Impossible Causes

by Julie Mayhew

  ‘Leah Cedars did it!’ she hollers.

  Saul shakes her fiercely. ‘You stop this! You stop this!’

  There is a skirmish in the lobby; all attention is drawn to the door. If Viola needed any further proof that she is powerful, it arrives; she has evoked a presence with the mere mention of a name. Leah Cedars blunders in, disoriented, as if she’d expected to pass through that meeting-room doorway and find herself somewhere else.

  Saul drops Viola’s arm. Like a magnet, he is drawn to Leah, desperate to usher her from this place, but the bottleneck of people in the lobby behind her will not let this happen.

  The human tide is at the door.

  They shove one another forward, and the school receptionist, the doctor’s wife and the librarian can no longer hold them back. This meeting will be public, come what may.

  Viola wrenches her other arm free and careens into the middle of the room, barging past the three men of the Council who do not know which way to move: towards Viola, towards Leah, towards the advancing people who now line the walls and fill the corners. The Eldest Girls pierce Viola with insistent stares, imploring her to shush, but she will not. She feels a thrill, a new impetus, at the increase in her audience. There is nothing left to lose. If she is to die, then let it be like this, in defiance.

  ‘Saul helped her do it,’ Viola bellows, ‘because he is fucking her!’

  She hits the F hard, raising a hiss of disapproval from the women present. Viola laughs, the sound bubbling up unbidden. In the midst of all this, still a swear word is outrageous?

  ‘I knew nothing of the body until this morning.’ Leah Cedars’ voice comes loud but robotic, as if speaking is a new skill for her. ‘The girl came to my house to tell me that the Eldest Girls had…’ she swallows hard ‘… killed Mr Hailey.’

  A wild note of alarm peals through the gallery.

  The handsome coycrock teacher! Dead?

  ‘No!’ objects Viola from the middle of the room. ‘She lies!’

  The men of the Council move towards Leah; Saul inserts himself between them and his beloved, the stand-off lasting but a moment as more spectators surge in, bumping everyone from their positions. Three women are pulled through the massing crowd and take their places at the front – Mary Ahearn, Rhoda Sayers, Ingrid Duchamp.

  They cry out at the sight of their daughters, their butchered scalps. The Eldest Girls cannot keep their terrified silence any longer; they keen plaintively in response. The distance between them and their mothers is a devastation.

  ‘Stay back!’ warns Jacob Crane. ‘You leave those girls to their shame. Don’t make matters worse.’

  His words work instantly. The women go rigid; they swallow their whimpers. Viola feels it too, rushing through her veins like a drug – the compulsion to obey. With Jacob Crane present, can anyone else ever take charge?

  Leah Cedars is willing to try.

  ‘I counselled those girls to turn away from the dark arts,’ she says, a mollifying tone to quench the flames of the dragon.

  ‘Judas!’ Viola puts in.

  ‘Hush, Viola,’ Britta manages, from the stage above her.

  ‘I have counselled them to confess,’ continues Leah, turning to the women of the gallery, the mothers. ‘I told them they must talk of the … darker arts that have acted upon them, the real things that have warped their minds.’

  She is met by blank gazes; she is speaking in riddles.

  Viola seethes with irritation; her fists clench. Leah Cedars is doing no good.

  ‘Leah Cedars is the one with the warped mind!’ Viola taunts, reclaiming the attention of the room – but it is short-lived. The packed lobby groans once more, it heaves, delivering another body into the space.

  Benjamin Hailey.

  Horrified cries of ‘Mary, Mother of God!’ break out at the sight of the teacher: windswept, breathless, very much alive.

  A laptop cradled to his chest, he takes up position beside Leah and something passes between them, tenderness perhaps, an overwhelming feeling. Leah Cedars snaps her head away, unable to bear it.

  ‘See!’ Leah says, using his appearance to her advantage. ‘The coycrock girl lies.’

  ‘I never said it was him,’ Viola spits back. ‘You assumed! You assumed!’

  Benjamin Hailey looks from Leah to Viola, lost.

  ‘You’re a liar, Viola Kendrick!’ Leah Cedars’ voice cracks with emotion.

  ‘And you … you …’ Viola gropes for a comeback, her eyes landing on Saul, the way he is looking so pitifully at the object of his affection. Of course, thinks Viola, of course, why shouldn’t it be true? ‘And you,’ she accuses Leah, ‘are pregnant with Saul Cooper’s baby!’

  A fresh exclamation from the spectators. Saul lurches for Viola, intent on silencing her, but she darts away from him, runs to the furthest corner of the room, pulling the radio from her pocket, holding it aloft as bait.

  ‘He gave me this and told me to spy on Leah,’ she continues, almost gleeful, almost enjoying herself. Saul lurches for her again and Viola dances from his grip. She catches her breath and carries on: ‘Leah Cedars told Benjamin Hailey that it was his baby, so that he’d take her with him on the April ship.’

  Saul gives up the chase and spins on his heels, meeting the gaze of the Council men who watch this petty scene with growing anger and impatience.

  ‘This is a complete lie,’ he says, palms flattening the electric atmosphere.

  Leah Cedars takes hold of Benjamin Hailey’s arm, an appeal for him to look at her, but his attention is fixed on Saul, regarding him with an almost tangible air of violence.

  ‘It’s not true,’ Saul persists in his official tone – a quavering version of it. ‘The stranger… I mean, Mr Hailey… isn’t even registered for travel today.’ He says it as if this piece of trivial bureaucracy is the real crux of the allegations.

  Viola pokes at the embers; she throws on petrol. ‘No, Mr Hailey’s actually leaving on the August ship, because he’s promised to take the Eldest Girls with him.’

  The tremulous chorus from the mothers soars again, a shrill jigsaw of ‘What!?’ and ‘Why?’ and ‘What’s going on?’ Mary Ahearn seizes Benjamin Hailey’s shoulder, demanding he turn around and look her in the eye.

  ‘Stop this!’

  Jacob Crane’s voice is like a sledgehammer against glass.

  ‘A boy has been murdered,’ he says, pacing the room, reclaiming it. ‘Lured to his death. And these girls here have admitted to it.’

  All eyes return to the shaven captives, up on the stage, quivering in their seats.

  ‘No!’ wails Ingrid Duchamp, and Anna can’t help but respond, an involuntary sound like an animal trapped.

  Jacob Crane continues: ‘They have confessed to the sin of murder, and also to the sin of witchcraft.’ Dr Bishy and Jed Springer fold their arms and nod. ‘They carried out these acts in the service of the Devil.’

  Murder, witchcraft, the Devil.

  The hands of the onlookers fly to their faces, to their breasts, in shock. Any sympathy for the wretched girls immediately fades.

  ‘Under duress!’ objects Mary Ahearn. ‘They confessed after you brought them here and tortured them!’

  The headmaster rounds on the woman. ‘We brought them here to separate the diseased sheep from the lambs, to be done with their sorcery of silence.’

  ‘To strip them of their ornaments,’ Diana Crane puts in, receiving a sharp glance from her husband – this is not her time to speak.

  ‘Regard not them that have familiar spirits,’ Jacob Crane intones, turning with frightening swiftness to point a finger at Viola. She chokes on her surprise and retreats until her back presses against the raised stage. He moves steadily towards her, mouth wet with spittle. ‘Neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them: I am the Lord your God!’ This is not the man who stands up in chapel and reads; this is a monster who believes himself divine.

  He turns from Viola, as swiftly as he had attacked, impaling the gallery with h
is gaze, a finger trained on the girls.

  ‘A brother is dead at the hands of these sisters, these women who have reawakened the island’s shameful history of superstition and necromancy, women who have danced naked and fornicated with the Devil …’

  ‘No, no, no!’ Ingrid’s cries burst free again.

  ‘Mama!’ calls Anna, sending all three girls into shuddering sobs. Viola reaches up across the raised platform of the stage, as if she might be able to grab hold of an ankle, touch them.

  ‘The bible is very clear.’ Jacob Crane’s voice rises in intensity – the coming of a terrible storm. ‘And we on the Council always defer to His word, which is this…’ He takes a pause, he pronounces their sentence. ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’

  The mothers howl, the gallery gasps, the Eldest Girls scramble from their seats and bundle together as one at the back of the stage. Viola uses the last of her physical strength to haul herself up onto the platform, pushing up through her arms, dragging her belly across the wood. She throws herself at the girls’ trembling bodies, murmuring a desperate, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…’ as Mary Ahearn breaks loose from the throng, teeth clenched, and launches herself at Jacob Crane.

  ‘No!’ yells Rhoda, fearful of recompense, but Jed Springer has hold of Mary before she can reach the headmaster’s throat.

  ‘I gave you due warning, Mary Ahearn,’ Jacob Crane roars above the hubbub. ‘And I made your duty clear – 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 in the depth of the sea. You failed in your task of raising your daughter and now she faces the consequences of your actions!’

  ‘So drown me then!’ cries Mary Ahearn. ‘Drown me like you drowned my husband!’

  As the words leave her mouth, the blood leaves her body, the muscles go too, the bones – she becomes limp. The room is submerged in silence. Viola lifts her head from the embrace of the other girls and feels the vibrations of this seismic shift – the power of something said aloud that has been long buried or dismissed.

  What next? asks Viola’s mind, but no longer as a scream. What comes next?

  ‘You killed my Neil,’ mutters Mary, as much a discovery to herself as a means to bring down this monster. ‘You killed him… you scuppered their boat!’

  Jacob Crane shakes his head firmly. The wives and the hangers-on of the Council take their cue to caw objections, but the gathered have stepped back, a hung jury, uneasy in their wavering.

  The proceedings judder, they stall.

  ‘And it shall be, when he shall be guilty in one of these things, that he shall confess that he hath sinned in that thing.’ Benjamin Hailey speaks up – the outsider. He reads the scripture from his laptop, his face illuminated. ‘And he shall bring his trespass offering unto the Lord for his sin which he hath sinned, a female from the flock, a lamb or a kid of the goats, for a sin offering; and the priest shall make an atonement for him concerning his sin.’

  No one responds, not even Jacob Crane.

  Leah Cedars turns and appraises the man beside her as if he were a stranger once more – a stranger all along. He has never been a religious man.

  The Eldest Girls lift their heads and wait.

  The coycrock teacher looks about him, to the anxious spectators, gauging his reception. He goes back to the screen, brings up fresh words. The apple of his throat rises and falls. He begins.

  ‘“On September the first, 2017”,’ he reads, ‘“on the first day of term, Mr Crane called me to his office early, before school started, so that he might speak with me alone.”’

  Viola feels the bodies of the Eldest Girls react, suddenly alert. She searches their expressions.

  ‘The dossier,’ whispers Jade-Marie.

  They hold their breath as one.

  Benjamin Hailey continues: ‘“Picking up his bible, Mr Crane said that, now I had turned sixteen, I had been chosen to lead the other girls by example and learn the errors committed by Eve so that I did not copy them and multiply the sorrows of everyone living on Lark. We were to act this out, he said, in his office there and then, so the understanding would be in me and I would never forget.”’

  The headmaster lunges forward, swiping bear-like at the teacher’s laptop, but Benjamin Hailey turns away in time, saving the screen.

  ‘“I was told to kneel”,’ Mr Hailey continues, ‘“and Mr Crane explained how Eve had been beguiled by the serpent and then he unzipped the fly of his trousers and took out his – ”’

  ‘No!’

  The swipe is successful this time, the laptop clatters to the wooden floor – but at the hand of Diana Crane.

  ‘I will not have it,’ the woman cries, her husband frozen at her side. She is charged with rage, it crackles from every inch of her.

  Mr Hailey dives to the floor, the laptop still breathing, and the gallery cluster around him to see the screen, to shield him from further interruption.

  ‘“February the twentieth, 2018. Dr Bishy took me into his surgery and I was told to undress. When I asked him why, he said that he suspected that the mark of the devil might be found on my body and said that I was to remove everything, even my underwear, because bad spirits were known to hide within the cavities of a woman’s body and he would need to go inside me and expel them so that – ”’

  ‘Enough!’

  A heel breaks through the crowd, striking the lid of the laptop, stamping it shut.

  ‘Enough of this… this… pornography!’ hisses Elizabeth Bishy, the doctor’s wife, looming over the scene. ‘What kind of pervert encourages young girls to tell stories like that? Why on earth would you do such a disgusting thing?’

  She reaches down, snatching at one of the laptop’s sleek but dented edges. Mr Hailey moves quickly, slamming his two fists onto the lid, pressing the machine hard against the floor. Diana Crane elbows through to join in the fight.

  ‘Because they are true!’ comes a shout, arresting this brawl.

  Heads turn to the door where Leah Cedars stands hand-in-hand with the bewildered Earl. Abe Powell is at her shoulder, Reuben Springer clutching his arm. Leah looks to Abe for reassurance, the physical protection to continue – he nods.

  ‘Because these stories are true,’ she says firmly. She looks to the Eldest Girls on the stage who have risen to their feet, then to their mothers who look ashen, stunned. ‘My friends left the island because of this abuse. My brother left so he would not be coerced by these men.’

  ‘Lies!’ screams Diana Crane.

  Leah nods at Jacob Crane and Dr Bishy, at the statues they have become. ‘My father sat on the Council with these men in order to keep me safe. Abe Powell sits so he will not be punished for who he chooses to love. Robert Signal and the Reverend refuse to sit at all because these men, who claim they speak for God, only bend His scripture to their will.’ She turns to the gathering of people encircling the new teacher, the laptop now held tight against his chest. ‘You know this!’ she implores them. ‘You know!’

  ‘And we’re supposed to listen to you, are we?’ snarls Diana Crane. ‘A daughter who condemned her own father?’

  ‘I condemn your husbands,’ Leah snaps back.

  Sarah Devoner and Miriam Calder fix Leah with indignant stares. Diana Crane laughs showily, and turns to address the audience.

  ‘We’re to believe the words of this woman above the word of our Council?’ The gallery avoids her gaze; they look at their feet. ‘A woman who plays with the Devil’s cards, who rants in the street, who spits in the faces of our men?’ They shake their heads slowly – children chastised. ‘She is nothing but a bitter spinster with a vendetta against those who have what she wants. To believe her is to believe the ramblings of a madwoman.’

  Leah tightens her jaw, keeps her head high, but mutinous tears fall down her cheeks.

  Diana Crane brushes herself down and cuts a purposeful path across the room to stand beside her husband once m
ore – marking this victory.

  ‘Then believe me instead.’

  Britta Sayers sways at the edge of the stage.

  ‘We killed a boy,’ she says. ‘We did it to bring the authorities to the island. Bethany Reid killed herself because the same thing was happening to her, but we killed a boy.’

  Jade-Marie steps forward and fumbles for her friend’s hand, gripping it. ‘We thought if we could lure Luke Signal to the stones and… kill him,’ she says, ‘then people would at last pay attention to what was going on.’

  ‘He took pictures of us, you see,’ Anna speaks. ‘Pictures he shouldn’t have taken. That’s why we chose him. And because he tried to make Viola have sex with him, and because… because…’

  She trails away and Viola understands why. None of it sounds just; it all sounds impossible. How can the telling of the final score ever convey the emotion of the game?

  ‘We had to kill someone, just someone,’ Viola says, coming forward to complete the line-up. ‘Believe me.’

  ‘See!’ blusters Dr Bishy. ‘See!’

  ‘Guilty!’ Mr Crane attests.

  The gallery can only nod, but the verdict feels uncertain, weak.

  There is silence, then:

  ‘Also believe me!’

  Hannah Pass stands on the opposite side of the Earl to Leah, inhaling deeply as the whole room swings its attention to her. Viola provides the encouraging nod Hannah needs to continue.

  ‘I have always suspected that the Countess left the island, and her husband –’ Hannah takes the hand of the man beside her in his wheelchair ‘– to save their eldest daughter from the attentions of the doctor.’

  ‘No!’ says Elizabeth Bishy. ‘Don’t listen to that woman.’

  ‘I will be heard,’ says Hannah. Viola and the Eldest Girls band closer together on the edge of the stage, the very edge. ‘The Earl remained in his position here but he lost in his struggle to turn the island, to steer it into clearer waters, and he has become ill as a result.’ Hannah swallows hard. ‘I have a fourteen-year-old daughter,’ she says, ‘and every day I think: I must leave. I must leave, because I can’t keep her safe.’