"The constable they sent to see what has happened came back and said, weel, bar the dripping blood, it was a very accurate description"— he paused for effect—"of a nice Upland cow, chewing her cud in the bracken!"
We sailed down half the length of the loch before disembarking for a late lunch.
We met the car there and motored back through the Glen, observing nothing more sinister than a red fox in the road, who looked up startled, a small animal of some sort hanging limp in its jaws, as we zoomed around a curve.
He leapt for the side of the road and swarmed up the bank, swift as a shadow.
It was very late indeed when we finally staggered up the path to Mrs. Fiona's, but we clung together on the doorstep as Douglas groped for the key, still laughing over the events of the day.
It wasn't until we were undressing for bed that I remembered to mention the miniature henge on Lyndhia to Douglas. His fatigue vanished at once.
"Really? And you know where it is? How marvelous, Elsie!" He beamed and began rattling through his suitcase.
"What are you looking for?"
"The alarm clock," he replied, hauling it out.
"Whatever for?" I asked in astonishment.
"I want to be up in time to see them."
"Who?"
"The witches."
"Witches? Who told you there are witches?"
"The vicar," Douglas answered, clearly enjoying the joke.
"His housekeeper's one of them."
I thought of the dignified Mrs. Lindsay and snorted derisively.
"Don't be ridiculous!"
"Well, not witches, actually. There have been witches all over Scotland for hundreds of years—they burnt them till well into the eighteenth century—but this lot is really meant to be Druids, or something of the sort. I don't suppose it's actually a coven—not devil-worship, I don't mean. But the vicar said there was a local group that still observes rituals on the old sun-feast days. He can't afford to take too much interest in such goings-on, you see, because of his position, but he's much too curious a man to ignore it altogether, either. He didn't know where the ceremonies took place, but if there's a stone circle nearby, that must be it."
He rubbed his hands together in anticipation.
"What luck!"
Getting up once in the dark to go adventuring is a lark. Twice in two days smacks of masochism. No nice warm car with rugs and thermoses this time, either.
I stumbled sleepily up the hill behind Douglas, tripping over roots and stubbing my toes on stones. It was cold and misty, and I dug my hands deeper into the pockets of my cardigan.
One final push up over the crest of the hill, and the henge was before us, the stones barely visible in the somber light of predawn. Douglas stood stock-still, admiring them, while I subsided onto a convenient rock, panting.
"Beautiful," he murmured.
He crept silently to the outer edge of the ring, his shadowy figure disappearing among the larger shadows of the stones. Beautiful they were, and bloody eerie too.
I shivered, and not entirely from the cold. If whoever had made them had meant them to impress, they'd known what they were doing.
Douglas was back in a moment.
"No one here yet," he whispered suddenly from behind me, making me jump.
"Come on, I've found a place we can watch from."
The light was coming up from the east now, just a tinge of paler grey on the horizon, but enough to keep me from stumbling as Douglas led me through a gap he had found in some alder bushes near the top of the path.
There was a tiny clearing inside the clump of bushes, barely enough for the two of us to stand shoulder to shoulder. The path was clearly visible, though, and so was the interior of the stone circle, no more than twenty feet away.
Not for the first time, i wondered just what kind of work Douglas had done during the War. He certainly seemed to know a lot about maneuvering soundlessly in the dark.
Drowsy as I was, I wanted nothing more than to curl up under a cozy bush and go back to sleep. There wasn't room for that, though, so I continued to stand, peering down the steep path in search of oncoming Druids.
I was getting a crick in my back, and my feet ached, but it couldn't take long; the streak of light in the east had turned a pale pink, and I supposed it was less than half an hour 'til dawn.
The first one moved almost as silently as Douglas. There was only the faintest of rattles as her feet dislodged a pebble near the crest of the hill, and then the neat grey head rose silently into sight.
Mrs. Lindsay. So it was true, then. The vicar's housekeeper was sensibly dressed in tweed skirt and woolly coat, with a white bundle under one arm.
She disappeared behind one of the standing stones, quiet as a ghost.
They came quite quickly after that, in ones and twos and threes, with subdued giggles and whispers on the path that were quickly shushed as they came into sight of the circle.
I recognized a few. Here came Mrs. Buchanan, the village postmistress, blond hair freshly permed and the scent of Evening in Paris wafting strongly from its waves. I suppressed a laugh. So this was a modern-day Druid!
There were fifteen in all, and all women, ranging in age from Mrs. Lindsay's sixty-odd years to a young woman in her early twenties, whom I had seen pushing a pram round the shops two days before.
All of them were dressed for rough walking, with bundles beneath their arms. With a minimum of chat, they disappeared behind stones or bushes, emerging empty-handed and bare-armed, completely clad in white.
I caught the scent of laundry soap as one brushed by our clump of bushes, and recognized the garments as bedsheets, wrapped about the body and knotted at the shoulder.
They assembled outside the ring of stones, in a line from eldest to youngest, and stood in silence, waiting. The light in the east grew stronger.
As the sun edged its way above the horizon, the line of women began to move, walking slowly between two of the stones.
The leader took them directly to the center of the circle, and led them round and round, still moving slowly, stately as swans in a circular procession.
The leader suddenly stopped, raised her arms, and stepped into the center of the circle.
Raising her face toward the pair of eastern-most stones, she called out in a high voice. Not loud, but clear enough to be heard throughout the circle.
The still mist caught the words and made them echo, as though they came from all around, from the stones themselves.
Whatever the call was, it was echoed again by the dancers.
For dancers they now became. Not touching, but with arms outstretched toward each other, they bobbed and weaved, still moving in a circle. Suddenly the circle split in half. Seven of the dancers moved clockwise, still in a circular motion.
The others moved in the opposite direction. The two semicircles passed each other at increasing speeds, sometimes forming a complete circle, sometimes a double line.
And in the center, the leader stood stock-still, giving again and again that mournful high-pitched call, in a language long since dead.
They should have been ridiculous, and perhaps they were. A collection of women in bedsheets, many of them stout and far from agile, parading in circles on top of a hill. But the hair prickled on the back of my neck at the sound of their call.
They stopped as one, and turned to face the rising sun, standing in the form of two semicircles, with a path lying clear between the halves of the circle thus formed.
As the sun rose above the horizon, its light flooded between the eastern stones, knifed between the halves of the circle, and struck the great split stone on the opposite side of the henge.
The dancers stood for a moment, frozen in the shadows to either side of the beam of light. Then Mrs. Lindsay said something, in the same strange language, but this time in a speaking voice.
She pivoted and walked, back straight, iron- grey waves glinting in the sun, along the path of light.
Without a word, the dancers fell in step behind her. They passed one by one through the cleft in the main stone and disappeared in silence.
We crouched in the alders until the women, now laughing and chatting normally, had retrieved their clothes and set off in a group down the hill, headed for coffee at the
vicarage.
"Goodness!" I stretched, trying to get the kinks out of my legs and back.
"That was quite a sight, wasn't it?"
"Wonderful!" enthused Douglas.
"I wouldn't have missed it for the world." He slipped out of the bush like a snake, leaving me to disentangle myself while he cast about the interior of the circle, nose to the ground like a bloodhound.