Page 14 of The Changeling

A stone baptismal font stood just inside the church, near the doorway into the belltower. It had been carved long ago with a chain of dancing skeletons, each holding hands with a man, woman or child, leading them towards the gaping mouth of a grave. All the skeletons were grinning. All the people were weeping.

Father Benedict called it the danse macabre, and said doubtfully that it was a good thing, surely, for us all to be reminded that one day we must die.

As if to balance out the terror of this dance of death, he had painted smiling saints and singing angels on long wooden panels along each side of the church. He loved animals as much as me, so he chose saints known for their connections to beasts. The Virgin Mary with a tiny unicorn resting its head in her lap, St Anthony with his pet pig, St Cuthbert with two otters warming his feet, St Brigid with a great white wolf, St Francis with a sparrow on his hand. Underneath, Father Benedict had painted words on a long scroll.

Let every creature who is in heaven or upon the earth, in the

sea or in the depth of the abyss, render praise unto thee.

The panels were not yet finished. Like his book of hours, it seemed a task Father Benedict would take a lifetime to complete. Every Sunday when we went to church we would find something new added – a red-breasted robin, a butterfly with spots like eyes, an angel playing the bagpipes. All the children loved Father Benedict’s paintings. It gave us something to look at while he chanted his incomprehensible prayers, and made it easier for us to stand still for so long.

Lord Patrick did not approve, however. He said it smacked of idolatry. And, five years later, when Pastor Knox’s fiery sermons ignited riots in Edinburgh and St Andrews, Lord Patrick was the one who threw stones at our stained-glass window and smashed it to bits. Father Benedict was turned out of his cottage, where he had lived for so many years, and driven away. A new preacher came, named Pastor Malison. He had an immense grey beard and only ever wore black, unlike the gaudily embroidered vestments Father Benedict wore, in shades of meadow-green, rose-pink, wine-red and violet-blue. Pastor Malison ordered the men of the parish to tear down the paintings of angels and saints. When they demurred, he got an axe and attacked the face of the Virgin Mary. I was not the only one to cry. Sullenly the men took down the wooden panels, and Pastor Malison ordered them burned.

‘How like a man!’ Nan said. ‘What harm does a wee beauty do?’

She marched up to where he stood, watching the painted saints burn, and said angrily, ‘Are you daft? What right have you got to smash up our church?’

‘It’s my church now,’ Pastor Malison said.

‘That’s where you’re wrong, you old gowk! The church is the people, as the Bible itself says, and we are its living stones.’

‘Hold your tongue! As the twelfth verse of the second chapter of the First Epistle to Timothy declares, I suffer not a woman to teach nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.’

‘What bollocks!’ Nan retorted.

He shook a fist at her. ‘You are an impudent nag! I shall have the scold’s bridle locked on your head so that you learn to keep that tongue still.’

‘I am no’ a horse,’ Nan answered. ‘Though you look like a horse’s arse with that ridiculous beard of yours. Dinna you ken how to use a brush or comb?’

‘I’ll have you ducked in the river!’

‘It’s you that should be ducked. From the smell of you, I’d wager it’s been a wee while since you last saw a tub of water!’

Lord George had to intervene. In the end, Nan was not ducked, or made to sit on the new stool of repentance that Pastor Malison had installed in the church. She did, however, have to apologise and promise to hold her tongue in future. ‘I am sorry if I offended you by saying you smelt,’ she said. ‘I thought maybe you dinna realise.’

Pastor Malison glowered at her, and she added sweetly, ‘I’ll bring you some of my honey soap next time I come.’

That night, as she sat on her stool stirring our supper, water began to pour from her hair and clothes, bubbling out of her mouth, spreading about her feet.

‘Nan!’ I screamed and flew to her, flinging my arms about her.

‘What’s wrong, hinny?’ she asked, gathering me close.

But I could not hold onto her; she was sinking away into the sea. Calling her name, I tried to drag her to safety. Then the vision passed, and I was standing once more in our kitchen, sobbing and pulling at Nan’s skirt, which was dry as a bone.

‘You were drowning,’ I cried.

She drew me onto her lap, holding me close, neither of us talking.

Then she sighed. ‘Och aye, death comes to us all in time. I admit I’d rather it wasna by drowning – I always thought that would be a hard way to go. But we canna command the day or way of our going, just as we canna command when and where we are born. Come now, hinny, hop up and let me stir the pottage, else it’ll burn.’

After that, Nan was scrupulously polite to Pastor Malison, though she could not stop rolling her eyes sometimes. When we gathered rowan berries after the first frost, we did not string them into necklaces, but made tiny sun-crosses and hid them in our pockets. At Christmastide, there was no midnight mass and no wassailing, though Lord George defiantly held the traditional Yule feast at Inchbrakie.

Sorcha and I were then thirteen years old. She was more than a full head taller than me, rosy and sturdy, while I stayed small and slender and pale. We had both been given work at Inchbrakie, Sorcha in the women’s weaving room and me in the kitchen. I had made friends with the castle cook, Master McGregor, who did not seem to mind that I had to stand on a stool to stir the soup and that I couldn’t carry a tray, because of my stick.

He had an old cookbook filled with magical-sounding recipes. ‘To make a dish of snow’, one was called. ‘To make a castle spun of sugar’ was another. Master McGregor told me that such dishes were made by master cooks for princes, and enchanted me with descriptions of pies that released songbirds when cut, roast peacocks served with iridescent feathers intact, and – my favourite – a unicorn with a long horn made from gilded marzipan.

My family gave me gifts to celebrate my new status as one of the laird’s cooks. Mam made a new girdle for me with a good sharp knife in a sheath, and a drawstring pocket embroidered with elder-flowers and wild roses to carry the coins I would now earn. Sorcha whittled me a long-handled spoon from rowan, and Nan presented me with a little iron cauldron with three clawed feet and a lid with an acorn handle.