of the loch. Now it looked black against the sun. It dived. Morag scanned the blank surface of the loch. The crowd murmured with disappointment, then they roared as it surfaced again a hundred yards out. The head and one of the humps showed above the surface for a moment, then they disappeared and there was only the dark blue water with the sunlight trail fading from it and the gulls dipping and gliding above it.

  'Well I'm blessed!' said Morag. 'Well I'm blessed! That kelpie is a remarkable creature, surely.'

  She rose stiffly to her feet, collected her knitting and her basket and looked up to the road. There was a terrible confusion going on there, a great roar of talk and buses and cars revving up and all trying to pull out on to the road at once. A young man came leaping down to her. He had a camera on his back, a notebook in his hand, and his hair was standing on end.

  'I'm from the Inverness Journal, Mistress McLeod,’ he said breathlessly. 'Will you give me a statement? How did you know the monster would be here?'

  'Why, a kelpie told me, of course,' Morag said calmly. 'And now if you'll excuse me, young man, I must be getting away. I can see the Abriachan bus waiting at the corner and I've no notion to walk up the steep hill to my croft.'

  And on she went as cool as could be, leaving the reporter looking quite bewildered. Nobody noticed her in all the confusion and excitement as she made her way through the crowd, but all the people on the Abriachan bus stopped their chattering as she climbed aboard and gave her the same strange looks they had given her in the morning. However, Highlanders are the most polite people on the face of the earth and they chatted pleasantly to her on the journey home. But nobody mentioned the monster.

  Morag went down to the pool as usual that evening and found the kelpie waiting for her.

  'Did you see the monster then?' he called as she came down the path.

  'I did,' said Morag, 'and it was a remarkable sight, indeed it was.'

  'Ha!' he boasted. 'There’s a thing you couldn’t do—bring the monster up like that just on the word of command!'

  'Och, but I am just an ordinary old woman,' said she, laughing.

  She settled down then to telling the kelpie everything that had taken place; the beautiful day that was in it and the peaceful quiet of the loch-side; how the monster had appeared, what it had looked like, and how the word had got around so that great crowds of people had come to see if it would appear.

  The kelpie looked curiously at her while she was speaking. When she had finished he said,

  'Mark my words, there's trouble ahead for you, mistress. You will not be "just an ordinary old woman" for much longer.'

  He took good night of her and slipped back into the pool, leaving Morag wondering just what he had meant by this strange speech.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Book of Elizabeth MacLeod

  Now the reporter who had spoken to Morag on the loch-side was a clever young man, and a well-educated one too, for he had been to the University of Edinburgh and had letters after his name. But of course, they don't teach you anything about kelpies at the University, and moreover the young man was a Lowlander and so his education had been quite neglected in this respect. He had no idea what Morag was talking about when she said to him that the kelpie had told her the monster would appear that day, and so on the bus back to Inverness he asked an old man sitting beside him what a kelpie was.

  'Have you never heard of the kelpie?' asked the old fellow, quite amazed at his ignorance. 'The Sasunnach, the Lowlander, here, he's never heard of the kelpie!' he called to the rest of the folk on the bus—but of course he spoke in the Gaelic so as not to hurt the young man's feelings. Then, in English, he said to the young reporter, 'Well now, I'll tell you about the kelpie, and you be heeding my words if you are going to live in the Highlands! The kelpie is a water-spirit, and there is not a river or loch in the Highlands but has a kelpie living in it. But when the kelpie comes out of the water it takes the shape of a big black horse, and it is a very fierce creature indeed.'

  The young man didn't believe such nonsense of course and he said, 'Have you ever seen a kelpie then?'

  'Seen one!' cried the old fellow. 'I was as near as could be drowned by a kelpie once!'

  Everybody on the bus was listening now, for Highlanders dearly love a story. The old man knew this very well and he settled himself down to the telling of it, quite pleased with all the attention he was getting.

  'It happened by the River Garry,' said he, 'when I was only a wee boy. I was guddling a trout out from under a stone, and all at once I saw the kelpie's face in the water. My hair stood on end I can tell you, for it was a face as old as Time and wiser than all the books ever written. The next thing I knew, something grabbed one of my hands and tugged but I gave a great pull in the opposite direction and rolled back on the bank out of harm's way. Then what should rise out of the river but a great black horse, all gleaming-wet and eyes as red as coals. It climbed out on the bank and stood there dripping water and looking sideways at me out of those red eyes. I jumped to my feet meaning to run a mile from it, but it stood there quite quiet and peaceful beside me. Well, I was only a little lad then you understand, and this was a great fine horse and the notion came on me that it would be a grand thing to have a ride on its back. And mind you, I got the idea from the way the kelpie looked at me that it wanted me to do just that. "What's the harm!" said I, feeling what a bold lad I was, and I laid hold on its mane. I was just going to pull myself on to its back when I remembered what my mammy had said to me once. "Hamish," she said, "don't you ever ride the kelpie if you should meet with one, for it is a wicked creature that will carry you down to its home beneath the water and you'll never see your mammy again!" Well, when I remembered that, I let go the kelpie's mane and ran away as hard as I could. I only looked back once and that was enough. The kelpie was striking the ground with its hooves in such a rage that it put the fear of death in me and I ran all the way home shouting for my mammy.'

  'And that,' said the old man, 'was how I was near drowned by the kelpie. And if you take my advice, young man, you'll do the same as I did if you should ever meet with one.'

  The young man didn't know what to make of this at all and he thought maybe the old fellow was having a joke at him. Howev
er, he thought he might as well tell him what Morag had said about the kelpie.

  'Morag MacLeod, did you say,' said the old man. 'Aye, she might well have had dealings with a kelpie. There's some say she is a witch and maybe she is at that. Why else would a kelpie be friendly with her? Depend upon it, they're two of a kind and likely up to no good.'

  The reporter looked down his nose at the old man, thinking he was wandering in his wits. 'A witch!' said he. 'Now you are talking nonsense!'

  'Maybe aye, maybe no,' said the old man. 'But her grannie was a witch, that's for certain sure. She cured my knee of warts with a powerful charm when I was a wee boy.'

  'She charmed the milk back into one of my grandad's cows that had gone dry,' said a young woman in the next seat.

  'And found a silver crown-piece that my grannie had lost when no one else could find it,' said another passenger.

  And so they went on talking all round the young man about Morag and her grannie and the kelpie, and him sitting there thinking what a curious business it all was and making up in his head the piece he was going to write about Morag in the newspapers.

  When he got back to his office he sat down and wrote it all out and sent it off with a photograph he had taken of Morag and another of the monster to a big Edinburgh newspaper. And there it appeared the next day, and a very strange tale it made too—all about Morag being a witch with a familiar spirit that prophesied things to her, and how she and the kelpie had made a spell to bring the monster up out of the loch for everyone to see.

  This roused a great deal of curiosity naturally, and people began coming up the hill to have a look at the cause of it all. They came in ones and twos first, then in dozens and finally in hundreds, for the first ones who came saw more than they had bargained for and they spread the tale of that too.

  What they had seen was Morag with Torquil's animals. She was sitting out in the sunshine in her little garden peeling vegetables for a pot of broth, and because it was such a fine morning she had taken the animals out of their cages to give them an airing and to keep her company. Dondo the blackbird was on his favourite perch on her head and one of the little hamsters was sitting on her lap washing his face with his paws the careful way hamsters do; the other animals were scattered about the grass enjoying the fresh green shoots and Polar was curled at her feet with his fierce ferret-eyes closed against the bright sunshine.

  It was the kind of thing that Torquil and Morag herself took as a matter of course, but to the townspeople who came to see her it was a thing of wonder and even of fear. Even those who were country-bred looked on in awe to see a fierce creature like a polecat ferret lying peacefully beside creatures that were its natural prey. One and all they jumped to the conclusion that here was proof before their eyes of Morag's strange powers, and so the story grew even further.

  In no time at all the editors of other papers were asking what strange business this was going on up in the Highlands and sending reporters to find out. They came up the hill road to Abriachan in their cars and then came stumbling across the heather in their city shoes to Morag's door and asked her questions till her head rang. Then they went back to Inverness and asked the professor who was the leader of the scientific expedition to find the monster what he thought of it all.

  Well naturally, the professor being a scientific man didn't believe a word of anything that had happened and when the reporters asked him, 'Do you think Mistress MacLeod is a witch?' he said, 'I think she is a humbug!'

  Now this was not a very nice thing to say, but then maybe he was a bit annoyed about an ordinary old woman like Morag getting all the attention instead of having his scientific expedition written about in the newspapers.

  It made no difference to the reporters anyway. They still wrote stories about Morag in their newspapers, and when she got tired of answering their questions they spoke to other people at Abriachan and collected tales of Morag's witch-grandmother. In fact, the only thing they didn't manage to find out about was the pearls in the Kelpie's pool, for Morag was too afraid of having the pool disturbed again to risk mentioning them and Alasdair, of course, had his own reasons for keeping quiet about the pearls.

  The Witch Of Abriachan they called Morag in their newspapers, and soon everybody was talking about her and wondering was she or wasn't she a witch. 'How else would she know the monster would appear that day?' asked those who thought she was, and so the argument went on. No one outside of the Highlands believed her about the kelpie, of course, but those who did believe it were all the more certain that she must be a witch, especially those who had seen her with Torquil's animals.

  Torquil, of course, blamed himself for all this. 'If only I'd warned her in the beginning,' he thought, 'she would not have risked talking about the kelpie to anyone!'

  When he realized how his animals had added to the stories about Morag he was even more sorely vexed and would have shouted it aloud to everyone that they belonged to him, but Morag would not allow him to say a word.

  'Do you want to put a death sentence on the innocent creatures?' she asked sternly. 'Because that is just what you will do if the Woman ever learns the truth.'

  There was no doubt that this would be the case if the Woman ever learnt the animals had been the cause of his disobeying her order not to go near Morag. Once Torquil had admitted this to himself he went in fear that she would find out about them, and so for both of them things went from bad to worse as the days went by.

  The people who came to look at Morag and the kelpie's pool camped all over the hill-side. They stared at her whenever she went out, frightened her hens and scattered her sheep and altogether quite destroyed her peace. She took to going down to the pool after dark to draw water, and through the day Torquil tried to save her from the worst of the curiosity by doing all the outside work of the croft. But still, it was a terrible time for Morag and a lonely time too, for of course the kelpie never showed his face while all this was going on.

  The fine weather held all this time and each morning Morag would stand in her doorway looking down at the sparkling water of the loch and wishing that the weather would break. 'A storm would drive them all off the hill-side,' she would sigh, searching the sky for signs of bad weather. But the sky stayed blue and the sun shone as brightly each day as on the day before.

  'I wish I could make a storm!' said Morag, exasperated, one morning as she looked out on another cloudless day. The words were hardly out of her mouth before the thought came to her that she knew where to get the answer to her wish.

  There was a little old black cupboard built into the wall of her kitchen, and that cupboard had belonged to her grandmother. Inside it were things that only her grandmother knew about and no one else had ever dared to look at or to touch. The answer to her wish was inside that cupboard!

  Morag turned from the door and went into the kitchen. She took a key off its hook on the wall and stood looking down at the little old black cupboard. It had never been opened since her grandmother died and her heart beat loudly when she thought of what she would find inside it. Then she thought of all the noise and fuss that would soon be stirring on the hill-side and with trembling fingers she put the key in the lock and turned it.

  The door of the cupboard swung open and a smell came from inside it, a smell that Morag could not place. Her knees began to shake again but she bent down to the cupboard and lifted out a big book that took up nearly the whole of one shelf. It was bound in black leather and as she lifted it out she realized that it was the mustiness of this leather binding she had smelt when the door of the cupboard swung open. For all that, though, the book was in truly amazing condition for its great age.

  Morag had never seen this book before, though she had heard plenty about it, and it was with a feeling of great awe that she turned over the thick yellow pages written all over in her grandmother's hand. It was all in the Gaelic, of course, but Morag could read and write that language as well as speak it and once she had got used to the cramped style of the writing in t
he book she managed very well.

  There was nothing on the first page except

  Elizabeth MacLeod

  Her Book of Magic

  but every page after that was closely written on. Morag's eye skimmed over the heading of each page.

  A spell for the Raising of a Fair Crop. For the Finding of Things that be Lost, Ane Powerful Spell. Ane Charm for the Taking-away of Enchantment over Cattle-beasts

  she read—and so on. There seemed to be a spell for everything except the raising of a storm, but at last she found it and settled down to read it carefully.

  For the Raising of a Storm take first a piece of linen cloth that has been neither washed nor worn but is fair and clean, and of colour, white. Take also four pieces of green wool of equal length. A Powder of Spiders' Blood. Four each of the Jewel in the Forehead of a Toad. Four feathers from the breast of a white cock. And a Pitcher of Water from a kelpie's pool. Lay these things before you and do thus with them.

  So her grandmother had written.

  Morag stopped reading in dismay at this point. She could supply the cloth, the wool, the feathers and the water from the kelpie's pool, but where would she find a powder of spiders' blood and the forehead jewels of four toads?

  She rose from the table where she was sitting with the book of magic in front of her and went over to her grandmother's cupboard. Except for the space where the book had been, the three shelves of it were full of little brown stone jars and wooden boxes, each with a label on it. There was nothing for it but to look and see if one or more of these held what she needed, and she began to take them out carefully one by one.

  Some of the labels were hard to read, some she could not read at all and she was almost in despair when, right at the back of the shelf, she found a tiny jar labelled Ane Powder of the Blood of Spiders. A few minutes after this she picked up a small box that rattled and on the label of it she read The Forehead Jewels of Certain Toads.