by Julie Mayhew
When the girls formed a circle, holding hands and speaking low, the real magic happened. They tipped back their heads, eyes closed to the last meagre helpings of sun, and the earth began to hum.
‘Oh my god, can you hear that?’ Viola gasped the first time it happened.
‘Hear what?’ said Michael.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ she’d replied.
If he had to ask, he couldn’t hear.
The ground pulsated, singing with something, speaking to Viola in the purest way. This was the true reason she was here on Lark, the vibrations said, so she could make friends with the Eldest Girls.
Such conviction was out of character for Viola; it had to be caused by a spell. When it came to friends, she never did the picking, was rarely first-picked. She was not distinct enough to be popular – or to be bullied, aside from the inevitable comments about her ginger hair. She occupied the social middle ground back home, forming alliances with those who trod the same path. The idea that this group of magical, disobedient creatures would welcome Viola Kendrick, an average human being, was implausible, yet still Viola knew it was her unavoidable fate.
She needed to start going to school, to St Rita’s, be close to the girls. This became her goal. She would tell her mother that it was the best course of action for both of them; Deborah Kendrick’s interest in teaching had already begun to slide away.
It had been a rule that Viola must complete all her schoolwork before walking Dot, but that boundary had shifted.
Viola’s refrain every morning went: ‘Do I have to do all of this?’
No longer was it met with a firm, routine, ‘Yes!’
‘I suppose we could finish up a little early,’ her mother had taken to saying. Or, ‘Maybe just one chapter is enough.’
With November approaching, Deborah Kendrick’s replies had grown thorns. ‘You’re a big girl, Viola, you can work out for yourself what needs to be done!’ She had started wearing a thick, home-knitted cardigan, with holes in sleeves and a missing middle button, every day and even to bed. She sat out on one of the broken wicker chairs on the veranda, surveying the land – ‘Just plotting what to do next, Vee-Vee.’ The tools leant against an outhouse, turning orange with rust. The cup of tea in her mother’s hand went cold before she remembered to drink it. Deborah Kendrick’s only excursions were to chapel on Sunday – but straight home, no shift at the tea urn – and to the Provisions Store. And really, where else might she go?
It was Viola who was the wanderer.
She walked Dot whenever she wanted to now, the dog being hardy enough to stand it. Viola learnt when to trek across estate land and avoid the routines of the gamekeeper, how to hit the cobbles at an hour when a fishing boat came in so there was something to see. At the end of the afternoons, when the bell at St Rita’s sounded, the echo of it reaching across the fields, she made for Cable’s Wood to meet Michael, onwards through the pines to the irresistible Sisters’ Stones.
Those hours she spent walking, Viola considered how to get what she wanted – to go to school – how to position it to her mother without sinking her any further. Deborah Kendrick was gradually slipping, slipping, going under once again.
Then, the island intervened.
Viola returned from a spying trip one afternoon to see the Land Rover parked in front of the farmstead, the Customs Officer leaning against the bonnet. He nodded at her as she passed with Dot, a hello that also felt like an apology. On the veranda, a man had pulled up one of the wicker chairs so he could sit close to her mother, who looked fixedly out at the horizon of trees, not at their visitor. Viola came slowly up the wooden steps, the guest turning in his seat, smiling, standing.
Mr Crane.
‘Ah, here she is!’ he said, as if talking to a much younger child. ‘Viola Kendrick! We were just talking about you!’
Viola stalled on the top step. She felt Dot stall too, sensed the dog looking up at her, enquiringly, asking, What now?
‘I wonder if you could tell me how you are doing with your home-schooling, Viola?’ The man strode towards her, hitching up the belt of his trousers. When he reached her, he placed a hand on her shoulder, too gently. ‘Do you think that you are getting all that you need from it?’
He leant in, bringing them eye to eye, this huge man and she a slight girl, a gesture that told Viola she could tell him the truth, that it would be all right; he would rescue her. And she needed rescuing, she wanted out. This was her way to win. But Viola could see her mother leaning forward in her chair, making herself seen behind the bulk of the man. She was giving Viola a slow, warning shake of her head, her mouth making an exaggerated shape – ‘no’.
The vibrations at the Sisters’ Stones had been strong, this message was stronger.
‘It’s going really well. Thank you,’ Viola said, returning Mr Crane’s gaze. Her lungs felt tight, squeezed empty of breath.
Mr Crane straightened up abruptly, his smile gone. He stared at her for a moment, the acknowledgement of the lie passing between them.
Above, a red kite squealed plaintively in its search for prey.
‘That so,’ he said, not kindly, but not unkindly either, and there were few pleasantries exchanged after that, before the man tendered his final goodbye.
He made his way down the stairs towards the Land Rover, and as he went, he ever so quickly and hardly at all pinched Viola on the cheek.
ORDINARY TIME: AUTUMN 2017
The letter was sent home with the children.
It could also be found, folded in three, inside every hymn book at Saturday Mass. It took up the whole of pages four and five of the Lark Chronicle, a quarterly, stapled pamphlet, typeset by Miriam Calder. The Chronicle’s pastel-coloured pages rotated with the seasons, pink, green, blue, yellow, but the front cover illustration remained unchanged – a pen drawing of the harbour by a long-dead resident. The notices inside were unchanging too, only the dates shifted. So, this letter was something else.
Residents of Lark,
Let it be clear: that our beloved island was built upon superstition and mystique is no excuse for a pursuit of the dark arts. For those were shaky foundations and dark times, before the light of Jesus had touched us, bringing word that God created all. He shaped Lark, let it yield grass, herb and fruit, siting it in a location that provides us, the fortunate and chosen few, with splendid isolation.
We have maintained it well, upholding His word, keeping this island a place of beauty, free from so many of the sinful temptations that are permitted to flourish upon the mainland.
But we are not without struggle. Daily, we must battle with the devil, dousing his desires to engage us in conversation, enticing us as he does with his mystic cards, his vices and his rituals.
Be convinced: a dialogue with Satan is never entertainment and must not be justified as distraction or play. His symbols and his polished stones, his rhymes and his actions, will never bring protection, only harm.
Uncertainty about the future is understandable as we continue to welcome strangers to our beloved isle (just as the righteous welcomed Jesus, not knowing that He was the Son of God). The strangers come in person but also in words and images, in publications and in films, and in the shape of their physical items. The foundations of our principles will be tested by these strangers and their objects, but we must not hide from this challenge. We shall not shirk our responsibilities. We will face them and be strong.
If you require answers, turn only to Him, keeping with you the understanding that some things are not for us to know. He is your one true God, your one true guide in this life and the next.
Do not be swayed towards forgiveness or complicity, dear elders of the island. The burden is on you to reject this voodoo and necromancy, or else the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the generations that follow. Steer our young towards good. As Jesus tells us in the Book of St Matthew: Any person allowing a child to slip from the path of righteousness may as well have a millstone hanged about their neck and be drowned i
n the depth of the sea.
I leave this to your morals.
Mr J. R. K. CRANE
The congregation extracted the letter from their hymn books and grew pale. The parents who had pulled the missive from their children’s satchels the previous day, nodded at the familiar words, grim-lipped. Not a one of them was without sin. They had all told tales of giants, feared seven-yearly sacrifices to the sea or petted the black hair of a virgin for luck. Each person assumed the letter was meant for them alone and, at the same time, knew absolutely it was written about everybody else. Guilt was strong in this congregation, but indignation at the misdeeds of others was stronger.
Surely, the letter had the Eldest Girls in its crosshairs, designed to reprimand them in the most public way for their behaviour at the Sisters’ Stones. Though, if this was so, it didn’t seem to be having the intended effect. Britta, Anna and Jade-Marie sat together at mass, dressed demurely in chapel best, displaying no outward signs of mortification. Their mothers carried no extra visible burdens either. Did these women not know that the image of the millstone had been included for them, a reminder of the consequences of not keeping their offspring in check?
Perhaps not. Gossip on Lark spread rapidly but strategically, and never near the subjects or their kin. It was quite possible that these women were ignorant of what their daughters were getting up to, and saw no reason to feel any disgrace.
Theories shifted.
Those with children in the senior classes reported how the hand of the lovely Miss Cedars had shook as she distributed the letters at the end of school. Some embellished this account to give her reddened eyes and a particular catch of the breath. It made sense. The word ‘strangers’ was mentioned no less than three times in the letter, and Leah Cedars had been seen entertaining that new teacher more frequently than was necessary. An excursion, just the two of them, to view the sunset from the west coast was extending hospitality too far. The woman’s easy trust of the man was folly.
‘Plus, she spends every Tuesday evening with Margaritte Carruthers.’
This became the main topic for discussion at October’s pop-up hairdressing salon, Elizabeth Bishy, the doctor’s wife, as usual, cutting the first turf.
‘And when she’s at Margaritte’s house,’ she went on, ‘they close the curtains, so we don’t see what that kind of woman gets up to.’
Hope Ainsley paused in her application of perming solution to the rows of tightly wound curlers on Elizabeth Bishy’s head. Martha Signal, who was rereading the letter in the Chronicle, her hair an armadillo of highlighter foils, looked up aghast.
‘Are you saying that… ?’
Elizabeth nodded firmly and mouthed the word, so she might not be blamed for raising something from the island’s history considered long dead – witchcraft.
Quietly, knots made from rowan twigs went up in the corner of doorframes. Old odd shoes poked out of spare gaps in rafters. Front paths were sprinkled with salt, ostensibly for the prevention of slugs, an explanation that did not account for the collection of stones placed there too, ones selected from the accessible edges of the East Bay specifically for the holes in their middle – hag stones, whittled by the action of the sea.
‘They’re pretty and unusual,’ said the women who threaded them onto ribbon and scraps or garden string and hung them from fence posts and railings. ‘We just like the way they look.’
These same women fell in love again with their arrowhead brooches, wearing them prominently on sweaters and jacket lapels. They told young children, more forcefully than before, to smash a hole in the bottom of the shell when they’d finished their boiled eggs: ‘So that the remains can’t be used as a boat.’
The children were bemused. Who could make themselves small enough to make a vessel of an eggshell? The women would not say. If you were to talk of who, that was an admission that they existed, that your own trust was being placed in talismans and rituals and that you, in your bid to ward it off, were engaging in black magic yourself.
Theories shifted once more.
The gunsight moved gently across, onto the stranger himself. How had they not let themselves see it, that the new teacher’s mastery of science was a cover for darker arts? In his crate of equipment from the mainland, Benjamin Hailey had brought pestle and mortar, glass globes, a cauldron, ingredients for potions. The man had stolen a canister of gas and showed no aversion to making fire. These were the ‘objects’ spoken of in Jacob Crane’s letter, objects to be feared and refused.
Talk turned quickly to the stranger’s likely dismissal. Though he could be released from his teaching post, there would be no means of ejecting him from the island until the boats restarted in April. Did that prison room still exist up at the Big House? some enquired. It was time, they agreed, the situation grave enough, that someone alerted the Earl. Yet Mr Crane, keeper of the children’s morals, keeper of the principles of the whole population, seemed intent on rehabilitation, not punishment. His letter in their hymn books had been nothing but a shrewd method of recruiting an island of watchful eyes, a righteous army to show their wayward newcomer the right path.
Mr Crane had not admitted this in so many words, of course; he had kept his counsel on who was the true target of his explosive epistle. He would only say that ‘a soul knows its own stain’, and that those who have transgressed should ‘bring forth their offering of turtledoves’. But it could be made to add up. The lovely Miss Cedars and the impressionable Eldest Girls were not perpetrators; they were victims. This was not the island’s occult history repeating itself; this was a virus from the mainland.
Britta, Anna and Jade-Marie had recently been taken under the new teacher’s wing. The girls had been convinced – by Miss French, it was said – to choose a science as one of their A-Level options, to make the most of Mr Hailey’s arrival at the school. On Fridays from October, Dellie Leven taught the younger seniors while Mr Hailey gave the girls some ‘practical scientific experience’ – the phrasing of the gossipers (suggestive emphasis placed on the word practical).
Wary of the mathematical demands of chemistry and physics, the girls had opted for biology, the study of nature, life and human beings. In that classroom, that laboratory, under the tutelage of Mr Hailey, the girls wore white jackets and plastic goggles as they ground down gritty substances in the aforementioned mortar, the smell of rotting fruit – or nail varnish, perhaps – drifting into the corridor. Other times they spilled India ink onto thin slivers of glass, cooing as they peered at them through the lens of a microscope.
Their stories matched up when asked what they were doing –
‘We’re marking out the boundaries of cells,’ they said.
Or ‘We’re using chromatography to distinguish the pigments within leaves.’
– but when their experiments took them to the graveyard, the outcomes were clearly less scientific.
They squatted amongst the tombs in the drizzle, the teacher and the girls, conferring in the long grass, attracting the attention of the trio of nuns who lived in the stone enclave beyond. In a break from prayer and from the tending of the island’s green vegetables in their convent plots, the sisters watched these goings-on, initially from the shelter of the cloisters, one hand to their white headdresses so they might not lose them to the wind.
According to the sisters, Mr Hailey and the Eldest Girls were ‘searching for Chuggy Pigs’ or should they say ‘Monkey Peas’, for that was what the stranger had named them, making the girls whoop with laughter. For the purposes of the lesson, they were to write down woodlice, followed by the creature’s taxonomy – Oniscidea of the order Isopods within the class Malacostraca. The nuns admitted to joining in with the hunt for these little armoured beasts, lifting rocks and splitting tufts of grass, Mr Hailey adept at creating enthusiasm for the task.
It wasn’t insects they were searching for, he explained, but crustacea, woodlice belonging to the same taxon as lobsters or crabs. An old butter tub was populated with the animals, then t
he girls set about marking each one of them with a dot of paint, before releasing them again among the tombstones.
They came back a week later, Mr Hailey and the Eldest Girls, their conversation flowing effortlessly, more intimate now, something that could be deduced very easily, even from a distance, by the movement of their bodies and the gestures of their hands. They repeated the exercise – searching for woodlice and placing them in the butter tub – and were then given an equation to work out. (They hadn’t managed to escape mathematics entirely.) Take the number of animals from the first search, multiply it by the number of animals found during the second search, and then divide by the number of animals in the second sample that were marked by a dot of paint. This, the stranger explained, was the Lincoln Index.
But something had gone wrong. None of the second sample of woodlice bore the white spot, and the teacher was foxed. Had the paint he’d provided – non-toxic so as not to cause harm – washed off in the island’s insistent rains? One of the nuns, Sister Sarah, suggested that woodlice on Lark might be, unexpectedly, more nomadic than mainland woodlice and didn’t like to stay in one place for as long as a week. No one was convinced and the discussions continued. Britta Sayers, usually the most determined contributor in these kinds of situations, remained silent to the last. Only when all other possibilities were exhausted, did she offer up her conclusion, as if it had been the conclusion all along, no further argument required.
‘The marks protect them,’ she said.
The teacher urged Britta to go on.
‘By marking them like we did, we stopped them from being captured again.’ Britta’s face took on a beatific glaze.
‘I don’t see how that would ever work,’ said Sister Clare, folding her arms.
‘Well, it’s like the runes, isn’t it, Sister?’
‘I beg your pardon!’ exclaimed Sister Agnes, stepping forward.