Free Haunt Me Still by Jennifer Lee Carrell Page A

with wind chimes that gave the room its voice, from a high silvery ring to a rich dark bass. A wall fountain added the quiet laughter of water. Before a small fireplace stood two comfortable armchairs and a small table, and an antique carved chest sat beneath the hill-filled window. Other than that, the room was empty of furniture.
    It was the chest that riveted my attention. Centered atop it sat an immense silver bowl, flanked on one side by a small rectangular standing mirror in an ornate carved frame, the glass spotted and dim with age. On the other side lay a knife with a black hilt and strange undulating whorls running through the steel of the blade. From even a short distance, it looked exactly like the knife I’d found on the hill. Had Ben given it to Lady Nairn?
    I stepped through the room and bent close. Only then could I see that this knife had no runes running down the blade, and its edge was rounded and smooth. Oddly thick, too. It had never been honed.
    “You’ve found my inner sanctum,” said Lady Nairn over my shoulder, and I jumped. “The pieces at the heart of our collection. Cauldron, mirror, and blade. The inspiration for the production, too. The cauldron is Iron Age Celtic. At least the original is—dug up out of a bog in the Highlands in the eighteenth century. Too fragile for use, though, so what you see is a reproduction. The mirror is Elizabethan. Said to have belonged to the King’s Men.”
    “And the knife?” I asked, my breath tight in my throat.
    “A modern copy.”
    “Of what?”
    “Of one found on the hill.”
    “Tell me about it,” I said.
    She was watching me as if she could see through me to the past and maybe also the future. “I had it made for the stage—”
    “The original.”
    Crossing to the chest, she set it in my hand and motioned me to one of the armchairs by the little fireplace. Turning to sit, I saw on a hook by the door a shimmering length of blue silk, scaled like a dragon. Knife in hand, I stared at it as if at a ghost.
    “Ellen Terry’s Lady M costume,” said Lady Nairn with some amusement. “Or an approximation thereof. Made of silk embroidered with beetle wings. How perfect is that, for a queen who was a witch in all but name? Though perhaps the beetles would disagree.”
    I was still staring at it, openmouthed, remembering the peculiar dry pattering sound of the gown over the body on the hill, when she started her tale. The knife had been found at the end of the eighteenth century, she said, during the first archaeological dig on the hill. It had not turned up in a spadeful of earth, though. Instead, it had been plucked, early one morning, from the grass, where it lay gleaming in the weak sun. How it got there was never discovered. Even to amateur eyes, though, it was clearly ancient, fitted with a black hilt and etched with letters no one could read.
    “What happened to it?” I asked, my mouth dry. “Evil rumors gathered around it—mostly whispers that it was the blade that had killed Macbeth. The real one. Grim, but it made it valuable. For nearly fifty years, it passed from father to son, as one of the great treasures of the house. Then it was sold to pay a gambling debt. Soon after that, the family very nearly lost the entire estate.”
    She cleared her throat. “Coincidence, no doubt, though not everyone thought so. By the time a son of the house tried to trace the knife, however, it had passed beyond reach. Then, in 1857, William Nairn, my husband’s great-great-grandfather and the paterfamilias at the time, claimed to have found it, once again, just lying in the grass on the hilltop. This raised some eyebrows—not least his wife’s—even at the time, but he never wavered in his story.
    “However he came by the knife, thereafter he would not let it out of his sight. By the following summer, when his son—my husband’s great-grandfather—was born, the knife seemed to have taken an uncanny hold over him that not even a new child could