A Handful of Ash

by Marsali Taylor

  There were snow flurries throughout the rest of the evening, rapping against the windows and on the fibreglass roof. The wind was a good force 6 now, and Khalida rocked in her berth. Across the pontoon, somebody’s halyard had worked loose, and was banging against a metal mast. I sighed and hauled on my jacket and toorie cap. A loose halyard meant frayed ropes, and I’d be grateful to a fellow-mariner who tightened mine.

  I swung onto the boat nose-on to Khalida, hauled the rattling rope down and wound it tightly around its cleat. My feet had just touched the pontoon again when I heard a voice calling my name. I looked up and around, shielding my eyes from the snow with one hand. Across the water, on the shore road, a figure raised a hand, then began walking towards the marina gate. He was muffled up in an old-fashioned parka, navy, with fur around the hood, so I couldn’t see who it was. I walked along the pontoon to the gate, but didn’t unlock it yet.

  When he got to the gate he flung the hood back. It was James Leask, that had met Annette for a meal in Scalloway Hotel the Monday before she died.

  ‘I wanted to speak wi’ you,’ he said.

  It was too cold to stand shouting at each other through a mesh fence. I unlocked the gate and motioned him towards Khalida.

  He stood in the middle of the cabin, looking around, while I re-lit the lantern. ‘This is bonny. My folk hae a motor cruiser, but it’s aa’ fibreglass inside. This is lik a home, wi’ the wood, an’ the books apo’ the shelf.’

  ‘Have a seat,’ I said.

  He eased himself down in the bulkhead corner, where Sergeant Peterson had sat. I still thought of it as Anders’ corner, and it gave me a queer pang to see James’ fair head against the mahogony, except that he had thicker hair than Anders, with a wiry texture, and none of Anders’ dazzling Norse god looks. Instead of the reckless Viking raider, only happy at the prow of his ship, you could see the Norse settler who came over with his steatite bowls and Eidsborg whetstones, his wheat, sheep, kye (and looking at James, probably his mother too) – all he’d need to make a new life. His slightly bulging eyes were a clear, pale blue, and his eyebrows were low-set and dark, giving him a serious look. He wore a boiler suit under his parka, and a faint smell of sheep came in with him. He was sensible, reliable, the very best type of country Shetland man, that could turn his hand to anything, but for someone as lively as Annette, boy-next-door was stamped on his forehead.

  I made him a traditional tea, adding an extra teabag for the pot size, and leaving it on the ring to stew before pouring it. He eyed up the tarry colour appreciatively and sloshed some milk in. ‘That’s a good cup o’ tay, that.’ He cupped his hands around it. ‘I’m fair starved wi’ that wind.’

  ‘It’s no’ warm,’ I agreed. I offered him a ginger nut from the plastic tub tucked behind the starboard fiddle. He shook his head.

  ‘I’m just had me eight o’ clocks.’ He paused, drank some of his tea, then set the cup down, still gripping it as if the cold was deep inside him. ‘Cass, I cam aboot Annette.’ He looked down at the floor, then up at me. ‘I dinna ken if what I’m got to say is o’ any use in catching wha’ did yon to her. I’m no’ used wi’ meddling wi’ dat kind o’ a thing. I towt at if I browt it to you, you’d ken. You’re courting wi’ dat policeman wi’ da kilt, so if you towt you should, you could tell him. If it would help catch – whaivver.’

  I’d forgotten the way Shetlanders said ‘courting’ for folk who were going out together. I stored that in the back of my mind to think about later, and said, ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘I met up wi’ her,’ he said. ‘I aye liked her, at the school, she was that lively. Dramatic-way, I suppose you’d say. She seemed to live life as if it was much more interesting than what I was doing, feeding the sheep and kye, and sailing the Shetland model at the Interclub regatta. I suppose in a way, that’s part of what made me sign up for this course. I wanted some o’ that excitement an aa.’ He twisted the mug in his hands. His voice roughened, like the sea dragging itself out of a crack in rock. ‘Maybe I thought that she’d notice me if I was a seaman, travelling all over the world.’

  He finished the tea and pushed the mug away, then leaned towards me. ‘I’d see her about in Scalloway, from time to time, and I’d say aye aye. Then, ee’ day, I was going up one of the lanes, an I saw her coming towards me. She was dat upset she wasna looking where she was going, and I had to catch her to stop her walking straight into me. Well, I walked with her along to the hotel and took her in for a coffee. She was wearing a scarf, but just loose aroond her neck, not the way they all wear it these days, with the end doubled, and she kept it on, even though she took her hat and coat off. Then, when it slipped –’ He paused, and looked sideways at me. ‘You’re heard about these marks apo’ her neck?’ His voice hardened. ‘The whole place has heard. Nate’s made sure o’ that.’

  ‘I saw them, yesterday morning.’ Was it really only yesterday? I seemed to have lived years since then. ‘Scratches, with a bruise around them.’

  ‘Well, that’s what I saw. Fresh, they were, as if they’d been done no an hour before, and the darker mark where the claw went in just beginning to colour.’

  ‘What day was this?’ I asked.

  He thought for a moment. ‘Saturday. It was Saturday, because I hadn’t planned to be in the village, wi’ it no being a college day, but then Mam decided she fancied a different sort of roast for Sunday lunch, and she sent me in to get a piece of pork from the butcher. It was the middle o’ the efternoon. Anyway, Annette wouldna tell me anything that day – well, I didna really ask, she was that upset. I phoned her later, and we agreed to meet up for a bar supper on Monday. I hoped she’d tell me what was wrong then, once she’d calmed down and had time to think it through.’

  The lantern guttered with a hissing noise, then went out, leaving his face in darkness. I fished behind the fiddle for another tea-light candle, picked the old one out with a spoon and dropped it in the sink, then lit the new one. The gold glow bathed James’ face once more.

  He looked as if he’d hardly noticed the interruption. ‘She told me, that second time, that she was really worried about something someeen wanted her to do. She wouldna tell me wha’ it was, or what they wanted, but she said it wasna wrong exactly. She said that several times, so I could see that it was wrong, and she didna want to do it, whatever it was, but she was frightened about what would happen to her if she didna do it.’

  He looked directly at me. ‘I bet you’re seen some queer things. All the old men who’d been to sea, they were willing to believe in things that don’t seem ordinary.’

  ‘I saw a mer-horse once, off Fiji,’ I said. ‘It had a head like a horse on a snake’s neck, with a brown mane, and great, blind eyes. I didn’t put it in the log, but in my own head I’m sure of what I saw, and it’s not anything in the natural history books.’

  He gave a long sigh. ‘Yes, that’s what I meant. Well, Annette, see, she had this thing about having things around her neck. That’s why her scarf kept slipping, because she wouldna pull it tight, and she never wore choker necklaces, or high-necked jumpers, or anything like that, never, so long as I’d known her, and if anyone put their hands near her neck, you ken, playing in the playground, she’d scream blue murder. Some o’ the boys in my class were just awful for teasing her about it, until they got a talking to from the headteacher, and gave it up. Well, she thought –’ He paused, took a deep breath, then said it steadily, watching my reaction. ‘She believed she was the reincarnation o’ a witch who’d died here in Scalloway.’ He jerked his chin towards the cockpit. ‘Up on the Gallow Hill there. Before they burned them, they strangled them, with a cord. It was kind o’ merciful, I suppose, instead of burning them alive. She said she kept dreaming of being hustled up the burn beside her house, with her arms tied, and everyone laughing and jeering at her, and then of the big pile of peats, and being tied to the post, and the smell of peat reek filling her mouth. She was nearly in tears just thinking about it.’

  ‘What did you say
?’

  The sensible crofter answered. ‘I telt her it was worrying about it was bringing the dreams, and if she made her mind up and telt them she’d have nothing more to do with it, then the dreams would go. But she wouldn’t. She said that what she’d promised to do would exorcise her, and then she could forget all about it.’

  He paused and looked around, as if he was afraid of being overheard. ‘She wouldn’t say who it was, but I think I ken. I dinna get on wi’ Nate dat well, he’s a bit o’ an odd fish, an he has a sister. She works to the college. Rachel, Rachel Halcrow.’ He took a deep breath. ‘She’s a heksi.’

  I’d never heard the word. ‘A heksi?’

  ‘A witch. See, she’s aye had an odd reputation. She was older than me at the school, she’d left by the time I came into first year, but folk still remembered, ones that’d had an older brother or sister in her class. Things used to break around her, and there was one time in Chemistry when a fire started, just by itself, with her nowhere near it.’

  I remembered the wineglass that had broken in the canteen, and Nate’s voice: Still breaking things, are you?

  ‘Annette woulda heard those stories too. I reckon she went to Rachel for help, because she’d ken about witches, and now Rachel’s taking the chance to get her into her coven, that meets up on the dark nights on Gallow Hill. Then she refused after all, and Rachel killed her, outside her own house.’ He rose, jerkily, and pulled his hood up over his fair hair. ‘I’d need to go. That was what I was wanting to tell you. I don’t want to think about what cloored Annette, but I’m certain that Rachel’s behind it all.’

  He pulled back the hatch, lifted the first washboard, and was out over the second one and lost in the darkness, in the flurrying snow, before I could stop him.

  Friday 28th October

  Low Water Scalloway 01:29 BST 0.6m

  High Water 07:42 1.5 m

  Low Water 13:41 0.7m

  High Water 19:51 1.6m

  Moon waxing gibbous

  Moonset 04:12, 272 degrees

  Sunrise 08:14

  Moonrise 16:06, 84 degrees

  Sunset 17:22

  ess (n): ash, peat ash

  Chapter Seven

  I woke at seven, and stretched out one hand to haul the curtain back. The cold air sent a shiver down my arm. Below the sea wall, the beach-stones were outlined with snow in the long slope down to the water’s edge. The tang on the shore was frilled with ice. There was a triangle of snow in the pavement angle on the far side of the road, and a frosting of white across the grass hills. A combed-out skein of cirrostratus cloud spread across half the sky: more wind coming.

  It had taken me a while to get to sleep last night. I hadn’t thought of Nate’s house also being Rachel’s. Folk said she was a witch … The smash of the glass falling behind the café counter echoed in my head. Poltergeist activity, although Rachel was older than the usual adolescent focus of unexplained power surges, falling objects, and mysterious fires. The Scottish nanny had been older too, Carole Compton, she’d been twenty, twenty-one when she was put in prison for fire raising. I knew about her because of a Brazilian boy we’d had on board the Sorlandet at the time of her trial. His home village had had a series of unexplained fires, so he followed the case avidly, and he was full of similar tales, which he shared with his whole watch on dark nights out at sea.

  Fear was what had spawned the witch hunts: the male fear that women who’d been put so nicely in their place, with even the clothes they wore belonging to their father or husband, had a source of power that would let them get their own back. They’d picked on women who were outside the accepted round of children and tea parties, women who had an important place in the women’s community as midwives and healers, and given them a sinister reputation, the black side of white magic, with charges too outrageous to be believed. I glanced out at the Gallow Hill as I dressed. I had a vague memory of a poem we’d studied in school, Auld Maalie, a child asking her mother what they were doing to the old woman as they dragged her up the hill. The last women who’d died there, had they been dancing on the Sabbath? I’d need to go along to the museum and find out more –

  Suddenly there was a rattle on the cabin roof. I looked out and saw hail balls bouncing off the pontoon, the size of my little fingernail. The sky behind was still blue, and the hail was blowing across it like columns of grey smoke. Soon the road was white. Then the real snow began, drifting flakes from a Christmas card. I looked out, and couldn’t believe it. We hadn’t left October, and there was winter spread before me, in the snow-glazed hills, the grass tussocks bent under their white shadow, the cobalt sea tumbled over with long white crests. The castle wore a white cap, and the little turrets had disdainful eyebrows over the latticed windows.

  When I came out of the shelter of Khalida’s cabin, the cold struck me like a blow. I’d dressed for it today, with my sailing thermals under my jeans and warmest jumper, but the wind searched out the cracks between glove and sleeve, cap and cheek, scarf and neck, and stung like a wasp. The air was thrumming with the noise of taut rigging being plucked by the wind. I checked my halyards, then headed off towards Kate and Peter’s house. Cat came out onto the pontoon, turned tail, and slid back below through the forrard hatch. It wasn’t a day for cats to go walking.

  There was no sign of Kate in the kitchen. I waited for a moment, then took a step into the living room, rapped on the door, and called her name. There was silence for a moment, then a call from upstairs. I retreated to the kitchen and waited as a bed creaked. Footsteps edged along the upper hall. I heard Kate’s voice: ‘Cass, is that you?’

  The living room mirror reflected me standing there. I’d pulled my hat off as I’d entered, and my hair curled in a dark cloud around my face. The mirror was one of those old ones that makes everyone look as if they’re underwater; my skin was greenish white, with the scar crossing it like a blade of seaweed. I looked like the witch of the Little Mermaid, the original story, which had gripped me with fascinated horror as a child, or like Medusa with her snake hair. There were Michaelmas daisies in a vase, filling the room with their bitter smell. The lilac petals were browned and falling.

  ‘Hello,’ I called up.

  She hadn’t dressed yet, Kate, whose scarf and Alice band always contrasted smartly with her round-necked jumpers, whose padded waistcoat matched the grey, brown, or green of her cords. I felt that sense of wrongness you’d get if the captain came up on the bridge in his underwear. Her dressing gown was a man’s housecoat, scarlet silk with a thirties Paisley pattern, like something from a Noel Coward comedy, worn over a white nightdress, and she’d thrust her feet into Damart slippers. She hurried down the stairs, pausing halfway to tie the dressing gown around her. ‘Don’t go, Cass. I’m up, I was just –’

  The kettle was already on the Rayburn; as I moved it to the hottest part, over the fire-box, my brain caught up with my senses. This cream box of glowing warmth, this cosy kitchen, smelled of oil, not of peat. I opened the firebox door and saw only the little flame of the burner.

  I’d assumed that Annette had been working with the Rayburn at her house before she’d gone out, but now I thought about it, that was nonsense. Even if it hadn’t been oil-fired, it would have been riddled and the ash removed in the morning. When you wanted the fire to stay in all night, the fuller the ash-pan, and so the less air from below, the better. No, she’d been working with a peat fire or stove that was being lit only for the evening, clearing the cold ash before lighting the new fire. She’d dusted her hands off, but not bothered to wash them – no, the fastidious Annette would never have left her hands dirty. She hadn’t washed them because – My imagination stuck there. ‘Do you have a peat fire, as well as the Rayburn?’

  Kate shook her head, every gesture weary. ‘Just the Rayburn, and the radiators, and Snow White’s box.’

  ‘The what?’

  The ghost of a smile crossed Kate’s face. ‘It’s what I call the fire in the sitting room. It’s one of those electric ones t
hat looks like a real fire, but it’s inside an iron and glass box, like Snow White’s –’ Her lips moved on the word ‘coffin’, but no sound came out. Then her her sorrow welled up and overflowed, great gulping sobs interspersed with apologies; she pulled a large, green-edged handkerchief out and buried her face in it, then blew her nose. ‘Sorry, Cass. It’s all been –’

  I hoped my expression showed my sympathy. I couldn’t think of what to say; but she didn’t need me to say anything, just to listen.

  ‘We had to go, last night, to identify – I thought it was going to be awful, and it was, but not as bad as – That wasn’t our Annette, always so lively, and changing expression every two seconds. I knew then she was really gone. She was a waxwork of herself, so still, with nothing on her face at all. It wasn’t even as if she was asleep. She was just gone.’ She took a sip of tea. ‘I’d never seen a dead person before. I was too little when Grandma died.’

  She needed someone with her, I thought, not just the hired help, no matter how well we got on. She needed someone who could hug her and let her cry, someone to tuck her into bed and sit beside her, and bring her sweet biscuits and cups of tea. ‘Kate, is there a friend I could phone for you, someone you’d like with you?’

  She shrank back into her chair, shaking her head. ‘You’re fine, Cass. I don’t need anyone else.’ Her voice quickened. ‘We don’t really belong here, you know. It’s a time like this you feel it. Oh, everyone’s being so kind, but we’re outsiders. It’s kindness to strangers.’ Her voice changed suddenly, became alarmed. ‘Did Peter go out?’ She began to twist the cup around in her hands.

  ‘I haven’t seen him,’ I said, ‘but Dan and Candy aren’t here.’

  The turning cup stilled. ‘Then that’s all right. He won’t – ’ She peered sideways at me, then shook her head, as if chasing a thought away. When she lifted it again her eyes were clear, the mask of competent countrywoman back in place. ‘Sorry, Cass, I’m making no sense today. I’ll finish my tea and go back to bed.’