A Handful of Ash

by Marsali Taylor

  This was my world, my people. Now I felt at home again, squashed behind the fold-out table, with a man in a thick sea jumper on each side of me, eating without polite conversation or worrying about table etiquette. The tortilla was deep yellow with the yolks of free-range eggs, and deliciously runny inside. Reidar hacked off a slice of bread and polished his plate with it, and I followed suit, mopping up the last of the eggy fluid. I washed the plates in the beautiful hot water that gushed from the tap, and Anders stowed them. It was only once we’d had two Ballerina biscuits each and a lump of chocolate, and Reidar had found, cleared, and lit a pipe whose smoke-colour suggested his own home-cured tobacco, that it was time for me to speak.

  I did my best to explain clearly, but everything was too muddled in my own head. Annette, the devil who’d carried her, the glass that had broken on the canteen floor, the witches gathering heather for their Sabbat fire, Nate floating in the harbour, his hands and feet bound, the burning peats thrown into Khalida. They listened, nodding from time to time, then, when I’d finished, Reidar drew on his pipe again, blew an amber smoke ring, and said, ‘I know only Danish tales. Witches almost sank the ship of our Princess Anne as she was coming to marry your King James, by sending small devils to climb the keel. They caused smallpox too, I think. I don’t know what Scottish witches do. I think you need to go and find out.’

  The way he said it, it seemed the most obvious thing in the world. ‘Yes,’ I said slowly. ‘Yes, I think I do.’

  ‘Do you know where?’ Anders asked.

  Nate had had a file on witchcraft, but I wasn’t going to go back to Gavin. I nodded. ‘Lerwick, the Archives. I’ll bunk off class and go this afternoon.’ I looked down at the heap of grey fur and black and white velvet sleeping together on the cushion. ‘Could you maybe keep Cat? I don’t want to leave him alone on Khalida.’

  ‘He will stay,’ Anders said. ‘You can see, they have missed each other.’

  I thanked Reidar once more for the wonderful breakfast, and headed back to Khalida, leaving them to sleep.

  It was seven o’clock. Now the sky was flame-orange in the east, the clouds varying the intensity of the colour so that they were scaled like the side of a red gurney, trailing away to one side, and becoming paler as they went further from the sun. Even as I watched it, the sky brightened to fire-orange, then faded; in five minutes it was gone, leaving the clouds milk-grey.

  Red sky in the morning. But there were no other signs of trouble; the sky was patterned lightly with those mottled clouds, with a thicker clump only in the north-west, arranged in long bands as a warning of wind or rain. The occasional drop made circular patterns in the mirror-smooth water.

  I could see my decks now. I went round the three indentations where the burning peats had landed, tracing each with my fingers. The first, the one I’d lifted most quickly, was the shallowest, but the second was deeper, and the third had burnt almost through the fibreglass. I’d need to patch that. We’d been lucky, Khalida and I, lucky that the decks had been wet with rain, lucky that I’d moved fast, lucky that Gavin had been quick with the fire blanket. My tough little boat had been seconds away from burning. The three crows would regret this, along with the shadowy leader who’d sent them.

  Witches. There was the display in the museum, here in Scalloway, and Peter had said that when the organisers had done their research, they’d kept a copy of everything they’d found out, so that other researchers could sit at a table in the glass café corner, and read through the sources. There would be a file on witchcraft, with photocopies of what was in the Lerwick museum. I didn’t fancy looking through a witchcraft file here in the heart of Scalloway, framed in the glass, so that any passer-by could see that I was researching something, maybe even see from the colour of the file what exactly I was looking at. No; I’d head to Lerwick after the morning’s gardening.

  Peter’s car passed me, coming out from the upper entrance as I opened the garden door. Kate was standing at the side of the house, looking towards the drive. There’d been an argument, I could feel that, though whether it was over his going back to work, or if he’d gone back to work to get away, I couldn’t tell. Kate turned with her usual smile as she heard the gate clunk closed. ‘Good morning, Cass. You’re very prompt. I was feeling guilty about telling you to come so early.’

  ‘I was up anyway,’ I said. ‘I had a surprise at dawn. My friend Anders, who used to crew for me, he arrived on a motorboat from Bergen, so we had breakfast together. Cat’s stayed on board with him.’

  ‘Peter’s off to work,’ Kate said. ‘I thought it was too soon, nobody would expect him, but it’s Monday, and he wanted to get back to normal.’ Her voice made it achingly clear that there would never be a normal again. The circles under her eyes were bruise-blue. ‘Well! Talking doesn’t clear a garden.’

  She flung herself into the work, hauling out the last suckers and pulling up handfuls of a silver-striped nettle-leaf and rust geranium stems, until suddenly we came on flagstones. We scraped and hauled, and revealed a path running between what had been two herbaceous borders at the sea end of the garden, under the overhanging sycamore branches. I saw at last what she’d meant by the garden’s bones; cleared of the plants that had hidden it, the path was laid in a smooth curve that rested the eyes.

  ‘This has been lovely,’ Kate said, her eyes bright, cheeks flushed, so that for a moment she looked herself again. ‘I can plant this with paeonies and old roses, and lilies, and clove pinks spilling over the edge of the flagstones. I could hang Chinese lanterns in the tree branches, like that Sargent painting. We need to cut these sycamores back to let the light and air in. You take that barrowful to the car, I’ll fetch the saw.’

  We spent the next hour lopping off jagged tree branches. Each one half-filled the car, and Kate had to make a dozen trips to the bonfire site, but by half past ten the tangle had become two long beds waiting to be dug properly. The clear morning light poured in like a blessing on the disturbed earth.

  ‘Tea,’ Kate said, dusting the sawdust and bark from her hands, ‘and we’ve earned a chocolate biscuit.’

  The kitchen was beautifully warm. Working so vigorously had kept me from feeling the cold, but soon my hands were tingling with the glowing heat of the Rayburn. Kate produced a packet of orange Clubs. We slumped into our chairs and drank our tea in silence.

  ‘We heard, last night,’ Kate said abruptly. I looked across at her, and saw Nate’s face in her eyes. ‘The place has turned rotten,’ she said passionately. ‘It’s like this garden. It has to be rooted out, completely, all of it, so that there can be new growth. Slashed down – ’ Her words choked to silence. She swallowed and looked straight at me. ‘Do you think your policeman can do that?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Someone has to.’

  ‘You help him,’ she said fiercely. ‘If you set your mind to it, it’ll happen. Don’t worry about what you have to break.’ She made a jagged, stabbing gesture. ‘It killed Annette. She got mixed up in it, and it killed her. Whatever you have to do, do it for her sake.’

  We spent the rest of the morning digging. The beds had become infested with a fresh, green leaf which Kate called ground elder. My first handful pulled up easily enough, but then I discovered that my fork brought up a tangle of bitter-smelling white roots. The earth was filled with them, and a metre of border had the barrow overflowing.

  ‘Root it up,’ Kate said. ‘All of it, then in the spring I’ll put poison on what’s survived.’ Her hands were trembling on her spade. ‘Root it out – ’ Her eyes were full of tears. She pushed them away with one hand, leaving a smear of dirt on her cheek. ‘I think I’ve maybe done enough. Would you like some soup before you go?’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m going to skive college and head for town.’

  ‘Then let me make you a sandwich – no, I insist. It’s no trouble.’ She packed an ice-cream tub with buttered bread and slices of roast lamb, and added a bottle of water. ‘There.’

  On the door
step, she laid a hand on my arm. ‘You’ll remember? Whatever it takes.’

  ‘I’ll remember,’ I promised, and set out along the road.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It had become a lovely sunny day. It could have been summer, except for the long shadows that magnified every hollow, bringing back the boundaries of long-gone croft houses. The heather hills were patterned like the coat of a tortoiseshell cat, swirls of fawn, chocolate, ginger, with the burns running down in a path of brighter green. Cloud shadows chased each other over the hills, and the sea was burnished silver.

  I walked briskly out of Scalloway, past the school which was half occupied, half achingly empty, around the curve of the burn, and up past the quarry. I paused at the viewpoint to look over Scalloway and drink some water. From here I could see some thirty miles: up to the north, and the silver-red bulk of Ronas Hill; down the long coast southwards, with the islands of Trondra, Burra, the deserted South Havera; out to the west, where Foula floated on the horizon like my granny Bridget’s Isle of the Dead, Tir nan Og. I wondered what sort of heaven Nate had believed in.

  I felt a stab of pain behind my left eye, and realised that there had been a nagging pain there since last night. Stress; too much happening. This walk would clear it. Below me, Earl Patrick’s castle dominated the town, taller than the modern cubes of ice plant and factory, doubled in height by its own reflection. The sandstone was a soft red in the autumn sun. From here I could pick out the close where Annette had lain, but the bay where we had found Nate was hidden behind houses. Khalida floated in her berth, with nobody near her, and Reidar’s high-bridged motorboat just two berths down. I screwed the top on my water bottle, took out a sandwich, and strode on.

  This was one of the narrowest parts of the island. Just two hundred yards further, the curve of the road hid the Atlantic, and gave me a view up Dales Voe to the North Sea, with the Out Skerries on the horizon: the Viking sea-road which Anders and Reidar had travelled last night. I kept on the north road, rather than turning to the eastward. These heather hills were darker, as if the sun didn’t shine within the valley, to bleach them to rust. A herd of Shetland ponies galloped towards me as I walked by their fence, little legs pounding, then wheeled at the last moment in a tossing of manes and tails, and stopped, as if that was quite enough exercise for one day. A few early golfers were out as I came over the Brig of Fitch and alongside the last hill before Lerwick. A couple of ravens wheeled above them, waiting for the chance to snatch a ball. One capped golfer waved a club at them, but they just glided lower, unimpressed. I plodded steadily up the hill, around the last curve and onto the downwards stretch into Lerwick.

  The best way to come into Lerwick was by sea, straight into the harbour at the heart of the old town, where grey-stone houses still stood on their strong foundations, gable-end to the sea, their wooden unloading doors fastened now against the rising water. Between them, under the street, were smugglers’ tunnels where Lerwick merchants had hidden gin and schnapps brought by Dutch fishing boats. The oldest part of the town dated from the 1660s, just after the downfall of Black Patie. Cromwell’s troops had used his castle as a headquarters for a while, then built a new fort here during the Dutch wars. Naturally the inhabitants of Shetland kept on trading with the herring fishermen in the harbour below the guns. Then the tollbooth had been built here, and the town house, and Lerwick had become Shetland’s administrative centre. It had boomed in the herring years of the late nineteenth century, and the enterprising Victorian merchants expanded the pier, built the square-towered Town Hall that dominated the skyline just as Earl Patrick’s castle had ruled over Scalloway, and laid out the broad streets and flower parks between their substantial villas. Now the mackerel went to the factory at the end of town, and the villas were mostly flats or B&Bs, but the Town Hall clock was still the clincher in any exact-time argument, and the gardens were filled with colour from the first crocus to the last rose.

  Coming from the north brought me through the industrial end of town. I came past two garages and tarmac filled with chrome-winking cars to the Gremista turn-off, the area up to my left, with The Shetland Times printing factory, the Shetland College, and the Tyre and Exhaust centre, hidden behind a roog of tyres. The Bod, where P & O’s founder Arthur Anderson had been born, was preserved in nineteenth-century stone among a cluster of modern sheds: the marina, McNab’s fish, and the Shetland Heat Exchange building that took the refuse from all over Shetland and burned it to create central heating for Lerwick. The marina was behind them, four double lines of boats floating comfortably in the arms of their rock wall. The blue building at the back of the marina was Shetland Catch, one of Europe’s largest fish-processing factories.

  My feet were getting tired. Briefly, I regretted the little white Citroen I’d bought for the longship film, but as I didn’t need it at college, and didn’t have a licence anyway, I’d sold it before coming to Scalloway. I’d got away with driving in the country, but it didn’t seem worth risking illegal-driving in Lerwick just to get to Mass once a week. I plodded on past Lerwick Power Station, a cavernous brown building with a spike of a chimney, and at last I was at the outskirts of the town, with the first council housing schemes on my right, and the ferry terminal on my left. The blue and white North boat was at sea, leaving the passenger walkway sticking out into space. Cargo boats, a clutter of cargo cages, the Co-op. I was almost there. I cut alongside the Peerie Dock with its rowing boats lying on the shingle shore, slipped through the timber mill of Hay and Co., and came out on the path around Hay’s Dock.

  The new museum (it would be new for another thirty years at least) had been built where Hay and Co., the island’s main fishing agents for three centuries, had had its boatbuilding sheds. Three of these sheds had been incorporated into the museum. One was still used for restoring boats. The new building was impressively tall, with its gables shaped like the brown sails of the herring drifters that once filled the sound. It was sited right on the waterfront, with a little walled harbour in front of it, and a shingle shore, where the museum’s own fleet of boats was pulled up. Moored at the pier were fishing boats like the ones I could just remember seeing in the country in Ireland when I was a child, dark hulled, with a small white wheelhouse, and names like Pilot Us and Nil Desperandum. A couple of seals were sculling in the harbour, popping their noses up, then turning over to show pale bellies. I came past the murmuring speakers of the Modern Art Installation (a babble of recorded Shetland sounds that intensified depending on the wind speed) and into the museum.

  I hadn’t visited it yet, and suspected that it would take more than the half hour I could spare from witch research, but I couldn’t resist a scoit into the boat hall I’d heard so much about. I crossed the flagstones to the start of the exhibitions, and found I couldn’t go slowly: there were stones to run a finger over, smooth axe-heads to curve in the hand, a model broch, a display of Pictish silver, Norse combs, and a scratched drawing of a young man with a tight head of curls and Anders’ straight nose. After them was the cramped room of a croft house, with a wild-boar pig tied by its leg to the settee, a bannock on the fire, and a lady singing to her cradled baby in the ben room. Past that was a stuffed Shetland cow, black and white, with long horns, then a display on fishing, with a turtle caught off Unst suspended above me – and then I came into the boat hall, and was transfixed. On the ground was a great ‘flit-boat’, tarred black, almost the length of Khalida, used for shifting peats or sheep. Above it, suspended in the air for three storeys of height, were the elegant hulls of Shetland models, our own class of racing dinghy: shallow and double-pointed, like miniature Viking war galleys. I admired the hulls from below, then went up the stairs to lean on the balcony and enjoy the man with his lunch in the motorboat, the elegant lines and set sails of the racing Maids. They’d been moving towards obselete on the west side when I’d been growing up, so I’d never sailed in one of these three-man flyers, but I was determined that if I was still here next summer, I’d get a crewing berth.<
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  I didn’t have time to dream about next summer. I needed to find out about witches now. I threaded my way through the glass cases of Victoriana, Up Helly Aa costumes, and knitting, dodged round a circular display about the oil era, and came out into the upstairs corridor.

  There was a stern notice on the Archives entrance: no food or drink, no mobile phones. I checked mine was switched off, took a last swig of water, and opened the heavy door. Instantly, silence surrounded me – that working hush that you get in the control room of a ship at sea, with the navigator intent on his chart, the steersman looking forward. There were half a dozen people in the room, spaced along long central tables, heads bent over their work. The far side of the room had computer terminals, and this side was lined with books. A man looked up from the reception desk. ‘Can I help you?’

  I sat down on the convenient chair. ‘I’m looking for information about witches.’

  He pushed a sign-in book towards me. ‘You’ll be wanting Marion Perdone. That’s Hibbert.’ He unfolded himself up from his chair, went straight to one of the shelves, picked out a large, black book, and brought it to me, looking in the index and flipping to the page before handing it over. ‘Here you are.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, and took it to the tables. There were holders of sharpened pencils and homemade notepads. I took one of each, settled myself in the black net chair, and bent my head to the book.

  ‘Hibbert’ turned out to be Samuel Hibbert, A Description of the Shetland Islands, 1822. The book’s paper was browned the colour of weak tea, with the edges nibbled as if by mice, and he’d given Marion Peebles alias Perdone, spouse to Swene in Hildiswick, AD 1644, a whole section to herself. It seemed to be some sort of accusation, for it was given as ‘you’ – that you did send sickness on Janet Robertson, saying she would repent what she had done to your daughter and good-son – and so on for a four-page list of malice. The first account was of her having sent sickness on Janet Robertson, but when Janet’s husband threatened her, she transferred the sickness to a cow, which died, while Janet recovered. She did the same in the next account; the next charge was spoiling beer, and the fourth had her casting madness on Madda Scuddasdoughter until she drew blood of you, biting two of your fingers whereupon she came to her ryt senses. There was more trouble with animals – two cows which gave strange milk, a herd of horses which she was supposed to have cursed, a calf that ran mad and died. By the end of the first account I was left wondering why the local folk hadn’t run her over the banks, if she’d really been that malevolent. Then there was a second set of accusations, dated Scalloway 15th March 1645. The first concerned an Andro Brown; she’d set sickness on him frae the crown of his head to the sole of his fute and it was only when the neighbours came round and prayed in God’s cause that she would cure him that she consented to come. This surprised me. Surely if she was a witch it should be the Devil’s cause. She uncovered his leg, put her finger on it, then put the finger on the ground three times, where immediately his pain was dissolved. However, he’d obviously blamed her for causing it in the first place too publicly, for she told the neighbours she’d heard what he was saying, and said emgrace on them that bewitched you whereupon Andro fell back into the sickness. Eventually Marion sent him a bannock, which he ate, and recovered, the sickness going into a cow, which died.