by Julie Mayhew
‘Britta Sayers is always stopping me in the school corridors to ruffle my hair or straighten my collar, that kind of thing. She’s very… tactile.’
He was so obviously pleased with the word ‘tactile’ that Viola had snorted with laughter.
Michael defined each girl as a clear archetype – Britta was the gobby one; Anna, the angel; Jade-Marie, the friendly klutz. It made Viola wonder what easy classification he applied to her when she wasn’t there, because surely he did talk about her. This was currency – first-hand contact with the redheaded newcomer, the one with the obstructive mother who was growing as reclusive as the Earl.
Could Viola describe Michael with a cute little phrase in return? He was such a keeno, such a neek, king of all the boffins… No, nothing was quite right. Archetypes were what boys used to label girls – so they could get past the tedious business of empathy and nuance, and focus on the gawping, deciding if the art deserved a place on their wall.
When repetitions started to appear in Michael’s stories, signalling that he had little else to reveal to her, Viola made her move. She needed to break free from the way he watched her as she watched the girls, making comments on her every reaction. She wanted to enjoy the vibrations, tip her head back as the girls did, allow the sensations to shiver gratifyingly through her body.
He was her friend and she liked him, but Michael had to go.
She put it to him straight. ‘You need to leave this to me.’
They were walking back through Cable’s Wood, Dot making reckless zigzags in pursuit of rabbits, pine needles pluming in her wake. Viola had found the confidence to release her from the lead now, letting her snuffle beneath logs and mark territory as her own.
‘You have to let me watch the girls by myself.’
The boy looked at her, wounded; she’d known that he would.
‘I’d love to keep you with me, Michael, truly I would, but with the terrible fury and everything …’ He gave the faint beginnings of a nod. ‘If I’m alone, I can approach them, be part of what they’re doing, experience it. With you there, that can never happen, because we’ll always be hiding and straining to listen.’
‘But you can’t join in,’ he replied, appalled, his face pale. ‘You mustn’t participate in…’ he whispered it, ‘… witchcraft!’
Viola laughed too loudly; Michael’s wounded expression returned.
‘Look, I don’t think it’s witchcraft,’ she told him. ‘I think it’s…’
She stopped and called for Dot, rewarding her return with a scrap of cold sausage. She refastened the lead, buying herself a moment to think. Michael stood, fists in pockets, pulsing with hurt.
‘I think it’s just girls’ stuff,’ she said, a lie and also not a lie. ‘But we’ll never know for sure unless you let me get closer.’
They continued their walk, Michael still brooding. Viola didn’t want this to be a trade-off – her only friend on the island in exchange for the possibility of three new ones. She wanted to have them all.
‘But we should meet somewhere else,’ she said, ‘to compare notes.’
He lifted his head at this olive branch.
‘I think you could start an investigation of your own.’ She spoke the idea as it formed. ‘You could go and watch, I dunno …’ She sifted through the things she’d seen on her wanderings, the people she’d observed. ‘What about that guy who works in the Customs House?’
‘Saul Cooper?’
‘Weaselly-looking, white shirt with embroidered thingies on his shoulders, drives a Jeep –’
‘A Land Rover actually.’ Michael gave a little skip – another point scored. Viola was winning him back.
‘I go up to the harbour in the mornings sometimes,’ she told him. When I can’t sleep, she didn’t say, when the silence at the farmstead is suffocating and I need to see some people, some movement, anything. ‘And that guy will leave the Customs House, take the alley between the Counting House and the Provisions Store, and wait until this woman comes up the hill –’
‘What woman?’
‘I dunno. Black hair like yours, lives by the harbour, always got an armful of folders.’
‘Miss Cedars?’
‘Like I say, I dunno. Anyway, this guy, he waits in the passageway and then he steps out as if it’s a complete coincidence that he’s bumped into her – really weird it is, sort of funny – but she never stops. She does this big loop away from him, even if he calls after her.’
‘If it is Miss Cedars, she’s a teacher, you know!’ Michael was a little breathless at this news, this possible scandal. ‘She’s my teacher!’
‘Lisa, I want to say…’ Viola replayed the moment, the Customs Officer shouting her name. ‘No… Leah.’
Michael sounded it out, reverentially almost – ‘Leah’ – turning over the knowledge of his teacher’s first name like a shiny new coin.
‘We thought she was dead,’ he said, ‘and we thought they daredn’t break it to us, because she disappeared after All Hallows’ Eve, was gone for nearly a fortnight. Then she came back, different.’
Viola nodded, as if this was interesting, as if it meant something to her.
They continued on their way, lost in their own meditations – Viola thinking about the Eldest Girls and what she might do, Michael repeating, like an incantation, the names of his new quarry.
‘Leah Cedars and Saul Cooper. Leah Cedars and Saul Cooper…’
THE BOOK OF LEAH
The cottage had no phoneline; I couldn’t let them know. So, they came to me.
Miriam Calder was the first ministering spirit. How could she resist? The story of too-many glasses of rum drunk on All Hallows’ Eve, combined with my absence from the All Saints’ Day service the next morning at school, would have had her salivating.
‘You don’t look very well,’ Miriam said, appraising me on the doorstep. I pulled my long dressing gown tight around me, so the wind wouldn’t lift it and reveal my bloodied knees. Miriam narrated the reshuffling of teachers that had been necessary to compensate for my not being there, the immense effort it had required, claiming credit for this orchestration. I denied her my thank-yous and well-dones.
‘Anyway, I can’t stand here talking all day,’ she said, her monologue done. ‘I expect you’ll be better tomorrow though, eh?’ She gave me a knowing smile and an almost wink.
Rage swelled up inside of me at this priggishness, at her undeserved pride. It was an emotion so pure, so full, it thrilled and terrified me in equal measure. I could have lifted the woman by her prim, flowery collar and thrown her over the harbour wall.
‘I’ll see how I go,’ I said.
I didn’t return to school the next day.
The skirts I owned would cover the mess of my knees when I was standing, but not when I was sitting, and Jacob Crane had made clear his views on female teachers wearing trousers.
Also, I was truly sick.
The body knows when an illness might come as a kindness, I think, when the psyche needs to retreat. Everything I ate, I threw up, forcing me into a fast that could only be good for my murky soul. Let me vomit up this sin, I told myself, or starve the devil within.
On the second day, Ruth French was my ministering spirit.
She came with arms laden – milk, apples, a loaf. She delivered her compassion with characteristic brusqueness.
‘Take them, then,’ she said. ‘Take them off me!’ I didn’t want them. Even simple foods made my stomach roll. These items would sit in my kitchen, curdling, rotting, the sight of the apples reminding me of my transgression, of the juice that had soaked my blouse. ‘It took three forms and a promise of some private tutoring to get the crones at the Provisions Store to let me buy something under your ration,’ Ruth went on.
I could not refuse.
‘Do you need anything else?’ she asked.
I shook my head. ‘I just drank too much, that’s all.’ Now it was a lie, it seemed easier to admit.
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Yes!’ I said. ‘All I need is sleep.’ I thanked her and closed the door with a slippered foot.
But I could not sleep. My mind galloped, trying to piece together my actions, not just the physical movements that night from pub to harbour to Customs House and home, but what drove me to behave that way. You enjoyed it, said a voice within, replaying the memory of my legs twined around Saul’s body, the cry I’d given out at the point of release. You’d had a taste with Ben and you wanted more. That is who Leah is.
I was the favoured child, lying at the bottom of the estate well, sprawled on top of an embarrassment of gold, no conceivable way to climb out.
The night after that, as I lay awake, there came a click – the rear gate – followed by a gentle rap against my kitchen door. Not all ministering spirits are angels, I knew; this was the devil come to tempt me from my fast. I held strong. I didn’t answer, even when his voice lifted gently, so compellingly, into the night air. ‘Please, Leah, I just want to know that you’re okay.’
At the weekend, Margaritte let herself in by a door I was certain I had latched. She found me dozing on the sofa. I swung myself quickly to sitting, the swiftness of the movement making my sight go black.
‘Put your head between your knees,’ I heard her say. I felt the weight of her dropping onto the sofa beside me, her powdery smell close. She stroked the curl of my spine and my vision returned like vibrations settling on the surface of a pool. In front of me, on the coffee table, was a small, stout bottle of cloudy liquid.
‘It’s a tonic I made from bistort root.’
‘I don’t want it,’ I told her.
‘I heard you being sick, through the wall. This is good for that.’
‘I said –’
‘It’s good for wounds on the outside too.’ She was looking at my knees, covered by a pair of marl pyjamas.
‘Did you see?’ The thought that anyone had witnessed me leaving the Customs House, dishevelled and bleeding, brought on a fresh and brutal wave of nausea.
Margaritte shrugged evasively.
I got up, staggering to the opposite side of the room. I needed there to be space between us; I had to see her for what she was – a deluded woman too attached to the old ways.
‘You take that stuff away,’ I told her.
‘But it’s just herbs, Leah.’
‘You know it isn’t. I should never have been sucked in. What you do is against God.’
She laughed loudly. ‘You tell that to Father Daniel!’ she replied. ‘After he fell out with Dr Bishy and couldn’t be going to his surgery anymore, I cured his pink-eye with a clary water, just like that.’
She clicked her fingers.
I did not know what to question first – the reverend’s engagement in the dark arts, or his falling out with the doctor. Both were irrelevant.
‘Jacob Crane has his sights on you,’ I warned. ‘On me too.’
She sighed and looked down for a moment, blinking upwards again to ask: ‘Are you frightened of him?’
‘Yes!’ came an unbidden voice. To my surprise, it was my own. Was this true? Was I scared of Jacob Crane? And if I was, couldn’t it be justified, wasn’t it to be expected? I had known him only as my headmaster, then straight away as my superior at work. Didn’t everyone on the island hold him in some kind of fearful reverence?
‘Aren’t you?’ I returned. ‘Frightened of him?’
‘Actually,’ she said, easing herself up from the sofa, placing a hand gently on my arm as she left, ‘I think it’s time that he was frightened of us.’
On the Monday, when I still hadn’t returned to St Rita’s, Cat Walton knocked on my door, the tails of her curate’s gown flapping beneath her short, bulbous Puffa jacket.
‘I’m here in my professional capacity,’ she said, ‘responsible as I am for all the souls of this parish.’
She made us both tea and, as we sat at my kitchen table, told a story from the Classical Greek – of Metanoia who walked in the wake of the god of opportunity, cloaked and tearful, urging those around her to be sorry for all the moments that they had missed. Cat was at liberty to do this – apply the lives of the pagan gods to ours – even in chapel. She had a degree in theology, obtained on the mainland, making her – academically, at least – closer to God than Father Daniel was, since he had trained at the feet of our previous reverend.
Cat lifted a tin of biscuits from her bag and insisted I take one. I waited for the story’s moral.
‘Maybe you just seized the moment,’ she said. ‘Perhaps Metanoia would be proud.’
I had to believe she was talking about Ben – only Ben.
‘I seized the wrong moments,’ I said, the sweetness of the biscuit making my stomach clench. ‘And now I need to repent.’
‘Well, that’s something,’ said Cat with a kind smile. ‘Let’s work with that.’
I let her visit me each day and talk me into leaving the cottage. We would go and sit in the still midday air of the chapel, sometimes just enjoying the silence; other times, Cat would read to me from the books of Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Revelation – words of contrition are not enough, a person must act, carry out the ‘first works’, or else God cannot support them in their transformation. Sometimes we bowed our heads and prayed: ‘Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, maker of all things, judge of all men: we acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness…’
‘And they are manifold,’ I told her in the quiet that followed, ‘my sins.’
Cat took my hand. I admitted my greatest fear: ‘Underneath all of this… niceness, I think that I am wicked.’ I began to cry. ‘Jacob Crane’s letter was for the Eldest Girls and for their mothers and for Margaritte and for Ben, but most of all, it was for me, because … I am the witch.’
I was breathless at the relief of saying it aloud – it was an exorcism. I readied myself for my penance. Cat trembled in the pew beside me, her large chest shaking, then she let go of the sound – laughter, bouncing startlingly from the stone walls. She pulled me in to her, hugged me, the vibrations travelling from her warm body into mine. I didn’t submit, though; I couldn’t, I was rigid.
‘Oh, Leah!’ she sighed. ‘Come with me.’
She took my hand, guiding me towards the chancel, to the recess that held the relic of St Jade – her mummified foot, beneath a dirty wrapping of linen, in a box of smoked glass. In the fourteenth century, Jade had quite literally stamped out evil on Lark. Impervious to venom, she used her bare feet to destroy the poisonous snakes that once picked off our children, driving her heel into the serpents’ throats. A painting above the case depicted her in action, mouth wide in ecstasy, black hair and green robes flowing, knee raised in preparation, a startled creature on the ground beneath her.
‘Are we to pray to St Jade?’ I asked.
‘If you like,’ Cat said, meaning ‘no’.
She reached up for the wooden voting box that rested beside the glass case. Here was another relic of our past, seventeenth century probably. It was a means for islanders anonymously to report anyone they suspected of witchcraft. At school, we were taught that it was a symbolic object and never used. It merely acted as a physical reminder not to meddle with black magic, lest your neighbour be watching. It was easy to imagine our barbaric forebears using that box though, to settle grudges or to seek vengeance. Even as a child, I knew my young ears were being given a softened version of history.
Cat handled the voting box with a roughness unsympathetic to its age, popping the hinged door underneath and shaking free the dead insects and bat droppings within.
‘Nope,’ she said, ‘no one has put your name in here.’
‘Don’t joke,’ I told her. ‘I’m serious.’
‘So am I. Take this.’
From her pocket she retrieved her Agnus Dei, placing it in my hand – the remainder of an Easter candle crushed and imprinted with the image of a lamb. I had one of my own on the mantelpiece at home.
‘So, is it working?’ sh
e asked. ‘Are you melting? Do you feel your insides burning up?’
‘No.’
‘Of course not.’ She reclaimed the wax block. ‘Witchcraft isn’t practised by accident.’
‘But I did.’ I lowered my voice. ‘I did practise it. On purpose.’
Cat set the box back and folded her arms, unconvinced. ‘How?’
‘With cards.’
She shrugged. ‘So have I.’
‘You!’
‘You need to know your enemy, don’t you? And, well, I can see how it might be done for fun. Did you do it for fun?’
‘I suppose.’
‘Then I forgive you.’ She grinned; it was that easy for her. I had to wonder if this was something a mainland upbringing gave you. Ben had it too – the ability to shake things off, not to worry. ‘You didn’t do it because you are wicked or possessed. I think God can forgive you too.’
‘And Jacob Crane?’
Her smile faltered, his name echoed about us – an anomaly, an intrusion.
‘I don’t speak for him,’ she said.
I kept my chin to my chest. We weren’t done; I had to find the courage to be free from it all. ‘And what about sexual deviancy?’
She stayed quiet.
I pushed on: ‘Do you do that because you are wicked and possessed?’
I looked up. She narrowed her eyes. ‘Which “you” are we talking about here?’
‘Me,’ I said. ‘Who did you think?’
She had been holding her breath and now let it go.
‘Oh, I didn’t mean… I wasn’t talking about you and Ruth if that’s what –’
‘No, I didn’t suppose that you were.’
The silence was drawn out and awkward.
‘There was love in your heart,’ Cat said eventually. ‘I saw it. Ruth saw it. We both know love when it comes along.’
She was only talking about Ben.
She had misunderstood me all along. I had been talking about sex, which was my sin alone, something selfish you can do with someone else. Cat had confounded sex with love, a united act, and in doing that perhaps she saved me. Her mention of the word came like a rope knotted at intervals and thrown over the side of a well. Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good. If Metanoia was not to wail her remorse at my missed opportunity, it was time to pull myself free.