The Runaway's Gold Read Free

now, do you?”
    Our queen’s Anglican Church of England, with its powerful bishops, was considered too similar to the Roman Church for most islanders’ independent spirit. In fact, it had been mostly driven from Scotland since the time me great-great-grandfatherwas born. But me Daa, he had to be different. His world was full of enemies—the fire-and-brimstone rule of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which we called “the Kirk,” at the top of his list, and me Midder the only exception. William Robertson, I heard our neighbors mutter, was a troublemaker—and a nonconformist of the worst kind.
    And he did
look
different, after all, with his high cheekbones and large jaw—features he claimed as royal, no matter how distantly they might be traced.
    As Daa herded the ewe past the table and through the door to the adjoining byre, I knew he had already calculated, to the pence, how much he could get for the extra wool she and her offspring would provide. And if he could mark the lambs as his own and then quickly return her to the scattald—the grazing area we shared with our neighbors—who would know they weren’t his own? It had always worked before.
    The croft house we leased from Wallace Marwick was a two-room rectangle and attached byre made of stones from the beginning of time and rafters salvaged from the wreck of the
Alice May
in 1667. The front room was dim, the air heavy with the earthen smell of peat burning in the fire in its center. Three snarling pigs rooted under our table, and when you looked up, you saw a ceiling of neatly stacked turf across a network of battens and ropes. The other wee room was for sleeping.
    On most nights we could easily listen to the sounds of the cows in the byre through a many-gapped wall of stone, but that night the wind roared and moaned.
    â€œCanna hear her,” Daa grumbled, eyeing the door.
    We hadn’t been seated at the table but a moment when he left to drag the ewe back inside.
    She was a Shetland, an ancient breed with a mixture of brown and white fleece, all of it hanging low to the ground and matted with burrs, nettles, and mud. She paced in the glow of the fire, bleating, panting, and soiling the cleanly swept floor as we made fast work of our shrinking ration of dried fish and oatcakes. John and I sat perched at the edge of our chairs, bellies churning, eyeing the plate in the center of the table where one last shriveled piece of cod remained.
    When it was clear the ewe was in trouble, Daa flipped her on her side by the fire, his stiff left leg awkwardly pointing straight ahead, his right bent beneath him. He smoothed his thick purple-and-red chapped hand over her belly as she thrashed and kicked, her stomach rising and falling in a violent rhythm.
    â€œSoli Deo Gloria,” I whispered as she wrenched her mud-caked neck and stared at me with the same wild-eyed look I remembered on me Midder’s face the night she struggled to bring our wee brother Michael into the world.
    Little light made it through the croft’s two windows of stretched lamb’s hide. Only the glow from two smoldering lamps of foul-smelling fish oil and the orange-red flames of peat made it possible to see what little remained of last season’s ling and cod hung by their tails from the rafters like a string of ghosts.
    â€œOoooo! Handsome Christopher’s eyes are so, so blue. Ann Peterson canna keep her eyes off him.” Nosy Catherine giggled from across the table, ignoring what we all knew—that Daa was once again up to no good.
    John’s right brow arched, his glinting eyes taunting me from across the table as Catherine prattled on. He knew—we all knew—it was he who stole the hearts on our side of the island. He who could focus his gaze on a lass’s face and make her feel like she and only she held the key to his heart.
    Catherine was seven, with a mouth that never stopped. I had nearly reached me fourteenth