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    “Lady Nairn, if you suspect foul play in Sir Angus’s death, you should go to the police.”
    “I think it must be dealt with by other means.” She cocked her head. “How much do you know about the writing of Macbeth ? Not the story. The writing of it.”
    I frowned. “There’s not much to know. It’s Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy. Published posthumously, in the first folio.”
    “The first collected edition of his works,” she said, nodding. “Dated 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death. But that’s about its printing. Not its writing.”
    “We don’t know anything about the writing of any of his plays.”
    “There was an earlier version.” She said it defiantly, a gauntlet thrown down.
    “Many scholars think so,” I said carefully. That much was true, mostly because of the witches. Eerie and terrifying at one moment, they are, and broad comedy at the next—not to mention Hecate, queen of witches, who seems to have been pulled wholesale from another, later play by Thomas Middleton and slapped down haphazardly into Shakespeare’s play, for all that her brand of gleefully cackling evil would be more at home in a Disney film. “But there’s no real evidence one way or an—”
    She cut me off. “As a child, my husband’s grandfather met an old woman on the hill. She told him that long ago, Shakespeare had come here with a company of English players and met a dark fairy—a witch—who lived in a boiling lake. She taught him all her dark arts; in return, he stole her soul and fled.
    “She searched high and low, but he had hidden it well. It was not in a stone or an egg, a ring or a crown: not in any of the places one normally hides such a thing. She found it at last, though, written into a play, mixed into the very ink scrawled across the pages of a book. Snatching up the book, she cursed his words to scatter misery rather than joy, and then she vanished back to her lake.
    “Some time earlier, the boy’s grandfather had vanished on the hill, so when the old woman told him her tale and made him repeat it back to her, he decided she was the dark fairy of her own story, and the book, if he could find it, was her payment for his grandfather…. In later years, he—Angus’s grandfather—came to believe she had been talking about Macbeth. ”
    I gazed at her in silence. How could I put what I had to say tactfully? “Lady Nairn—with all due respect to your husband’s grandfather, as wonderful as his story is, it’s a child’s half-remembered tale, a hundred years old. It hardly counts as evidence for an earlier version of the play.”
    “Not by itself. But it fits with this.” She went to the desk and opened an archival folder, handing me a Xeroxed page. “from the old Dunsinnan House account book,” she said. “Half ledger, half diary.” under an entry dated 1 November 1589, someone had written, “The English players departit hence.” But it mentioned no names.
    “read the next sentence,” said Lady Nairn.
    The same day, the Lady Arran reportit a mirror and a book stolen, and charged that the players had taken them. But they could not be found.
    I looked up quickly. I knew of Lady Arran. Elizabeth Stewart, Lady Arran, her contemporaries had sneered, was a greedy, avaricious, and ambitious woman. A Lady Jezebel who consorted with witches. For a time, young King James had been besotted with her and her husband both; there had been whispers in some corners that she was the reason the king would not take a wife. Other whispers charged that she’d kill him if she could, that she desired, above all else, to be queen. She was, said some, the historical figure standing in the shadows behind the character of Lady Macbeth.
    Lady Nairn smiled. “I thought you might recognize that name. So you see, we do have evidence.”
    “Of what?” It was all I could do to stay calm. “That Lady Arran was here, yes. That Shakespeare was, no. He knew of her, almost surely—almost twenty