Charles Leslie, an Irish propagandist and Jacobite with a secret agenda who interviews her mere days before the execution. Witness to the massacre, Corrag is not surprised at the fevered excitement turned her way: “Folks need a foe and they have their foe already, see?” Her only visitor while awaiting her burning at the stake is Rev.
A healer like her mother, Corrag is called to minister to the warlike MacDonalds, her heart captured by one who belongs to another. Condemnation to death for the disappearance of a cow, barren hens or the coveting of another man’s wife, meanness is sufficient for the finger that points, pitch rising with each added voice chanting “witch, witch.”įleeing England after her mother, Cora, is hung as a witch, Corrag travels for a year, finally reaching a quiet glen in the Scottish highlands where she is at least free of the prying eyes of gossiping women. In a particularly heinous era of torture and scapegoating, the massacre of the MacDonald clan in Glencoe, Scotland, in the 17th century, while no doubt tied to the conflict between William of Orange and James Stuart for the English throne, is an opportunity to accuse those who are different from their peers.
Hunger, disease, avarice and envy breed superstition and fear, justifying the sacrifice of souls society deems culpable for what men cannot explain.
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