Renegade

by Amy Carol Reeves

  “I wonder … ” Simon’s voice trailed off wearily. Evening had begun to set in and the room had darkened. He stood up from the desk and paced a little, near the window. “I wonder why, although she’s been in service to them for almost a century, she would feel the need to go on a killing spree now. What spurred her to do this?”

  “It could be anything,” I replied. Through a nearby window, I scanned the horizon, out over the roofs of the village homes that blocked our view of the sea. I recalled the rage I had felt when William told me about his past, about his dalliance with Jane Morris. I felt almost ashamed of it now, even though my feelings of anger at the way he had treated me persisted. I then remembered my conversation with Christina as we stood in my closet. “Of all the mysteries about this creature, we can be sure of one thing … ”

  Simon lifted his head to look at me. His hair became a halo, caught in the bronze light of the setting sun.

  “She is part woman,” I said. “Of that we can be certain.”

  Simon suddenly stepped toward me, caught my hand, and lightly kissed my fingers—the shock of his gesture felt lovely to me. He had never done that before, and I realized that I had still not sorted out my feelings for him. I felt my heart upon the bough again.

  He looked quickly away, his pale face reddened slightly; I couldn’t take my eyes off of him in that moment—he was so beautiful in the sunlight. “You are correct about that, Abbie. But her woman-ness will make her all the more unpredictable.”

  We walked to Bromwell’s only tavern to take dinner that evening, hoping to learn something, if anything, about the attacks and to secure a reliable guide. Then we could go across the waters to meet Seraphina. I had insisted that we leave for her island tonight.

  As we approached the pub, I saw a large man seated near the doors, his hat pulled over his face. I noticed longish gray tufts of hair hanging out from under his hat. I signaled for Hugo to sit, and he lay down near the entrance.

  If it hadn’t been for our long journey, Simon and I would have looked very out of place. But my hair had fallen from its prim knot and felt ratted and tangled; my dress, which I had worn since yesterday, was untidy and wrinkled now, with mud splatters from when Simon and I had stepped off the ferry. Simon was not dressed in black, as usual; he wore only a white shirtsleeve and muddied brown trousers. Even so, he maintained the angelic aura about him.

  “We should fit in,” I said, quietly. “We look as if we’ve been fishing all day.”

  Simon glanced down at me, amused. “We don’t fit in at all,” he said, holding the door open for me. I saw immediately that we were Londoners. My dress, even with the wrinkles and mud stains, seemed overly prim and formal, and sported far too many buttons.

  The place was small and crowded. As we stepped inside, the smell of ale, grease, and dirt assaulted my nose, and I felt at least fifty pairs of eyes upon us—probably half the population of the town.

  Simon and I seated ourselves, and I felt my face turn scarlet.

  “Whit will ye be havin’ tae eat?” the tavern keeper asked when she came over to greet us. Even though I had worked in a charity hospital for prostitutes, I had never seen a dress so low. While I gawked, Simon calmly told her what we would be eating.

  When our food arrived, I found that I had no appetite. I knew we were supposed to behave naturally, but my heart pounded. My ears rang and my stomach twisted upon itself. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t conduct a normal conversation knowing that William was near death somewhere not very far from us.

  The tavern keeper eyed Simon and me carefully when she brought out our ales. I watched, amazed, as Simon charmed her, bringing the conversation around to the curious sketches of the monster displayed on the buildings of the town.

  I saw the woman’s lips tighten at this, and I wondered if the people of Bromwell were touchy about their local monster. Her gaze became unfriendly and she stopped speaking to Simon immediately. We noticed, after our meals came, that the gazes from other Bromwell natives became steelier. Although Simon masked his emotions well, my nervousness continued to mount and I felt as if going to this pub had been a futile and disastrous endeavor.

  We are wasting time.

  I think Simon felt the same, because very soon, we left, calling Hugo to come with us; we walked away as quickly as we could. The cool night air had set in, and I could see our breaths puff out in the shadows.

  I was about to ask Simon about their strange reaction, but I heard footsteps behind us—steps in the dirt. Just as Hugo began to growl, I turned around, immediately on my guard and thinking that it might be the ash-haired stranger. But I saw then that our follower was the gray-haired man who had been seated near the door of the pub.

  Hugo continued to growl, but Simon calmly silenced him with a wave of his hand.

  “Whit is yer interest in th’ monster?” he asked. At first, I thought it was a threat, but his tone did not seem threatening. It seemed merely inquisitive.

  Unsure of how to answer him, we said nothing.

  “Coz ah saw ye Londoners git off th’ ferry today. We don’t git many visitors like ye.”

  “Our reasons for being here are personal.” Simon said quietly. Then I saw Simon pause and gaze thoughtfully at the man, assessing him. I knew that he was trying to read the man’s character. Please Simon, I thought. Think of a way to get him to help us.

  “One of our friends, from London, stayed here recently, on vacation,” Simon began. “He disappeared, and we’re trying to find him.”

  The man said nothing, and I believed now that he was trying to discern our character.

  Simon continued, knowing that we would need to provide more information. “More specifically, from what we have learned, our friend went out into the waters in a boat. He never came back.”

  “Yer friend is dead,” the man said quickly.

  I started to retort, but Simon laid his hand on my back and asked the man quietly, “Why are you here?”

  The man’s nervousness increased. “We don’t loch talkin’ abit it. We hav’ enough jokes abit us believin’ in monsters in our lochs and aw ’at.”

  I saw, in the moonlight, that he was not as old as I had first thought. No older than perhaps his late fifties. He seemed hardscrabble, as if he had been out in the sun every day of his life, but there was also a vulnerable nervousness about his demeanor in this moment.

  He looked sideways, back in the direction of the tavern. “Ah wuz watchin’ ye baith through th’ window, and ah think ye know mair than yoo’re sayin’.”

  Simon’s expression must have brought affirmation to the older man, because he continued talking.

  “That thing out thaur in th’ waters killed mah granddaughter. She was aroond yer age,” he said, pointing one thick finger in my direction. “If yer friend was here, and he disappeared in those waters, it’s likely she got ’im.”

  Perhaps it was impetuous, but I said quickly, “We think we know where the creature is.”

  The man’s eyes widened. “That so?”

  The three of us stood in awkward silence for a full minute. The man was the first to speak.

  “Neil MacDiarmand,” he said quietly. After Simon and I introduced ourselves, as husband and wife of course, Neil glanced around to make sure no one was nearby. “Come wi’ me, and we’ll talk.”

  His house, nearby, looked like so many of the other houses in town—small, cottage-like. His wife, like the man, had a sunburned face. Her grayish red hair reminded me quite a bit of Ellen’s, but the resemblance stopped there. She seemed so melancholy, so bleak. As she stood in the kitchen, wiping her hands on a rag, her eyes appeared so dark and void that she seemed almost dead. I thought of the grief she must have experienced, losing her granddaughter.

  Still, she greeted us politely and brought us steaming cups of tea; she even took a bowl of water outside for Hugo.

  A
t the table, Simon pulled the folded map from his pocket. “We believe she’s here,” I said, pointing to the specific island Max had marked.

  Neil took a long sip of tea and studied the map. “Whaur did ye’ fin’ this?”

  I glanced at Simon, feeling slightly nervous, not knowing how we could explain it. Simon, however, seemed unalarmed and spoke confidently. “We have researched the area, the geography. Based on the locations of the murders, we estimate that her lair would be in this place.”

  “We want to go there, to this place, to see if she’s there,” I said firmly. My impatience had mounted to the point of being unbearable. “We want to go there to find her and possibly find our friend, but we don’t know these waters, so we need someone who does know them to take us there.”

  I felt almost like a madwoman, speaking so bluntly, and I knew Simon would have eased more smoothly into asking Neil for his help. Neil eyed me sharply, his eyes a lovely glassy gray, bright against his tawny skin. We were all quiet, around the table. The room was lit only by the nearby fireplace and a few tallow candles. I heard Hugo bark from the front porch.

  Finally, after a few moments, Neil spoke. “Ah’ll go wit ye, but this might be a fool’s errain. Why, there’s nae inhabited islands in that place. Only rocks. Rocks we’ll smash against if we go at the wrong point of day, fer certain.”

  “We have reason to believe she is there. We must at the very least find and explore the area,” I said urgently. Simon shot me a split-second gaze, and I realized that I hadn’t taken a single sip from my teacup. Although my stomach churned, I immediately took a sip in order to appear sociable.

  Neil finished his tea and sighed. “Best time to go out will be early mornin’. Three o’clock. I don’t want people around here knowin’ I’ve befriended ye.”

  I took another sip of the hot tea.“Why are you befriending us?” I asked. Other people in Bromwell had lost loved ones; I didn’t understand why Neil had sought us out, why he was troubling himself for us.

  He was quiet for a moment, then finished his tea and sighed. “Ah’ll show ye. Go up that stair.”

  We followed his wife, who had just come in from outdoors, up a creaky set of stairs until we were at a room at the top of the house. She opened the door to a small bedroom. It was simple, like the rest of the house, but had been brightly painted. Whitewashed. In a small bed with a lace coverlet lay a little girl, no more than seven or eight years old. She had long stringy dark hair and her eyes were black and hollow. She lay on her side, unmoving, not speaking, as if she was unaware that we were there. The woman sat by her bed and stroked the girl’s hair gently. The child clutched a one-eyed, threadbare doll in her hands.

  I had seen this look on a few of the children in the hospital—most of them had been beaten. We’d had one terrible situation soon after I began working at Whitechapel, where a young girl had been raped by her drunken uncle. She came to us with her wounds, along with the same hollow, terrible look. Trauma.

  I sat at the end of the bed, near the child’s feet.

  The girl did not look down at me, even as the bed moved with my weight. She did not speak.

  “How long has she been like this?” I asked the woman.

  “Three weeks,” she said. “Ever since … ”

  She didn’t continue, but I intuitively knew what she could not speak of, the root of her speechlessness.

  The attack.

  There was no point in talking about it in the room. The woman stayed with the child, and as soon as we closed the door and were in the narrow hallway outside the room, Simon whispered, “The child witnessed the attack?”

  Neil nodded. I could see, under the wrinkles in his face, that he was still highly affected by the state of the child. “She did. Her older sister, Margaret, was to git married next month. She and her fiancé were in a meadow, on the northern part of the shore. My Laura had arrived there to meet her and saw the attack upon ’er sister. She saw ’er sister devoured before ’er eyes. And she saw the beast.”

  “The lamia,” I said, stunned, feeling coldness creep through my veins. William was still with that creature.

  “The child is a strong one,” Neil said quietly. “She’ll be fine. But ah don’t feel safe til the beast is gone—she’s smart—been livin’ in these waters for years. Mostly left us alun. But not lately. Disturb’d, she is. Ah can’t let mah Laura out of the house wit’ this she-wolf still alive. Ah wan mae grandchild to be saf’ agin. Their father, mah son, is dead. Their mother gone. Ah’ve raised them. This beast, this creature, has taken everything from me. Ah’ve ridden my boat out at nights, in the places the search parties have not been. She’s out there, she is. Ah’ve seen the gleam of her back in the distance.”

  We spent the next hour discussing where and when we would meet him.

  Simon and I arrived at a copse near the southwest shore of Bromwell, with Hugo, at one o’clock that morning. I felt strange, as I was wearing some of Simon’s clothes—his pants, one of his white shirts. It simply had seemed foolish to meet this lamia creature wearing a dress and stiff crinoline. Although his clothes fit me about the waist, the pants were far too long, and I’d spent our time back at the inn, after we’d left Neil’s house, stitching them up with a needle and thread. Simon’s shirt hung loose around my neck, the sleeves rolled up as securely as possible. I had pulled my hair tightly away from my face in a large knot.

  My heart pounded as we waited. I felt as I used to feel when anticipating a knife tournament in Dublin, but this endeavor was so much costlier, so much more frightening.

  William was so much on my mind.

  Simon and I sat, leaning against a rotten tree trunk in the reflecting light of the water. Hugo lay beside me, looking out over the waves. Occasionally, he perked his head up, laid his eyes back, and growled or whined, and I wondered what he sensed out in the depths. I knew that we all might die, and so much remained unspoken between Simon and myself.

  “Abbie,” Simon said suddenly, quietly. “You are under no obligation to love me.”

  I laughed a little as a tear slid down my face. I had always felt amazed at Simon’s level of perception, at his ability to know how to read me, how to read my heart.

  I looked at him, feeling as if I might split in two. The sea roared ahead of us and a breeze pushed through his curls. This situation was so different from the one last fall, when I had rejected Simon’s proposal of marriage. I had not known him well then. The break from William had, painfully, allowed me to see Simon’s heart—to know that he did not merely seem good, true, constant. He was good and true and constant. And we were so similar. The story he had told me of Africa … for someone to live through what he had and to still believe in humanity at all … it was nothing short of miraculous. I felt another tear slide down my cheek and I choked awkwardly.

  Simon leaned forward, wiped the tear away.

  “I’m sorry, Simon. You are so bloody perfect for me—in every way. Grandmother would even approve. I do love you, but … ” How did I explain that the love I felt for Simon was too temperate? My thoughts didn’t make sense even to me, and yet I knew the choice had already been made. In spite of good reason and judgment, I knew, suddenly, that I had and always would love William.

  Simon leaned forward and kissed my lips lightly, in what I knew would be our last kiss. This journey to the Orkney Islands marked the end of so much. I tried clumsily to speak, but Simon placed his finger upon my lips, urging me not to speak another word.

  A streak of green light flashed across his pale face, and I turned out to the water to see where it came from. In what was probably the most beautiful sight I had ever seen, I saw what looked like enormous green yarns, green serpents, glowing beautifully, weaving themselves across the dark skies as if alive. Flashes of fires. I had never seen anything like it, but scenes from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” came to my mind—“a hundred fire-flags sheen.”


  I murmured the line under my breath.

  “Northern lights,” Simon said, gazing out, and I knew that he had heard me. I looked out at the display with him, and then I felt his eyes upon me.

  “It’s beautiful,” I whispered. The beauty only made my heart more sorrowful.

  “Odd,” Simon responded, his light blue eyes focused over the waters again. “They appear more often in winter. But this is lovely.”

  The lights played around his hair in slithering auras. His beauty, as it had back at the inn earlier this evening, almost overwhelmed me. Yet, I knew he was not my own. I also knew in that moment, tragically, that I was the only person he would ever love. This realization came instinctually. There would be no one else for Simon St. John.

  “I’m sorry, Simon,” I said again. It sounded weak. Pathetic.

  He turned in the darkness to face me just as an intense streak of light fell upon us, illuminating our forms, blinding me for one second before I could refocus on Simon’s face in the darkness.

  “Inexplicable,” he whispered. “Wild. Unruly. And yet the lights still stir the heart.”

  More tears now. I knew his point, deftly identifying the nature of my love for William.

  He reached for my hand, and somehow this felt more intimate than the kiss had. “It’s all right, Abbie.” He paused, looked away. His voice cracked. I saw a tear in his eye. “There are some matters, some paths of the heart, that even the will cannot conquer.”

  A little before three o’clock, even amidst the night winds, we heard Neil’s boat approaching us, softly coursing near the shore.

  “Our ride,” Simon said gently, helping me rise and leading me down the rocky mounds to the water.

  Part IV

  “O fair and strong and terrible! Lioness

  That with your long locks play the Lion’s mane!”

  —The Princess

  Twenty-six

  A storm rolled in as we neared the island. Indeed, the island seemed to be all rocks—a small sharp bundle of cliffs and crevices jutting out in all directions, a craggy, pointed starfish. I would not have noticed the place if we had not been looking for it—the island seemed to rise up from the waves only when we were almost upon it. Even Neil said that he had been in the area but had never seen it. “Th’ currents veer away,” he said. “E’en on sunny days, a blankit ah mist settles in the area an’ it’s guid as covered.”