As Gideon Baxter refused to set foot in the kirk, alleging that he was damned, the Cotho elders felt obliged to report him to the Overseers. Students were sent on Sundays to take his duties, and as no one could be induced to settle at Cotho he was allowed to live on in the manse with the hope he might recover his reason. He was harmless, except for his conviction that Benjamin was a changeling and, as such, should be exposed in some silent place where the fairies would find him and carry him away. He wished the boy no harm, he said, only that he should be happy among his own people. He showed astonishing pertinacity and cunning in getting hold of the child, and a degree of reason in choosing where to abandon it—if on the open hillside, with a heather windbreak; if in the valley, on the soft grass that grows beneath elder trees. In the end, there was nothing for it but to have him declared a madman and taken to the County Bridewell, where he lived to a great age. Mistress Baxter went with the children to live with her sister above a grocery shop in Glasgow, where she was much happier, just as dirty, and insisted on her standing as a Minister’s wife.

16 Foxcastle

He could not imagine in what way he had offended them. Ever since he could remember, they had fascinated him. His nurse sang him to sleep with ballads about them; he pursued the hinds and shepherds on his father’s estate for stories of how they danced round the Cranach Loch, of the pebbles aimed by invisible hands that skipped over its surface in games of duck-and-drake, of how, on a sudden, they would leave all together, whirring their wings and whistling; how they stole butter from Mungo’s mother’s churn, hated sluttishness, danced rings into the grass; how, wearing mourning scarves, they were seen following the crazy Minister’s bier to the grave; how it was impossible for them to weep, how they must never be mentioned on a Good Friday, how wary one must be not to offend them by pulling as much as a dead bough for fuel from a thorn tree. When he was sent to the University of Aberdeen and could get at books, he read everything he could find on their subject: that they were the scattered remnants of Satan’s host, were a superstition, were the old Picts; and reading the English poets—a fanciful lot—that they slept in cast snake-skins, drank from acorn-cup goblets, sat on mushrooms, drove teams of mice. Grounded on ballads and folklore, he discounted most of this, except as evidence substantiating their existence—since to be dismissed as a superstition proves a preliminary belief. Time went on, he took his degree as MA, and was appointed to the Lectureship in Rhetoric. The learned life suited James Sutherland so well that he was careful not to jeopardize his hold on it by mentioning his private opinions. Yet sometimes they broke from him, as when in a Disputation with the Professor of History, a fanatic for the Picts, he found himself being an Apologist for the Kingdom of Elfin—and thereafter was spoken of behind his back as Fairy Sutherland.