Dark Possession by Carol Goodman

Author:Carol Goodman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448175482
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I LOOKED AROUND the square again—at the sign on the church door and the contraption in front of the market cross. It was a wooden T, the top bar made from two long pieces of wood with a large hole in the center and two smaller holes on either side. I recognized it from history books as a pillory for holding prisoners and humiliating them in public. The sign on the church door announced a kirk session to investigate charges of witchcraft. We hadn’t wandered into a plague-ridden village: we’d wandered into one in the throes of a seventeenth-century witch hunt. No wonder everyone was hiding behind locked doors. However, Jeannie’s tirade drew a few cautious souls out of their homes to see what was going on. Meanwhile, William was stumbling for an explanation for why he’d skipped out on his fiancée (whose existence he’d conveniently forgotten to mention last night) and disappeared for seven years.

“Jeannie, I was kidnapped the night before our wedding by …” I saw a frantic look in his eyes. Did he dare tell his fiancée and the assembled townspeople that he’d been taken by fairies? Did the citizens of old Scotland still believe in fairies?

“ … by pirates,” William concluded.

“Pirates?” Jeannie echoed. “Do ye think I’m daft, William Duffy, that I’d believe sech a story?”

William looked unsure of how to answer that question, so I stepped in for him.

“Actually, pirates were quite active in the … er … right about now. The Barbary corsairs were—are— still raiding European coastal settlements, more commonly in Spain, France, and Italy but also in England, Ireland, and Scotland, well into the late seventeenth century. In fact, in 1631, a Dutch corsair captured nearly an entire village in Ireland and sent them to North Africa, where most lived out the rest of their lives as galley slaves or in harems—”

“Aye,” William interrupted, “that’s where I found this poor lass, enslaved in a sultan’s harem. So, you see, she can’t be the girl you spoke of who married Malcolm Brodie. I was about to be slain when she came to my rescue and pleaded for my life. Only because she was the sultan’s favorite was she successful. Together we escaped and came back here!”

I wasn’t sure that I relished being made a harem slave, even in a fictional account. Fortunately, I had recently reread a Dahlia LaMotte book called The Barbary Beast, in which an Irish girl was abducted by an English corsair who sold her into a sultan’s harem. I recalled the details of the plot now to give me a more active—and virtuous—role.

“Yes, I was sold into a sultan’s harem, but I was able to fend off the sultan’s advances by telling him part of a story each night, which again and again I left unfinished, with the promise that I would tell him the end of the tale the next night if he, er, left me alone. I did this for one hundred nights, until I was

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