by Julie Mayhew
But Britta was not to be squashed. ‘It’s like the mark of Algiz for healing, Eihwaz for protection, Teiwaz for strength.’
Sister Agnes’ face went as purple as the aubergines she cultivated in the convent greenhouses.
Still, Britta persisted. ‘It’s like the cross that stands at the end of the jetty, to stop our fishermen from dying.’
The holy sister clutched the small wooden crucifix, strung with beads around her neck, Britta seizing upon the action:
‘Like what you’re wearing now!’
This conversation might have been lost and forgotten, dismissed as a young girl sent giddy by the novelty of a lesson outdoors, if the three Eldest Girls hadn’t come to school the following week with matching bandages on their left wrists. There was the smell of rubbing alcohol about them.
Mr Crane had not been in school that morning to demand they remove these non-regulation affectations, and Mrs Leven who stood in his place, was always one to avoid confrontation. It was the lovely Miss Cedars who challenged the girls in the canteen, instructing them to remove the bandages at once. Jaws that had been working away at beef patties and cabbage, slowed and stilled. Every pupil’s gaze settled on the girls lined up before the hot plate.
The handsome coycrock teacher, his back to the scene, was one of the last to notice the stand-off. He rose abruptly, chair legs squealing, his mouth open, ready to protest, but Miss Cedars stopped him with an icy stare.
She turned her attention back to the girls.
‘Come on!’ said the once nice, polite teacher, who had grown stricter of late, shorter in wick. ‘Take the bandages off! Unless you’ve really hurt yourselves. You’ve not really hurt yourselves, have you?’
The Eldest Girls shrugged, unsure, and unravelled the white gauze, revealing the skin beneath, pinpricked and bloodied.
‘What is this?’ asked Miss Cedars, appalled.
On Jade-Marie’s inside wrist was a crude etching of a tree; on Anna’s skin, a skewed Z; and on Britta’s, an upward arrow.
India-ink tattoos.
‘Algiz for healing,’ said Britta, ‘Eihwaz for protection and Teiwaz for the strength of a warrior.’
All went quiet. Miss Cedars was lost for a response. She had not absorbed Britta’s explanation, this elucidation on the runes. Instead she had watched how the girl held Mr Hailey’s gaze as she answered; how the new teacher dropped his chin guiltily to his chest.
THE BOOK OF LEAH
I drew the curtains and turned off the lights. When I heard the click of the rear gate, I hurried upstairs and hid beneath the blankets.
I can’t see you, I told myself. Or rather, I do see you. I see you so much better than before.
‘Leah! Leah!’
He wouldn’t stop calling; he was going to wake the neighbours. I had to go downstairs and open the door – just a crack, let in a small breath of cold air.
‘You locked it!’ he said, smiling, thinking it a silly mistake.
‘Go away,’ I replied.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Just go away.’
These were the only words I could manage.
‘Is this about … Is this about today, with the girls?’
I said nothing.
‘Because I can explain what that was. It isn’t what you –’
I shut the door, latched it again and stood with my back against it.
‘Leah!’ he called gently. ‘Leah?’
I could hear him sigh and shuffle, lingering, trying to work out the right tenor of comeback. Then the rear gate clicked, marking his retreat.
I stayed behind the door for a long time – the crown of my head against the glass, my palms against the painted wood. How inevitable this had all been. From the moment he mentioned Britta Sayers’ difficult question, my doubt had grown stronger and stronger, until it was bigger than the joy of his presence, more persuasive than any prospect of true love.
I told myself I was lucky. He was Hades and I was Persephone; it was a mercy to be free from the underworld before any real damage was done.
I returned to my Demeter, to the bosom of my family.
All Hallows’ Eve, I walked up through the estate to the gamekeeper’s lodge where my parents lived, past the furthest reaching walls of the Big House, along the winding path there, the bricks beneath my soles slimy with moss. The light hadn’t fallen completely and labouring continued in the fields; a trio of figures moving across the land. The fog had been thin that day; they had to make the most of the conditions. October 31st was supposed to mark the end of harvest, but there was still work to be done. The date didn’t mark the end of summer either. That had vanished long ago.
I carried a bottle of wine, gripped tightly by the neck – an expensive purchase, in payment and in effort. I’d dropped the name of both my father and the Father in the Provisions Store to secure it. Wasn’t I duty-bound to honour them both with a good bottle on this most holy of nights? Wouldn’t it be unchristian to refuse me?
Rhoda Sayers, cow-eyed and heavy-jowled, was unimpressed. The good stuff was to be held over for Christmas rations, she said, no exceptions, no matter who you were. I knew these rules, but winning against the woman suddenly became important.
‘I think you owe me this,’ I said quietly, in all reasonableness.
She folded her arms. ‘How’s that?’
‘Sparing your Britta punishment for those pagan tattoos.’
We locked eyes.
‘That’s not what she said,’ said the woman.
I floundered. ‘Huh?’
I had let the girls’ actions go, not followed them up. I was too engrossed in my own error of judgement, my own heartache. Mr Crane would have seen what they’d done, those scars scabbing at their wrists. Perhaps he meted out a penalty later.
‘So, they were punished?’
It wasn’t enough of a question to prompt Rhoda to respond.
‘What did Britta say?’ I stumbled on.
Rhoda shook her head, disapproving of my fragile grasp of the situation, but she slid the bottle of wine across the counter towards me.
‘Take it,’ she said, claiming victory in this surrender. Then she turned away, sighing as she wrote my purchase in her ledger.
I didn’t want it anymore, the wine, my thirty pieces of silver. I could see what I was doing – challenging the mother in lieu of the daughter, a girl who had been through enough already, manipulated and led astray by our charming newcomer, just as I had.
Sister Agnes’ account of Ben’s graveyard lessons had spread; we all knew where the idea for the tattoos had come from. We all knew that he was the only person on the island with stashes of India ink. I should have been comforting Rhoda in the Provisions Store that evening, assuring her that no one was acting friendly with Mr Hailey in the staff room anymore. I should have apologised for the polite smiles that we hid behind, the way we awkwardly circled questions, not daring to ask. Why was Benjamin Hailey still teaching? Why did Mr Crane still pat him on the back when they passed each other in the corridor?
Instead, I left the store with a muttered thank-you, a gutless one.
I passed the estate’s stone well on the walk uphill to my parents’ place, a familiar structure, but that evening it delivered me a lost memory. Not one I’d forgotten as such, rather a memory I had set aside – an object placed on a high shelf to be brought down when its usefulness was realised.
There were stories attached to the well. My father delighted in telling me that gold lay in its dark, unfathomable depths, along with diamond rings, priceless art and, most hauntingly to the younger me, sacrificial teddy bears. The well would grant you absolute truth on a matter of your asking in return for something you held dear. When my brother, Paul, took over these stories (the gift of the gab bypassing me, the older child, and travelling down the male line), they became more sinister. There were ancient bones down there, he told me, and some not so ancient as you’d expect. There were the remains of prized cattle too, beloved wives
and – he knew when to hold a pause – the bodies of favourite children.
I understood his inference, the moral of this parable.
‘I’m not the favourite,’ I snapped back.
‘Yes, you are,’ he replied levelly, no invitation to argue; he was stating a fact. ‘Mum and Dad are making sure everything works out all right for you.’
He was ten then. I’d have been sixteen.
I leaned over the well’s edge and peered down into the dripping dark. With my adult eyes, I still expected to see the flash of gold or a white splinter of bone. I wondered what I could throw into the depths so that I might know the absolute truth about Ben, about his relationship with the Eldest Girls. Had I been right, I would ask, to cut him off, not to let him explain? But that would mean admitting that I still held him dear, despite all efforts not to. Would I have to throw Ben to his death, only to discover his innocence?
The last stretch of the journey to my parents’ house was a steep incline, scented by the zest of pine needles, sycamore keys pirouetting around me. In books, adults returning to a childhood home after many years become overwhelmed by great Proustian rushes of emotion at the things they see and smell and hear, faded memories leaping vividly alive. It occurred to me then, as if I had just thrown something precious into the well to receive this realisation, that I would never really know how that felt. Not the true extent. I would never experience the way a long absence can remould a place, make it warmer, kinder, more palatable.
I passed through the front gate and walked down the side of the lodge to my parents’ back door, bracing myself for my mother’s greeting.
The tone of it came as expected: ‘Oh, here she is, gracing us with her presence! I swear, Leah Cedars, that you are worse than a flea to catch.’
I stepped across the threshold, offering up my excuses – the latest rules from the mainland on testing, along with the implementation of the new GCSE grading system meant my workload was immense, the paperwork never-ending. I kept talking in this way until the perverse urge to confess deserted me. I have been spending almost every evening with the stranger, Mum. I thought that I loved him but it seems he’s not the sort of person I should love, a man who leads young girls to the devil.
Then I might have spoken more truths. Since Paul went, since you made no effort to stop him, this feels like no home at all.
I divulged nothing, having no wish to burden her or compromise her position in Lark’s hierarchy. I perched on one of the stools at the kitchen island – a kitchen that was the envy of all the women for its shiny white cupboards and flecked marble surfaces – and I watched her chop vegetables and baste a chicken too big for the three of us, especially on this evening that was supposed to involve a fast.
In front of me, she placed a bowl of olives, something she had taken to ordering in large jars when the ships were running, and I picked at them as she embarked on an anecdote about the Earl.
‘They thought that he’d died at the weekend,’ she said, eliciting the gasp from me that she so clearly wanted. He may have been an invisible ruler, the Earl, a disenfranchised one, at his own discretion, leaving Lark’s deciding to the Council, but the idea of him dead was terrifying. The island would be a ship without a captain, without a figurehead, without a rudder.
The climax of my mother’s story had Hannah Pass, leader of the Earl’s diminishing housekeeping team and mother of Abigail, one of my Fourth Years, breaking into his locked bedroom to see if he was still breathing. The anti-climax: he was – still breathing, that is. He had merely taken to his bed for a few days, as was his way. The worst of it was that the ‘gazunder’ – the chamber pot – was full to overflowing.
My mother moved on to updates of the latest movements of Elizabeth Bishy and Diana Crane, Martha Signal and Eleanor Springer. Her sweetly worded aspersions on these women, her friends, were not dissimilar to those made about her in return – conversations that I was not supposed to overhear.
‘I wouldn’t trade my kitchen for Susannah Cedars’ “spaceship” for all the riches of Abraham.’
‘And isn’t that exactly what it cost her to have it sent over?’
‘Imagine how it shows up the muck!’
That was how I knew for sure my mother was envied.
‘You’ll be going to the Anchor later for the celebrations, will you?’ Mum asked, lifting the cork out the bottle, not waiting for Dad. There was a directness to her speech that I had not inherited, nor learnt through imitation. We looked alike; I could see my future in the way her lips had thinned and how the skin between her eyes furrowed. I knew my black hair would give way to strands of silver. But I doubted I would ever own that voice.
‘I won’t be, no.’ I pushed another pitted olive into my cheek, enjoying the sensation of its flesh giving way between my teeth.
‘It’s open to women tonight,’ she went on, telling me what I already knew, ‘even though it’s a weeknight.’ She poured two very generous glasses of wine. ‘I think you should go and find out where that handsome teacher is hiding himself.’
I stopped chewing and stared at her.
What handsome teacher? was the reply that rose childishly to my lips. What smashed window? What muddy footprints in the living room?
I took a large mouthful of wine and washed down the olive. I still wasn’t sure if they were truly pleasant things to eat.
‘I see him every day of the week at school,’ I said with a tight smile. ‘I think that’s quite enough, considering the current situation.’
‘Such a shame,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I replied cautiously; her inflection was not that of a woman appalled at a stranger’s behaviour. Quite the opposite.
‘He seemed so perfect,’ she added wistfully, grasping my hand on the cool of the countertop. I flushed hot and gulped more wine. ‘A fella from the mainland,’ she went on, squeezing my hand tighter, beseeching me with shining eyes. ‘He might have broadened your horizons a little.’
I had no idea how to respond.
The island was against Ben, thought him in conversation with the devil – so my mother must think this also. For all her gentle slanders of Diana Crane, she and her husband were important allies of my parents; together they sat on the Council. Or rather, my father and Jacob did; Diana and my mother brewed the tea and made the sandwiches.
The letter Mr Crane had written was aimed at Ben and the girls, wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
Yet Ben was still teaching. Mr Crane still patted him on the back when they passed in the corridor. I should have found the courage to ask my mother what was going on, but my father opened the back door at that moment, making her hand fly from mine, sending her back towards the hob. I was startled at the sight of Dad; the whiteness of his beard and his stoop that had become, all of a sudden, more pronounced.
‘Will you come in for some dinner, Luke?’ called my mother to my dad’s young apprentice. Luke Signal loitered outside on the hard-standing, waiting for the formality of an invitation. He nodded at me, sheepish, as he stepped inside. I’d taught Luke for his GCSEs just three years earlier, my first official class when newly qualified, aged twenty-four. I had reprimanded him for the way he tied his tie, the grubbiness of his homework, his difficulty with spelling. His younger brother, Michael, almost sixteen, was in my current class, and always raised his hand, an answer ready. He was a real show-off. It seemed impossible that the two boys were related.
‘You should fill your belly, Luke,’ muttered my father as they wrestled free of their boots and shook off their wax jackets, Luke’s two sizes too large for his wiry frame. ‘You’ll need it for our night ahead on the lamp.’
‘Ah, Peter, no!’ My mother threw down her tea towel and was off. Did my father not remember that he was supposed to be retiring? What on earth was he doing still volunteering for evening work? She would brook no argument about the severity of the fox infestation, because there was Mary, there was Luke now, both trained up to take over the nighttime lamp
ing.
At the end of her speech, my mother’s voice became tender. ‘I just want to spend more time with you, Peter,’ she said.
When only family were present, she would go on to suggest a holiday, a cruise or a visit to Paul on the mainland. When she’d first proposed these things, I’d assumed them a provocation. Look how angry I am, Peter! Listen to what blasphemous things you have me suggesting! But I began to wonder, after the way she’d grasped my hand that evening, if she truly meant to go.
Four places were laid at the table. As was the custom on All Hallows’ Eve, one setting was for the most recently departed family member – in this case, my paternal grandfather, John, whose heart had given up on him four years previously. This was precisely the phrase my mother used – ‘his heart gave up on him’ – and I was beginning to understand the expression viscerally. I couldn’t shake the sensation that our extra setting was not for Grandpa John, but for my brother, Paul, or for a handsome teacher maybe – two people who had not died but, in their different ways, had slipped through my fingers.
An extra place was found for Luke, so the untouched knife and fork could remain, and my father asked him to say grace. I watched Luke’s Adam’s apple ride his throat at the prospect. He was neither a master of words nor memory in my classroom, though I’d heard he’d developed a particular swagger lately, holding court at the Anchor if he had a story to tell. His name was used as a reliable witness in gossip about the Eldest Girls and I imagined that he had an eye on one of them. His classmates Bernadette Dean and Tom Ainsley had left the island as soon as their exams were done and married on the mainland. Luke would need to look to the younger girls, to Britta, Anna or Jade-Marie. Perhaps they thought him appealing in return. He was nineteen, aspirational, had the same black hair as his fifteen-year-old brother. Both brothers were tall, the height difference barely noticeable, despite their age gap, though Michael carried more meat on his bones. Luke was the one with the sculpted cheekbones and jaw. There was a not-unattractive dirtiness to his skin that I imagined would remain no matter how hot the bath.