The Posy Ring

by Catherine Czerkawska

  At the end of October, the wind and rain that had been constant throughout the month abated, just in time for the return of the cattle from the shielings: compact and sturdy beasts in black and dun, very like the horses, the garrons, which were compact and very sturdy too. The climate and the terrain seemed to demand a measure of toughness if beasts were to survive. Beasts and people both. Bonfires were lit on the high hills, and those returning brought flaming brands down with them, and carried them sunwise around the houses, although carrying any torch around Achadh nam Blàth was quite an undertaking since the house was so big, the land around it so uneven. There were, besides, windy corners where the torches were in danger of being blown out, which was thought to be unlucky. When Mateo asked why they did this, he was told that it was ‘for protection’. They sang as they walked and Lilias translated for him.

  ‘May God give blessing to the house that is here,

  May Jesus give blessing to the house that is here,

  May Mary give blessing to the house that is here,

  May Bride give blessing to the house that is here,

  May Michael give blessing to the house that is here.’

  So the Archangel Michael was known here too.

  ‘Everything must go with the sun, not against it,’ said Lilias. ‘Did you not notice? When we women are waulking the cloth, we pass it sunwise as we sing. Even the boats when they are brought onto the shore or when they are launched must never be turned against the sun. Our houses are blessed by fire in the name of God and his angels, but it must be sunwise. The very stones on the querns must be turned with the sun, otherwise the grain will go bad.’

  ‘And you believe this?’

  ‘Why would I not, when it is the God’s truth?’

  There seemed no answer to this strange combination of Christianity and something older, so Mateo simply assented. This was a powerful invocation and who was he to quarrel with it? He had been at sea for long enough to know that all voyages were mired in superstitions and heresies. If, on the island, these extended to everyday life, then perhaps it was necessary.

  Later, there was feasting in the great hall, to which he and Francisco were invited as guests, along with a great many islanders. Lilias told them that the empty places set at the table were for the souls of the dead who might visit on this night. After the meal, there was singing and dancing. Stories were told of which Mateo understood not a word, but the sounds washed over him and it seemed to him that they brought their own strange and vivid images to his mind, of ancient battles and long-ago quarrels and loves lost and won. It seemed to him that the songs were sadder than those of his island, and it occurred to him to wonder if it had something to do with the dark time of year, the absence of the sun, which was such a constant on his island. The long dark nights were difficult to bear and he’d been told that the days would grow shorter still. No wonder so many prayers and songs were invocations to the sun for its return.

  ‘But the days are much longer in summer,’ Ishbel told them. ‘You wait. There’s hardly any darkness at all in the middle of summer!’

  He found it hard to believe, but he knew that it must be so. It was different from the world he had left and lost, although it didn’t make it any more comfortable to endure.

  Late in the evening there were games of which, again, he understood almost nothing. Francisco had taken himself off to bed, well fed and as happy as Mateo had seen him since they left home.

  ‘I think I might sleep soundly for the first time in months,’ he said.

  For himself, Mateo felt wide awake and animated. He had been sitting at some distance from her, but once the meal was cleared away, he had slowly but surely edged closer to Lilias, who was looking very lovely, in a yellow gown with creamy lace at the throat and cuffs.

  ‘Is this heather-dyed too?’ he asked, during a break in the music.

  ‘This? Why no, Mateo. This is a silken gown from my brother in St Andrews. He brought it for me the last time he came home. It’s the finest thing I own. Or have ever owned for that matter. I’ve never had a gown like it.’

  ‘It becomes you very well.’

  ‘Thank you, kind sir. Whatever did I do for compliments before you washed ashore? And have you enjoyed these celebrations that are so new and strange for you?’

  ‘More than anything for a very long time.’

  ‘Then I’m glad. I’ve never seen Francisco so happy.’

  ‘Nor me, since we left home.’

  ‘Is he sick for his home? Does he long for it as I would?’

  ‘I think he is.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘A little. Not just so much.’

  How could he say that he was sick only for her company? That the thought of her filled his mind, all day, and half the night. Whatever work he was asked to perform, he did it with her in mind. It would not do. Her father would never permit it. She had told him quite freely and cheerfully that there was a man called Seoras Darroch, who held a considerable acreage of land on a nearby island, and who could command many followers. It was the same family where her brother was fostered. Seoras had lost his wife two years previously, and there had been some talk of a betrothal, but nothing had been formally arranged as yet. She thought that perhaps her father was not so anxious to be rid of her and so he kept putting it off.

  ‘Do you want to be married?’ asked Mateo, even though it pained him to ask the question.

  She pulled a face. ‘Not yet a while. He seems like quite an old man to me!’

  At last, when people were leaving, to go home to their own cottages, to the rooms above the stables, to the chambers in and around the house and wherever they could find a bed, one of the lassies threw a handful of hazelnuts onto a flat-iron griddle and thrust it onto the fire. She called out her name, Cairistiona, and the name of one of the lads, Seamus, pushing the nuts side by side with a pair of tongs, trying not to burn her fingers. A group of girls gathered round, laughing, jostling, naming the little brown nuts, seizing the tongs and pushing them into pairs. Lilias was urged forward and chose the cobnut she fancied for herself, and then Cairistiona was pushing another nut alongside it, and whispering ‘Mateo’ and all the girls burst out laughing, so much so that the elders, huddled over their drinks at the other end of the hall, looked around in disapproval.

  ‘Daft lassies,’ said McNeill, and carried on with his discourse on the finer points of cattle-raising.

  The nuts roasted and the smell of burning nutshell rose from the fire. Most leaped apart, many of them right off the metal plate and into the fire where they flamed up and disappeared. There were shrieks of mirth and disappointment. Love, like the nuts, would not last. One or two lay quietly side by side. Mateo stared at those named for himself and Lilias. The fire crackled and spluttered and the two nuts jumped up and leaped apart. He swallowed his disappointment. How foolish, he thought. What a silly game. But then there came another burst of flame from the fire and the two nuts rolled together again, and there they stayed, small, round, brown, and indisputably as close as it was possible to be.

  Lilias got to her feet. Her cheeks were flushed, although whether from the heat of the fire or from embarrassment it was hard to say.

  ‘I must take my leave of you!’ she said to the group of young women around the fire, embracing her closest friends among them. ‘Goodnight my friends. Sleep well.’ She caught his gaze. ‘Mateo de Tegueste, my partner amid the flames, may you sleep soundly too. May the good Archangel Michael, bonnie fighter that he is, protect and keep you, now and always.’

  She dropped him a curtsey, the yellow dress swirling about her, her vivid hair escaping from its confinement after the activity of the day, and left. He joined a sleeping Francisco in their small room, and he lay down on the bed, his hands pillowing the back of his head. But he barely slept the whole night. He was wearing a crumpled linen undershirt, and he found his fingers comp
ulsively searching for the inner pocket, where he had concealed his sole precious possession: a small, golden ring.

  TWENTY-THREE

  It’s a ring, a gold band, slightly misshapen, with tiny fragments of sand still clinging to it here and there. Cal blows on it gently to clear the sand away, then peers at it more closely. She does the same, and their heads almost collide. But it’s irresistible.

  ‘Jesus!’ he says. ‘Where did this spring from? Did you know this was here, Hector? You couldn’t have, could you?’

  ‘Don’t let him swallow it!’ she says, momentarily panicked.

  Hector sniffs at the ring, sneezes, backs away. Cal closes his hand protectively round it until the dog has lost interest.

  ‘Bog off, Hector,’ says Cal and surprisingly the dog does, looking hurt. ‘I don’t fancy having to retrieve it from the other end!’

  She takes the ring from him, feeling the weight of it, and they bend over the extraordinary find again, intrigued.

  ‘Gold?’ she asks.

  ‘Oh I think so, don’t you? Nothing else feels so heavy and comes out of the sand and out of the sea still shining like this after...’ He stops suddenly.

  ‘Well, go on. After how long?’

  He shakes his head, distracted. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But it looks old, doesn’t it?’

  He stares at her for a moment or two. ‘I know what I think, but it’s better to be sceptical to begin with. May I?’

  Carefully she transfers the ring back to his outstretched palm. He feels in another pocket and fishes out his jeweller’s loup. He looks closely at the ring, tipping it this way and that, but always carefully, holding it between finger and thumb. He has nice hands, slender and sensitive. As she watches him, she shivers at the memory of his kiss, but she also has a sudden unreasonable desire to wrest the ring from him. Mine, she thinks. It’s mine. He found it here. On my land. My beach. I’m like Gollum, she thinks, which makes her laugh. He takes the loup away from his eye and gazes at the ring for a moment or two without it, then holds it out to her again. He seems both puzzled and intrigued. She takes it back, relieved, and sits it on the palm of her hand. It already feels warm from his fingers. She can see that there is a design on the outside, and lettering of some sort inside.

  He breathes out, bemused. ‘I keep wondering what next? What are we going to find next?’

  ‘Tell me what you think it is!’

  ‘Well, I’m not a hundred per cent sure, but it looks to me like a posy ring.’

  She frowns. ‘Wasn’t that poesy, originally? As in poem.’

  ‘I think so.’

  She’s peering more closely at it. ‘Is that a hare on the outside? A running hare and flowers. There are flowers.’

  He offers her the lens and she squints at the ring through it. Suddenly, the design springs to life in vivid detail, only slightly blunted by time, the yellow metal impossibly warm and bright for something that might have lain hidden for many years. It makes her think of the brightness and warmth of the portrait of Lilias. The pattern is in shallow relief, the hare bounding around the ring’s circumference through a border of flowers. Inside, there is an inscription, in tiny, precise lettering.

  ‘Vous et nul ... autre?’ she says.

  ‘That’s what I think it says as well.’

  ‘You and no other.’

  ‘That’s right.’ He’s looking at her solemnly, his face shadowed, his brown eyes huge. The sun has gone behind the wall and there’s a chill in the air.

  ‘It’s a love token then.’

  ‘I think so,’ he says, carefully.

  ‘Weren’t they given as love tokens between courting couples? Or perhaps to mark a marriage.’

  ‘But it was a time when marriages were often political or convenient, so sometimes they were secret gifts. This is a real love token, I think. A talisman.’

  ‘How old is it?’

  ‘Old. I think so anyway.’

  ‘You mean very old? Like the picture?’

  ‘Well, there are plenty of modern copies. Lots of jewellers started making them and they still do. We’ve had them in the shop occasionally. But never anything really old. They can be fifteenth or sixteenth century. Sometimes even older.’

  ‘And this one?’

  ‘Could be.’ He shrugs. ‘You’d need to get a jewellery specialist to have a look at it. We could take some pictures. I can give you some contacts. You don’t need to let it go.’

  It’s as though he can sense her anxiety.

  ‘Right,’ she says, still holding the ring, peering at it. ‘I think it might have been enamelled.’

  ‘I think you’re right. But the enamel will wear off with time, dissolve, leaving just the gold. When you look at it through the magnifier, there’s just a tiny bit of colour, microscopic really, here and there.’

  ‘I can see. And there seem to be two phrases, not just one. You and no other, and then another one. Even smaller. Un temps viendra.’

  ‘That’s what I thought it said. But that was…’

  ‘On the picture of Lilias.’ She almost whispers it. ‘Is this for real?’

  He shudders suddenly. ‘I think it’s fucking spooky,’ he mutters.

  ‘Does it bother you?’ She’s surprised. He doesn’t seem the type to be spooked.

  ‘A wee bit, it does. I don’t know why. I don’t like this kind of thing much. Coincidence. It’s just coincidence, isn’t it?’ He seems to need reassurance, so she nods.

  ‘I suppose so. Why would it be in French? It must mean that the ring is French, mustn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I mean they may have been imported. People may have had them made and perhaps the goldsmiths were foreign. I’m not sure. I know you tend to find them in England rather than here. The Ashmolean in Oxford has a collection.’

  He’s thinking aloud, as puzzled as she is, but feeling that he ought to know more. It strikes her how much men like to be seen as experts.

  ‘How would it finish up here?’

  ‘I have no notion. It would almost make more sense if it was in Spanish.’

  ‘You mean the Armada?’

  ‘Aye, I do, Daisy, but it’s a mystery.’

  He reaches over, takes up the ring and slides it onto the third finger of her left hand. ‘I had a feeling it would fit,’ he says dreamily, and it does.

  She looks at it for a moment, seeing the ring on her finger, the hare leaping forever round and round, leaping with the sun, clockwise, endlessly circling the ring of gold.

  ‘Clockwise,’ he says. ‘You know they won’t turn their boats against the sun here, don’t you?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You ask Donal McNeill. If you’re putting a boat in the water or taking it out, you have to make sure you turn it with the sun. Otherwise ill luck began to follow the unfortunate man – as somebody here once said to me. So I always turn with the sun too.’

  She slides the ring off her finger. ‘I don’t think I should wear it,’ she says. ‘What if it really is four or five hundred years old? But I don’t know what to do with it!’

  ‘Let’s take it back to the house at least. Find a safe place for it. Maybe it’s a ring whose time has come.’

  *

  They both seem to find the ring disquieting, albeit for different reasons. For Daisy, it’s one more responsibility. She can’t quite fathom why wearing it made her feel so strange, nor why Cal is so apparently discomfited by it. Inside the house, she looks around the big room and finds a carved wooden trinket box on top of the oak press. Inside there is the usual guddle of receipts, a coil of string, elastic bands, some paperclips, an old hayfever spray and a half-used book of stamps from several Christmases ago. She tips them out, although they make her think of Viola all over again, puts a tissue in the box and sits the ring on top of it, covering
it with another layer of paper.

  ‘Don’t forget where you’ve put it,’ he says.

  ‘I’m hardly likely to do that! If I had a safe, I’d be locking it away.’

  ‘You should maybe just wear it.’

  ‘I can’t risk losing it.’

  ‘The way somebody once did?’

  ‘Do you think it was lost or hidden? Don’t you have to report finds like this?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Mum would know, if you don’t mind me telling her about it. You’re supposed to report treasure trove, but I don’t know if a single ring like this would count. If you’re not going to wear it, you should probably sell it.’

  ‘I might not want to sell it. And I certainly don’t want some government official to carry it off to a museum.’

  ‘You could always pretend you found it in the house. I won’t tell if you won’t. Besides, we found it on your beach. Hell mend them. It’s yours to keep.’

  ‘I can’t make my mind up about any of this right now, Cal. It’s all too much.’

  ‘Are you thinking of trying to keep the house as well?’

  ‘It had crossed my mind. Yes.’

  ‘It’s an expensive business. The upkeep of a place like this.’

  ‘And I don’t have that sort of cash. But maybe I can sell some of this stuff. I don’t want to become a hoarder.’

  ‘All antique dealers have the potential to be hoarders. It’s in our DNA, I think.’

  ‘Isn’t that the truth? You have to learn to live with things and let them go. But I’ve never had to deal with something as huge as this before, and so personal as well.’

  ‘You don’t have to make any immediate decisions, do you?’ He looks at his watch. ‘Listen, I have to go. I have work to do.’