by Alys West
“Strawberry and vanilla. Thought I’d give them a go in the tearooms.”
“They’re good.” If Dad was trying out new recipes then perhaps this was only a bad day, a mere blip on an otherwise upwards curve. With a smile of sheer relief, she said, “The lack of dried fruit might be a bit radical for some of your customers.”
“The visitors will like them.” Dad shrugged. “Can’t let them think we’ve no new ideas up here.” Then after a long pause, he added, “Jenna, we need to have a wee talk. Don’t think I don’t appreciate what you did in coming home when you did but it’s time you thought about going back to Edinburgh.”
Why was he saying this now? Today, of all days? Of course, she thought about going back. What Dad didn’t know, because she’d not known how to tell him, was that she regularly trawled job sites, had downloaded application forms for heritage positions all over Scotland but never filled them in. Because what was the point? She couldn’t leave. Even though he went to work these days, and even occasionally socialised, he still depended on her too much. Who’d cook him a meal on his day off so he got a proper break, or do the books for the tearooms or sort out the marketing?
“What are you talking about? Of course, I’m not going—”
“Well, I think it’s time you did. There shouldn’t be any trouble getting a job for a lass like you. How many folk can say they’ve worked at The Royal Armouries and Holyrood Palace, eh?”
“Dad!” Jenna glanced away. “That was years ago.”
“Aye, love, that’s my point. Too many years ago. You gave up everything when you came home and I shouldn’t have let you, I see that now. And I don’t want you thinking you’ve to stay close at hand so you can fly home at weekends. It’s time you lived a little—” He raised a hand as she tried to interrupt again. “I know I should have gone in today, you don’t have to tell me that, but Nicky can manage on her own once in a while. I needed time to think about what Nina said.”
“What do you mean?”
“I dreamed of her last night, love.”
“Oh, Dad! Not again, I thought you were over that.” The dreams had been part of his darkest days. He said waking was like losing Nina again, she’d been so real in the hours of sleep.
“No, Jenna. Don’t be like that. This was different. It was as if she was there, sitting on the bed next to me. She wasn’t happy you’re still at home. She told me in no uncertain terms—”
“And you think…” The sentence trailed off as her tears prickled behind her eyes. This was too much after what had happened earlier. Her emotions were too raw.
“I shouldn’t have needed her to point it out.” Dad picked up his tea and blew on it. “I’m sorry, love.”
“For what?” Jenna put her plate down and knotted her fingers together in her lap. Dad’s faith in his dreams had always unsettled her. Mum was gone. The only dreams she had of her were the usual muddled mess. Nothing reassuring, nothing to cling to in the desolation of grief.
“For not saying it before. And, well—” Dad’s hand strayed to Jet’s head “—for being a poor kind of father to you these last years. You gave up everything to take care of me and keep the tearooms going and that’s not right. You should have gone back to Edinburgh years ago.”
“But…”
“Will you promise you’ll think about it?”
“Yes, of course, Dad.” Any other day she’d feel the most enormous weight had been lifted. But not today. Too much had already happened today.
“You should ring Rosie. Maybe she’ll know if there’s any jobs going.”
Jenna tried to repress a sigh. “Rosie’s on maternity leave, Dad. I told you.”
“Aye, I remember. A wee lad wasn’t it?”
“Laurence, yes.” Jenna and Rosie had met when they both worked at Holyrood Palace. Having become friends they’d rented a flat in Tolcross together which they’d not been in six months when Nina died. Rosie’s career had continued to flourish. She’d got a job at Edinburgh Castle which she loved and through working there had met Joe who she’d married three years ago. Laurence was nine months old now. Much as she loved Rosie, the neat, expected pattern her life followed increasingly made Jenna feel a horrible mixture of jealousy, resentment and bitterness, which she hated herself for. Rosie was happy. That was what mattered. Just because Jenna’s life had gone off track six years ago didn’t mean she wasn’t pleased that her friend’s hadn’t.
“She said it’s the time for change, for embracing new energies and moving on,” Dad added, turning to stare out across the sea. “I guess that applies to both of us.”
Jenna blinked. She didn’t share his belief in his dreams but she’d been brought up to never ignore a coincidence. Messages from the Goddesses Mum had called them and you turned your back on them at your peril. She slipped her mobile from her pocket. No signal. There rarely was but, more from habit than anything else, she always checked. She stood. “Do you mind if I use your phone?”
***
Winston swung the motorbike panier through the door of his room and dumped it on blue-and-white-striped carpet. Filling the kettle from the sink in the corner, he switched it on. It took ages to boil so after slipping his jacket off he removed his boots and, sitting cross-legged, took out the items they’d taken from Maeshowe.
Four blue candles, fragments of a pottery bowl, now safely encased in a clear plastic bag. He turned them over in his hands without opening the bag; green glaze, earthenware, probably about eight inches in diameter with traces of what appeared to be blood. Pages from the Crystal Goddess website and leaves, some loose, some tied in bundles.
Holding one of the bundles up to the light, he frowned. Ash, he recognised, and that was fennel. But the others were a mystery to him. Finn would know and it would give him a good excuse to call. Finn hated him making a fuss but what else could he do? What happened in Glastonbury and the fight against Maeve in the Nine Maidens stone circle had changed his friend in ways that Winston couldn’t begin to guess at. Thank God Finn had got Zoe. He’d thought it’d fizzle out, that the crazy intensity of how they’d met would evaporate in the real world, but when he’d visited Donegal before he came to Orkney he’d been surprised how contented they appeared. It was still early days but if he was wrong then he’d rarely been as happy about it.
At the bottom of the pile were two small plastic bags. In the first was earth he’d scraped from under the broken bowl, in the second were white flakes of whatever had been used to create the pentagram. He put those to one side. With a little flattery, he was fairly sure he could persuade Suzie, the new assistant in the lab, to analyse them for him. It’d be helpful to know if it was blood in the bowl and if there was anything special about the paint. Suzie had made it pretty clear before he left that she was interested and, now he’d ended things with Natalie, there was nothing to stop him.
Automatically he glanced at his phone as if the mere thought of Natalie would conjure up another of her texts. Or rather sexts. It’d been fun while they’d been dating but bordering on desperate to keep sending them once he’d ended it. That’d been one good thing about coming to Orkney, it’d given him a great excuse to call it a day once she started planning for him to meet her parents. He didn’t do that kind of thing. Not since Amber. He thought he made that clear but again and again women forgot as soon as they’d been together for a few months.
The kettle built to a crescendo and Winston stood. From the bedside cabinet he took his secret supply of lemon and ginger teabags. As he poured hot water into the cup, the sharp citrus scent laced with earthier undertones was released. He’d deny it to everyone. Herbal tea was such a girl’s thing. But he couldn’t tolerate as much coffee anymore. Since he hit his mid-thirties, his body needed something other than caffeine and alcohol. And drinking water was just boring.
Settling down again on the floor, he stuffed half a chocolate hobnob in his mouth and picked up his mobile. Pressing the photo icon, he pulled up the two shots of the inside of the chamber
he’d taken while Jenna was coming down the tunnel. The place had been left in serious disarray as if the person performing the ritual had simply abandoned everything and left. Had they been disturbed by someone on the outside or had things got so sticky inside they’d legged it leaving everything behind?
Flipping through the pages from the Crystal Goddess website he was struck again by how elementary they were. Any spellworker with the power to handle what Maeshowe could generate shouldn’t need instructions on how to call the elements, cast spells and raise energy. Could it be what Jenna had suspected at the beginning? Kids with a modicum of talent trying their hand at the solstice and getting far more than they’d bargained for? Only if that was the case, what had blown the gate off its hinges? And what was the connection with Nina?
After he’d tidied up in the chamber, using awen to sink the markings of the pentagram into the floor and to make the puddle of what might or might not be blood (his archaeological instincts prevented him from theorising ahead of the evidence) disappear; he’d shuffled up the tunnel carrying the bundle Jenna had formed from his jacket. Outside the visitors’ centre he’d carefully stashed everything in his bike panniers before going inside to look for her.
She was standing behind the desk, her fingers gripping the pendant at her neck, running it up and down its chain. As their eyes met he saw hers were red-rimmed. He’d been intending to go up to her, to try to persuade her again but he couldn’t intrude on that grief. Holding her gaze, he nodded slowly and significantly. She smiled fleetingly, her restless fingers stilling for a moment. Then she’d turned to speak to the girl next to her and a flood of activity was released; walkie-talkies were spoken into, tills rang, visitors were summoned. Maeshowe was open for business again, the crisis had been averted. He watched as she tugged the hem of her Historic Scotland tartan waistcoat before she came out from behind the desk to speak to an agitated-looking woman holding a clipboard. He’d scribbled his mobile number on a scrap of paper, left it with her colleague and gone back to work because, for now, there was nothing else he could do.
His phone lit up, vibrating against the bedside cabinet. Picking it up, he frowned. It was an Orkney number. Probably the guy from the Orkney Archaeological Society about the talk he’d promised to do. Pressing the screen, he said “Hello?”, and a quiet voice said tentatively, “Dr Gr… I mean, Winston. Is that Winston?”
***
Jenna had taken the phone into Mum’s room. It was a wooden extension tacked onto the end of the bungalow with a separate entrance. Mum had seen her herbalism clients here and it had a small dispensary tucked in a corner behind a false wall. While she’d been alive there’d been a pungent smell of seeping herbs but the dispensary was empty now. Most of the bottles and jars of herbs had smashed during the break-in on the day she died and everything that survived had been either thrown away or given to friends who’d know how to use them.
Once they’d finished clearing up, the room had been left pretty much as it was. Dad had insisted on it. Jenna worried that it wasn’t healthy, that it was a sign he wasn’t grieving properly, but what could she do? Dad had always refused counselling or bereavement therapy or anything else she’d suggested that might involving talking about how he felt.
Despite those concerns, Jenna always felt closest to Mum here. This was a conversation she didn’t want Dad to overhear and it felt marginally more mature to have it here than to hide in what had been her bedroom like a teenager talking to a boy her parents didn’t approve of.
“Jenna?”
“Yes, I…” She really should have figured out how she was going to say this before she dialled his number.
“Well, this is a surprise!” The lazy arrogance in his voice made her hand tighten around the phone. Jet had come with her and, ceasing his inspection of the wooden floor looking for crumbs, settled down to doze on the brightly-striped rug by the bookcase.
“I thought you didn’t want anything else to do with me. Or my magic.”
Damn him! She should have known he wouldn’t make this easy. “There’s something I think you should know,” she said as briskly as she could manage. “Something I should have told you earlier.”
“I’m pretty sure there’s a dozen things you didn’t tell me, Miss Henderson but I’m a patient man, I can wait.”
“You’ll be waiting a long time,” Jenna muttered turning the phone away from her mouth.
“What?”
“Nothing. I…it’s about the pages we found. They’re from a book of magic Mum was writing before she died.”
“She was what?”
“She was writing a book called The Spiral Path. It explored the links between spellworker and druid magic, how both parts of the tradition could learn from each other.”
“Bloody hell! But that’s massive. That would…I mean, that would change everything.”
She knew why he was so excited. Spellworkers and druids might have worked together in The Order but that was very much as far as it went. Each side tended to view the other with a mixture of suspicion and resentment, with an unhealthy dose of prejudice and intolerance from the more diehard members of the community. “Well, it might have done if she’d finished it.”
“Where is it now? Can I see it? It’s got to have something to do with why she died, why they all died—”
“That’s just it—”
“Don’t you see, Jenna, whoever killed The Order—”
“But that’s the thing—”
“—it could have been because of Nina’s book. There’d be plenty of people who wouldn’t want that to get out. I can think of half a dozen off the top of my head.”
“Yes but—”
“I can see why you didn’t want to tell me but I’m not one of those ‘spellworkers and druids can’t mix’ types. That’s all rubbish if you ask me. Trust me, Nina’s secret’s safe—"
“Winston! Shut up a minute, will you?”
The line went quiet.
“Sorry. But you weren’t listening.”
“I’m listening now.”
“Good, right.” For reasons she didn’t want to think about she hurried on. “The thing is I don’t have the book. It went missing the day Mum died.”
“Christ!”
“Exactly.”
“So you think…”
Blowing out a long breath, Jenna walked over to the window. The sill used to be filled with plant pots, herbs of all varieties mixed in with geraniums and cyclamen. Now it was empty except for a brown witch bottle in the centre. “I don’t know what I think anymore. I’ve looked at it every way possible over the past six years. Turned it this way and that and I keep coming back to the book. If she’d not started writing it, would she still be alive? But that doesn’t explain the others. Why kill them too?”
“I don’t know, Jenna.”
There was a long moment of silence.
Then Winston said, “We need to talk about this. When can we meet?” at the exact second Jenna said, “Well, I just thought you should know—”
She hesitated, unsure how to handle his assumption that she’d changed her mind. He didn’t. The line crackled as his voice rose. “You’re not still going to walk away from this? You can’t!”
Jenna straightened, glaring out across the bay at the clouds casting shadows over the sea. “I can do anything I damn well like.”
“But this changes everything. What happened at Maeshowe today and Nina’s death they’re connected. They’ve got to be—”
“It changes nothing.” The words came out harsher than she’d expected. Turning from the view, her free arm folded around her middle, hugging the grief back in.
Through the silence she could almost hear Winston thinking.
“Meet me, will you?” he said quietly. “Talk to me about what happened. I know it must hurt like hell. Hurt in ways that I can’t possibly imagine but you know more than anyone, Jenna, and if it’s all connected then I need your help.”
Help. Someone always needed h
er help. Her dad, her colleagues at Maeshowe, everyone who worked at the tearooms, even Jet because she was the one who bought his food from Tesco in Kirkwall because they didn’t stock it at the Co-op in Stromness. But no one helped her. Sinking into the armchair and hugging the scarlet appliqued cushion to her, she said, “One time. That’s it. I meet you, you ask your questions and then that’s it. You go off to do druidy things and you leave me to get on with my life.”
After what Dad had said, that was more important than ever. Although whether she could really leave him when he continued to dream of Mum was another question altogether. But that was something to worry about later, not during a conversation with Dr Grant.
“Alright, if that’s what you want. What are you doing this evening?”
“I’m at Dad’s at Birsay.”
“Where’s that?”
She couldn’t help herself. She sighed and if it was a peedie bit overdramatic then he deserved it. “How long have you been here?”
“Four weeks too long.”
As far as she knew he’d only arrived four weeks ago but she let that one pass. “And have you ever actually left Kirkwall?”
“Obviously. I met you at Maeshowe.”
“To go anywhere that’s not a Neolithic site?”
There was a tiny hesitation. “Well, I am here to work. I haven’t had much time…”
“You should try it. You might be surprised and, for your information, Birsay is on the far western tip of the Mainland.” Turning her head, she glanced out of the window. “After this there’s only the Atlantic.”
“Tomorrow evening then?”
She pressed her fingers against her forehead. What was tomorrow? So much had happened today it was hard to believe it was still Wednesday. “Thursday’s no good. I go to The Fiddlers for the folk session.”
“That’s alright, I’ll see you there.”
“But I won’t have time to talk to you. I’ll be playing—”
There was an unmistakeable electronic purr from the phone. “Bastard!”
Jet stirred from sleep, got ponderously up and came over to her. “Not you,” she said, fondling his ears. “You’re lovely.”
