All the Murmuring Bones

by A. G. Slatter

  The trip seems longer than it should, trying not to bang against the rough-hewn walls. I see a light below: Jedadiah has lit a torch. He unties me. ‘Right?’

  I nod, a lump of uncertainty in my throat.

  ‘This way. And I’m sorry, for what it’s worth.’

  The tunnel is short and the torchlight dances up ahead of us. A boot is the first thing I see, then a bright blue trouser-covered leg, then the hem of an amethyst jacket, a very fine waistcoat in emerald silk. Peacock hues; just such clothes as my uncle has worn every day since I arrived and, no doubt, quite some days before. The light licks up, picks out the silver chain of a fob, then a neck, dried out and narrow, the skin corrugated, and a face, thin, thin, thin, mummified. Empty sockets, thick dark hair sliding off the skull, but a surprising lack of decay.

  ‘Who... who is it?’

  ‘This, Miss Miren, is Liam Elliott. That waistcoat, that coat, that fob-chain: all his. And his hair, too, very fine that it was in life.’ He sighs. ‘I’m afraid this is your father.’

  I kneel beside the body and carefully pull on the fob-chain. The thing comes reluctantly, dragging the weight of a round watch. I hold that silver circle in the palm of my hand, feeling its coldness almost sear the skin. On the top is an engraving, the double-tailed, Janus-faced mermaid, the O’Malley seal – a gift from my mother, no doubt – worn down, the details blurred as if the owner habitually rubbed it with his thumb, as surely as water will wear away stone.

  31

  I’m sitting at the white pine table in Lazarus Gannel’s small kitchen, nursing a mug of whiskey and milk. I’ve not said much since they led me out of the mine, except to answer when Lazarus asked if I wanted my father brought along too.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘For the moment, leave him here. We’ll bury him properly when this is all finished.’

  They asked no more and were silent in the almost hour it took us to walk back to the gatehouse. The last ten minutes they’ve spoken over the top of my head while Lazarus prepared drinks. Jedadiah sat beside me, his hand on mine, and all I could feel was the heat of him when I was so very, very cold. Cold as if I’d gone back into the black waters of the lake and drifted down with no thought of coming back up again. When the silver mug was put in front of me, I took a deep draught, not caring that it made me light-headed, not recalling until then that I’d eaten no dinner. I ask for and am given slice of bread and cheese. At last, I feel a single thought pushing to the forefront of my mind, a single question overtaking the whirlpool in my head.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? When I arrived? You knew he was dead then, why not say something?’ I hear my own voice but cannot divine my tone; I cannot tell how I must sound to them. Again, it’s like drowning with only that strange dullness the water brings to the ear. ‘I might have entered that house and been killed immediately.’

  Jedadiah has the grace to look ashamed or something like it; Lazarus looks me in the eye and says, ‘That would have been some greeting, wouldn’t it? Miss Miren, I didn’t know you from a bar of soap. You’ve the look of your mother, yes, but who knows what you knew or did not know? What if you went straight to your uncle and told him? And here’s us trying to keep the fact we know something’s not right from him. Who knew what you’d do?’ He shakes his head and grins like a challenge. ‘Besides if you’d been killed so easily, what sort of girl would you be? Certainly not the sort of girl I took you for...’

  ‘Miren, this has been our home for over thirteen years. We all made agreements with your parents – your mother. She brought us here and the big house was already built, and our houses, just as she promised. We’ve taken those oaths seriously. We’ve been hoping she would return.’ Jedadiah shakes his head. ‘And you arrived, and you’ve done more than right by us, but those first weeks? All we could see was you getting closer to your uncle, you making excuses for him. And how he looks at you—’

  ‘How does he look at me?’ I ask sharply.

  He lifts a brow as if wondering how stupid I might prove to be. ‘The way neither uncle nor father nor brother should look at a niece, daughter or sister, Miren.’

  And I notice he calls me by my name without “miss” in front, but I also think about how Edward Elliott came into my room, touched my hair. I think about Nelly’s behaviour and how it makes so much more sense if there’s a jealousy and fear in her soul. She must know. She must know about my father. And if my father is lying in the silver mine, in a disused pit, an oubliette of a thing, then where is my mother? Where is Isolde??

  ‘Six months they have been here, my uncle and Nelly Daniels,’ I say. ‘Three months without my parents. They met on the road or so Nelly told the old dames. Nelly was pregnant when she came here, she was meant to be a wet nurse to Ena, not a housekeeper… who was the housekeeper before?’ Things I had not thought to ask – why would I? One sees a structure, a system, one assumes it has been in place a long while… but appearances can be deceiving, assumptions can be dangerous. Nelly keeps the dust at bay, but only just, and only in the areas we use. There are no stable lads, the gardens are tended once a week by the Woodfox boys, and are slowly growing wild with insufficient attention.

  ‘Miriam Dymond.’ Ah. ‘And the Toop girls used to be the maids; Paley Jethen’s boys took care of the stables.’ Jedadiah leans forward. ‘But they were told not to come back to the big house. At first they were sent to work in the fields or the mine or the smelter… then the mine began to run dry, the fields and orchards ceased to produce… No one but you has seen the inside of that house in months. Your uncle only ever talks to Oliver Redmond on the front stoop.‘

  I feel pieces of knowledge that have been scattered in my memory click into to place, gravitate to other fragments as if a form of magnetic attraction is at last in play. ‘Did… did my parents tell anyone that my uncle was coming? That he’d been sent for?’

  Their gazes tell me no.

  ‘Did my parents tell anyone that they were leaving?’ I ask, trying to untangle the skeins in my mind.

  Lazarus shakes his head. ‘Ours is not to question our betters, Miss.’

  ‘Did you see them go? Did they offer farewell to anyone?’

  Lazarus looks embarrassed. ‘I heard them go. It was just before dawn and I heard the horses. I looked out the window, saw the hedge open and them riding out. The day after the fire.’

  The day after Nelly Daniels lost her child? It seems heartless that they would have gone then, but they left me behind, didn’t they? Their own flesh and blood? Ena, too. What care would my parents have for anyone else?

  ‘Did you see their faces? Any baggage?’

  He shakes his head. ‘No. I’ve thought on it time and again since we found your father, and I did not see their faces. I recognised their clothes, your mother’s green cloak, your father’s overcoat with the silver animals embroidered along the cuffs. But he wore a hat and she had the hood of her cloak over her face and I… But they carried no luggage.’

  ‘You didn’t go down to check on them?’

  He looks ashamed now. ‘I… since your uncle arrived, your father had been… even less solicitous than before.’

  Jedadiah says, ‘You must understand, Miren, that as loved as your mother was, your father was loved by no one but her.’ He hesitates, swallows. ‘Five years ago he ignored warnings that parts of the mine were unsafe. There was a cave-in and a flood. We never found the bodies, gods only know where they got to… my wife was one of them…’

  I slide my hand away from his; I cannot eat his grief at the moment, not when my own is such a filling meal. Then I think of the kelpie telling me of bodies washed down in a flood some years back, their throats cut... but that won’t help anyone, that knowledge of the dead being so far from home, out of reach and already reduced to their component parts. It might be nothing more than coincidence; corpses might not have come from Blackwater. I don’t mention it.

  I look at Lazarus. ‘So by the time they ostensibly left, you didn’t care enough to check or to
question?’

  He shakes his head, takes a gulp of his drink. ‘And I’ll regret it forever.’

  I say, ‘You might not have survived either.’

  Jedadiah says, ‘The next day your uncle came to the village, spoke to Oliver, told him that your parents had gone on a buying trip to Breakwater.’

  ‘He told me Calder. Calder to speak to the Leech Lords about the failing silver mine…’ And I’m amazed that Edward Elliott would tell such contrary tales… then again, it explains why he was unhappy for me to be in the village on my own, why he only tolerated it when it was clear my presence was making Blackwater productive once again, that it might stave off any rebellion from its people for a while longer, any difficult questions… ‘When did the mine stop producing?’

  ‘A month after your parents left.’

  Did my mother’s magic have some effect on the mining as well? ‘But Isolde and Liam knew Edward Elliott, yes?’

  Jedadiah nods. ‘He and your father were great friends. They looked alike too, so when Nelly told people they were brothers…’

  ‘You did not think to question.’ My father would have felt no need to tell his workers anything about the newly arrived “friend”. Only Nelly would have spoken to the village women, trying to make herself seem bigger and better than she was. Now here is the rub: this man. This uncle. Not? I feel sick. I cover my eyes, drop my head onto the table, think how I have been living with a murderer for almost two months, all unawares. And feeling bad for those moments when I have been untrue or deceptive. And I wonder why I have survived, but I can guess: I made the estate work again. And Edward Elliott, whoever he is, has an unhealthy interest in me.

  ‘Was there a storm?’ I ask as another thought hits me. The strangeness of it is clear from their expressions. ‘The night before my parents supposedly left. Was there a wild storm?’

  Lazarus nods. ‘I thought… I thought I could hear voices in it. We’re used to strong weather up here, but it was… unusual.’ He reddens, ‘It was another reason I didn’t go out. It was still raining.’

  Even away from the sea, Isolde was an O’Malley, there was salt in her veins just as there is in mine. The sea mourns when we die, we female O’Malleys, for whatever reason. Perhaps because we produce the children, the tithe we feed to the waters. Perhaps that’s why we are a loss. And all the waters in the world are joined, Blackwater lake is salty – salty! – and surely they speak to each other, in those places where fresh meets salt, siblings. Somehow, no matter where we are, the sea knows and it sends a tempest to weep for us.

  And I know for certain that my mother is as dead as I’ve always been told she was. I don’t know where she rests or why they separated her from Liam. But she’s no longer breathing above the earth or below it. She was dead before I left Hob’s Hallow. If I’d only found the letters sooner… then again, she’s no more dead now that I thought she was my entire life. Yet still it hurts sharp as a knife.

  ‘Is there… is there another way into Blackwater?’

  Lazarus looks as if I might be mad with all these random questions, but there’s a method to my madness. He nods. ‘A track leads from the smelter through the woods, through the back part of the estate, to the road to St Sinwin’s Harbour. Ten days’ journey, but that’s where the dealers are and where the silver ships from. We live here in secret, Miss Miren, that was part of our agreement with your mother. Most of us, we don’t out beyond the hedge, only Oliver Redman sends the Cornish brothers with deliveries.’

  ‘And you didn’t go down to open the breach in the hedge for them that dawn?’

  ‘Your father knew well enough how to do that. I didn’t watch.’ And Liam would have told his new best friend, wouldn’t he? All the things about this place, or almost. This man he’d invited into his life.

  ‘So, whoever was dressed in my parents’ clothes might have simply gone along the road until they found that junction and re-entered from there. Their horses, I suppose, were left to wander away.’

  Jedadiah and Lazarus sit back in their chairs, stunned. Their mouths move as if to argue, but they know that if Liam Elliott is lying discarded deep in the earth, then he could not have ridden a horse out the hedge gate three months ago. They look at me at last, holding their breath, and when I remain silent, Jedadiah almost bursts as he asks, ‘What do we do now?’

  * * *

  Jedadiah escorts me back to the big house around four in the morning. We barely speak, but walk close beside one another. When we almost reach the front lawn, we keep to the trees just in case (although no one wakes early in this house), and go around the side, into the shadows of the kitchen garden. I push open the door, then take his hand and pull him in behind me. I cannot confront my uncle, not yet. I want to know what happened. I want Ena safely out of Nelly’s hands. I want to be in a position where I can prove all my accusations. I want to know where my mother’s buried. So much I want to know, but I must play this game to its end.

  But this… this is something I can do, a means of marking my rebellion.

  He doesn’t pull away, doesn’t ask stupid questions, simply follows along behind, careful to keep his footfall light as we go. I lock the door to my chamber… the first time I have done so here, the first time I have felt my sleep might not be peaceful or safe.

  In my room… in my room it is much as it was with the green-eyed assassin, but for longer. Also, there is tenderness this night, whereas the other was all heat and hunger. He strokes my back, traces the marks my grandmother left, but does not mention them. Jedadiah asks me what I want, then gives it to me.

  He also asks, in quiet moment, about the mer.

  ‘I don’t know why, exactly, but they followed me from Breakwater. They tried to drown me once.’ But, I think, did they? ‘My family made their fortune from the sea, but there’s not many of us left. Just me, now, of the direct line. Many cousins with thinned blood, but I’m the last O’Malley. I thought there was my mother too, but…’ I swallow. ‘I don’t know what they want.’

  I don’t tell him of their song, that when I’m gone, they will be free, because trust is something that needs to be earned and I will only give so much.

  And after he leaves in the strange greying light just before dawn, I touch the place where he lay until I can no longer feel the heat of him. I lie there and pull my thoughts away from his broad shoulders and deep chest, from the scars on his torso that perhaps I will ask him about one day, and perhaps he will explain. I think about what I need to do, and I ponder how to do it. At some point I go to sleep but it’s not many hours later that I wake, sweating, having dreamed myself in the hole in the earth beside my father who turns empty eyes to me and whispers, I don’t know you.

  32

  ‘Good morning, Nelly.’

  I enter the kitchen without warning, surprising the woman hunched over the pot of what smells like stew on the hearth. The steam has reddened her face, made her blonde curls limp. I’ve slept well past breakfast. Ena is sitting in a high chair by the large wooden table, chewing on a rusk, and she’s wearing a spattering of it and spittle across her pink skin and down the front of her bib. The little girl smiles to see me and bangs the wooden tray top. Nelly’s expression darkens.

  I go straight to the child, picking up a damp cloth from the carved stone sink. I wipe Ena down to make her presentable, and she giggles, then I fill a bottle and feed her a decent breakfast. She’s biddable and quiet, happy for the having of an attendant. Nelly throws me an irritable look. Knowing what I know of her – that she was hired only to be a wet nurse – I cannot imagine she is happy being lumped with housekeeper duties and all the menial domestic work as well as being the cook. Obviously the decision was not hers; I wonder how long my uncle’s presence in her bed will keep her biddable?

  Then I wonder how long they’re planning to stay on here. I wonder how much forethought went into all of this scheme, how long they’ve known each other? Was Edward the father of poor Meraud, burned to a cinder that night? I wonder
if, even as I fortuitously arrived, had they already been preparing to move on? What would they have done with Ena? Having lost her own babe, how attached is Nelly to my little sister? Is she already thinking of the child as her own? A replacement for what was lost? Would they take Ena with them? Or leave her behind. With one of the villagers or alone here in this big empty house for someone to find or no one?

  ‘Can I do anything to help, Nelly?’ I ask pleasantly. ‘I feel that I have not been pulling my weight. I’m sorry for that. How can I make things easier for you?’

  She just looks at me, stunned, eyes narrowed.

  ‘Perhaps we could have some of the village girls come up once a week to assist with the cleaning? It seems a ridiculous amount of work for one woman to be expected to undertake. All those rooms, all that dust.’

  ‘I manage,’ she says and sounds defensive.

  ‘I’m not saying otherwise, dear Nelly, I simply want to ensure you are happy and rested. I know caring for my sister takes much of your energy and you cannot be expected to do that and keep the house in order.’ I frown. ‘Are your nights still interrupted? Are you ridden by nightmares? Some other disturbance?’

  ‘I sleep well enough,’ she says, then asks, ‘Who says I don’t?’

  Nelly is not the sharpest nail in the jar. My uncle is a charming and convincing liar, light on his feet always with a ready answer come easily to his lips; no wonder Nelly is so easily dominated. Too convenient for them to have simply met on the road on their way here.

  ‘Where were you working before, Nelly?’ She stares at me and I take a chance, thinking that my father would have travelled regularly to one place. ‘Was it St Sinwin’s Harbour? I hear it’s an interesting place. Was your position there a good one? I hope my parents offered you a fine living to come here. Blackwater is so isolated, so very quiet, rather lacking in diversions.’