Impossible Causes

by Julie Mayhew

  Girls can’t escape through keyholes, of course, everyone on Lark knew that, but witches could. Witches do.

  The night before the Feast of the Transfiguration, the island following the Lutheran tradition and celebrating this in February, Cat Walton hosted a meeting at the chapel. The attendees were as follows: the mothers of the Eldest Girls, Margaritte Carruthers, Ruth French, Benjamin Hailey. No invitation was extended to Diana Crane or Elizabeth Bishy, to Eleanor Springer or Hope Ainsley, yet Reuben Springer, of all the hopeless cases, was seen scuffing up towards St Rita’s that night.

  ‘We were planning the upcoming Easter Celebrations,’ explained the curate in the Anchor after the event, pre-empting the expected objections. ‘We thought we should give other members of the community the opportunity to participate.’ Adding: ‘By that, I mean give the usual volunteers a well-earned break.’ For safety, she tagged on: ‘So they may wholly concentrate on their devotional fasts during Lent without the burden of extra responsibilities.’

  At the service for the Feast of the Transfiguration, Father Daniel read from the Book of Matthew, telling how Jesus took Peter, James and John up into the mountains, his face shining. There, a voice from above had told the men that Jesus was indeed the Lord’s beloved son.

  ‘And Jesus came and touched them, and said, Arise, and be not afraid,’ said Father Daniel, lifting his eyes from the book, receiving earnest nods from the congregation in return.

  The Eldest Girls were then ushered to the front, joined by the red-haired coycrock girl who had teased her fiery mane into a long, neat plait, and, like the others, wore a white chapel-best dress, clearly borrowed as it was too long.

  All creatures of our God and king, they chimed, displaying their perfect harmonies once more, this time not hidden within the crowd. Lift up your voice and with us sing.

  Mary Ahearn started the round of applause at the diminishing of their last beautiful note. Clapping was unusual in chapel, was considered de trop, so not everyone joined in, but those who did made enough sound for the rest. The girls, who were now closest to the altar, were first to receive the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Everyone saw the coycrock girl give a nod, red braid riding up and down her spine, before she made a throne of her hands and received the body of Christ with an Amen. They saw each of the Eldest Girls step forward after her and gently bow, opening their mouths and offering their tongues.

  ‘Amen.’

  ‘Amen.’

  ‘Amen.’

  All four drank from the cup.

  As the rest of the congregation queued down the aisle, waiting their turn, as the girls stepped humbly away, Martha Signal dipped close to Elizabeth Bishy and said, ‘Well, their bodies show no sign of rejecting the host.’ Her voice contained none of her customary deference to the doctor’s wife; perhaps it even exhibited a note of triumph.

  This display of godliness, however, did not prevent the Eldest Girls from attending their Council-prescribed ‘examinations’. They were escorted, in turn, from St Rita’s to the clinic abutting the Bishy house on the southern elevation, a simple brick-built extension with a two-bed medical ward and a compact, carpeted consultation room that overlooked Elizabeth Bishy’s magnificent garden.

  Andy Cater, as representative of the Council, was sent to the Reunyon Farmstead to demand that the Kendrick girl also be brought forward for examination, but he returned shamefaced and empty-handed. The girl hadn’t been there, he said; the mother had threatened him with a pitchfork was another version of the story that did the rounds.

  Sister Agnes was asked, last minute, to chaperone the Eldest Girls to the Bishy surgery – an error in communication meant the mothers had not been aware of the appointment times, falling as they did during morning lessons. Sister Agnes elected not to accompany the girls into the consultation room itself – their privacy was to be respected – instead she watched them make their way to the far side of the clinic, then retired to Elizabeth Bishy’s immaculate front room for a hand, or four, of gin rummy until each girl returned from her time spent under the doctor’s care.

  These examinations were to be of a psychological nature, with the girls’ best interests at heart, but would certainly be rigorous. The learned doctor needed to ensure, through careful probing, that their fascination with sorcery was just that – a passing fascination – and not an outlying symptom of something more serious. Their reactions on leaving his clinic – Anna, mute and dead in the eye; Britta, biting her lip till it bled; and Jade-Marie, weeping and shaking – demonstrated the deep shame they felt for meddling with that goat’s heart, an emotion the doctor should be applauded for successfully extracting.

  Elizabeth Bishy relayed this outcome to the women of Lark as she sat, damp-haired, beneath the scissoring fingers of Hope Ainsley. The collected nodded their approval and went back to their reading of the Lark Chronicle and the various ageing editions of mainland magazines.

  Except for Martha Signal.

  ‘Are you sure he didn’t check them in other ways?’ she asked. She got up and idly scooped a few fingersful of grey hair from the floor. These were cuttings from Mr Crane’s time in the chair, swept to one side now the man had gone. The men’s session at the salon was completed first, Mr Crane the last customer that day. Of the women’s session, Elizabeth Bishy always took the first slot.

  Hope’s scissors stopped. ‘Checked them how?’ she asked.

  ‘You know,’ said Martha. She cupped the grey hair clippings in one hand and rubbed them between the thumb and forefinger of the other. ‘Extra nipples, bloody moles, strange warts, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Why on earth,’ said Elizabeth Bishy, her voice high, constricted, affronted, ‘would he want to do that?’

  Martha Signal had winced a little at her choice of verb – to want to. ‘Because that would show that they have felt the devil’s touch, wouldn’t it?’

  No one seemed to know how to reply. Eyes skittered from the powerful Mrs Bishy, reduced somehow by the limp wetness of her hair, to the short, dark wife of the island’s accountant, who had recently developed a new and bolder way of speaking.

  Martha persisted. ‘And they hide things in there, don’t they? That’s what they say.’

  ‘What who says?’ Elizabeth Bishy’s voice broke. She fumbled her words. ‘Hide what in what?’

  Martha’s palm closed around the hair cuttings.

  ‘Men say it, mostly,’ she replied obliquely, ‘I would imagine.’

  ‘Men say what!’ demanded Mrs Bishy, twisting in the hairdresser’s chair. ‘You come back here and tell me what you mean!’

  But Martha had already put on her coat, dropped the cuttings into the pocket and exited the room.

  FRIDAY THE 13TH – APRIL 2018

  Viola stands in the front room, disorientated.

  The layout is identical to Leah Cedars’ cottage next door, but the floorplan is flipped – a mirror image – and where Leah’s place was a temple to a life half-lived, this home explodes with things: paintings, candlesticks, small statues of frogs and insects and fish.

  In the recess by the fireplace, there is a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf with texts on crystal healing, past lives and the power of runes, the sorts of books Viola had searched for when looking for a gift for the girls, and now cannot believe are able to exist on the island like this, in so many volumes. In the centre of the room there is a green-baize foldaway table, lit by a fluttering tealight. A tuft of grey hair lies beside the candle, alongside a spread of cards that contain images of fire and sticks and queens. The card on the very edge of the table depicts a heralding angel. It reads: Judgement.

  The old woman, cloaked in a pink dressing gown of pitted chenille, had grabbed Viola by the shoulder in the ginnel and steered her forcibly into a backyard, ordering her to tie up Dot outside, before bundling Viola into the kitchen.

  Now, they are in the living room and Viola wonders if she should sit, if that will get the matter sorted faster so she can be on her way. She looks down at the sofa wit
h its crocheted cushions, its appliqued cushions, its sequined cushions, and camouflaged within them all, until that moment, cats – three of them, sleeping. This is why Dot had to be left in the yard.

  ‘You keep cats!’ With all that she has seen in the room, this is what astonishes Viola the most.

  ‘No,’ corrects the old woman, ‘the cats keep me.’ She shoves up the sleeves of her threadbare dressing gown to signal an end to their small talk. On the woman’s bony wrist there is a fresh India-ink tattoo, crusted and red – a symbol, two triangles joined at their points.

  ‘Dagaz,’ she says, following Viola’s gaze, fingering the scab, ‘the symbol for community.’ Then she makes a righteous fist, shakes it. ‘This,’ she says, ‘has been a long time coming.’

  ‘What has?’ asks Viola.

  ‘Everything has its time to die,’ the old woman continues, ‘and that time is now.’

  It dawns on Viola slowly.

  ‘You mean… you know?’ she says. ‘You know what’s going on?’

  The woman nods and Viola looks nervously down at the table again, at that angel with its trumpet – Judgement.

  ‘Did you see it in the cards?’ she asks, a little scared of the answer.

  ‘Yes, I saw it.’ The woman shrugs. Then she grins, not so proud. ‘Also the walls are thin between these two cottages. I could hear you and Leah next door. So, tell me, where are the girls? We need to work together now.’

  Viola allows herself to feel a prick of joy. This is help, this is a friend, and by the evidence in the room, not someone who would want to condemn the girls out of hand.

  ‘They’re going to school as if nothing has happened.’ Viola speaks rapidly. ‘And I’m going to the Big House because I think, I think …’

  ‘You will find judgement there,’ the woman finishes. ‘That’s your instinct.’

  ‘Yes!’

  It is like electricity coursing through a wire. It is time for this to happen, the old woman is right.

  ‘But wait,’ says Viola. The current is cut abruptly, the circuit broken. ‘What did you mean – that this has been a long time coming?’

  The woman steadies herself, one hand against the green baize, and looks away.

  ‘Do you mean people have always known what is going on? Like, really known?’ Still the woman does not look at Viola. ‘People knew and they didn’t do anything?’

  ‘There have been attempts. The girls will have told you.’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘I can’t speak for the others.’ The woman gives a heavy sigh. ‘The girls’ mothers certainly have no real idea of the true extent, or else blood would have been spilled long before last night.’

  The mention of blood snaps Viola back to the urgency of the moment; she needs to go. Maybe this woman is no real friend, no compatriot in the fight. She is likely the same as everyone on Lark – her eyes have been averted for too long, never willing to be sure.

  Viola turns for the kitchen, the way out.

  ‘You have to be compassionate to those who looked away.’ The woman follows her, imploring her to listen. ‘The truth is slippery; it’s difficult to get hold of. And if you do, what then? You can’t escape it here. You have to shape it, make it palatable. Or else, how do you go on living? Some people can’t, just ask that poor girl who –’

  ‘Bethany Reid!’ Viola whips back around, the girl’s name bursting from her lips – a hard sweet released from the throat by a slap on the back. ‘She killed herself because of what was happening to her and you all looked away!’

  The old woman’s voice is riven with remorse. ‘She left nothing, no evidence, nothing we could use.’

  Viola shakes her head. It is not good enough.

  ‘But now we have three voices,’ says the woman.

  ‘Four,’ says Viola fiercely.

  ‘And Bethany is here too.’ The old woman stretches out her fingers and plays the invisible strings of the air. ‘I believe that. I think she came back as a fox. The men lost at sea, they are now deer and –’

  Viola backs away, frightened by this talk. ‘No,’ she says.

  The woman lets her arms float down and steps closer, peers at her.

  ‘Did you lose someone?’ she asks, trying to place a hand on Viola’s shoulder.

  She flinches from this touch. ‘People don’t come back from the dead.’

  ‘You understand the pain then.’ The woman speaks gently, sympathetically. ‘You know it too well.’

  ‘People don’t come back,’ Viola repeats. She had let herself think that they do, was haunted in the aftermath by that scene from their namesakes’ play – Sebastian arriving in Illyria, returned from the dead, not in his watery tomb at all but able to hug his long-lost sister. The fiction tormented her. ‘They just die,’ Viola blurts, ‘they just end. They don’t even go to heaven because why would we want them up there, looking down on us, seeing what we’re doing now and how we’re getting it all totally and completely…’ She chokes, unable to go on.

  The woman gets her hand to Viola’s shoulder this time and her touch is like a kind of magic. Viola’s vision swims. She looks down, roots herself, sees her legs in pyjamas, her two feet in their boots, the kitchen tiles beneath. She sees that she exists, she is here, and that is enough. She looks up.

  The woman smiles, tells her: ‘I will do better this time, I promise. I have you beside me.’

  Her words make Viola think of the ancient stones, that cryptic message left as an arrangement of rocks, and she sees the old woman and herself as some kind of continuation of that, a chain of events.

  ‘I have to go,’ says Viola, and from behind them, as if cued, comes the sound of the yard gate being opened.

  Saul Cooper’s voice calls: ‘Margaritte! Margaritte! You in?’

  ‘You need to leave this way!’ The woman steers Viola back through the front room towards the door facing the harbour.

  ‘But what about Dot?’

  ‘I promise to look after her,’ she says, ‘you have to trust me.’

  Viola nods, there is no choice, but also she thinks she can – trust.

  She wrenches open the door and bursts free, hearing Saul Cooper arrive with his demands, ‘Where is she? What’s going on?’

  The old woman’s reply is swift and high. She plays a version of herself that others have come to expect.

  ‘I turned the Eldest Girls into cats, Saul, that’s what’s going on. See, there they are, on the sofa.’

  Viola makes faster progress without Dot tugging in her wake, but she knows the journey will be harder from here, now that she is alone. If only she can keep hold of that feeling she had with the woman’s hand on her shoulder, the ground solid beneath her feet. Viola must remember that she is all of those who have come before her and all of those who will follow. A wave is building. She and the girls need only ride it.

  Viola heads down the narrow passage behind the smokehouse where the gutters hold onto their odious puddles, before making northwards, along the fencing of the harbour loading bay, sprinting into the tarmacked yard, almost colliding with Abe Powell as he fills a wheelbarrow with logs. He stands, unfeasibly tall, his jumper loose on his bones, and he watches her as she hops backwards, then swerves around him. He wears the same dead stare as he did at the Council meeting, and she expects a challenge. He will ask her what she’s doing there, what she’s running from – something. But he doesn’t. He lets her go without a word. She climbs the fence and spills onto the green estate land, sending a gathering of scavenging ravens cawing for the sky.

  Ahead of her is a thicket of sycamore, hazel and pine, and Viola runs towards it, through it, knees high, to avoid the tangle of bramble and nettle. The copse gives way to a brick path, trees branching over on both sides, creating a tunnel of radiant green.

  She pauses, orientates herself. This is undiscovered territory; she has never used this route before. She should make a wish – that’s what you’re supposed to do when you step onto new land. They had done
it when disembarking from the ship, her mother closing her eyes and grasping Viola’s hand, instructing her to send a request skyward. She had wished to go home, and it strikes Viola now that she wouldn’t make that wish again. Deep down in her dark heart, she acknowledges that there will never be any going back.

  She takes the path to the right where it slopes upwards and must therefore lead to the Big House. The incline gets steadily steeper, the pine trees deliver a lemony sharpness to the lungs. Viola rounds the corner.

  She stops dead.

  There is a well to one side of the path and someone is leaning over it, black hair falling forward, sobs echoing into the hollowness below. It is a scene from a fairy tale.

  FEBRUARY 2018

  Viola knew that she would have to be the one to do it – make payment for the fetching of the heart.

  ‘Do bad things happen on the mainland too?’

  That was one of the first questions the Eldest Girls had put to her, the very afternoon she had emerged from her spying place and stepped into the stone circle. She hadn’t understood what she was being asked, not really. She had struck forward blindly, replied, ‘Bad things happen everywhere’, her only concern being to sound cool, insightful.

  Then she had spoilt it all by bursting into tears. Not because of the pressure to say the right thing or her fear that they would reject her – though those feelings played their part – but because she had inadvertently spoken the truth, one she had wanted to say aloud for a very long time. Bad things happen everywhere, Mum. Accept that you can’t stop them. Let’s try and live our lives. Jump in with both feet. Move on.

  ‘My dad and brother were killed last year.’ The story had poured from her in a great unstoppable surge. ‘They were coming home from a football match together and there was a man at the tube station and he was sick in the head and he’d taken drugs – he was raving, saying mad stuff – and he had a carving knife and Seb just in the wrong place at the wrong time or had the wrong face or whatever and the man went for him and Dad tried to step in and it only got worse and both of them ended up … It was random. It was just … random.’