Read Online The Selkie Bride by Melanie Jackson - Free Book Online

Fergus. Duncan’s uncle had been attempting to find the lost Spanish gold through divination. His notes suggested that had he not been killed by the finman, Herman would have been headed for a sacrificial death and mummification at the next dark of the moon.
    I am not an early riser, if I can avoid it. It is not that I am slothful or unnaturally indolent, but I see no need to be up before the sun when it is cold and I will need to make a fire just to be comfortable. Neither coal nor peat was cheap in Findloss, so I felt justified remaining in my bed until normal inclination told meto rise and rub the laziness from my eyes. But even for me, that morning was making an exceptionally late start. The sun was high in the narrow bit of scarred glass that I had forgotten to shutter before retiring to sleep.
    Looking at the situation optimistically, I decided I could skip lumpy breakfast porridge and just have an early lunch.
    I had previously resisted the temptation to pay a visit to the local Sithean Mor , a supposed abandoned faerie mound mentioned by the locals and in one of Fergus’s handwritten books, believed by the natives to be a tomb for a race of giants, though Fergus did not mention this in his notes. The mound is reachable on foot if one is undeterred by hard climbing and the possibility of broken bones and drowning. None of those things appealed to me in the least, but that morning I found myself sufficiently curious and willing to consider the existence of what had previously seemed impossible that I tied up a lunch and a small sketchpad and pencils in a large scarf, which I hung down my shoulder like a peddler’s sack, and started off on my adventure.
    First I stopped in at the post office, ostensibly to check for mail but really to mention where I was going. The post office is also our only shop. It is not a very impressive store, and Mistress MacLaren who runs it does not spend her time trying to lure customers into buying her multifarious wares withattractive displays or signs—mostly because she has no competition to lure customers from, and also because the wares are not all that diverse or alluring. What is it about a shopcounter that turns a mere table into an insurmountable obstacle one would never dream of crossing? And why does the person behind it seem more in charge than the one offering custom? I have often wondered if Mistress MacLaren had a stool concealed back there that she stood on whenever she heard the door, because she seemed much taller on one side of the counter than on the other.
    Mistress MacLaren was not a licensed grocer (or even a postmistress), which probably explained the lack of variety in her goods and why we sometimes ended up with wooden seeds in supposed raspberry jam. (I had never encountered counterfeit jam before and found the experience at once amusing and annoying). But, to be fair, I doubt she would have made enough money in commerce to pay the license fees the government required, so we were grateful for whatever she carried. My main purchases were oats and eggs. Though as thrifty as any native, I had found it hard to do without certain things and so had asked my solicitor before I arrived to arrange for a shipment of a few luxuries, among them potatoes, dried apples for baking, fine milled flour, some sugar and a small amount of cinnamon. I don’t think Mistress MacLaren ever forgave me for buying these things from an outsider.
    To the villagers, I am slightly tainted by sinful worldliness because of where I was born. This also makes me foreign—as in, not a Scot—a fact for which I am to be pitied. If they were not themselves also transplants from several other villages, I should likely be completely ostracized, but none of us here can say we actually belong to Findloss. And frankly, I have the bestclaim, having been left one of the original residences by my late husband’s uncle. Perhaps they would have trusted me more if I had explained that my mother’s family was