Impossible Causes

by Julie Mayhew

  We entered the lobby with its tired marble floor, a floor that had always made me wonder what Lark had been like when the stone was first laid, shiny and new, a hundred or more years ago.

  ‘Turn left,’ I told the girl, feeling her instinctively edge towards the right. ‘Turn left.’

  In the meeting room, in front of the raised stage with its red velvet curtains and carved and painted Union Jack above its proscenium arch, were two foldaway tables, pushed together on the parquet floor and spread with a white tablecloth. Jacob Crane sat at the head of this table, jacket slung across the back of his chair, his top buttons loosened. To his left, was Abe Powell, our lanky harbour master, in his battered and ubiquitous Fair Isle jumper, and at his side Jed Springer from the Anchor, still in his bartender’s waistcoat. On Mr Crane’s right, Dr Bishy wore his customary navy three-piece suit, unbuttoned to allow for the distension of his belly. There were five seats empty – one for Saul, one for the Reverend, one for Robert Signal, one for our Earl, one for my father.

  Jacob Crane raised his hand as Viola and I entered, a sign that we were to stop where we were. The gesture was one I recognised and had been trained to obey. Should I be called to his office at school and cross the threshold a moment too early, he would hold me in place in the doorway while he finished reading the last few lines of a document. It occurred to me only then that there never were any last lines that needed reading; the hand was a tactic, a way to exert his authority from the very start.

  Viola and I halted in the doorway as Jacob Crane ran through the apologies, his voice perfunctory, ticking things off on a lined notepad as he spoke.

  ‘Brothers who send their absences this evening – Earl Catherbridge, Father Daniel, Robert Signal, Saul Cooper.’

  ‘No, I’m here.’

  I was to regret my challenge of Saul on the cobbles. There he was, taking the empty chair beside Dr Bishy, not bothering to remove his large, wild coat. If I achieved success that night, Saul would want to claim a piece of it. I would owe him.

  Dr Bishy reared back from his new neighbour, as if to get a view of a rare and peculiar creature. Jed Springer shook his head, amused; Abe Powell kept his gaze steady, shark-like.

  Jacob Crane’s smile was stiff and he closed his eyes briefly for emphasis as he greeted Saul. ‘Thank you for gracing us with your presence, Mr Cooper.’ He turned to me. ‘Do you have an urgent message, Miss Cedars? Will that explain this interruption of the Council in session?’

  This was it, this was my cue.

  ‘I’m here to arbitrate on the case of my father’s death,’ I told him.

  Silence.

  ‘I assume,’ I went on, ‘that it will be happening this evening?’

  I looked to Abe, Jed and the doctor in turn, each of them immediately fascinated by the white nothingness of the tablecloth.

  Mr Crane’s smile grew more rigid. ‘Though you think it should concern you, Miss Cedars –’ he spoke kindly, slowly, the way he addressed the younger children of St Rita’s ‘– and I understand how you might have come to this conclusion in the midst of your sadness, for which we all here are very sorry –’ there were muttered condolences ‘– this matter does not concern you. So, you may leave.’

  Viola twitched to go. I snatched a handful of her coat.

  ‘I was present at the last,’ I went on. ‘Dr Bishy here was not.’

  The doctor spluttered righteously into speech, one finger spearing the air. ‘That was no oversight on my part, I assure you, I –’

  ‘No,’ I interrupted, ‘I didn’t say that it was. My father was dying, nothing could be done. But I was the one who received his final word on how his death should be recorded and Viola here –’ I regathered my grip on her coat. The girl stood up straighter at the mention of her name, ‘– she was involved in the game with the heart.’

  ‘Game!’ Jed Springer slapped a palm against the tablecloth, making both Viola and me jump. He laughed, quite genuinely. ‘Game!’ None of the other men joined in and his amusement puttered out.

  Saul stared at me open-mouthed.

  ‘“Game” is the wrong word,’ I agreed. ‘They did it in all seriousness.’ Viola gave a great gasp. ‘But only as a keep-safe,’ I went on. ‘That is what they have been used for in our island’s darker history – hearts with nails – as talismans to ward off evil spirits.’

  I could feel Mr Crane readying his sword to fight me, so I raised mine – higher.

  ‘My father was looking after Miss Kendrick here, while her mother was… is…’ I didn’t know how to phrase it.

  ‘Unwell,’ Viola put in.

  ‘Yes, unwell. My father had been ensuring this girl was safe and cared for and she is very grateful for this. She would never have wished to bring him any harm.’

  Viola nodded her head in agreement. Mr Crane tried to speak; I left him no gap.

  ‘With his dying words, my father asked that Viola Kendrick and the Eldest Girls –’ I held eye contact with our headmaster as I gave their names, ceremoniously. This was what did it, I believe, sealed my fate, speaking of them as he was wont to do, as single charms, not one collective spell, ‘– Jade-Marie Ahearn, Anna Duchamp, Britta Sayers…’ He glared back, unblinking. I could barely breathe but knew I must go on. ‘My father said that they are not to be blamed for his death and that they are not to be punished but instead given shelter. Protection is something they tried to find for themselves with that goat’s heart.’

  Dr Bishy folded his arms, chins vibrating with the shaking of his head.

  ‘The coincidence of his death was precisely that.’ My voice grew louder now. I was outside of my body, watching myself speak. I had let go of Viola’s coat and was observing my own hands before me, making passionate gestures. ‘He had been sick for some time, we know now in hindsight. He had lost weight, he had been under a large amount of stress and had been experiencing extreme fatigue, which made him fall asleep at work. I can bring witnesses who –’

  ‘Enough, Miss Cedars, enough!’ roared Mr Crane. ‘I have allowed you to speak for too long already. Should we need you as a witness, then we shall call you. Now you may leave.’

  ‘I haven’t finished,’ I replied.

  ‘Believe me –’ he beat out the words ‘– when I tell you that you have.’

  I looked to Saul, desperate for him to speak, terrified that he would.

  ‘I will be taking up my father’s hereditary seat on the Council,’ I went on. I would say it all, everything I had planned.

  ‘Seats pass to sons,’ said Mr Crane as casually as he had read out the absences. He was flicking though his lined pad now, bored of me. ‘Women do not sit.’

  I felt Viola reach for my coat, as I had grabbed for hers, but she was too late to stop me. I walked towards the table and pulled back the seat beside Jed Springer, planting myself down. Our landlord issued another of his amused barks. This was how he dealt with Council meetings – Saul and the others kept away, Abe Powell was present in body but vacant of mind, and Jed Springer treated it merely as entertainment on a stage. His decision to stand back and laugh was better than the alternative – the kind of horror that was playing across Saul’s face. Viola took a nervous step towards the door, as if she might run for help.

  ‘Get up,’ said my headmaster.

  ‘I shall take the minutes,’ I said, ‘that’s a woman’s job, isn’t it?’ I showed them my teeth; it was supposed to be a smile. I pulled the phone from my pocket.

  Ben had told me that this was the best of his devices for doing what I needed to do, though he also told me that it was lost. We turned over cushions and pulled out drawers in our search, Ben explaining that there was a democratic attitude to possessions at the Billet House – ‘Borderline communist,’ he said. Everything belonged to everyone. It occurred to me as we searched that he was pretending to have mislaid it because he didn’t want me to take it – those mainlanders and their attachments to their phones. When I spied it, slid onto the very top of their understocked
bookshelf, it felt as if it had been put there deliberately – hidden. Ben was not as pleased as I’d imagined he would be, reunited once again with an expensive phone that had been missing for weeks. Still, he charged it up, he demonstrated how to use the function I required and he handed it over.

  I placed the phone in front of me on the white tablecloth. The men of the Council leaned back in their seats, while Saul leaned in, Viola too, slack-jawed.

  I did a sweep of their anxious faces.

  ‘Don’t worry, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘I shan’t be bringing forward a proposal for a phone mast.’

  No one smiled.

  ‘I’m going to record this,’ I told them, pressing the buttons as Ben had showed me, hands shaking, betraying my desire to appear confident, in control. ‘It’ll make things much easier to type up later.’ I cleared my throat and stumbled on. ‘My first proposal as a newly appointed member of this Council is that, with the parents’ agreement, the Eldest Girls shall be put in my charge for a time, to set them back on a godly path.’

  I looked at Viola as I spoke, gauging her reaction, an indication of how the Eldest Girls would receive the news.

  ‘Get up, Miss Cedars.’ Mr Crane’s voice came like a rumble of incoming thunder. ‘Do not threaten your distinguished post at the school by continuing with this display.’

  I did not get up.

  ‘I admire you, Mr Crane,’ I said, ‘for juggling the headmastership of the school, your Council duties and your numerous chapel commitments alongside your teaching of the girls.’ This script that I had written for myself, had I ever truly believed I would have the audacity to voice it? And was it really me saying these words? It felt as though the message was coming through me. This was the channelling of a spirit. ‘But it is time that the Eldest Girls returned to the bosom of Lark’s womenfolk.’

  I felt power in the word womenfolk. In their mouths, it was used to diminish us; in mine, it was an amplification. I could push it no further in that meeting room, though, the idea of our collective strength, our potential. To win, I needed to bring them back onside, make them see the reason in my argument, make this the Brothers’ decision all along.

  ‘I am a good and godly woman, am I not?’ They were silent. ‘Make your nods loud for the recording, please, gentlemen.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Saul Cooper, the only man present to know this wasn’t true.

  ‘Aye,’ said Jed, an agreement delivered in a tone that suggested his vote meant nothing.

  ‘I am a pure-born Larkian and much-loved daughter of this Council, am I not?’

  ‘Aye, Miss Cedars,’ said Mr Crane, his voice low, pointing me to the paradox – my being a much-loved daughter made this crime of speaking up all the more grave.

  ‘And as someone who holds a distinguished post at the school, and as a woman, I am best qualified to tell these girls of womanly ways and how they might return to them. Do I hear any objections?’

  There was only silence in the room.

  Outside on the cobbles, Viola’s dog keened loudly for the return of her mistress and I felt a sudden, painful connection with the animal. I too wanted to howl, bring everyone running.

  ‘Then the motion is carried,’ I said, as calmly as I was able. ‘Is there any other business?’

  TRANSFIGURATION 2018

  The daughter said that the reward of sin is death. She said this about her own father.

  His body was but six weeks in the ground and already she sought to condemn him, calling his demise a correction by the Lord. No other hand was involved in the too-early passing of Peter Cedars, according to this one-time beloved daughter of the Council, the man merely submitted to God’s mercy for his wicked acts.

  ‘Hearken unto thy father that begat thee!’ was the scripture wielded in response around the island’s tea urns.

  ‘Honour they father and thy mother, that thy days may be prolonged in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee!’ said those who really wanted to show off.

  The curate with the spiky hair, if ever she bumped up against this talk, would come back with: ‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.’

  She said this within the chapel walls, and she repeated it at the Anchor at the weekend, one eyebrow raised – an eyebrow that suggested, as heathens do, that the bible can be interpreted to prove just about anything.

  She was challenged, of course, asked outright, ‘Are you contradicting the word of the Council?’

  To which the curate responded with a question in return. ‘Is that what it sounds like to you?’

  It felt dangerous, this way of speaking, the kind of behaviour that risked the full bell, book and candle – or a suspension at the very least. For that is what had happened to the now-not-so-lovely Miss Cedars.

  ‘It’s not a suspension!’ spat Susannah Cedars at the Provisions Store when she overheard Eleanor Springer filling in everyone on her daughter’s absence from school. ‘It is extended compassionate leave because the girl’s father has just died!’

  Susannah Cedars, whose short hair was looking distinctly wild after missing the last two monthly hair salons, dropped her full basket of produce to the floor with a crash, bringing the store to a hush. She took in their stares, understanding that this was her own personal excommunication.

  ‘You vultures!’ she muttered as she walked away, abandoning her basket, smashed eggs and all. ‘You enjoy your taste of flesh!’

  This outburst only served to strengthen the Council’s judgement: Leah Cedars was afflicted with a serious illness of the mind. As is the mother, so is her daughter. Turning up at the Counting House half-crazed, believing she had a right to speak as a member of the Council, appointing herself a conduit of God’s word, dragging with her a bewildered hostage in the shape of the red-haired coycrock girl… it was all very, very sad. The woman was no longer up to her job.

  On the Monday evening, after the announcement that Miss Cedars’ class would be led by Mrs Leven until a suitable replacement could be found, the disgraced teacher had been seen thumping on Miriam Calder’s front door, almost wrenching the dolphin door knocker from its plate. The daughter’s hair was as wild as the mother’s, and she was dressed in a strange combination of an oversized man’s shirt and too-short trousers.

  ‘I was there!’ she was heard ranting at Miriam on her doorstep. ‘Why would you believe him and not me? I have it all recorded!’

  She demanded that her version of the meeting’s minutes be published in the next Lark Chronicle.

  ‘Mr Crane supplies me with the minutes,’ Miriam replied firmly, as Miss Cedars pulled from her pocket a smooth rectangular something that she started flicking and tapping and cursing at, before thrusting it towards Miriam’s ear. (‘I truly thought she would strike me across the face with it,’ Miriam told everyone, after the fact.)

  This exchange was brought to an end by Frank Calder, coming to the door with his walrus moustache and his wooden crutch for the wonky hip that kept him from working and going to chapel and any other number of commitments on the island, though it did not prevent him from frequenting the Anchor. He nodded for his wife to step aside and, letting his crutch fall against the porch wall, he took Miss Cedars by the arm and wrestled her away, back down the cobbled slope towards the harbour.

  ‘Remove the beam from your eye, Miriam!’ Leah Cedars hollered in her wake, as everyone on the southern elevation opened their windows and doors to observe the evening’s entertainment.

  What people spoke of later was the eerie parallel between Leah Cedars’ removal from the Calder doorstep and Jade-Marie Ahearn’s ejection from chapel that first worship in September. No one spoke of the fishy miracle that had allowed Frank Calder, all of a sudden, to walk some distance unaided, grappling with a person much younger and fitter than he.

  The next day, Lark woke to discover that someone had expressed their disapproval of Leah Cedars’ behaviour by throwing a can of red paint against the front of her harbour cottage. No one w
as condoning such an act; it was a terrible shame that the white-rendered face of that lovely little cottage had been spoilt, especially as it was likely to be given to someone new, now that Peter Cedars was dead and his daughter had acted in a way that made her, with all due respect, unmarriageable. (Had anyone seen the handsome coycrock teacher at her side amid all this drama? No, they had not.) But if a can of paint was what it took to stop Miss Cedars from shrieking nonsense on people’s doorsteps, perhaps it had been a necessary evil.

  She was seen sounding off just one last time on the cobbles, in her pyjamas, as the sun rose and the red paint dried. Saul Cooper was at the sharp end of her tongue this time. He held her by the wrists as she came at him, demanding, ‘You must have seen who did it! Don’t give me that, you know!’

  Then she disappeared. To the gamekeeper’s lodge it was presumed, where her mother lived. For now.

  As for the Eldest Girls, their curfew still stood, their futures uncertain. Further enquiries were needed – further ‘examinations’ – according to the published minutes of the Council meeting that had been called to discuss Peter Cedars’ death and the issue of the mutilated heart (those decisions being reached after a hysterical Leah Cedars had been expelled from the Counting House).

  Though the sword hung from a thread above their heads, it was widely reported that the girls had broken their curfew and returned to the stones, sneaking out at the dead of night.

  Mary Ahearn, who some tentatively referred to as the gamekeeper proper, though no announcement of her promotion had been made, was heard in the Anchor at the weekend, stating loudly that she locked her doors and windows when she went to bed and kept the keys beneath her pillow. Rhoda Sayers and Ingrid Duchamp had taken to doing the same, Mary confirmed, ‘to ensure the girls’ safety’.

  ‘The only way our daughters would be escaping from their bedrooms at midnight is through the keyhole,’ said Mary. Her tone was flat and hard to read, but it was familiar – similar to how Cat Walton had spoken in seeming defence of Leah Cedars. There was a sense that the listener was being played with.