The Posy Ring

by Catherine Czerkawska

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And what did she say?’

  ‘It was unrepeatable, what she actually said. But we both think there’s not much we can do. I’m going to finish this restoration job as soon as I can, and cart it down to Glasgow next week. Mum’s customer will be ready for it. And I’ll see my father then as well. See if I can talk some sense – or generosity – into him. But I’m not holding my breath. And my mum always does as she’s told. Do you fancy taking Hector for a walk?’

  ‘Why not? Why don’t we go up the hill there? I don’t even know if the tree is still there. Do you know it?’

  ‘The Clootie Tree. Aye, it’s still there. Although nobody publicises it and folk don’t go there so much now. Load of nonsense if you ask me.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘Have you been up there?’

  ‘Once, years ago. The only other time I visited the island. When my mother was very ill.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He understands immediately. ‘It didn’t work, I take it?’

  ‘Well, it worked after a fashion. According to my dad. There was our wish, but he had another one. And since that was much less specific, much more down to him to accomplish, that one came true.’

  ‘Which is typical, isn’t it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Fairies, otherworldly creatures, weavers of magic spells. There’s always a get-out clause, always the gold turning into dried leaves in the light of day, always the trick question, the instruction they neglect to give you!’

  ‘Humour me. I want to see it again and I’d rather you were with me.’

  He gives her a small sidelong glance. Smiling. ‘OK. Do you want to make a wish?’

  ‘No, but you do.’

  ‘It’s a piece of nonsense, hen. It really is.’ Whenever he becomes exasperated like this, his accent turns into pure Glasgow. She finds it very attractive.

  ‘Nevertheless. Do you have anything that belongs in the cottage? Something we could tie to the tree.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, Daisy!’

  ‘Humour me,’ she repeats.

  He sighs, spreads his hands wide in capitulation. ‘As it happens, there’s an old tea towel in my car. I use it to wipe the windows. Will that do?’

  ‘Go and fetch it.’

  The tea towel is faded almost beyond recognition and threadbare too, but it once had a pictorial map of Garve on it with yachts and fishing boats, oystercatchers and dolphins, and the outline of churches and houses including Auchenblae. All washed out and ghostly now.

  ‘We got it for my mum, years ago. They had them in the ironmongers shop in Keill for a while.’

  ‘Perfect,’ she says. She doesn’t tell him that they should write the wish on it. It would be a step too far for him. It will just have to do. He folds it up and tucks it into his pocket. They head out of the gate and turn left up the hill. The narrow lane is warm and damp and sweet-smelling. It is so sheltered that the fuchsias in the hedge are beginning to flower remarkably early here. A blackbird is singing in the thicket, and here and there they hear rustles and squawks as small birds squabble and jostle for place.

  The lane narrows even more, until the grass growing down the centre begins to take over, and it becomes little more than a muddy track, winding up to the top of the hill. The lane ascends slowly through a mixture of willow scrub, taller hawthorn and beautiful birches, their leaves like dazzling coins of light at this time of year. The track takes a final twist and they find themselves in a shallow saucer of land at the top of the hill. It isn’t a very high hill, only a few hundred feet, but the rise from sea level makes it seem higher.

  ‘There’s your Clootie Tree!’ says Cal.

  Oddly, Hector, who has been lolloping ahead of them, lies down suddenly on the very rim of the saucer, panting and whining. No matter how much they coax him, he will go no further.

  Almost at the centre of the saucer of land stands an ancient hawthorn. It is massive, grey and hoary as a venerable old man, and the prevailing winds have twisted its shape and canted it over to one side, although not without difficulty. The tree seems to have fought a constant battle with the wind for much of its life. The many branches are covered in beards of lichen and moss, but the topmost branches have, against all the odds, blossomed, and there is a crown of sweet-scented white flowers up there. A great many of the leafless lower branches are festooned with fabric – scraps of cloth, scarves that remind Daisy of herself and her father, tying her mother’s pale silk scarf on a branch, all those years ago: old-fashioned handkerchiefs, cuttings of this or that textile, rags of all kinds, from ancient linen sheets to pieces of pillowslip and more garish bits and pieces from garments associated in some way with the wish. There are even the sad and tattered remnants of a baby dress, hanging high up, just below the crown of flowers. She had forgotten almost all of this over the years. But perhaps she and her father had been too intent on what they were doing to notice their surroundings, and her father had been desperate to get back down the hill and away from the island without encountering his mother-in-law or without Viola seeing her, Daisy, at all.

  ‘Wow,’ she says. ‘It looks like a person.’

  The fluttering rags do have the effect of making the branches look like arms, as though the movement in the fabric is giving the illusion of the tree itself moving.

  ‘Where’s your tea towel?’

  ‘Here.’ He fishes it out of his pocket. ‘But where will we put it?’

  The lower branches have split and fallen or are already full of decaying cloth. She can’t see anything resembling her mother’s silk scarf and can’t remember where they put it; the elements must have done their work and it is long gone, shredded by wind and rain. The place has a very strange feeling. Daisy doubts if she will come back up here, or certainly not on her own. The tree is not promoted in any way to outsiders. There is nothing about it in the island tourist leaflets and nothing on the website. She doubts if many casual visitors to the island even know of its existence, although some of the offerings festooning the lower branches look quite new, so at least some of the islanders are still indulging in a little paganism now and again.

  ‘See,’ he says. ‘Even Hector thinks it’s weird here.’ The dog is still crouching on the lip of land, looking across at them and whining, but coming no further.

  ‘Lift me up, and I’ll tie it onto a branch,’ she says.

  He puts his arms around her, jiggles her upwards until he is holding her under her bottom (‘this is nice,’ he says, his nose against her breast, breathing her scent), and then he hoists her high into the air, like a weight-lifter, staggering slightly.

  ‘Ooof,’ he says.

  ‘Are you implying I’m heavy?’ she asks. For someone so slender, he’s surprisingly strong. He’s all muscle. It strikes her that this is very far removed from the last tragic time she was here, and yet in its own way, it seems equally important.

  ‘Get a move on for God’s sake!’ he says, but he’s laughing too. She balances in his arms, finds an empty branch, reaches up and ties the worn tea towel round it, thinking of Fiona swearing over the Wemyss pig, thinking of Cal, sitting on the bench, hammering angrily at the wood. Thinking of his lovemaking and how much she enjoys the sensation of his long body welded to hers.

  She could wish for all kinds of things for herself: for the wisdom to know what to do with the house, for her father’s happiness, for a nice faithful man in her own life and even, as has lately crossed her mind, for the possibility of a child. Tick-tock says the biological clock. She has been deaf to it until now but it has been there all along and now she can hear it. Soon it will become insistent. But she doesn’t wish for any of those things at this moment. Instead, she whispers, so quietly that the wind carries the words away and he can’t hear them, ‘I wish it would be all right for Cal. Let him keep Carraig. Let things sort themselves
out in the right way.’

  Then, she braces herself on his shoulders. ‘Right,’ she says. ‘You can put me down now!’

  ‘Thank Christ for that,’ he says. ‘I don’t need a hernia right now.’

  She slides down his body, but he keeps his arms around her and pulls her close, kissing her deeply, his tongue in her mouth. She’s dizzy with desire for him. There’s a big boulder on top of the hill, not far from the tree. It could be the remains of a standing stone, or just a huge piece of granite. It has a smooth, vertical surface. He lifts her again and staggers towards the stone.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asks, but he just shakes his head.

  He sets her back gently against the stone, running his hands down her body, tugging at her jeans.

  Breathless, she asks, ‘Have you got anything? Cal?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says, ‘not for this,’ and then he’s on his knees, pulling down her jeans and pants. She’s resting on the stone, which feels curiously warm against her back, threading her fingers through his hair, feeling his tongue, warm and insistent. Momentarily, she wonders what would happen if somebody climbed the hill, saw them, but Hector would bark, wouldn’t he? She can hear him snuffling about among the willows. And then she can think only of Cal. She leans against the stone and sees green leaves, white flowers, a pale blue sky and at last a wave of the most intense, helpless pleasure scythes through her.

  Then he’s looking up at her, grinning wickedly. ‘Was that good?’

  ‘Do you need to ask? It was good! But what about you?’

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he says. ‘It was good for me too. We’d best go back down to the house before the dog decides we’ve gone missing.’

  ‘Where is the dog?’

  ‘Over there. I can just see his ears.’

  ‘Why won’t he come into this circle?’

  ‘Why indeed. He’s spooked, I think. I’m spooked too.’

  ‘It didn’t seem to stop you.’

  ‘No. But maybe that’s part of the ritual.’

  ‘Do you mean that?’

  ‘No. I’m joking. But we can pretend it is.’

  All the same, she wonders. This is a primitive place and with him, all her impulses seem primitive too.

  ‘Are you staying the night?’ she asks.

  ‘Do you want me to?’

  ‘Yes, I want you to.’

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  1589

  The winter seemed impossibly long. How do they bear it?, thought Mateo, when he woke yet again to a day of thin rain, mist on the hills and grey skies. Francisco carried on teaching the three children as best he could, although Ishbel was by far the most amenable. McNeill had managed to obtain some precious paper and charcoal from the priest, whose small church lay in the south of the island, while Lilias, with her father’s permission, had written a letter to her brother to be carried to the mainland by the next visiting vessel. It listed the various pigments, canvases, brushes and other essentials the Spaniard needed to enable him to paint two small portraits. Any more would be prohibitively expensive.

  In February there was a brief respite when the young women of Achadh nam Blàth and the nearby clachan celebrated St Bride’s day. They took a sheaf of oats from the previous year’s precious harvest, formed it into a rudimentary figure, dressed it in some scraps of wool and linen, and trimmed it with whatever decorative items they could find: a handful of glass beads from broken jewellery, small shells from the seashore, a garland of daisies, snowdrops, coltsfoot as well as hazel catkins, culled from sheltered parts of the island. The figure was supplied with a slender white wand formed from a piece of birchwood with the bark scraped off. Ishbel had made a bed of rushes covered by a baby blanket close to the house door. There, Bride was welcomed in and laid down comfortably for the night with a couple of candles burning to keep her company.

  ‘She was the foster mother of Christ,’ explained Lilias. ‘And so we honour her in this way. But she brings the springtime with her as well. Soon, soon it will come.’

  ‘It can’t come too soon for me,’ said Mateo.

  In the morning, the cousins found some of the household looking at the cooling ashes of the fire. ‘There they are,’ said Ishbel. ‘The marks of her wand. She has been wandering about in the night, and there will be a good crop!’

  ‘And a prosperous year,’ added Lilias.

  Mateo peered into the ashes. There were patterns and spirals there for sure, although nothing that might not have been created by the wind blowing down the chimney. But who was he to quarrel with or to quell their joy?

  When it became apparent that the days were lengthening, Mateo learned how to use a cas chrom, the long foot plough called the ‘crooked foot’, which enabled one man, working all alone, to plough several acres of inhospitable and rocky ground so that oats and bere could be planted there. The implement was simple enough, an iron foot over a long wooden shaft with a peg sticking out to one side. The shaft was the slender trunk of a birch tree. It was a long, hard and tedious job, working backwards, slowly and carefully, along a trench, pushing and rocking and turning, pushing and rocking and turning and then starting over again. Once he got into the rhythm of it, there was a certain pleasure to be had from the sheer repetitiveness of it, the physical effort, the chik-chik, chik-chik as the implement sliced into the sod. It took his mind off Lilias and that single thoughtless kiss, hardly a kiss at all. Had it been friendship or love? How could he tell? It took his mind off his home and the weather, the bloody events of the past year, and the uncertain and possibly ruinous future for himself and his cousin. Nobody helped him, although sometimes the islandmen eyed him, in passing, hardly acknowledging his presence.

  In March, while Mateo was still working away at his task, doggedly, sodden with mud, washing himself in the painfully cold burn afterwards, like a form of penance, Lilias’s brother sent a heavy wooden kist, locked and bound all around with iron, to the island. The key to this precious cargo was in the possession of McAllister, whose birlinn had ferried it to Eilean Garbh. They opened it to find all that Francisco had asked for in terms of paints and pigments, brushes and canvases and more. Kenneth had postponed his own visit home until the summer, but had sent the things to Islay with a friend, who had engaged McAllister to bring them on to Garbh during a reasonably calm spell. Lilias confessed to Mateo that she had no notion how her brother had got the money, the ‘siller’ she called it, to pay for these things, since her father had sent nothing save the letter requesting them, and Kenneth was always without resources. But he must either have won the money by gambling, or borrowed it, both of which seemed alarming to her. They seemed faintly alarming to Mateo as well, but he was pleased on his cousin’s behalf. Ishbel was wildly excited at the thought of having her portrait painted. Lilias was less exuberant, but he could tell from the sparkle in her eyes that her vanity, such as it was, was flattered. He hoped his cousin could do her justice.

  McAllister seemed surprised to find the Spaniards still on the island. Perhaps he had expected them to escape. Perhaps he had expected them to be killed. He seemed more surprised still at the nature of his burden as they hauled it up the track to the house.

  ‘Pictures?’ he said and spat on the ground outside the house. ‘Pictures? He wants pictures? Ach, what is McNeill thinking of? What next?’

  Iain Og McNeill, a house servant and a remote cousin of the family, who had been sent to help with the kist, sniggered.

  Ruaridh McNeill, standing just behind the door, overheard them. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘And do you know what I’m thinking, McAllister? I’m thinking that I will most certainly be paying you far too much for fetching a wee kist such as this one from one island to another. As for you, Iain Og, have you no work to do?’

  Iain Og slunk off, while McAllister had the good grace to look embarrassed. But he and McNeill were soon chuckling over a silve
r cuach of whisky shared between them, the best spirit, redolent of peat and honey, and the best cuach too, normally kept locked away for the most important visitors. The truth was that McNeill saw the portraits as giving a certain status to his daughters. Only the wealthy had their portraits painted. He was not wealthy, at least not in terms of gold and silver, but he had a significant number of men at his beck and call and a significant number of cattle, so why shouldn’t his daughters have their likenesses done by a real artist. He never doubted that the foreigner was a real artist, and indeed it quickly became obvious that Francisco was very skilled.

  Ishbel’s portrait came first. They knew that the child wouldn’t be able to sit still for very long. Francisco sketched her with charcoal, and then bribed her with sweet cakes, made by Beathag with her precious stores of summer honey. They were at the bitter end of the year and supplies of everything were dwindling, although it had been a mild enough winter and the cattle had done well. McNeill would come in and peer over Paco’s shoulder for a while, making him very nervous, but the laird said nothing, only grunted in a noncommittal way. He seemed happy enough with what he saw.

  Lilias would sometimes come out to watch Mateo working in the field, the rhythmic push and rock, cut and turn of the cas chrom, following every movement, as though following the melody of a song.

  ‘Stop,’ she would say, sometimes. ‘Just stop and talk to me.’

  ‘I have to finish this stretch of land. I promised.’

  ‘Who did you promise?’

  ‘Your father.’

  ‘If you don’t do it, somebody else will.’

  ‘That isn’t the point. I gave my word.’

  She sighed. ‘Ah God,’ she said suddenly, ‘I do wish the cailleach would go to sleep. Can you not feel her, nodding and yawning. Like a child who resists with every wee piece of her. Can you not feel her?’

  He came over to where she was perched upon a rock, laid the cas chrom down, and sat down beside her, brushing the sour earth off his hands.