Joan came to our village a hardy, unsmiling woman of no more than seventeen, young even for our folks to be setting up house. That brute of a man, Thomas Murfie, brought her… her and her round-cheeked Baby John.

Even before Thomas bragged about her in the tavern, we knew who she was. He, a lowly sailor with never more than a copper to his name, had a woman of noble birth to set up his house and give him his children. What did he care if she came from a family marked as the devil’s own? That even with this birthright, she had been shamed? Who could have got that child on her? How had he dared? That Thomas showed no concern for the baby which was not his own seemed sign of witchery. Thomas Murfie wasn’t the sort who accepted another man’s spawn as if it were his own kith and kin.

Thomas took her straight to Pastor Matthew for the marriage blessings and after, before Pastor Matthew could offer her welcome, he packed her and her babe back into her rickety cart pulled by the sorriest nag this side of the grave anyone had ever seen. We watched her, that noble-born woman, daughter of the High Chief of Glen Cluain. She, who had been raised in luxury on the profit of her father’s robber baron ways, sat straight and stiff in that cart with wee Baby John on her knee. Thomas promptly left her at the shack she was meant to make a home and made his way to the tavern.

She sat for the longest time, still as stone, staring into the sea. We half-expected her to leap from the cliff. But after what seemed forever, she turned and surveyed her sorry patch of land and the shack that did no more than cut wind in a gale. With no one’s aid, she came down off her cart, put her infant in a basket cradle and began to unload the cart’s meager contents.

Where was the dowry of a High Chief’s daughter? She brought less to the marriage than a village girl; nothing more than a battered trunk, a squawking old hen, a bushel bag of potatoes, a half barrel of provisions and a flea-bitten bed roll.

Joan wasn’t a woman familiar with hard labor. Anyone could see that in the way she moved. Unloading the cart, however meager its contents, was man’s work, but she did it nonetheless. She never once looked back at the menfolk watching her from the village, though she surely must have felt the heat of our eyes. When the trunk slid onto her, not one of us heard a muttered oath. No. She stood rigid a moment before bending her back to work again.

She moved everything into the shack that afternoon and when she was done, she unhitched the horse and tethered it on a patch of winter grass near the house. Then, as she stood on the threshold of her new home, she stopped and turned. She looked each of us in the eye, over the distance of her rocky field before withdrawing into the shack.

Joan was the daughter of a High Chief, shamed by her father’s house, with a babe near a year old before any pastor said the marriage blessings over her, but her pride remained unbroken. She wasn’t humbled by the shack that replaced her father’s castle nor her ale-swilling husband. We knew the stories about evil magic in the high family of Glen Cluain. Some of us were fool enough to think we saw a hint of it in the unbending, silent stance of a fair-haired young woman that day.

Would that I could tell you we greeted Joan with pleasantries that first morning she came to the village; or the second or even a month of days later. We spoke to her when we were spoken to, then quickly turned our backs and whispered prayers to turn the evil eye.

She came early each day, Baby John perched upon her hip. From the Widow Turlough she bought milk for her baby, and oats from Miller Dunne for her nag. She paid with bright shiny pennies carried in her apron, then she would wish us a good day and begin her slow walk back to the shack.

Those first months, sometimes we would pause in our labors and look toward the shack by the cliff. We could see Joan grooming the remnants of the winter coat from her horse, or stringing a line behind the house to hang out her wash, all the while talking to Baby John. Thomas, we saw in the pub each night.

The day Joan came to the village with the marks of her husband’s fist on her face, we knew we’d seen the last of Thomas. Widow Turlough offered Joan a poultice then nearly died from fright when Joan’s face turned stony while she waited for her milk. That night Thomas Murfie was warming his normal seat at the pub.

The entire village breathed a sigh of relief that early spring morning two weeks later when Thomas’s ship sailed from the port at the county seat. Joan and Baby John watched the ship from the edge of the cliff then went back into her house.

Plowing and seeding time brought a new flurry of debate. It was the men’s duty to look out after the widows and lonely women, to see to it they had a crop to feed their families. For all of our God-fearing obligation, we couldn’t decide who would be the one to step forward. Joan, in her own silent way, ended the talk.

With Baby John settled in a basket nearby, Joan and her aging nag struggled with a make-shift plow through the rockiest patch of land inside County Ros. It was backbreaking man’s work, but the High Chief’s daughter had set her mind to it. She stopped every so often, whistling and clucking to the horse as she squatted down and dug through the soil with her bare hands to unearth the rocks that pitted her field. Stranger than a woman plowing that field by herself was what she did with the stones she came upon. She would loop a rope around the rock and drag it to cliff-side. There, between a craggy tree and the cliff, she set her stones. As the morning progressed, more of us hovered at village edge where we could watch her plow the field and build her coiling pattern of stones. If Joan saw us, and surely she must have, she pretended otherwise. Toward noon there was a jostling of elbows among the men as we encouraged one another to offer help. It was Widow Turlough’s half-daft son, William, who broke from his mother’s side and approached Joan at her plow. We all strained to hear what he said and, in turn, what she said to him, but they spoke softly. William nodded and trudged back over the field to us.

“What did she say, boy?” I asked.

William looked up in that dazed way of his and shrugged. “She says she’ll do for herself.”

Fear trembled the best of us then. Who among the highborn turned away service unless they were angry?

“What does she want of us?” Miller Dunne asked.

William squinted up at the miller’s puffy face and shook his head. “She says the field’s her own and the work’s her own.”

We turned to Pastor Matthew. “She’ll be cursin’ our names, Pastor. You have to do somethin’!” Farmer Brennan pleaded.

Matthew straightened his church smock and pressed back his wild red hair, then crossed the field to Joan’s side. She stopped her digging when he came upon her, cleaning her hands respectfully on her apron before she greeted him. She looked at us then, when Pastor Matthew spoke to her. She grew tall and stiff, her face more stony than ever before. She shook her head and watched Pastor Matthew until he reached us before turning back to her work.

We looked expectantly at the red-faced pastor. “She wishes us no ill and she will accept no help.” He stopped to take a deep breath. “She said that she will owe no man nor woman in this village.”

“Then the curse is upon us,” Widow Turlough moaned. “A witch cannot owe those she curses.”

Pastor Matthew held up his hands. “The woman claims she holds no ill against us. She says upon my very God’s cloth that there will be no curse.”

“But what nature of a woman wants no help in the field?” Miller Dunne asked.

Matthew shook his head. But I watched Joan, straight-backed stiff, whistle to her horse and push her plow on through her field.