by Sarah Moss
Did I tell you that in olden times here, rather than burning at the stake which would, no doubt, have been a waste of precious wood, witches, and also women taken in adultery, were tied up and sewn into sacks weighted with stones and dragged into the sea? Not even taken out by boat and dropped over the side, just dragged into a rising tide while the villagers watched from the beach. Some of Mrs Barwick’s tales revolved around their reappearance.
Midnight—
Mrs Barwick just came to my room, the candle under her chin giving her an uncanny resemblance to the weirder beings from her stories. I was already in bed and hardly in a state to receive friends, much less enemies, but I already knew that she has had occasion to forget many of the finer points of etiquette since she left her position with Miss Emily. I sat up and asked what she meant by disturbing me at that hour and she said that she was come to tell me a story. I said I was in no mood for stories and she said that was no matter – really, if I had had a veil at the end of the bed I would almost have expected her to start rending it before going off to set the house on fire (I can certainly imagine Aubrey leaving me sponging blood off someone with a maniac lurking nearby, in the blithe conviction that he was offering a compliment to my good sense, though in other ways I would call him rather more elegant than Mr Rochester). Anyway, after we had established that she was not to be allowed to perform this scene seated on my bed I allowed her to continue. She had come, it seemed, to tell me about a Lady Sands, floreat c. 1750–1770.
Lady Sands was a fine Edinburgh lady, finer than any Manchester nurse even if she is of good family, and she made a fine marriage. She was known to have a temper on her right from a bairn, and they say before the wedding her father took the young man aside and told him if he had to treat her harshly for it he’d hear no complaints from them. Anyway, at first all went well – they made a bonny pair and of course a rich, beautiful woman can always do what in plainer folk might be taken badly. (You must imagine our prophetess raising her candle towards the mirror at this juncture, as if to remind me that I share neither of Lady Sands’ indemnities.) Her clothes were the envy of the town, and if it was said she went to church just as often as she had something new to display, well, she wasn’t the only woman of whom that might be said, then or now, and better than her lord, who rarely showed his face at all without his mother was visiting. Anyway, after a year or so there was a child, a boy, and rejoicing as if it was the Lord himself come again, and nothing in the land her ladyship couldn’t have for the asking, forby there was beginning to be word his lordship was getting through the money faster than it was coming in. (The old story, I suggested, and the candle was raised again. Maybe so, but not, she thought, one I knew yet.)
And then Lady Sands announced herself in the family way again, and this time, what with her sick and pale and money maybe not quite so free as it had been, his lordship wasn’t quite so quick to jump when she wanted peaches and another maid and a new carriage when she had to stop riding. A few of the servants were turned off and said they’d heard her screaming sometimes late at night and bruises on her arms and maybe other places too when the morning tea went in, but of course they’d a grudge against the house by then and her skin was always smooth enough by candlelight.
They say by the time the child came Lord Sands was openly escorting Mrs Mitchell to dinners as well as the theatre and whatever. She had the midwife all right at the birth, and a hard time she had and her not strong to begin with, and then a few days after it was given out that she’d taken a turn for the worse and died. Well, there was a big funeral and everyone very sad, the infant sent out to nurse, which was what she’d done with the first one anyway, and an English governess brought down for the boy, who’d have been maybe three. And that was the end of that, except (the stage directions call for a pause and the raising of the candle; the audience begins to feel that another prop would lend variety to the performance, which is none the less excellent of its kind, even remarkable under the circumstances) – well, I know of the roofless hut out near the church, do I not? (It is in fact hard to tell one hovel from another here, and since the vicar has come but twice from Colla since I arrived, neither occasion in any way edifying to me, I have not frequented the church, but I agree as the script indicates that I should.) And I know that house is known as the Scold’s Bridle? (I do not.) It is so called because Lady Sands was bridled there; she did not die in childbed but was taken to her brother-in-law’s house outside the city, from whence, after the ‘funeral’, she was brought, by stages and at night, gagged and bound, to Colsay, where she passed the seven or eight years that remained to her until she died in the smallpox which killed all but five of the islanders. (The speaker gazes piercingly at the audience.) And how do I think she passed those years? (I shrug; there is an icy draught snaking around my shoulders and I have not been indulged with a fire in my bedroom since our words over Mrs Grice’s labour.) Doing just nothing. She had no books or papers, none of her embroidery, nowhere to go. Lord Sands told the islanders to feed her when they could spare the food and hide her if anyone came to the island; he wasn’t specific about how and where but he made sure to leave a rope and a witch’s bridle, and they say she was so changed by then that it wasn’t likely anyone who’d seen her in her prime would recognize her anyway. He said if she got away or got a message to anyone he’d clear the island and burn the houses over the heads of anyone who couldn’t or wouldn’t go, and just to make the point he evicted the McConnells and fired the roof before they’d been able to get the beds out, and as it happened she was such a wildcat and acting like the queen herself, for all she’d suffered, after the first summer no one was feeling much sorrow for her however bad her plight.
When Esther Grice died the women offered Mary Sands her quern stone and even her spinning wheel, thinking she could find work for her hands and earn a little money for some handspun to replace the clothes on her back, and got slapped and spat at for their troubles. Well, after that she might live or die for what we cared, and you may be sure when the fever came and the bairns, hardly grown enough to raise a spade, had to bury their own parents, no one was worrying much what became of her ladyship. They say she lies in the old churchyard but I doubt anyone troubled themselves much over a Christian burial for the likes of her and there’s some have heard crying from the old hut of a winter’s night. (NB: You can hear all the voices of hell crying in the storm-winds here, in the prosaic mid-morning just as well as in darkness.)
The curtains stirred and the candle flickered and she fell silent, waiting for the next cue. I pulled my shawl around my shoulders and remarked on our good fortune to live in the present day when such outrages are quite impossible. Maybe they are, she said, and maybe they’re not. Good night to you.
Al, I think I may come home now. Not because I really think Mrs Barwick is going to tie me up in a stone hut for the rest of my life, nor even because I believe in the past or present presence of Lady Sands, only that I have failed here. I cannot tell if a different woman would have succeeded; I suspect a more circumspect manner might have achieved more, but I have failed. If the infant Grice is not this moment dead, it will be in the next day or two, and it is not really conceivable – nor, to be honest, worth another four months of my time and my absence from the Society, where I know that my energies are well spent – that I will be allowed to direct the next birth. I do not know what I have done wrong but I know now that my longing for home has deeper foundations than the self-indulgent wish for the company and fellowship of those I love best. There is better work for me to do.
May
15
THE NEXT GENERATION
The therapeutic analyses of adult neurotics left no doubt about the detrimental influence of many parental and environmental attitudes and actions such as dishonesty in sexual matters, unrealistically high moral standards, overstrictness or overindulgence, frustrations, punishments, or seductive behaviour. It seemed a feasible task to remove some of these threats from the next generati
on of children by enlightening parents and altering the conditions of upbringing …
– Anna Freud, Normality and Pathology in Childhood, p. 14
What follows below is surely the darkest chapter in the history of this area. Between 1800 and 1860 the population of Colla, Colsay and Inversaigh dropped by 74 per cent, and even this statistic masks the complete desolation of most of the smaller settlements, left burning and roofless as if in the aftermath of war. Some communities removed, or were removed, en masse to the New World, although the mortality rate on those transatlantic crossings was little lower than in the slave ships whose evil passages ceased during this period; there are stories of reluctant families hunted like foxes out of caves and mountain fastnesses to be carried bound and struggling on to these transports. Other villagers were forced into townships already overcrowded and hungry, where the sanitary arrangements were wholly inadequate for the distended populations and there was no visible means of support. The shifts to which people were reduced to feed and clothe their children bear comparison to the desperate ingenuity which the present author saw in Eritrea in the early 1970s, and both cases illustrate Sen’s thesis that famine is a consequence of relative rather than absolute shortage; it is not that there was no food, but that there was no food there. The problem was more to do with distribution than supply, a fact tacitly acknowledged by the Cassingham family’s response, which was to offer bowls of soup in exchange for labour on the new stone jetty.
The Reverend in Eritrea? Voluntary Service Overseas, I supposed, or maybe some post-war version of missionary work. He would have been the right age to kindle and burn in the liberation theologies of the 1960s, whose promise to combine divine reassurance and radical politics even I find appetizing. Perhaps I might in time find friends here after all, except that I am on the wrong side of this war. In Oxford, being a mother, state-educated, the product of lace curtains and roll-up garage doors, I can, when it suits me, raise the banner of my presumed inferiority. Here, I am Marie Antoinette, righteously menaced by those whose rightful inheritance keeps the roof of the Oxford terrace over my children’s heads. Even though the blood of Viking invaders, who also burnt the roofs over the heads of Celtic children and dragged their mothers into slavery on the black beaches of Iceland, runs in the veins of those cleared. And indeed, even though those who survived eviction and the emigrant ships and the howling winters of Manitoba founded their new lives on the genocide of thousands of Native American cultures and communities. Zoe is right: in moral as well as practical terms, we’re all fucked. I didn’t feel like reading any more.
I was cold. Put another jumper on, Giles would say, and enjoy it while it lasts. There will be no woolly jumpers in my grandchildren’s lives, if the world continues long enough for me to have grandchildren, certainly no knitted vests, nor those tights that seemed to have been made from the untreated wool of some particularly hardy brand of Greenland sheep. I went out into the hall, listened for the children’s voices upstairs where Giles was meant to be supervising the changing of sheets, a task which with enough ingenuity on the part of a parent who has no desire to go out in the rain can become a morning’s camping game. Moth giggled and I could hear Raph and Giles singing ‘The British Grenadiers’ as if it were the last night of the Proms. I went upstairs.
‘I thought you were writing your presentation?’ said Giles. He was sitting under a duvet cover draped over two chairs, outside which Raph stood at attention.
I looked around. ‘Where’s Moth?’
There was a flurry under Raph’s duvet. ‘Moth camping. In a bed.’
Raph stood at ease. ‘Mummy, Daddy says we can go camping.’
‘Does he? Daddy can take you camping if he likes.’
‘Really? Daddy, will you? Please?’
Giles peered out. ‘I didn’t say we could, I said ask Mummy.’
So Mummy can be bad cop again. ‘I just don’t think it’s my kind of thing,’ I said. Moth crawled back into his burrow. ‘Maybe when Moth’s out of nappies. And sleeping through the night. I don’t think anyone else on a campsite would thank us for taking him at the moment.’
Giles crawled out and stood up. ‘You don’t have to stay on a campsite, you know. It’s more fun to camp wild.’
I was beginning to wish I’d stayed downstairs reading about man’s inhumanity to man.
‘Not in northern Scotland with a toddler in nappies it’s not. It’s more fun to have hot and cold running water. And central heating, and floors to play on, not to mention a roof over your head.’
Raph had gone very still.
‘What is it, love?’
Moth reappeared. ‘Peepo!’
‘Peepo!’ said Giles.
‘Raph?’ I asked.
‘It’s that thing in the attic. Listen.’
‘Oh, Raph—’ Giles began.
But Raph was right. There was something brushing along the wall, chattering. Giles left the room and ran up the stairs.
Raph came for a hug. ‘It’s been there ages and you never believe me.’
I put my arm round him. ‘We can all hear it now. Daddy will see what it is.’
Moth scrambled off the bed. ‘Cuddle Moth too!’
I picked him up. Raph pushed his head under my arm. ‘It’s the baby. Or the baby’s mummy.’
‘Not in the middle of the morning,’ I said, as if there are times when one should expect reunions of long-dead families in the attic.
‘Anna?’ Giles called down the stairs. ‘Can you get me a torch?’
Raph and I looked at each other as if Giles had confirmed an outbreak of fire or a hole below the waterline. Then Raph reached under his pillow and handed me his wind-up torch, which also has a small compass and a mobile phone charger in case the apocalypse happens in the night.
‘I’ll mind Moth,’ he said. ‘But come straight back.’
Moth clung like a koala so I took him with me. Giles was kneeling on the boards by the chimney breast, tapping the ventilation panel. Something flustered and went still. I stood as far away as possible and handed him the torch.
‘Thanks. There’s a bird in there.’
My skin crawled. ‘Oh God, trapped. And fluttering about.’
Moth’s legs tightened on my waist.
I swallowed. ‘How – how long has it been there?’
Giles aimed the light through the metal louvres. ‘It’s still pretty lively. Rooks can get in and out. Doesn’t mean it’s trapped.’
I hitched Moth up. ‘It’s been there for weeks. Raph’s been hearing it.’
He was still peering. ‘Rooks come and go. The same one won’t have been there for weeks.’
‘And is it a rook?’
Giles shrugged. ‘I can’t tell through a chimney breast. It’s about that size.’
I remembered Raph, waiting. ‘Are you going to let it out?’
Not in my house, not a bird dashing itself—
‘We’ll give it a few hours and see if it finds its way out.’ He turned the torch off and stood up. ‘Do you want to do any more work or can I get off to the puffins now?’
I thought about the bird all afternoon. I couldn’t see how it could be in there without being hurt, how it could move without breaking its wings on the sooty brickwork. It was trapped, panicking, in darkness. In my house. I would rather have had a ghost, but Raph went out on his space hopper for the first time in many days and made several forays to the attic, coming back to assure me and Moth that it was still there and still making a noise. If the noise stopped, it occurred to me, we wouldn’t know if the bird was dead – rotting above Raph’s sleeping head, parasites teeming off its cold skin – or free.
‘More reading, Mummy!’
‘“You may go into the field or down the lane, but don’t go into Mr McGregor’s garden: your father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs McGregor. Now run along, and don’t get into mischief. I am going out.”’
‘Mummy?’ Raph was swinging around the door handle. ‘Mummy, do
people eat rabbits?’
‘Mummy, reading!’
‘Then old Mrs Rabbit took a basket—’
‘Mummy, I said, do people eat rabbits?’
‘Yes. Grandma Julia makes rabbit pie.’
‘Rabbits have a pie?’
‘No, Moth, rabbits eat grass, and vegetables. The Flopsy Bunnies eat lettuces, don’t they, and Peter’s going to find some cabbages.’
‘But then I am not a rabbit,’ Moth quoted dreamily. ‘More reading.’
‘—and went through the wood to the baker’s. She bought a loaf of brown bread—’
‘You mean she makes them out of rabbits?’ Raph stood still.
‘Of course. Rabbit pies.’
He looked green. ‘But I thought it was like gingerbread men or – or those horse things with raisins.’
‘Prunes,’ I said. ‘Devils on horseback.’
‘Not dead rabbits.’
‘More reading! Not talking, Mummy.’
‘—and five currant buns. Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail, who were good little bunnies, went down the lane—’
‘Where does she get the rabbits?’
There was a knock on the door.
‘I’ll go!’ shouted Raph, and Moth struggled off my lap to follow him.
I stood up and rolled my shoulders, stretched my arms. I couldn’t hear the bird from the playroom, but I knew it was there.