The Runaway's Gold by Emilie Burack Page B

the Earl of Cummingsburgh himself. For nearly fifty years he had led with an iron fist, preaching sermons each week that droned on and on for three hours a sitting, sometimes even longer.
    According to Gutcher, the reverend had at one time been a man of great stature, but for as long as I’d been alive his ancient body seemed as weathered and crooked as the driftwood stauf he grasped. His skin was gray and lifeless, as if it hadn’t seen much sun of late, and the white around his green eyes was bloodshot with a yellow tinge and deeply set under lids of flaking, wrinkled skin. Wild strands of hair crawled from his nostrils and rough, scaly ears, and his hair and beard were pure white except for the yellow pipe stains above and below his lips.
    He groaned as he stood and then steadied himself on his stauf. “Should you not be back with your Godless family tending to the destruction from the Lord Almighty’s fierce gale?”
    Panicked, I attempted to dart back to the path, only to feel his clawlike fingers grab fast to me arm. As leader of the Kirk,Reverend Sill was also the person responsible for what he called “all matters of morality and discipline.”
    â€œIt is no secret your father’s views of the Kirk,” he said, pulling me back toward a tall, woven reed basket we Shetlanders call a “kishie,” which sat beside him. “Prefers the mighty bishops of the Church of England to any
lowly
gathering of the Presbytery, does he not? And yet he is regularly in attendance at services.”
    Me face grew hot as I tried to pull meself free.
    â€œAye—me Midder saw to it.” And she had, knowing as we all did that in times of desperation the Kirk was the only source of charity.
    â€œHmmph,” he grunted. “You would serve your Daa well to remind him that it is not Queen Victoria and her ways that we, the polluted worms of this earth, are to worship. Men are not as beasts! And when life as we know it comes to an end, it is the saints who will be taken from the sinners!”
    I glared at him, unable to hold me tongue, remembering the shame and humiliation he had already cast upon me family.
    â€œMe Midder was a Godly woman. Of that there is no doubt.”
    â€œShe disgraced the parish!” His faced turned crimson as he slowly enunciated each word.
    I clenched me teeth, recalling the anguish in her kind, beautiful face as she stood, doing penance, before the parish each Sunday for four months, our neighbors’ unforgiving eyes tearing her reputation to shreds. An ancient punishment the likesof which no islander outside our parish had been asked to endure in decades. But so convinced was Reverend Sill that the Devil was lurking in our midst that he saw to it no curse went without the severest of punishments.
    â€œMrs. Peterson is a meddler and a gossip,” I blurted, the memory of that day two years before flooding back to me.
    Reverend Sill raised an eyebrow, cocking his head ever so slightly to the right. “Perhaps. Nevertheless, for your Midder to curse her was Satan’s work. The charge of blasphemy could not—would not—go without punishment. On this I have always been clear.”
    I dropped me eyes, recalling how Midder lost her temper when Mrs. Peterson came nosing about, catching her planting on the Sabbath. How she knew she was late in sowing the cabbages, having spent the week weaving cloth to help cover the rent. Time was running out and she hadn’t dared wait.
    â€œI see what you’re up to,” Mrs. Peterson had shouted, strutting down the path.
    Me Midder, she was a patient woman—as patient as any I’d known. But that day she didn’t hold back.
    â€œMay the Devil take your meddlin’ soul from our croft!” she cried.
    And that was all Agnes Peterson needed to hear.
    By sundown she’d reported Midder to Reverend Sill, with the punishment for blasphemy and breaking the Sabbath set by