I hear the echo of my words from the other day, on the loch. But there’s no soft apology in his tone. Instead he’s sure I’ll back down, now he has something I want – need. He’s so confident he knows me, but he doesn’t know anything. Doesn’t know what I know, or what I’ve done.
Before I realize I’m doing it, I reach into the basket and pull out the gun.
His eyes widen with surprise for a second, and a bolt of triumph bursts through me. He doesn’t know me that well. Then his mouth splits into a grin, and I falter as the heat of my fury gives way to icy shock at my own behaviour. What the hell am I playing at?
But Ren doesn’t seem frightened by the gun. Or even bothered.
He reaches out, taking the barrel of the gun in his hand. He pulls it – pulls me – forward until the tip is kissing his forehead, all the while watching me calmly.
“I’m not going to shoot you,” I say quietly.
“Says the girl with a gun to my head.” He smiles. “They’re in my top inside pocket, if you were wondering.”
I try to pull the gun away, but he holds it fast, keeping it pressing into his skin.
“Do you have a death wish?” I ask. “This isn’t funny. Stop it.”
“Take them.”
I hesitate, looking into his eyes, trying to read the intention there. Slowly, I reach into the inside pocket of his coat, find the box resting against his heart. I pull it out, my knuckles feeling the rhythm behind his ribs, beating hard and fast. Despite his arrogant smile, he’s frightened.
Or excited.
He smiles at me: a pure, open smile.
“You’re insane.”
“Am I?”
As I lift the package free, he raises his other hand, resting it over mine. One still keeping the gun to his head, the other pressing my hand to his chest. His heart is wild beneath it, the twin of mine. Glacier-blue eyes watch me, clear as the sky above. A girl could drown in eyes like that, and not in the fun way.
Then he blinks, and releases both the gun and me.
“Alva?” he says, his voice low, a purr to it that makes my mouth dry.
I raise an eyebrow, not trusting myself to speak.
“I knew you weren’t going to shoot me,” he says in his normal voice, folding his arms behind his head and leaning back. “You didn’t cock the gun.”
I turn on the spot and run, leaving him there, a faint red ring on his forehead like a faded lipstick mark. The last image of him is burned into my brain: sitting on the stump, cheeks flushed, breath coming fast. Flushed as mine, fast as mine.
I have what I came for. So why does it feel like I’ve lost?
SEVEN
I race back up the mountain, shame dogging my heels. I can’t believe I drew my gun. How reckless. How idiotic. A despicable thing to do.
There’s no excuse, no reason, for pulling a weapon on an unarmed person, no matter what they’ve done. I should know that better than anyone. Like father, like daughter. What’s wrong with me? What if it had gone off? What if I’d hurt him? What if it had been worse? Ren…
I rage at myself the whole way home, the fury only ebbing away as I get closer to the cottage, when it’s replaced by the fear that if Da is back then he knows I disobeyed him and left. Maybe it’s no more than I deserve.
I find the cottage still and silent, heavy with the feeling of emptiness. And it frightens me. I should be relieved, but I’m not. I’m worried.
“He’s fine,” I say aloud to the kitchen, as if that will make it true. “Of course he’s fine, why wouldn’t he be fine?” Concern for my father is a new feeling. “You just worry about yourself,” I mutter as I put the kettle on to boil.
While it does, I hide the bullets beneath the floorboards in my room, replace the flintlock in the cabinet in my father’s study, and brush the mud from my skirt. There. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.
Everything is fine.
I mix dough for bread and leave it to rise; then, starving after my hike, I throw together a potato soup, leaving it on the hob to simmer while I fuss over the already tidy cottage, dusting surfaces that are spotless, straightening quilts and polishing cutlery. When the soup is finally ready I lace it with dill, taking the bowl through to my father’s study.
Settling in his chair, legs curled under me, soup balanced on my knee, I flick through the huge logbook that represents his life as the Naomhfhuil, going back, back, until I reach the year I was nine. The year he—
I stop dead as I find a piece of paper folded between the pages of the log.
Lachlan is written on the front. My father’s name, in my mother’s handwriting.
Suddenly I can smell lavender and hear her singing off-key as she hangs the washing out. I remember running through a maze of white sheets on the first good day of spring, her chasing after me. I remember her making shadow-puppet monsters with her hands and screaming with delight when they tickled me through the washing.
She’d been pregnant in the weeks before my father shot her, but something went wrong. She lost the baby, and a lot of blood too. She almost died. Harry Glenn, who was the nearest thing Ormscaula had to a doctor of any kind, told my father to stay home with her, that she would need him. But he didn’t. As always with him, the loch came first.
She wasn’t the same afterwards.
She slept later and later; some days she never got out of bed. She stopped eating, stopped talking, stopped getting dressed. Her hair grew lank, her eyes bloodshot. It was summer, and she started to smell, unwashed and sour, so bad I didn’t want to go near her. When she did get up, she’d leave me at home and wander the lochside for hours, returning after dark and going straight back to bed.
My father begged her to pull herself together and I wanted that too. I wanted my mam back; I didn’t understand why I wasn’t enough to make her happy, like before. She barely seemed to know I was there; my father would come home from his rounds to find me eating jam from the jar because it was all I could reach on the shelf and I was starving. He told her over and over he was sorry for what happened, but that he needed her to get better. For her own sake. For my sake. And she didn’t. Wouldn’t. Couldn’t, I see now.
It was her screams that woke me up the night he killed her. Her voice that dragged me from my bed. After weeks of silence, there was suddenly sound: guttural, furious shrieking, rage shredding her throat, making each cry raw and ragged. Something in my father must have snapped, because I opened my bedroom door in time to hear a scuffle in the parlour, and then a gun going off. Four times, one after the other, with no pause. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Faster than my heartbeat.
The revolving barrel made it quick. You wouldn’t be able to shoot someone four times like that with a flintlock; you’d have to keep pausing to reload each bullet, to stuff more gunpowder down the barrel. You’d have to really mean it, to shoot someone four times with that. Maybe it’s easier with a revolver.
One more outraged cry, and then the window shattering. I ran back to bed and hid under the covers. I told myself it was a dream. I was in bed, so it had to be a dream.
When I heard my father’s tread outside my window, I shut my eyes until I couldn’t hear it any more. He was gone. That was when I went to the parlour.
I longed to see my mam crouched on the floor, picking up bits of glass with careful fingers, plucking them from her pretty carpet, a spark finally back in her eyes, reignited by the shock of the gunfire and the thunderstorm air-clearing of the row. I wanted her to tell me to go back to bed, and not to worry. I hoped to lie awake and hear my father return, and the sounds of them making up. But there was none of that. No sign of her. Only a little gun left on the floor. I picked it up and went back to bed, where I put it under my pillow.
When he came back he looked for it, of course. I screwed my eyes shut tight and listened while he lifted up the sofa, while he reached under the sideboard. I lay still as the dead when he came to my room, the gun hard beneath my pillow as the door opened and the beam of light hit the wall.
I thought he knew I had it. I thought he was coming to take it back and finish me off too. Those last two bullets, waiting for me. But all he did was bend and kiss my head gently, as though he hadn’t just gunned my mother down two rooms away and dumped her body in the loch outside my window.
When he finally closed the door I thought my heart would fly from my chest.
The next morning the door to my mother’s parlour was closed, forbidden now, and he told me she’d left in the night. When I asked if she’d be back he said he didn’t know.
A week later, when Giles Stewart came around, oh-so-concerned after hearing she’d lost the baby, and found her missing, I repeated what my father said – that she’d left us.
Even when he sent for a sheriff, I never wavered. I looked right into the sheriff’s solemn grey eyes and I told him she left of her own free will. I didn’t mention the gun or the shots. I didn’t say that my mother’s body probably lay at the bottom of the loch.
I remember later that night a great storm began, a sky-breaker, rain lashing down, churning the loch. My father spent most of the night by the window, watching it. Waiting to see if what he’d done would come to the surface.
Now, I lift this slip of paper out of the log, this note from my mam written so long ago, and slowly I open it.
I’ve gone down into the village to see Maggie, it reads. Alva is with me. We’ll be back for tea. Then a single kiss, an x slashed across the bottom of the page, instead of a name – because of course he’d know who it was from.
And he kept it. A note like one she must have left a hundred times before. A nothing note. Folded away in his precious Naomhfhuil logs.
My soup has gone cold, but I don’t have the stomach for it any more. Usually I try not to remember that night, but once you decide not to think of a thing, you can’t get away from it.
I uncurl my legs, needle pricks stabbing my soles when I put them to the floor. Once the pain has passed, I hobble to the kitchen and dump the soup back in the pot before crossing to the window. Outside the loch is so calm it’s as though a looking glass has been lain on the ground, reflecting the clear sky above. There’s no sign of life out there at all.
Filling a pan with water, I set about making tea, putting my bread in the oven while the water boils. I wish I had something else to do – more transcribing work, sewing, anything. The kitchen feels too big and my bedroom too full of secrets, so I take my mug to the front stoop, sitting on the thick slab and blowing at the steam. I tell myself I’m not watching for my father.
I check on the chickens and am surprised to find them huddled in their coop instead of out scratching for worms. When I rummage in the straw there are no eggs, and when I head to the goat shed, I find the goat dry too. I wouldn’t have been able to have milk in my porridge this morning, even if I had come out then. It’s that wild cat, scaring away my breakfast. I hope my father catches it soon.
Locking the goat in, I return to the stoop, my attention on the horizon, until the sky turns pink, mauve, then mulberry. When the polar star emerges above me, I go back inside. The cottage smells of fresh bread, like a real home.
It’s just before midnight when I decide enough is enough. He’s been gone for a whole day and night now, and I’ve spent the last three hours watching the clock on the mantelpiece, ears straining towards every sound, heart jumping with every imagined lift of the door latch. I’m never going to sleep feeling like this – I have to do something. I fetch my earasaid and my boots, and go to my father’s study for a weapon, deciding in a fit of rebellion to take the other long gun.
I’ll walk to the sheds and back. Just to see if there’s any sign of him.
The night is clear, and light enough to see, a hundred thousand stars glittering in an indigo sky, the moon a fat, bold sphere that makes me think of Ren, of all things, though I’ve no idea why.
A splash to my right has me whirling on the spot, raising the gun, as my eyes lock on to something moving in the loch. Then I laugh, delighted.
An otter. After all these years, there’s one right there, parallel to the shore.
I watch it dive, its sleek brown body slipping under the water without making a sound. Then it resurfaces, flipping on to its back and scrubbing its face with its paws. My heart lifts. If ever there was an omen things are going to be all right, it’s this.
My step is much lighter as I walk on, eyes tracking the otter until it vanishes into the depths of the loch and doesn’t return.
The joy lasts until I reach the sheds. I didn’t bring a lamp because the long gun needs two hands – it’s a more powerful gun – but I regret it now. A flintlock pistol would have meant I could have had both weapon and light.
“Da?” I call softly, moving from shed to shed, pushing the doors open and allowing what little light there is to spill inside. I hesitate to go in, suddenly scared the door will close behind me and I’ll be trapped, but force myself to do it anyway, leading with the gun.
“Are you here?” I whisper, both wanting and dreading a reply.
Rats squeal at the intrusion, bold enough in the dark to dart in front of me, but otherwise the sheds are still, the nets hanging dolefully from their hooks, the cart where I left it. If he’s been here, there’s no sign of him now. When I check the boathouses, both boats are there, their hulls bone dry when I pat them.
Defeated, I turn for home, looking to the loch, hoping to see the otter again, watching the whole way back.
The cottage is in sight, the kitchen glowing a welcome at me, when something breaks the surface of the loch again.
But it’s not an otter.
It’s fish-belly pale, and long.
The world falls away as I realize what it is.
A body.
Her body.
Then it moves.
It barely makes a ripple as it swims towards me, slowly cutting through the water with a sinuous grace. And as it dives I see its tail, mottled and grey.
It’s a pike, nothing more.
I laugh with relief, embarrassed by my imagination. I soon sober when I realize it’s a bad sign that pike are coming to the surface. Though I suppose it’s not so much the pike coming to the surface, as much as the surface is closing in on the pike. Even in the dark I can see the level has dropped again. That decides me. I’ll write to Giles myself, I think. He has to know—
Something grabs me from behind.
EIGHT
I drop the gun and scream. Within seconds I’m flung into my own hallway. Miraculously I manage to stay on my feet, stopping myself before I crash into the wall. I turn to find my father standing in the doorway, both long guns over his arm.
He slams the door closed and throws the bolt, leaning against it, breathing heavily.
“Da?”
“What did I tell you?” he says in a low voice.
“I was just—”
“What did I tell you?” he turns and roars, spittle spraying from his lips.
His eyes bulge so wide I see the white around his dark irises, his face purple with fury.
I back away, until I’m against the wall, with nowhere else to go. My knife is in my pocket; my fingertips brush the hilt. Then my father lets out a long, rattling sigh and walks away, into the kitchen.
My head falls back against the wall, my heart making a frantic bid to exit my body directly through my chest, my hand trembling against my hip.
Slowly, I exhale, breathing through my mouth, until everything is steady. When I follow him through to the kitchen, he’s sitting at the table, shovelling cold soup into his mouth straight from the cooking pot. He doesn’t look at me, just eats, spooning soup up with punishing rhythm.
I pull the loaf I made earlier from the breadbox and slice it, depositing thick slabs before him.
He glowers at me over the rim of the pot but accepts the bread.
When he pushes the pot towards me, I take a piece of bread and dip it in the soup. We eat until it’s gone.
The air settles between us, the tensio
n and rage dissipating with the sharing of a meal. Even a cold one.
“Did you see the pike?” I ask.
He stares at me, then nods. I wait for him to tell me he’s finally going to tell Giles, so I won’t have to.
“What were you doing out there?” he asks. “I told you to stay in the cottage.”
“Looking for you. You’ve been gone a whole day.”
His eyebrows rise in surprise. “I didn’t mean to worry you.”
I shrug, and begin to clear the table.
“Alva?”
I turn, soup pot in hand.
He doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Then: “You look so much like your mother.”
Abruptly he stands, heading to his study, closing the door behind him.
The moment I hear it click shut, my knees buckle and I hit the floor, the soup pot landing beside me with a gentle thud.
Sleep comes in snatches, punctuated by terrible dreams. In them I hear screaming, see carpets of blood creep towards my feet, my mother’s face mouthing words I can’t make out from beneath glassy waters. I wake between these nightmares and can hear my heart in my ears, as sweat cools on my skin. Each time is worse than the last, as though my brain is trying to outdo itself.
The worst, though, is the time I wake and realize I’m not alone. A thin shaft of light shines on the wall by my head, and soft breathing comes from the doorway behind me.
My father is there, watching me sleep. Just like he did that night.
Almost as soon as I realize it, the beam narrows and vanishes, the latch closing so quietly I wouldn’t have heard it if I wasn’t awake. A moment later I hear his bedroom door close, distinctive because it always sticks.
I don’t even attempt to go back to sleep. Instead I get up, throwing a shawl over my shoulders. I tiptoe to the bedroom door and lift the latch silently, sneaking to the kitchen to light a candle, before returning to my room and wedging my shawl between the bottom of the door and the floor to keep any telltale glow from giving me away. Then I sit at my desk and pull a sheaf of paper towards me. I open a jar of ink, dip my favourite pen in it and begin to write.
Hold Back the Tide Page 5