Instead I scuttled and stopped like a beetle, keeping to the wall-shadows, and shortly I broke into the twilight on the shore. There was Lily Fell, hunched over the hat that turned out to be a toy coracle. She’d woven its skeleton and stretched the hide tight. It rested sturdy on the pebbles, perfect and looking ready to sail the waves like a real boat. Just like the ones in Shipton’s harbour.
In the evening light her hair glowed in braids, its last red strands shining among the silver. The reddest tip dangled into the sea as she leaned forward, and her teeth, a marvel of the island, still glowed pearly in her old mouth.
‘They’re the last ones left,’ she said, giving me one of her sweet smiles over her shoulder. I thought she meant her teeth. I must’ve looked somewhat baffled because she shook her head.
‘The ghosts,’ she said, pointing back to the Croft. ‘The strangers all lived and died right in the Croft without leaving once. They didn’t believe in mixing.’
‘But who were they?’ I asked her.
‘Nobody knows anymore,’ shrugged Lily Fell. ‘But whoever they were, when they went they left their Dead-ones behind.’
‘Were they buried right?’ I asked. This is a reason for the dead up-and-walking, sometimes. Other reasons are loneliness and spite.
‘Well, they had their own ways with these things,’ she said. ‘So who knows?’
Lily Fell pulled the coracle toward her and started filling it with things from her shawl. Things wrapped in cloths, they were, small and precious. I could tell. Like traded glass she handled them; whatever she was doing, it was the very type of a secret.
Yet here she was, letting me see.
‘Mrs Fell?’ I said and my voice sounded too hard for that soft moment.
Her eyes sharpened but she kept to playing with her coracle and packages. ‘What?’ she asked.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, but it wasn’t. It was something.
‘So after the strangers went away,’ said Lily Fell. ‘Their left-behind ghosts start fussing, as you would. They start by making a lot of noise, and then they crawl up into Redcliff and fright the birds so that for months it was all you could do to come by one small egg. Nobody’s much bothered at first and the ghosts’ tricks are overlooked, until one day those ghosts get the deadly irrits. They’re sick of being alone, see, and they draw together all their wraithy trails and come right up and out of Strangers’ Croft.
‘They start by haunting the Southward. Sometimes it’s just a Mist Fellow or two. But other times it’s a clinging fog with its own face, and sometimes it’s a Dead-hand gripping at ankles on the paths. Then the ghosts gather themselves up into mobs of Following Sorrows. Their sobs and sighs follow some people all the way to their homes. They pass over folks’ thresholds, into their beds, and waylay them in their sleep.
‘And then they push it too far and the Father himself is accosted by a loose Wisp in Shipton-Cronk. A young and powerful man he was then, and full of his own fine self. Well, he’s just finished Mass when this windy little ghost gets all caught up in his robes and his hair, and up goes the Father, spinning and slapping at himself like he’s infested with fleas. Along the paths he kicks until the whole town has seen him and is laughing to split.’
She laughed but her face didn’t match her laughter. She looked more like somebody brave having a tooth pulled.
‘After that, the Father said he was through being pleasant while the whole island went hard to Hell. He said we were to go down altogether and expel those foreign ghosts. We would show a unified front, he said. For once.’
Lily Fell pushed the coracle from one hand to the other, back-and-forth a few times.
‘It sounded like a good idea,’ she said, and then sprang from her point like a breaking slane. ‘It wasn’t such a shock about your brother to me, you know. I knew your mother’s side and the male line was never quite regular. Not idiotic, you know, not wicked — not even sickly. Just not regular.’
She looked at me like I might know something about that, but nobody had ever mentioned irregular family to me. Not that they would.
Why would you want to talk about such people?
I felt my face shut up like a hinged box.
I could only think about my brother from a distance. From a distance he could be an idiot or a son-of-the-moon; from a distance but a different angle he could be a prophet and a Venerable. Right up close to him, though, he was just a mess of whittering and birdshit — and with my face, too.
He’d taken our face to town, into the market and the harbour, and he’d done and said such things as made folk stare at me slip-eyed and mutter. I’d learned to sit dumb as rock and deaf as bugs.
After a while longer I’d learned to hurl my mind-eye away.
Faraway. Into the clouds and out to where the sea and sky meet. Out there I could snug into the skytowers, see only my feet dangling, hear only the winds rushing. Faraway there was only the blue water spreading far below, my legs swinging above, between them just clouds and sea-birds.
Lily Fell saw that I had nothing to say.
‘Well, I’m sorry for your loss and tell your parents I said so, will you,’ she said, patting my hand, kind-sounding. Almost like a friend.
‘What about the ghosts?’ I said.
‘All right. So the Father is up to his dewlaps in it all,’ she went on. ‘He’s had enough of strangers and ghosts infesting the island like filthy sparrows. Enough of good people assaulted on the public ways by those as didn’t have the common-sense to lie quiet in proper graves. And more than enough of gods who left their very own Dead-ones rambling homeless all about the countryside.
‘In those days we were plaguey with signs. The moon would keep waxing red and Carrick was rocked in trembles until praying took up most of our time. Then one Sunday just after first bells, a flock of starlings comes, and it keeps on coming until the sky is black and we all have to go about with lamps. They pass over the island for the whole of that day without a gap in the blackness of them. Afterwards the earth underneath is all down and dung. Huddled together in the chapel and just about deaf from the din, we couldn’t pretend not to see what we were being plainly shown.
‘The towns were full of drunkenness, and the market was just a cheatery. It was a low time, entirely, and at the next Sunday’s sermon the Father said we were to spring-clean the home of our souls and not leave them to be scarred up in unholy wrigglework so they couldn’t go Home again.
‘“We will Scour the floor of your Faith,” he says to us. “We will Sweep Away all specks of Sin and all motes of Self-Regard.” I think to myself it sounds a healthy sort of thing. He says we’re to drive out all the hell-rakers, and we’re to start with the ghosts out of Strangers’ Croft.
‘It brought together even those who are all for fighting only each other. For the only time in memory the island agreed on something, and it was this: there was something wrong. Red moons and black flocks could easily turn to blood and ashes, in anybody’s book.’
Lily Fell stopped and turned to me of a sudden. ‘How’s your mother with it all happening so sudden?’ she asked.
‘All right,’ I told her. I didn’t know what to say. Moo’s face rose ghosty before me.
‘I had a child like that, you know,’ said Lily Fell.
‘Like what?’ my voice said.
Faraway, the other island rose on the glittering sea. The evening clouds piled-up out there, solid. The pebbly shore and Lily Fell and her coracle washed away from me in ripples.
‘It was twenty-five years ago today, you know.’ Her voice carried me back. ‘They cried and didn’t want to go.’
‘The ghosts?’ I asked.
‘Them, yes,’ she said. ‘And the others.’
Old folk keep the stories, but you can’t always rely on them to give them back right. Lily Fell was very old. She was the kind of old that starts to look like stone and moss. She batted the water with a mottled hand and wiped her face with the salt-water
. I watched it drip from a single hair curling on her chin and drop back into the sea.
‘The ghosts were easy,’ she said, after a long wait in which there was nothing to do but watch the foam come and go. ‘Everybody came from the crofts and towns and walked on them. It was a very sociable thing. The ghosts all upped and flowed ahead of us without a fuss, back into the Croft. I suppose they thought it was company at last.
‘That expulsion was a beautiful and mighty thing, Miss Quirk!’ Lily Fell’s face pinked-up on the memory. ‘I saw myself how those ghosts blowed away like feathers on the breath of the Father’s words. They rolled before him like—’ She stood up and turned her face to the sky. ‘Like those clouds.
‘The Father said the Words and those ghosts heard, I can tell you. Afterwards, some folk who’d been most averse to such things were moved to baptism right there on the beach, and then — I can only think the fine feelings of the day led us to what came next.’ She sat flat on the pebbles, and held the little coracle between her feet in the water. I confess I was downcast by the eons of this long story and didn’t see what-all it could have to do with me. Still, Pa says everything doesn’t have to be about you yourself, you can let some things be about other people. So I tried that.
At least she wasn’t talking about Boson.
‘For some time we’d had some children born to us,’ Lily Fell said. ‘That weren’t like other children. That is, they scamped and talked-back like other children but they were deformed and they drew pryings from all over. Some folk looked sidewise at the mothers, saying that their shapes had to come from somewhere.
‘The first one born was the two-in-one. He was one whole lad from the waist down but from the waist up, two whole lads. The shrub-wives nearly put him in the well with the shock. But then the right-side brother opened his eyes and looked at them so clear and pretty, and of course then they couldn’t.
‘After the two-in-one came the bone-child.
‘He was born twiggy, all cracking knees and knuckles and backbones. He was terrible log-like. I believe there were some that tried getting the faeries to take him, but they wouldn’t, no matter where he was left. He grew into a serious sort of boy, and I remember him watching everything like he was just waiting for folk to turn, poor thing.
‘The Father wouldn’t name them or baptise them, or even bless them until he’d settled what they were for. He always said folks’ souls were written on them, and that they showed up on the outside in warts and palsies and so forth. But, he said, most people’s marks were confined to tics or lazy-eyes. He’d never had to read such grave marks in a body before. In contemplating them he thought they could only be signs of some great, shared wickedness. These children carried the wickedness of the whole island in their bodies, he said.
‘The two-in-one could be a sign of our Hypocrisy and double-thinking. The bone-child seemed set to grow into a bone-giant, in which case he could only be a sign of our Pride. And it wasn’t just the Father who treated them like they were books to be read. Once he started up, lots of others copied him. Soon you couldn’t walk by a snug without hearing somebody holding forth on the secret codes written in their poor bodies.
‘Over the next eight years were born two shrunks, one spider-girl, and two offspring covered crown-to-heel in fur.As they grew the children became known as the monsters. I called them that myself.
‘Then a little lass was born, and she changed everything in spite of her having no arms or legs at all. Because she was my lass. My own little monster.
‘The Father called her the Lump and said she was the sure sign of Sloth, but her name was Cara no matter what he says. She was the last-born, and the one that made the Father settle once and for all on what they were. He said they were our goats. He said in the Book, goats took all the sins and were either for sacrificing, or escaping. But we never thought it would be done.
‘After the expulsion of the ghosts, a Brother called Balbo came with five others out from the Croft and with them came our little monsters. All except Cara who was in her basket on her Da’s back. As soon as we saw the children with the Brothers, we knew. I could feel Nele creeping to the back of the crowd with Cara, but it was no good.
‘Folk had been stuffed to the gills with rightfulness. The Father didn’t even have to say. Everybody just knew what was to be done.’ Lily Fell unwrapped a last package from inside her shawl and put it in the little coracle. It was a comb carved from a bone, with a whalefish on its crest.
‘She was only two but she loved the whalefishes,’ she said. ‘She’d be twenty-seven now. But I don’t know what her life would have been if she’d stayed here. Maybe it was all for the best. You never know, do you, Miss Quirk?
‘And all those red moons and trembles did stop. For a while.
‘The Brothers brought the monsters to a coracle pulled up right here on these stones. The bone-child came to us and took Cara in her basket onto his own back, and he looked at me all the while he put her on. I read in his eyes not to make a fuss. The crowd was very lofty by then and could have gone any way.
‘Just as they were loading into the coracle, she called to me once. “Mammy?” Like a question it was. Like she didn’t like this game, and would I come fetch her away. It set up a rushing in me, and I ran down into the wash all for reaching Cara. All for taking her home.
‘The Father took but two steps to reach me. He must’ve been watching for such things. “It is given to Adam to name the beasts, Lily Fell, and not the other way around,” he told me. He was right dark on me for running in front of the others. In case they ran too, I suppose, and the whole expulsion ruined from disorderly mothers. Nele held me tight against the running while they pushed the boats into the waves, and it took many months to forgive him for it. Later he said he was frighted that he might lose us both that day. The Father told me to go home with my husband and make another baby, a proper one this time.
‘“Her calling you mammy so pitiful, well it’s just one of their tricks,” he said to me and he meant to be kind.’
We sat and watched the sea beyond the breakwater. The unending spread of it and the wilful depths seemed to me the unfriendliest sort of place. I didn’t see how anybody could manage it.
Pa says Quirks don’t go to sea. They may be lost to the bog at times but that only stands to reason. People are clay, not salt-water.
‘Anyway I don’t remember much else,’ finished up Lily Fell. ‘But I do remember the road home. Folk lit bonfires and old enemies shared a brew, and the night was all tunes and forgetting.
‘Except for us parents,’ she added putting a red shawl into the coracle and covering it all with a wicker hat. She waded out into the wash pushing it before her. She pushed, once more, and the little coracle loaded with its strange hoard was drawn into the waters.
For a long while, until it was almost dark, we watched the place where it had been.
‘But how could you stand it?’ I said at last, my throat aching for the old lady.
‘You’d be surprised what you can stand,’ Lily Fell said. ‘We did what we had to do. We went home and learned to be thankful for what we did have. Everybody carries their own rick of sorrow and there’s no point moaning, as you know only too well, Miss Quirk. God has dark purposes that are no business of ours and he’s right one-eyed about it. He would sort it all out in the end. Do you find the same with your poor brother’s passing?’
It had been only matter of time after all. Like the rest of the lowlanders, she just wanted whatever she thought was hiding in me. But I wasn’t a shrub to be shaken for conies. Nothing was hidden in me. I was an open book.
‘You never know what other folk are for, do you?’ said Lily Fell.
I left her at the waterline watching the waves.
Chapter Three
Fledge
TWO WINTERS AGO on a sleet-soaked morning, Boson went for a walk.
Pa and Moo and me never saw him go and by the time we noticed he’d gone, it was near noon. Pa wrapped himself
in all the hide we had, and stuffed the hide with thatch to keep the ice-hag from hugging him too close, and then he left to search the Waterward. My brother, lately in all contrary humours, had taken to using this path for brooding. Pa told me to stay with my mother and so I stayed put as she prayed and the hours passed, and the afternoon drew in and the light grew sour. Then the snow came and with it, the quiet.
I went outside into the white to watch for Pa, and after a time the night came with a bright moon. I looked and looked. The paths were all empty. They stayed empty while my feet turned to lumps of dead meat and each breath tore at my nose. Just as I felt I couldn’t manage one more moment he appeared, a large and dark shadow, stumbling home. Boson was stuck to his back like an Ancient-one or a baby. I ran to them on my lump-feet.
‘Where’s he been?’ I asked my father, who just grunted.
‘Where’ve you been?’ I shouted in Boson’s ear, still feeling short from being left with my mother all day. He looked cosy up there on Pa’s back, under all the hide and thatch. I tugged the hide off his face to give him what-for — and all my irrits drained away.
‘He seems a bit distempered,’ said Pa in a tight sort of voice.
Distempered? My brother was a grey-faced thing, and burning-up. He looked at me all untroubled, eyes full of changeable skies, chattering lowdown in his throat. I leaned in closer and heard inside the warmth a cluck, a chuckle, a hoot, a peep.
‘Where was he, then?’ I asked as I helped them back to the glowing turf. Pa leaned his poor cold-addled self on me.
‘He was up the lake,’ he told me in short breaths. ‘In the reeds. Hat of snow. Arse of ice.’
‘What was he doing, though?’
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