Billie's Kiss

by Elizabeth Knox

  Murdo went to speak to Rory.

  A LONG, partly gravelled road ran in a loop through the edge of Lady Hallowhulme Wood and then down between the seawall and a sloping lawn before the castle. The road continued around the edge of the shallow, notched corner of the harbour – where the sea lay only at high tide – and terminated at a stagnant waterway straddled by a bridge on which perched Kiss Castle’s gatehouse.

  Murdo walked from the gravelled drive and along the road whose surface was rutted, leaves in a deep layer in each rut and the grass tall on either side. The road seemed to say, soberly, that it wasn’t recreational, was only for expeditions either into or out of the grounds of the castle. As Murdo went he watched water draining back into the mush of leaves where Clara’s trap had passed and the road was recovering its composure. Below the seawall the tide was out, and the rocks of the seabed were draped with a tissue of tender green sea cabbage and brown Neptune’s necklace. The notch was in the shade, rank and slippery, its air grainy with midges.

  Murdo knocked and was admitted to the gatehouse. Three men were lounging in its kitchen – Rory’s fat female friend was busy at the range. All had glasses of porter by them.

  The men were overseers employed on Lord Hallowhulme’s Stolnsay projects, under Murdo’s management. They were islanders, but only two were locals. Rory – like his surname – was from over the mountain range that had divided the island throughout its history.

  Stolnsay was the largest settlement on Kissack, Southport the largest on Skilling. This ‘on’ was deceptive – since Kissack and Skilling were one island. One – but because of the dividing mountains, Kissack had been invaded, settled, and ruled by Norsemen for several hundred years of its history, whereas Skilling was, for a long time, under the protection of an Irish chief. Both Kissack and Skilling later became the territories of two mainland clans, but while Kissack, looking to the northeast, embraced a combination of Scandinavian Lutheranism and the Knox Church, Skilling, facing southwest, remained an outpost of the Church of Rome. Murdo’s man from Skilling was named Skilling – Rory Skilling. Rory was a Catholic, and was thus even more Murdo’s man – not because Murdo was a Catholic – he was not – but because, as a Catholic, Rory was scarcely tolerated in Stolnsay.

  At the gatehouse Murdo sent someone up to see if his prisoner was awake. Then he drew Rory aside. ‘Can you do something for me?’

  The man turned his mouth down; he was surprised, not disapproving, perhaps pleased to be asked for help instead of given an order. He was favouring Murdo with his most attentive, serious look.

  ‘Would you go into town and buy me some shaving tackle? Mine went down with the ship.’

  Rory began to shuffle.

  Murdo gave him some money.

  Rory palmed it but continued to shuffle. He sighed, said, ‘You do know that I live here, Mr Hesketh. Here in the gatehouse.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘My Fiona’ – he indicated the fat woman at the range – ‘brings us bread, and eggs, and fish, and ale, sir. The landlords don’t like us at the bars. And the grocer has long since stopped serving me. I’m sorry, Mr Hesketh.’ Rory unclenched his hand and gave back Murdo’s crumpled money.

  Murdo hadn’t been aware, till then, that his men were so ostracised. He was astonished, and uncomfortable. He must send them down some whisky later. Yes – whisky – he could do that.

  The other man reappeared and said, ‘She’s awake.’

  Murdo went upstairs to see her.

  3

  Among the Dead

  BILLIE WOKE when the key turned and opened her eyes to see a man peer around the door.

  ‘Miss?’ he said. Then he came into the room and fished in his patched jacket. He placed a comb beside her on the bed. He apologised, he had no mirror. He went out again.

  There was dusty white grease in the teeth of the comb. Billie looked at it – waited as though for animation – before turning her eyes to the other recent appearance in the room: a mug of tea, its heat long gone and a dark skin on its surface. This skin shook and wrinkled as the floorboards quivered. Another man came into the room. Billie looked only at his shoes. They were black, with a high polish on the black leather-covered buttons of their gaiters.

  Had she not slept? he asked, then came close enough for her to see his hands, too, to see the one with the wedding ring lift the blankets that were still folded on the foot of the bed – lift them as though he was looking for something stowed between them. Then he planted himself in front of her and reached down to touch the filthy comb.

  Billie raised her head just high enough to see his waistcoat, watch chain, fob – all black, the chain made of beads, basalt and jet, the fob a heavy jet heart embossed with the glittering facets of an eight-pointed star. Billie checked her own hands, the silver ring on the little finger of one. His wedding ring was on his right hand, she saw, and he was in mourning. She looked up into his face.

  His face blinded her. It was, simply, the wrong one. She turned her head.

  ‘You will need shoes,’ he said. He went back to the door and called down the stairs: ‘Rory, send Fiona up here, will you?’ Then, a moment later, and in a lower tone, to a nearer person: ‘Could you go up to the castle and tell Mrs Deet that there is a girl from the ship with no shoes who needs to walk somewhere. Tell Deet the girl is approximately the same size as Miss Minnie.’

  He came back to stand over the bed. He asked Billie why she had jumped.

  She made an effort, but only to say that she couldn’t talk to him – didn’t care to.

  He asked her how she did it.

  Jumped? Took flight? Flew? She was in the cabin with Edith still, and was singing. She jumped and she hit her head. Oil fell from the lamp in little rags of fire. There were holes in the wool of her skirt, coin-sized, with brittle scorched edges. She was in the cabin with Edith still. The shadows swung and pooled against one wall. Black water. The light had gone out. She was in the cabin with Edith still –

  He asked how she knew? Why she jumped when she did?

  Billie tried; she opened her mouth and got it wrong. ‘The sip shank,’ she said. Then she said, ‘Stupid,’ to herself. She was gagged by stupidity. She ventured a look and saw his curled upper lip.

  ‘You disgusting creature,’ he said, softly.

  Billie was being misunderstood, and it mattered to her. That surprised her. She began to shake. She found she wasn’t in the cabin with Edith and the song was just something wheedling away in her sore ear. She touched her ear and felt, all down her neck, a lock of hair plastered with blood, set as hard as the grain in a branch of sea-dried tortured willow.

  Billie moved back against the wall, drew her feet up under her skirt, and wrapped her arms around her knees.

  THE GIRL mocked Murdo’s questions, then called him stupid, and then squirmed back across the bed and folded herself up away from him, fastidiously hiding her bare toes. The room filled with the faint smell of old vomit, stirred up from her skirt when she moved. There were holes in her dress, as though made by a dropped cigarette.

  Gooseflesh formed on the skin of Wilhelmina Paxton’s flat breastbone. In the dim light her hair was darker, a red without its own radiance, matted at the back, separated in thick chunks, and so long its curls still managed to form hooks against the bedclothes on either side of her hips.

  ‘Speak up,’ Murdo said. ‘Why did you jump, Miss Paxton?’ Then he went on to say that, while the island operated under the laws of the land, there was no representative of that law on the island – unless one were to count his cousin, James, who was a magistrate.

  ‘Henry was coming to take up employment as cataloguer of Lord Hallowhulme’s library,’ the girl said. Then, ‘I was happy to hear his name had two Hs. I couldn’t turn it around. I didn’t have to practise.’ Then she finally answered Murdo’s question. ‘It’s no business of yours why I jumped.’ She hugged herself tighter, put her forehead on her knees, and muttered that she couldn’t bear to wear anyone else’s shoe
s.

  Murdo said he imagined she might need shoes to follow a coffin.

  Miss Paxton grunted. She said, ‘Uh!’ in the true timbre of her voice, which wasn’t deep but dense and furry somehow – Murdo had heard that when she’d apologised after her clottish mistake with pail, vomit, and prevailing wind. Miss Paxton grunted, and came off the bed with the same speedy competence with which she’d jumped from deck to gangplank. She crashed into Murdo and pushed him right across the room and against the wall. The room shuddered, and a panel cracked. Miss Paxton was small but solid, like a young dog, all power and muscle; the only feminine things about her were her hair and her fine upholstery of body fat. Murdo caught her. He didn’t fall. He held her fists away from his face. She called him a pig – a mist of warm spit hit his chin. Then she went limp, lolled, and he turned her so that she fell against him, her head on his shoulder.

  Murdo righted himself and walked her to the door, touched the back of her bare ankle, her tender Achilles’ tendon, with the toe of his boot. She moved. He walked her down the stairs. Every man in the kitchen was on his feet, red-faced with stove heat and booze, but blotched, the faces turned to him like cards in a high straight hand.

  ‘Mr Hesketh,’ said Rory.

  ‘Be quiet!’ Murdo said, savage. He sat Miss Paxton on the stairs, her arms held crushed against her body. Then he released her. His hands hurt from the exertion of his grip.

  ‘Is the young lady –?’ Rory tried. Murdo glared at him, then at the top of Wilhelmina Paxton’s drooping head. He said to her that he simply could not believe that the explosion was only coincidental with her jump.

  ‘But, sir –’ Rory persisted. ‘Why would a young lady go to those lengths to –’ Then, in difficulties, ‘Who on that ship had enemies so desperate?’

  Murdo shrugged this off. He’d possibly never have imagined that the ship was sabotaged if the girl hadn’t jumped. He told Rory that he didn’t have to explain his thinking. But then he did. Perhaps it was the cargo the saboteur had wanted to send to the bottom, the tools and materials for Lord Hallowhulme’s factories. Perhaps the explosion occurred too soon. The fuse was poorly timed. She set it, then saw her mistake, and ran.

  Murdo saw that Rory Skilling looked dubious. He also saw pity. He leaned forward, held his weight for a moment on his trembling arms, then sat on the step above the silent, drooping girl. He looked at her hands – her grubby, grazed palms, stiff with scabs, and curled like cooked shrimps. Then he closed his eyes and regarded what he cherished – a plausible picture – Wilhelmina Paxton setting a flame to a fuse, the dynamite packed between the plates of the hull and something unyielding, perhaps the crated parts for the Scouse Beach generator, or James’s telephones, their batteries and bales of cable. He saw Miss Paxton check her watch to time the fuse. And, persuaded by his picture, he opened his eyes to look for the timepiece, around her neck or pinned to her breast. He touched her and she brushed at his hands, absently, as if brushing at a fly or scratchy foliage. Murdo opened the bag she wore on her belt – found a mesh miser’s purse, a pewter pillbox, a comb, a manicure set, a hinged buttonhook and shoe horn, the steel horn engraved on its inside curve: Janet Blazey. She hadn’t a watch, of course, and so Murdo let it go – her purse, and his picture.

  ‘It was the boiler,’ Rory said, consolingly.

  ‘Edith,’ whispered Miss Paxton.

  For several minutes nothing was said or done. Murdo remained beside the girl, his head hanging too, his men looming in the passageway and teetering a little like skittles grazed by a bowling ball.

  Fiona came back with two pairs of shoes. Worn dancing shoes, one pair red, the other white. ‘These can be spared, says Mrs Deet.’ Fiona was out of breath, with anger as well as hurry. She said to Rory, beginning quietly and ending up broadcasting: ‘Deet was in a fluster. I suppose because these shoes were poor Miss Ingrid’s. Still, a respectable woman would have asked why the girl was in the gatehouse, and noticed that, with me gone, the girl must be in the gatehouse alone’ – Fiona gave Murdo a mollifying but totally unmeant smile – ‘with one gentleman, and three ruffians.’ She was making it quite clear she’d modified her first thought – four ruffians. She knelt to fasten the shoes on Miss Paxton’s feet, first removing Miss Paxton’s one remaining shoe. ‘And where are you taking her, Mr Hesketh?’

  ‘Mr Mulberry’s church.’

  ‘She should have been there from the first,’ said Fiona.

  ‘But Fi, she was never in the water,’ said Rory Skilling.

  Murdo could feel his rage going, taken by reason and the force of circumstance. He had felt that he’d come ashore on the girl, that his imagination followed her jump – but behind him was the water, and Ian, under the water. Only his spite had vitality; it pulled him up and on again. Miss Paxton’s scabbed palm was against his own; he hauled her to her feet as Fiona finished fastening the shoes. Miss Paxton stumbled around the kneeling woman. Murdo hauled her out the door.

  They walked from under the arch of the gatehouse and onto the road. Murdo’s men followed them, a few paces back, except Rory Skilling, who stayed just behind Murdo’s shoulder, and whispered to him, ‘God help you, Mr Hesketh.’

  Murdo ignored him. He didn’t have to drag the girl. She went on nimbly enough, kept pace with him. Her arm was at its fullest stretch, but her shoulder never pulled forward. The worn leather soles of poor Miss Ingrid’s slippers slapped and scuffed.

  MR MULBERRY’S church had become a makeshift infirmary. Some pews had been moved together to make beds, and others had been pushed back to the walls to make way for cots. There was a detached draining board balanced on the font, carrying a kettle, a basin, a pot of soup, and a basket of bread. There were around ten town women in attendance on twelve near-drowned people – Mrs Mulberry in charge of all.

  Billie stood where she’d been let go, in the doorway, and listened to the doctor, to the minister, Mr Mulberry, and to Murdo Hesketh. Hesketh was now all politeness, patience, and propriety. The doctor told how he had the four worst cases back at his house – those who showed signs of bronchopneumonia after their immersion. Three had been ‘pumped’ on the pier yesterday. Emptied of water, and had air pumped in by a bellows inserted in one nostril. There were many ‘dry’ drownings – the shock of sudden and unexpected immersion in the icy water had simply stopped hearts. All the dead were next door, in the sacristy. Seven bodies were as yet unrecovered.

  ‘Your cousin wouldn’t let me look you over,’ the doctor said to Hesketh, grave. ‘Or the young gentlemen. He was in a hurry to have you off the scene and safe at Kiss Castle, and he couldn’t be made to see sense.’ The doctor pointed the porcelain cone of his stethoscope at Hesketh’s buttoned waistcoat. ‘Do you mind?’ Hesketh gazed disdainfully over the top of the doctor’s head, but submitted to his touch, stood rigid as the doctor unfastened six waistcoat and three shirt buttons and put the stethoscope in against his heart. The doctor then inserted a hand, fingers shaped like a parrot’s beak, to sound against Hesketh’s ribs. Billie saw Hesketh hold his breath, as he was told, then let it out so that it stirred the wispy, unoiled hair by the doctor’s left ear.

  ‘You’re fine,’ the doctor said, himself reassured. Then he moved out of the knot of men, came to Billie, frowned at her, concerned, and pushed down her bodice a little to place the skin-warmed porcelain cone against the top of her chest.

  ‘She wasn’t in the water,’ one of Hesketh’s men said, informative and acid at once. Billie recognised the man as the one with the same name as the other half of the island – Skilling.

  ‘I’ve brought Miss Paxton to help identify some people. Wherever they are.’ Hesketh spread his hands rather like the even-handed, sloe-eyed Christs in the Last Judgements frescoed on walls of the churches Billie had seen as a child. Churches in San Remo or Portofino, or the chapel near La Brigue – Christs with hands spread to say, Behold! The damned and the saved, Hesketh was apparently too refined to say, ‘Among the living or the dead.’

  B
illie, who knew well enough where in a church a sacristy generally was, took herself there. The men hadn’t expected this independent movement and, by the time they caught up, Billie was already in the doorway and faced with two rows of wrapped forms, on the flagstone floor, around a massive, immovable table in the centre of the room. The only light came from the church behind Billie and two tall and narrow windows of alternating, diamond-shaped, violet-and-amber panes. The minister’s wife appeared beside Billie, a lamp in her hand. She took Billie’s arm and led her in among the silent shapes. Mr Mulberry, Mr Hesketh, and Rory Skilling followed them.

  The corpses wore their names printed on brown paper and pinned to their shrouds. Billie looked at the paper on the shape nearest her, then glanced helplessly at Mrs Mulberry. ‘What is it, dear?’ said the minister’s wife. ‘Do you know this man? He’s Gunther Hathrenson, ABS – which means able seaman.’

  ‘I can’t read,’ Billie whispered.

  ‘Who are you looking for?’

  ‘Edith – and Henry.’

  Mrs Mulberry nodded and led Billie further in. ‘I’ve forgotten myself,’ she said. Her voice trembled. ‘Forgotten all the names. I helped write the labels last night, and I’ve forgotten.’

  The room was full, but breathless. The women’s skirts hissed against the sheeted figures at their feet.

  ‘She might mean the young fellow in Irish tweed,’ Mr Mulberry said, in a hoarse whisper from the doorway.

  The women had come about at the stained-glass window, arm in arm, as though they were taking a turn around the parlour on a sodden day. And there was Hesketh, barring their passage, halfway up the room, his arms out on either side of him, not very high, but nevertheless forming a barrier. His pale skin and hair and eyes gave back the lamp’s light, grew lamplike as the women came closer to him. ‘Thank you, Mrs Mulberry,’ he said, and took the lamp from the minister’s wife and placed it beside him on the table.