Alwyn was a midwife in the village of Dunvegan on the isle of Skye. On December 24, 1880, she was called to the bedside of young Margaret Macfarland. It was Margaret’s first child and the girl barely showed her pregnancy, but still her husband had waited too long to get help, and Alwyn knew when she reached up inside the girl that the child was already dead. The baby, a boy, so all the more to be mourned, was turned backside down and seemed to have the cord wrapped around his neck. Alwyn had to cut him out of the mother to save her if it wasn’t too late, but the husband protested, not understanding or believing his son was dead and his wife soon would be. Alwyn gave him something to drink to calm him and reassured him she had done this before and that it was necessary to save his beloved wife’s life, but even so, the young Margaret died in this useless begetting, and the man, crazed, would have killed Alwyn then and there had he not been distracted by the cry of an owl and then dazed with grief.
Stillborn babes and mothers who died in childbed were not unheard of in the village, but this terrible event happened on Christmas Eve, and the husband had no other children or family to comfort him, he and Margaret being both orphans. No one grieved more for him than Alwyn herself, but there was nothing she could say, and certainly he would not have listened. That Christmas was a time for mourning and the entire village forgot to celebrate the other birth that was meant to give them joy even in the midst of just such troubles as these. And it was cold, colder than any Christmas that anyone, even the elders, could remember in the history of the village, and such a poor time, no one having quite enough to eat. Even those that barely knew the girl were ready to believe the husband that Alwyn was a witch and had done this thing for her own purposes. And even those who professed not to believe in witches and fairies couldn’t deny that there was the sound of human grief in the timbre of the wind in the woods at night, a constant crying that haunted the season.
Abel and James, Alwyn’s two sons, heard the odd whisper here, saw the furtive glance there, and they made plans to take their mother to the new world, coaxing work from reluctant villagers to earn their passage. They did not want to stay where they were shunned; they never dreamed the full extent of their danger.
The night of the spring solstice there was music everywhere and even the gods could not have sorted out the strands of supplication, despair or joyous delusion in the frenzied chorus. Alwyn’s voice surely joined the singing during the night, but by morning her voice was stilled, her strangled body already a part of the petrification of wood and stone and soil that throbbed a slow eternal life hidden in the mist.
In the mist they buried her, the two boys, now men, before her body could be found and burned as a witch, and they left no marker but marked the spot in their own hearts by the scent of the place, the smell and sound of running water not far off, and the shape of the light through the trees. Then they went to the river to drink, to pray and to love her fully before turning their minds to the sea voyage ahead of them. Each gathered his own memories to last a lifetime. Abel longed to keep her eyes, the deep, dark, loving eyes a mother turns on her first born, if ever so briefly. James struggled to resurrect the scent of her, a scent of herbs and earth. Each would find her alive and real beneath an old oak that lived half uprooted on the strength of a flat-topped boulder at the other side of the world, but she would choose James.