by Julie Mayhew
We continued to meet daily for a week or so, until I felt strong enough to return to my job. Though she did not speak for Jacob Crane, Cat said she would speak to him, smooth the path for my return. I had sought out time and space to commune with the Lord, was what she told him, how could our headmaster argue with that?
As I hugged her in thanks, there was a click – the latch lifting on the door.
‘My next parishioner in need,’ Cat said, breaking our embrace. ‘Unless you would like to stand in for me on this occasion?’
This was her final attempt at ministering to my soul. She was Cupid disobeying the orders of Venus. I turned to see Ben – walking down the aisle.
NOVEMBER 2017
The path was clear, no Michael in her way, but Viola’s conviction dimmed.
Her mind was two wild horses – one galloping remorselessly forward in pursuit of friendship; the other fleeing, certain of rejection. She had heard the Eldest Girls call out for a sun god, for mother moon, for the ghosts of Lark’s past. How disappointed they would be when Viola, a mere mortal, rose from the ferns.
She decided to prepare an offering. A task that would take her away from the stones for a while, from the anxiety they now caused her. A simple procrastination.
She sifted through books at the farmstead, still sitting in boxes, awaiting shelves and her mother’s enthusiasm. Viola had been momentarily buoyed by the sight of green shoots in the tilled plots outside, until she realised it was November, not the time of year for that kind of thing, and these were nothing but hardy weeds. If this continued, there would be more visits. First the headmaster, then the doctor – who would come next?
‘What are you looking for?’ her mother called distractedly from the veranda, disturbed by the sound.
Viola sat amongst piles of mildewed Penguin editions and dictionaries in various languages.
‘Do we have any books on, like, magic and spells and stuff?’
No answer drifted back.
Viola considered handing the girls the Kendricks’ copy of Macbeth. Maybe it was one of the Shakespeare texts that Michael had hinted were forbidden. There was no cross-dressing in the play and only a suggestion of sex, as far as Viola could remember, but there was plenty of double, double toil and trouble.
Viola had seen how the congregation quivered over that letter about ‘mystic cards’ and ‘polished stones’. A similar letter (minus the fire and brimstone) had gone out to parents at Viola’s old school when an obsession for Ouija boards swept through Year Eight, but the parents back home had scoffed at it – necromancy and fortune-telling were bunkum, and the girls having nightmares needed to snap out of it, quit attention-seeking.
What exactly would Viola be saying by giving the girls a copy of Macbeth? That there was a parallel? Three Eldest Girls, three weird sisters. She threw the play text back into its box.
She trawled the estate land next, hoping to find a stone in the shape of a heart or a lucky clover with an extra leaf. She could press the sprig between the pages of the heavy atlas, then affix it to a neat piece of card, explaining its auspiciousness when handing it over (just in case four-leafers didn’t have the same meaning on Lark). She would be like one of those colonial explorers ingratiating themselves with an isolated tribe before engaging in their local rituals.
But she found nothing, only attracted, once again, the attention of the stooped and bearded gamekeeper. He pulled up alongside her in his tarped-over Land Rover, asking her why she was out on the hills alone.
‘You reckon it’s a good idea, do you, wandering about like this?’
His questions confused her, containing as they did echoes of the mainland rules, the ones that made it Viola’s responsibility not to put herself in a vulnerable position, not to make herself easy prey – the ones that weren’t supposed to apply here.
‘I’m just walking my dog,’ she told him.
‘Well, keep it away from the cattle,’ he replied.
‘Oh, she doesn’t chase anything that big, only rabbits.’
‘I’m thinking of the diseases she’ll have from that mainland of yours.’
There was a rugged-looking woman in the passenger seat beside him, about the same age as Viola’s mother. She wore a thick green jumper, her black hair scraped back into a perfunctory bun.
‘Leave her alone, Peter.’ The woman tutted, nudging him in the ribs.
He gave a grunt in response before pulling away, his eyes on Viola as he went, not on the landscape ahead.
His phrase – ‘that mainland of yours’ – had struck Viola. Like a priest was God’s representative on earth, the Kendricks were the mainland’s representative on Lark, defender of its principles, accountable for its actions, unless of course they chose whole-heartedly to convert. Would Viola be up for that? Could she ever be convinced to call Lark her true home?
She made the Provisions Store her next stop, thinking an offering of chocolate or cake – a literal sweetener – might charm the girls, if there was an allocation in the Kendricks’ ration for that kind of treat. Remembering how the bullish women behind the counter felt about Dot, Viola tied her dog to the wooden stocks before going inside and walking among the flat pallets of tins and packets, peering into the fluorescent insides of the refrigerated cabinets. Nothing appealed. She picked up a pomegranate and squeezed it thoughtfully – wondering where on the island it could possibly have grown. There was a myth Viola had heard once, or a ritual, involving the fruit, the dropping of it maybe and the spilling of its seeds, but she couldn’t recall it exactly. Anyway, she swiftly put it down when a snaggle-toothed woman wearing a shop apron bellowed that there was to be no ‘looking with your fingers’. Viola left, shame-faced, empty-handed.
Outside, Michael was on the cobbles, petting Dot. Passers-by stared at his roughhousing of the dog’s ears, and the way Dot spilled onto her back, spreading her paws and baring her gums, submissively offering up her pink-grey belly.
Viola’s heart sank lower. Michael would ask her how she was getting on with the Eldest Girls, expose her for her dithering.
She leapt in first. ‘So, what’s the word on thingumebob and whatshername?’
‘Leah Cedars and Saul Cooper?’ he whispered.
‘Yeah, Leah and Saul.’ She said it at full volume, making him hiss at her to shush as he checked over his shoulder to see who might have heard.
Viola untied Dot’s lead from the wooden stocks, thinking how, in any market town on the mainland, they might have served as a bike stand, but the inclines on Lark made cycling an impossibility.
‘I’ve found an intriguing pattern,’ Michael said, as they made their way towards the white sculpted chimneys of the smokehouse. ‘One that tells me they’re definitely doing it.’
He reached into his satchel for a notepad, flicking to a neatly drawn table of dates and times, filled out comprehensively with light pencil dashes and hard Xs.
‘I’ve been tracking her every move.’
He thrust the notepad into Viola’s face as proof.
‘Great,’ she said, pushing it away. ‘But you’re not being weird about it, are you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re not, like, stalking her?’
‘But that’s what you told me to do.’
‘No, I said…’
What had she said? Viola did not want to spar with Michael, have him demand, if you’re such an expert on all this, better show me what info you’ve collected so far.
‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘You’re doing great.’
‘You told me I should follow Leah so that you could speak to the girls alone.’
‘Yeah, I know.’ Viola began to walk faster.
‘So, you could get in on whatever they were doing and –’
‘Yes!’ she said. ‘I know!’
Then, the skies opened, instantaneously, as they were wont to do, and Viola had never been more pleased. Mother Nature was playing for her team. She would get soaked right through to her underwea
r before she reached the cover of home, but it would stop Michael following her there.
She started to jog. Michael, madly, joined in.
‘So, how’s it all going?’ he said. ‘What have you found?’
There was a great flash of lightning and that, at last, brought him to a halt.
Everyone on the island was scared of the electrical storms, the swift, metallic ferociousness of them. Viola had witnessed a strike at sea not long after they’d arrived – a pink zag of light across the water – but it was land these firebolts were really after, or people, a means to earth themselves.
Was this support from Mother Nature, she asked herself, or a scolding for her inaction? Stop hiding in the ferns and do what you must, or else I will take aim!
‘I’m really hitting it off with them!’ Viola called back to Michael as the thunder sounded. ‘I have so much to tell you.’
She began to run, full pelt for home, because there was another reason lightning came, and that was to strike down liars.
KINGDOMTIDE 2017
And so, it came to pass – three became four. The red-haired girl joined the Eldest Girls’ number.
The women of the community had wished for it; they couldn’t say that they hadn’t.
Four corners, they’d talked of, four pillars, a wholesome union of love, faith, hope and luck – the allusions were endless. This would make the girls a balanced group, strong, with no need for their illicit rituals. Though what these women failed to see was that their belief in numerology was an illicit ritual in itself. It could not be trusted, and sure enough, as soon as three became four, doubt made its way in, as slippery as the eel.
The coycrock girl was not the right person to steer those girls back towards the light. The evidence had been there all along; they should have taken note. She loitered in fields, in alleyways and at the harbour. She had been caught meddling with Peter Cedars’ dogs and kept an animal of her own as a familiar, watching it defecate on the cobbles, tying up what it produced in little bags that she carried home for some mysterious purpose. She had been observed in the Provisions Store damaging the fruit. Clearly, the girl was in excellent health with all the wandering that she did, yet still she did not attend school.
The mother was also skiving, from the land and, more recently, from chapel. So many families over the years had applied for a place on the island and been rejected, including one with a trio of hardy-looking sons. What error of judgement had led the Council to choose the Kendricks?
The sympathetic proposed that Deborah Kendrick, an upright, practical and pious candidate, had simply fallen ill and was now struggling to cope. This hypothesis gave rise to panic. Was she battling a mainland disease, one that Lark immune systems might not have the armoury to survive? In the Provisions Store, whenever the woman showed her pale face – what you could see of it beneath those wild curls – she was given a wide berth. Hands went to mouths to avoid the inhalation of germs.
Dr Bishy was forced to schedule a talk at the Counting House to allay the islanders’ fears. It was held in place of the planned session for the public removal of the plaster cast from Andy Cater’s broken wrist, an event the young of the island had been ghoulishly looking forward to.
What Deborah Kendrick was suffering from, the doctor reassured those who sat forward on their chairs in the meeting room to hear, was not a deadly flu strain, or Typhoid. It was certainly not Ebola. The woman had a sickness of the mind, something common on the mainland, something not unexpected at her time of life, with no husband to care for, her childbearing done.
Women of a similar age in the audience shared wary glances.
‘But, be confident,’ the doctor continued, leaning against the raised stage at the head of the room to convey how relaxed he was about the situation, ‘these sicknesses are not sicknesses at all if left well alone, if they are not pandered to or the patient mollycoddled.’ Then he repeated the prescription he had given the woman herself. ‘The only cure is fresh air and hard work – which Lark, I’m pleased to say, is able to provide in bucketfuls.’
Meanwhile, the daughter’s influence on the Eldest Girls was starting to display its symptoms.
‘We refuse to do A Midsummer Night’s Dream as our A-Level text,’ Britta Sayers had announced in class one morning, with a flick of her long ropes of hair.
Dellie Leven was teaching them that afternoon, Mr Crane being indisposed.
A slim volume was pushed across the desk for Mrs Leven’s attention. It had a black shiny cover with a photograph of a white-shirted actor playing the titular role.
‘Doctor Faustus,’ Dellie read aloud, picking up the book.
Anna Duchamp quickly corrected her pronunciation – ‘It’s Fow-stus, miss, I believe, not For-stus’ – then she delivered a short summary of the play. ‘It’s about a man who sells his soul to the devil in return for knowledge and power.’ She said it so demurely, tucking her hair behind her ears.
The teacher immediately dropped the book at the mention of Old Nick, realising she’d grasped the wrong end of the poker. Dellie inwardly cursed herself. She always let the girls do this – bait her – whenever Mr Crane was away. She could never see these challenges coming or head them off at the pass. (‘Was it very painful when you first had sex?’ Jade-Marie had asked her during one lesson, apropos of nothing.)
It was Jade-Marie who spoke now, making a declaration of their intent. ‘We want to study it,’ she said, ‘and we also want to do it for the Easter show.’
It was traditional that the outgoing Sixth Formers gave a performance of their set text, a theatrical swansong before exam season began, and that set text was always A Midsummer Night’s Dream. With no students in the school year above them, the girls would, come Easter, have to don the fluted-sleeved dresses, the wire wings and the papier-mâché ass’ head to give the island its annual show. Come the Easter after that, they would have to perform it all over again.
‘No,’ Dellie Leven replied. She may have avoided confrontation with the girls in the past, turned a blind eye to their wrist bandages, for example, leaving it to poor Miss Cedars to uncover their tattoos, but on this, she claims, she was firm. ‘We will not be using that blasphemous book. Absolutely not. And think how disappointed the little ones will be, come Easter, if they don’t get to see The Mechanicals.’
Dellie’s only error, perhaps, was not to confiscate the offending book, not to notice when Britta Sayers slid it back into her bag. She might have demanded it from them later, if the girls hadn’t returned so diligently to their discussions of meddling fairies, debating the rights and wrongs of making Titania fall in love with a donkey, and more earnestly, the reasons why the young people in the play decided that what happened to them should be considered a dream.
It was Saul Cooper who was challenged on the matter of the intruding play text. His log of the Kendricks’ incoming property had them arriving with an embarrassment of books. Had the Customs Officer checked every title? Could he swear on his ageing mother’s life that not a wrong one had made it through?
Yes, he said, yes, he could.
A likely story. Those who had, in the past, accused Saul of petty bureaucracy as they supped their beers in the Anchor, bemoaning his absence of light and shade in the upholding of the law, how he never let a damn thing past if there was a box that needed ticking, now called him a clock-watcher and a shirker, someone guaranteed to do the bare minimum, and decidedly less if no one kept an eye.
But all this was a wasted discussion, if you considered that the coycrock girl might not have given them the book at all.
She had held out an apple, cupped in the palm of her hand, as a welcoming gift when she stepped into that stone circle – not a play text – according to reports. Others had it as a pomegranate, for hadn’t the girl been seen trying to shoplift one from the Provisions Store? Wasn’t she often roaming through the nunnery gardens uninvited, sneaking into hothouses? The educated curate had once told the congregation the story of a goddess w
ho ate six seeds from that fatal fruit, then found herself bound to the underworld. It wasn’t hard to see what the coycrock girl intended.
The other version of events was that she took them no gift all – gave them only the charm of her tongue.
The Eldest Girls cried out in surprise when the girl emerged from the undergrowth. The mists were known to thin a little in November, before the climate doubled-down, sending temperatures plummeting. The coycrock looked like an apparition in the drifting haze. Here was that minion of Beelzebub they’d been calling out for. Here was Bethany Reid risen from the dead, albeit with the wrong-coloured hair.
‘Who sent you?’ Britta Sayers demanded, for the girl did have the air of a reluctant messenger, pushed forward to speak.
The Eldest Girls could look majestic in their white nightgowns as they danced and called, but they cut ridiculous figures standing stock-still, caught out, their muddied hems dragging, their cuffs hanging lower than their hands.
‘I’m Viola,’ said the girl as she moved closer, across the peaty ground. ‘Hello.’
‘We know who you are,’ Anna had replied cautiously, ‘we’ve seen you in chapel.’
There was a pause, as the coycrock girl searched for a way to break the tension, deciding in the end to thrust forward a hand for the girls to shake – a gesture that could be seen as too late and too grown-up, but one that could also be oddly endearing. It softened Jade-Marie. She stepped towards the coycrock girl, catching her toe in the hem of her nightdress, falling forward with a ‘Sorry, sorry.’
Britta Sayers slapped their two hands apart.
‘Who sent you?’ she demanded again.
‘No one,’ replied the coycrock. ‘I’ve just been watching you and…’
‘Spying!’
‘No! No, not –’
