by Julie Mayhew
‘But you said it would look bad for me.’
‘And it does.’
Leah tightens her grip. ‘How?’
‘You had it in for him. He betrayed you, everyone knows that.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Leah shakes her head. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
Viola pulls hard, trying to free her arm, and without warning Leah lets go, making Viola fly and stumble, almost fall.
‘You’re fucking mad,’ Viola hisses.
‘And you’ve sold your soul to the devil,’ says Leah calmly, in return.
Viola wants to be cool as she walks away, but Leah’s insult stings – you’ve sold your soul to the devil – it is a nettle leaf against the skin.
She could turn and defend herself, explain why he had to die, why what she and the girls did is a good thing, but Leah Cedars has already decided who Viola is. So she borrows a trick from the old woman – she plays the part that’s expected of her, she revels in it.
‘A curse on you, Leah Cedars,’ she calls over her shoulder. ‘A curse on you – and your wretched baby!’
FEBRUARY 2018
Viola had fallen a little in love with the idea – sacrificing herself for the sake of the Eldest Girls.
She would be a martyr like St Rita, pierced in the forehead to understand the suffering of the Saviour. Or like St Jade, enduring bites from venomous snakes to stamp out evil on Lark.
Viola ceremoniously removed all her clothing above the waist – St Catherine the inspiration for this. The tapestry on the wall of their church back home showed the martyr bare-chested and proud, as she was led towards the breaking wheel.
‘You girls keep on calling out for your Oak King, your Horned God…’ This was how he announced his arrival, strutting into view, his head adorned with the horns of a goat. ‘Well, he heard you. Here he is!’
‘Men aren’t allowed any further,’ Viola told him. ‘It brings on a terrible fury.’ And she stepped beyond the brink of the circle.
As he came forward, the Eldest Girls retreated to relative safety by the hollow centre stone. Viola let her arms hang at her sides. She held her chin high. The cold was anaesthetising, but she still felt the aggression of his kiss, the teeth behind it, the way he grabbed at her breasts forcefully, more deliberately than Michael. She was doing so well, hiding her shock, masking her fear, then abruptly, where his cloying warmth had been, there was bitter winter air once again. He’d been wrenched away.
She would not be St Viola after all.
‘How could you! How could you do this to me!’ Leah was screaming, dragging him backwards, throwing him to the grass, the horns tumbling ignobly away. Leah drew back her fist and he raised his arms to his face, his knees to his belly, protecting himself from the imminent blow.
Then Leah’s arm dropped. She fell quiet. He relaxed his armour. He peered up at her.
‘Oh,’ she said
He was swearing now, getting up, brushing himself down, asking her what the fuck she thought she was doing.
‘It’s you,’ she said, and she laughed, a strangled sound that disintegrated into a strange wail of pain. ‘But that’s not your coat,’ she said, ‘you even smell like …’ They all stared at her, wondering what words, what noise, might come from her mouth next. ‘Does your mother know you’re here?’ Leah asked. ‘Does Mary?’
‘The fuck they do,’ he replied, zipping the blue parka, flipping up the hood.
Anna came forward to throw a coat around a shivering Viola.
No one spoke.
Viola was reduced now, half-naked in the freezing air.
He was palpably on-guard, disturbed by the arrival of this deranged woman.
Leah Cedars was unsteady after the directness of her initial attack, but she found the strength to take charge, falling back into a classroom role, her voice sharp as a skewer.
‘Are you hassling these girls, Luke?’
Luke Signal shook his head, not in response, but in disregard. He retrieved his gun from the grass by Viola’s feet, and the girls twitched at the way it clacked in his grip. Had he brought it for cover, to explain his business out in the wood at night, or as insurance that he would get his payment as agreed? More vitally, would he use it now?
‘Fuck this,’ said the boy, the man, eyeing them each in turn before gobbing in the grass. ‘I’ll be coming for those keys to the lodge soon, yeah, Miss Cedars,’ he said, a final, malevolent rejoinder. Then he disappeared into the gloom.
They regrouped at the base of the centre stone, where candles were lit in jam jars and they huddled for warmth. Leah Cedars leapt immediately to the subject of blame. Under no circumstances were the girls to believe that they were at fault for what had happened there tonight.
Viola felt patronised by this lecture. Not their fault? She had engineered the whole thing! She might not be to blame, but she deserved the credit. Saul Cooper was now in her confidence and she would have had leverage with Luke Signal too if Leah Cedars hadn’t come blundering in.
‘The older generation are to blame,’ Leah went on. ‘The attitude of those men bleeds down into the young of the island. We grow up to think of ourselves as inevitable victims, while the boys are told they are conquerors, entitled to take whatever they want.’
Viola sighed, waiting for Leah to get to the point, or for the girls to eject the woman from their circle, whichever came first, but the others seemed to have forgotten how much they despised Leah Cedars. They were nodding along.
The teacher trained her gaze on Viola, her head on one side, to all appearances kindly, compassionate. ‘You know, you really shouldn’t have put yourself in that situation. You should never let yourself be abused in return for, well, anything.’
Viola couldn’t hold in her anger any longer. ‘Let myself be abused?’ she spat back. ‘Let myself be abused!’
‘Okay, okay,’ said the teacher. ‘That sounded wrong. That’s not what I’m saying. You know that’s not what I’m saying.’
What was she saying? Viola looked to the Eldest Girls. Why were they not jumping in to defend Viola, to argue with the woman? Why did they continue to nod so obsequiously?
‘We have to start saying no,’ Leah said. ‘We have to fight back.’
She spoke as if they were weak, as if they had been coming to the Sisters’ Stones all this time just to hide, as if they weren’t already on the frontline, battered and muddied, striving for victory.
‘You have no idea,’ Viola snapped. ‘No idea at all what’s going on.’
The Eldest Girls looked shocked at this outburst, and Viola was readying herself to let loose some fury on them too when Leah said: ‘I do.’
‘Huh?’ said Britta.
Leah looked down at her hands, at the weaving of her fingers. ‘I do know what’s going on,’ she said, such weight to her words. ‘I do know and I did, I mean… Oh, this is so hard, I’m so sorry.’ The girls’ eyes were heavy with sorrow. Their breath came in anxious hitches. ‘I mean, I think I always knew. I could see what was going on, but I couldn’t let myself see. I know this makes no sense, but you have to understand – it never happened to me, my father made sure of that, and I just couldn’t bear for it to be true, because I love this island so much. I just decided that it wasn’t true, that it was… I don’t know… impossible! And I made up all those excuses for myself, for why my friends were running away to the mainland, I built up this fortress of denial, but then my brother left because of it, and my father died, and I just couldn’t…’ Leah broke down. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she cried, ‘I’m just so, so sorry.’ The Eldest Girls gave vent to their tears then, the four of them falling into one another, hugging desperately.
Viola stood separate, observing this – the outsider again, the coycrock.
‘You told me you had no brothers or sisters,’ she said, something to break them apart, anything to discredit Leah. ‘You lied to me.’
Leah Cedars looked up from their embrace to smile dopily at Viola, as if this w
as apology enough. High on her confession, the teacher continued in earnest – Luke Signal should be brought to justice, she told the girls. They should stand up in chapel and speak the truth of what he’d done, get the congregation behind them. Then, they could start talking about everything else.
The girls dipped their chins; they backed away.
‘No,’ said Anna firmly. ‘No one will believe us. They’ll think like you did, that it’s all impossible.’
‘I’ll back you up,’ said Leah, ‘I’ll be a witness.’
The girls flickered glances at one another.
Viola said aloud what they were scared to. ‘And who will listen to you? Everyone on the island thinks you’re insane.’
The teacher sniffed proudly and turned to Viola, squaring her shoulders: ‘So, what would you suggest?’
That you fuck off and leave us alone.
‘We have our own means,’ she told Leah. ‘Our own methods.’
Leah held Viola’s gaze, as if checking the temperature of their exchange.
There was silence, into which the teacher gave a great, withering sigh, before saying: ‘And the photos?’
The girls’ heads lifted, guilty, as one – Viola’s too. Leah Cedars had seen the images?
‘What photos?’ said Jade-Marie too quickly.
Leah inhaled a steadying breath. ‘The ones Ben… Mr Hailey… took of you.’
She was biting back fresh tears, pushing down a feeling too awful to expose – but she had exposed herself. Viola could see it then, piercingly obvious – the real reason Leah Cedars had come to the stones that night. She had expected that horned god to be Benjamin Hailey. That was why her temper had run to fire one minute, then was immediately doused. She wasn’t here out of any love for the girls, she was here for herself, for Mr Hailey.
Viola grinned.
This was where her Eldest Girls would step in. They liked the new teacher from the mainland; they adored him. He had made their time at school so much more interesting, more tolerable, they said. He was funny, he was cool, but most importantly, he was theirs. They would not stand for Leah Cedars accusing him of something so terrible as taking naked photographs of them. Viola waited for them to put Leah straight, to defend their dearest teacher. Oh, no, not Mr Hailey! How could you believe for a moment it had been him!
But they didn’t say that.
Jade-Marie spoke falteringly. ‘Oh, he took those photos for a… a… a project we’re doing together.’
There was quiet. A tealight puttered out, casting its spiral of smoke into the cold air. Jade-Marie cringed almost imperceptibly, but Viola caught it; she had spoken out of turn. A look passed between the girls. There was a secret here, one that Viola was not party to. The idea that they would hold something back from her, something this huge, struck Viola like a punch.
‘No!’ said Leah forcefully. ‘That just isn’t right.’
On this, at least, were Viola and Leah in agreement?
‘You have to speak out about Ben,’ Leah went on. ‘This is our way to open it all up. The island will believe you if you accuse him, because that man is an outsider.’
THE BOOK OF LEAH
We lived amongst our boxes, our dread growing larger, becoming an extra brooding tenant in that lodge.
‘Why don’t we just go?’ said my mother, one afternoon, as she searched for something long ago packed and now needed. ‘I can’t stand this any more.’
‘Or we could move Mary Ahearn in?’ was my reply. ‘Appoint her ourselves.’
The idea felt delicious; the notion that we would actually do it buoyed us for days.
We invited Mary to the house to share our plan, opening one of the bottles of wine we hadn’t felt like drinking at Christmas. Mary looked immediately out of place – a muscular, green boulder perched on a tall stool at the island of my mother’s shiny, white kitchen. This sight alone made our suggestion seem ridiculous.
‘I don’t know,’ was Mary’s response as she swilled wine around her glass. ‘Jade-Marie and her friends are getting a lot of grief at school. Wouldn’t this make things even worse with Crane?’
We nodded sympathetically, we sipped. No one spoke for a while. My thoughts were loud – What kind of grief, Mary? What kind? Do you know? I mean, do you really know? They became too loud: I had to speak.
‘What kind of grief?’ I made it sound casual, innocent, and therefore easier, I imagined, for Mary to reply – but I had put her on the spot.
She looked up guiltily. ‘Well, the stuff with, you know, the heart and with… Peter. The idea that the girls are going up to the stones to do… magic.’
‘Nonsense!’ shot back my mother.
It was a comradely outburst, not an honest one. I had heard her gossip with the other women, before my father’s death, about how those girls were up to no good. She patted the top of Mary’s hand on the counter and I allowed myself to wonder for the first time how much my mother really knew. My instinct was that she was unaware of it all, blissfully so, but I was also astute enough to realise that this was the kindest conclusion to come to, for her and for me.
‘You know it was Luke,’ Mary went on. She eyed us cautiously, still unsure if she could speak freely.
My father had been her ally certainly, giving her work after Neil Ahearn drowned, but the fact remained that he had sat on the Council, alongside Crane and, until his recent retreat, Luke Signal’s father, Robert. My mother and I were, in Mary’s eyes, still under the Council’s wing.
‘He killed a goat,’ Mary said. Perhaps our earlier renegade proposal gave her the reassurance to continue. ‘Luke killed it and then took its heart to the stones. It was some sort of punishment, you see. He thought the girls, my Jade-Marie –’ her voice teetered; she took a breath to pull it back ‘– he thought they were fair game, out there beyond the woods on their own, if you get my drift, and didn’t like being turned down.’ She gulped her wine like it was beer, or maybe medicine. ‘I keep an eye. I’ve had to. At work, the boy’s got lazy. He’s a hotshot with that rifle, let me tell you, but is he managing to kill any foxes? Is he heck!’
We were quiet again.
‘So, there’s no way he should get the job,’ said my mother, stating the obvious conclusion to Mary’s account, ‘let alone the lodge.’ Then she added: ‘To think of all the dinners I’ve given him’, as if this were the real betrayal.
‘Crane knows it’s him,’ Mary put in. ‘We took the heart to him as proof – Rhoda, Ingrid and me – proof that our girls were being harassed. We know they’re acting a bit all over the place right now but is it any wonder? You’ve heard Crane’s solution to it all, though – lock ’em up!’ She finished her wine with an aggressive swig. ‘Why should we lock up our girls and not that little bastard?’
She set down the glass gently and straightened her jumper – a small, decorous action to demonstrate that her anger was not for us.
‘And who was it, do you think,’ I asked, adding that touch of innocence to my voice, ‘who told Luke the girls were fair game?’
My mother turned slowly to scowl at me. ‘Leah Cedars, you do ask the strangest questions!’
She was right; it was a strange question. I wanted them to see that it was and wonder why I’d asked it. Hadn’t Luke’s behaviour changed all of a sudden and only recently, about the same time a handsome new stranger stepped on our soil? The two of them moving into the Billet House, the elder perhaps encouraging the younger to give free rein to that dark something lying there, ready within him, cultivated during his childhood growing up on an island like this.
‘Oh, they say all sorts of crude stuff at the Anchor, the men,’ was Mary’s too-easy response. ‘It gets back to me,’ she said, ‘I don’t miss nothing.’
The three of us around that kitchen island were our own worst enemies – scared to tell each other what we really knew and honestly felt, how in our quietest moments we suspected the most terrible things, impossible things. How would we ever gain strength in numbers if we
continued to depend on the comfort of our doubts?
My mother tried to top up Mary’s glass but Mary placed her hand across it. She wanted to get home for Jade-Marie. We should just leave things as they were, was Mary’s parting decision, bide our time, see who the Council appointed as gamekeeper. As if that was going to be any surprise. I didn’t want to let her go. The girls had rejected my call to action and now Mary was too. I would not be herded back into that pen with the perpetrators, the collaborators and the ones who stood by.
‘We could go to the Big House,’ I said, taking a keen grip of Mary’s arm as she made for the door, ‘get the Earl to appoint you.’
Mary shook her head, laughed the idea away.
‘Wake the Earl?’ she said. ‘Oh, no, I’m not sure we’ve quite got to that yet.’
The day after her visit we found the first fox.
It was outside the back door, its throat torn, probably by a badly set snare. The second carcass, the following day, had a shotgun wound to the stomach at close range, as if it had been dead already and fired at for good measure, for amusement. This made me wonder if our conversation with Mary had been overheard somehow, if her words about Luke’s laziness with the foxes had got back to him.
I also wondered – the mood on the island being what it was – if Mary had staged the whole exchange as some kind of bait for us, if she was in league with the boy.
There was no third fox. The next day, there was Viola. She stood on our doorstep, as red of pelt as those earlier offerings, but very much alive.
‘Mr Hailey wants to see you at the stones,’ she said, delivering the message flatly, as if forced to, her hands thrust into the pockets of a long padded coat several sizes too large. Her dog was sniffing frantically at the ground, the fox scent likely still potent to its sensitive nose.
‘When?’ I asked.
‘Tonight,’ she replied, ‘after school. Sunset.’
Then she was gone.
I could pretend that I mistrusted the motives of the girl, that I took my time deciding if it was judicious to meet a man like Ben in a place as remote as the stones. I could pretend that the lure had not worked instantly, troublingly, rendering me useless for the rest of the day, counting the hours until the sun began its descent, but I was done with pretence; of course I would go.
