The Kelpie's Pearls

by Mollie Hunter

  She opened both cautiously. The spiders' blood was a dark brown powder, and the jewels looked to her like tiny, yellowish-brown stones. Greatly relieved that she could go on with the spell now that she had all the things she needed, she went back to the book.

  Grind small the jewels into the spiders' blood, and make with this a paste, using the water from the kelpie's pool. Take then the four white feathers and cover them with this paste, and wrap each feather into a corner of the white cloth, tying each tightly in its place with a piece of the green wool. Take then this cloth between midnight and dawn of the day the storm is desired to begin to a boundary stone where the land of three lairds meet, and lay it on the boundary stone. And with a branch of rowan tree beat the cloth as it lies on the boundary stone, all the time saying,

  I beat this charm upon this stane,

  To raise the wind, to bring the rain,

  They shall not lie till I please again.

  Morag raised her head and whispered the words of the rhyme to herself and she shivered, but it was excitement that shook her now instead of the fear that had gripped her before. Her fingers tingled where they touched the book of magic, and it seemed to her that the words on its yellow pages had begun to glow as if they had been traced there by a fiery pen that had left them still smouldering through all the years they had lain in the little old black cupboard.

  She looked down at the writing below the rhyme.

  When cloth has been beaten and the spell cast, bury the cloth on the west side of the boundary stone and cast the rowan branch into running water, saying,

  Rowan-tree, harm not me,

  On my foes this storm shall be.

  Within one hour from sunrise after this the storm shall break and shall continue for three days thereafter, and shall cease at dawn on the fourth day.

  And I, Elizabeth MacLeod, being a white witch who has harmed no one with her power, do conjure any who read this book not to cast this spell for destruction and malice, but only for the protection of the weak. And if they do as I command, the storm will pass over and above them and they will receive no harm from it. But whoso casts this spell in malice, my curse shall fall on them and they will be destroyed in the storm that will arise from the spell.

  'Well, that's plain enough,' said Morag as she read this warning. 'It's lucky for me my conscience is dear!'

  Just then she heard Torquil's footsteps outside at the back of the house as he arrived to go about his work. Quietly she closed the book, put it back on the shelf with the little jar and the box and locked the cupboard again. Then she filled the kettle and put it on the fire and when Torquil came in she was sitting waiting for him with the tea-pot ready at her elbow.

  First of all she gave him a chance to drink his tea. Then, 'Torquil,' she said, 'I have found a way to get rid of all those people that are destroying the peace of the hill-side.'

  Torquil gave her a serious look and asked, 'And how can you do that, Mistress Morag?'

  Now Morag had already made up her mind not to tell him this because she was not sure yet that she could make the spell exactly as it said in her grandmother's book and she knew that the smallest thing wrong with a spell means it will not work.

  'Time enough to say when it is done,' she told him, 'but if my plan works it means you will not be able to come up here for the next three days.'

  'Yes I can, I'm still on my school holidays,' said Torquil.

  'You will not be able to come because of what I am going to do,' Morag explained.

  'But my animals,' he protested. 'Who will feed them?'

  'I will,' Morag said. 'No harm will come to them, Torquil. No harm will come to anyone, I promise you.'

  Torquil looked away from her, not saying a word. He had grown up a great deal in the past few weeks the way boys do all of a sudden when they are twelve or so, and he was beginning to understand that he was the only one who could see the two sides of the argument about Morag.

  He knew very well that there really was a kelpie in the pool because he had seen it for himself. He knew very well also that strange beings such as the kelpie have strange powers and so he saw no reason to doubt Morag's story that he had brought the monster up for her to see. And he knew best of all that there was no witchcraft about the gift of King Solomon's Ring that he shared with her. Still, he understood how strange the whole business must appear to those who did not know her as he did. He began to try to explain this to Morag but she held up her hand to silence him.

  'Look at me, Torquil,' she commanded.

  Torquil looked up and met her eyes. They were old eyes with many lines and wrinkles round them, but old and tired as they were there was a light in them that could not be mistaken for anything else but the light of truth.

  'I am not a witch whatever they say,' Morag said quietly. 'Do you believe me, Torquil?'

  'Of course I believe you,' said he, looking at that steadfast light. But to himself he could not help adding with a sigh, 'But I am the only one that does.'

  He went away soon afterwards and thinking of his sad and troubled face Morag sighed too as she collected the dishes and washed them. When everything was neatly back in its place she went to the little black cupboard again. She unlocked the door, took her grandmother's book from the shelf and put it on the kitchen table. Then she opened it at the proper place and was about to sit down to read the words of the spell again when there came a knocking at her front door, a knocking that grew louder and louder till it shook the house and nearly made her die of fright.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Dam and the Spell

  IT was Alasdair the trapper who was doing all the knock-knock-knocking on Morag's front door and it was good fortune for Morag that she got her wits back in time to open it to him before it was broken in with the weight of his fists on it.

  'Go away, Alasdair,' she said as soon as she saw who it was. 'I'm busy. I'm very busy.'

  She started to close the door but Alasdair said 'I must talk to you, mistress. Let me come in.'

  This put Morag in a worse state of nerves than ever. 'You can't come in—no one can come in!' she cried.

  'That's where you are wrong,' snarled the Trapper and stuck his foot in the door. Morag cried out in alarm at this and shut the door hard on his foot. The Trapper drew it back from the door with a howl of pain and Morag seized her chance to bang the door properly shut. She locked the door and bolted it, and still shaking with the fright he had given her, she went to the window and watched the Trapper limping away from the house.

  At the burn he stopped for a minute and stared at the kelpie's pool. Then he turned and shook an angry fist at her before he went on across the burn and down the hill. Morag shrank back from the window when he shook his fist but she was not too frightened to notice that Alasdair had none of his trapping gear with him, and if he was not out on his trapping rounds why had he come to her house?

  Well, wondering only makes your head big, as they say, and Morag was too sensible to waste time puzzling over questions that had no answer and so without any more loss of time she turned from the window and went back to her grandmother's book of magic. First of all she had to collect all the things she needed to make the spell. She went to her linen-chest and took from it a clean white linen napkin that had never been washed or used since the day it was made. She found green wool in her work-basket and then collected the toad-jewels and the spiders' blood from her grandmother's cupboard. Then she stepped cautiously outside the back door and picked up the white cock so quickly that he had hardly time to realize he had left the ground before she had plucked four white feathers from his breast. Last of all she fetched a pitcher of water from the pailful she had drawn the night before from the kelpie's pool, and the stone bowl called a 'knocking-stone' that she used for grinding the meal for her porridge.

  Then, just as if she was going to do a baking, she laid all these things handy at one end of the kitchen table, put the book at the other end and the knocking-stone in the middle and began to make t
he spell.

  It is important for everything about a spell to be performed in its proper order and so she was very careful to follow exactly the instructions in the book of magic. She sprinkled the powder of spiders' blood into the knocking-stone, dropped in four of the toad-jewels and ground them till they were all mixed together in a fine powder. On to this she measured water from the pitcher till she had enough in the knocking-stone to mix the powder to a paste.

  When this was done she cut the green wool into four equal lengths and spread out the white cloth. Then she dipped the four white feathers into the knocking-stone. When they were coated evenly with the paste she laid them on the corners of the cloth, wrapped the corners round them and tied each one tightly into place with a piece of green wool, and the charm was made.

  Morag worked slowly, but even so it was still early in the day when she finished. However, with all the excitement of it she was tired as if she had done a hard day's work and so she sat down to rest in her rocking-chair in front of the fire. She would need all her strength later, she knew, for the boundary stone where the land of three lairds met was four miles away and that is a long walk for an old woman at night and over rough hill ground.

  For the rest of the day, then, Morag rocked and knitted and sometimes slept a little as old people do. People came to the door several times and knocked and called but she gave them no answer. None of the knocking was Alasdair's heavy thundering on her door and as the day wore on she decided she must have seen the last of him and his wild schemes for getting the kelpie's pearls. But in this, as she had been in wearing the pearls and in mentioning the monster, Morag was mistaken.

  All this time, you see, that she had been 'in the headlines' as the newspaper-men call it, Alasdair had never stopped thinking about the pearls and wondering how to get hold of them. It was a problem all right! No man in his senses would go into that pool again, and even if two or three men could work something out between them, sharing the risk meant sharing the profit. And anyway, who would take the first plunge?

  'Not me!' thought Alasdair, shivering at the memory of the kelpie's great hooves plunging down to his head.

  Of course, he could take a gun with him but even as he thought this Alasdair knew it was just as daft to think a bullet could kill the kelpie. A silver bullet? Well, they said you couldn't kill a witch except with a silver bullet, but a witch was still flesh and blood whereas a kelpie—

  'Ach, there's no such thing as a kelpie!' Alasdair roared when he came to this point in his thinking.

  And yet he was afraid to try for the pearls again because of the kelpie! It just didn't make sense.

  The whole thing was driving him mad and that was why, on the same day that Morag decided to unlock her grandmother's cupboard (though he wasn't to know that, of course), he made up his mind to go and see her again and see if he couldn't tempt her to get the pearls for him.

  'I'd share them with her,' he said, but this was a lie. The Trapper was a bad-hearted man and he had no intention of sharing the pearls with anyone.

  However, the scheme was all ready on the tip of his tongue to tell to Morag when she shut the door on his foot and left him outside the house howling with pain. If looks could have killed, then Morag would surely have dropped stone dead at the expression on Alasdair's face. But Morag was safe inside her house and there was nothing left for Alasdair to do but to limp away down the hill muttering angrily to himself, and that was what he did.

  It was when he paused at the burn to glare at the kelpie's pool that the idea came to him that made him turn and shake his fist at Morag watching him from her window. Bad man or no, he was still a good trapper with his eyes open to all the signs of the weather and he noticed then that the water in the burn was very low with the lack of rain on the hill that summer. It struck him suddenly that if he could dam the burn at a point further up than the kelpie's pool, the water in it would drain off and leave it dry for him to collect the pearls!

  'And the kelpie wouldn't be there!' he cried. 'It can only live in water!'

  It was the answer to his problem and he ran all the rest of the way to the bothy where he kept his tools and collected a spade for digging, and some food. Back he went to the burn again full of his plans and eager to start work, and was greatly put out to find a tent with four men beside it by the very part of the burn he meant to dam. Two of the men were preparing a meal and another one was watching the loch through a pair of binoculars. The fourth one had a mirror in his hand and he was moving it up and down in the sun's rays so that it sent flashes back and forward.

  The flashing mirror puzzled Alasdair. He looked round to see the reason for it and further along the hillside he saw the white dot of another tent. There were flashes coming from this one too, and presently he realized that the man with the mirror was signalling to someone at the other tent and getting a message back in me same way. Then the man with the binoculars turned to him and he recognized the professor who was leading the scientific party to find the monster, and it came to him that the tents were their observation posts for watching the loch.

  This was a great blow. If he started damming the burn now all sorts of awkward questions would be asked. Scowling, he sat down behind a big rock to think of what he could do next.

  From all he had heard, the professor's party meant to spend the whole summer on their investigations, and if he waited till they were gone for good someone might get the pearls before him, for with all the fuss about Morag and the kelpie someone would be sure to suggest the idea of draining the pool eventually.

  No, decided Alasdair, the thing would have to be done now while only Morag and he knew about the pearls. But it would have to be done after nightfall when the professor and his men were asleep.

  He settled himself down to watch and wait. From time to time he glanced towards Morag's cottage further down the burn but there was no sign of life from it. There was very little stir in the camp either. The men took turns at signalling and scanning the loch with binoculars but he soon got tired of watching this. The hot sun on the back of his neck and the murmuring of bees among the small moorland flowers made him feel drowsy. He yawned and thought to himself that there was nothing to be gained by staying awake. He lay back on the warm grass, his eyelids drooped, and he was asleep.

  All over the hill-side the summer sun held everything in its sleepy haze. Even the chattering noise of the sightseers round Morag's house was hushed, and in the house itself Morag slept the light sleep of old people. And so the day crept on towards the testing time of night when Alasdair would begin to build his dam and Morag would set out to cast her spell, each of them thinking that what they had to do would be a race against time and neither of them knowing it would be a race against one another.

  It was as dark as it was likely to be that night when Morag and Alasdair awoke, for it is never really true dark so far north in the summer. However late it is there is always a faint greenish glow on the horizon—a sort of false dawn that lasts the whole night through. The dawn, however, is about four o'clock at that time of the year, and when Morag looked at her grandfather clock and Alasdair at the watch in his waistcoat pocket, each of them reckoned that they had time to do what they had to do before sunrise.

  Alasdair stood up behind his rock and Morag went to the door of her cottage. There were no lights in the campers' tents, no sign of life anywhere.

  'I am the only person awake on the hill-side,' thought Morag.

  'I am the only person awake on the hill-side,' thought Alasdair, and he rolled up his sleeves to start the job of building the dam.

  Morag went back into her house. She poured herself a cup of soup from the pot simmering gently on the hob and quickly drank it down. Then she took the charm from the table where it had lain all day, put her shawl over her head and went out. The boundary stone lay on the same side of the burn as her house but first she had to go down to the burn to get a switch off the rowan-tree with which to beat the charm. She broke a thin light branch from the tre
e beside the kelpie's pool then turned and set off on her long walk to the boundary stone.

  There was no path to the stone and it was rough going over the springy stems of the heather and through waist-high bracken. Morag had expected this, of course. She had allowed herself enough time to take things slowly and the excitement of the business in hand held her spirits up as she tramped along, but for all that she was soon foot-sore and weary. However, she reached the boundary stone at last, took the charm from her pocket, laid it on the stone and raised the rowan stick.

  She was a queer figure standing there all alone on the dark slope of the hill-side—a small bent old woman with wisps of white hair sticking out from the black shawl round her head, the stick raised high and the charm glimmering white on the stone in front of her.

  But Morag was not thinking of the way she looked. She was thinking of the thing she had to do, and now there was a fear on her that she could not name and she felt very lonely and very old. But there could be no turning back now. To leave a spell half-finished is a dangerous thing, as she knew. She clenched her fist on the stick, brought it down with a sharp smack on the cloth and cried,

  'I beat this charm upon this stane,

  To raise the wind and bring the rain,

  They shall not lie till I please again.'

  Whack! Whack! went the stick on the cloth as she spoke, and in the quietness of the night the blows sounded loud and clear.

  Morag stopped, panting with the effort, and lifted the cloth off the stone. With the heel of her shoe and the point of the rowan stick she scraped a hole in the ground on the west side of the boundary stone, dropped the charm in and covered it up. Now there was only the stick to be cast away into running water and the spell would be finished.

  'I'll throw it in the burn beside the house,' Morag decided.