“Now you might ask, what was it that filled Colin MacQuiddy with such gall? He could not open his gob to shovel in a spoonful of porridge but that sour words must fall out first, no matter how fast he ate. Perhaps it was the heavy responsibility on his shoulders. Perhaps his teeth were a misery to him, or a bunion on his big toe, or worry for a brither who went to sea as a boy. But the truth is far stranger, and it starts with a simple fact. MacQuiddy had no wife and no bairns of his own to order about, you see, and so he must make do with the servants and other innocent wee lasses as chanced to come across him unawares.”

Horace grunted in pain and then cleared his throat in embarrassment. Without interrupting her story Jennet fed him a spoonful of the medicine Hannah had prepared, strong smelling and dark.

“The truth of it was, MacQuiddy should have found a wife without doing so much as flicking a finger. He was aye bonnie as a young man, from a good Carryckton family, and he served the earl himself in a position of trust. He should have had a wife, and he could have had a wife, except—”

At the other end of the bed Hannah had opened a vial and a smell filled the room, slightly bitter and still sweet. Horace tensed and tried to sit up, but Jennet put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down again.

Beneath the grime his skin was milky white. “Except?” he croaked.

“There's always an except,” Hannah volunteered in the calmest of voices.

“Aye, that's true.” Jennet spread her hands out on her lap. “You see, in the days when he was young, before he came to serve at Carryckcastle and long before he began his life's work of making wee lasses miserable, it fell to MacQuiddy to drive the cows in from the field to the milkmaids. Now one summer as he was coming along with the cows at gloaming, he chanced to spy a wee creature all clad in green, and with long yellow hair like gold, coming toward him.”

Hardwork's expression was blank with wonder. “A fairy?”

“Aye, a fairy, a bonnie fairy no bigger than a lass of three years—but still a woman grown, in her body and face. Fair beautiful she was, but with something wild in her eye, something fierce that was hard to look at. MacQuiddy couldna describe it with words, try as he might.

“I havena told you yet that in his youth MacQuiddy was far and wide the tallest of all the lads and men alike, long and thin as a stick bug, so very tall that the wee fairy reached only to his knee. She had to put her head back to look him in the face. And she raised up her voice, high and unearthly it was, and she looked MacQuiddy right in the eye and she called up to him as from the bottom of a well. ‘Colin MacQuiddy! I'm looking for Colin MacQuiddy!'

“Now, everybody knows that the polite thing to do when a body calls your name is to stop and greet them, fairy or no. But MacQuiddy lost his nerve and he ran away, right into the milking barn and shut the door behind himself with a crash.

“He could hardly speak for trembling, but when he finally found the words to tell the tale, the milkmaids laughed at him. It was young Gelleys Ballentyne who told him. ‘Why, Colin MacQuiddy,' said she with a wink and a smile, ‘that's a wife come for you this night. You must go and take her hand.'

“‘A wife!' cried MacQuiddy. ‘May the good Lord keep me from such a wee wife as that!' And he told everyone later that he was in such a fear that the hairs stood up on the back of his neck like the bristles on a hog. All the time he stood there trembling the fairy was outside calling him by name, you understand, for she had set her eyes on MacQuiddy for a husband. He waited and waited for her to go, and when he could wait no longer the fairy followed him back home and then—believe it or not—Colin MacQuiddy closed the door in her face.”

Jennet looked sternly first at Horace and then at Hardwork. Horace was sweating openly, his face tight with pain, so it fell to Hardwork to ask the question.

“Is it wrong to close the door on a fairy?”

At that Jennet straightened her back and put a hand to her breast. “I can see you've no had the pleasure,” she said. “Listen then and I'll tell you what happened. The wee folk are proud creatures and sly too, and spiteful when they've been slighted.”

The boy leaned forward, but Horace had closed his eyes, and the muscles in his neck and jaw convulsed alarmingly.

Jennet said, “MacQuiddy never found a wife who would have him. Can you imagine it? No lass would have the MacQuiddy.”

“For fear of the fairy?” asked Hardwork.

“Do you think? Perhaps, for fairies are aye jealous creatures. But if that was the revenge she took on him, it wasna enough to satisfy her hurt pride. It was a year or more before anybody took note, but starting on the day MacQuiddy turned away his fairy bride, he began to get smaller. Just a wee bit every year,” she added quickly, holding up her fingers to show them. “But nothing he did would stop it. Nothing he ate or drank, no prayers he might say, no teas or cures or charms, year in and year out he grew a wee bit shorter.

“When I was a girl he was a small man, and when I was a young woman I could look him in the eye. On the day I married I could look down on his bald head and count the freckles there.”

She looked Hardwork directly in the eye. “One hundred and three there were, exactly. And the smaller MacQuiddy grew, the worse his temper. Gelleys the washerwoman was the only one wha would speak the truth to him. She would raise her finger—to MacQuiddy!—and tell him what he didna want to hear.

“‘You called it doon on your own sorry heid,' she told him. ‘The night you shut the door on your bride.' And what a temper would be on him then, enough to make the moon hide in the sky.