The Island House

by Posie Graeme-Evans

  “I’ve said he’s not here.” The man sounded hostile.

  Great. Just great. Freya locked her jaw; he’d hear her teeth grinding if she wasn’t careful.

  “Oh, please, I’m really, really sorry to bother you, but Mr. Boyne asked me to let him know when I’ll next be in Portsolly. Turns out I’m coming over today from Findnar—you know, the island? I’d love to buy him a coffee if he’s got a minute. And he told me there’s a boat over here, but I don’t know where it’s moored.” That was true—she’d not noticed any other vessel anchored in the cove last night.

  The stress was genuine suddenly; this was a child’s voice, squeaky and close to tears.

  Workshop Man said nothing.

  “Hello? Are you there?” Freya hated this. Her voice was shaking.

  “Yes. I’m here. Go down the path, Freya Dane. There’s a sea cave at the far end of the cove. Look there.” The phone clicked, and the dial tone kicked in.

  Freya felt like screaming, so she did. “Charming. Just. Bloody. CHARMING!”

  A cloud of gannets wheeled up from the cliff protesting loudly—a mist of honking black and white. Freya felt absurdly guilty; perhaps there’d be chicks in the nests still—how irresponsible was she? “Sorry! Going now.” A stage whisper.

  For a moment, she paused. The fog was rising fast from the strait. Soon Compline would be shrouded in white; she’d better get going or she might get lost. Lost? Findnar’s not big enough. I might fall over the cliff edge, though. Freya pulled her jacket tight; her wet-weather gear was all very well, but she wasn’t wearing thermals. Maybe in Portsolly she could buy a hat of the keep-your-head-and-ears-warm variety—and gloves? Might be a good idea if she really was going to stay, even for a while.

  Pushing her phone into a back pocket, Freya made careful progress down the track toward the house. The rain last night had left the mud slick as ice, but she could just see a line of smoke rising from the kitchen chimney; that was a pleasing sight, the first successful thing she’d done on Findnar—lighting that ancient stove.

  Mist and smoke, quite similar in their way.

  Freya sniffed and wiped her nose, dreaming of warmth. Maybe the water would be hot enough for a shower now, or a bath. Come to think of it, had there actually been a showerhead in the bathroom?

  She zipped her jacket and pulled up the hood, half-contemplating the ruined walls of the Abbey near the house. Fog was starting to obscure the meadow, but from this height she could see the space the structures had once occupied. Ridges ran away beneath the grass, and mounds of rubbled masonry showed the buildings had once been extensive—surprisingly large for such a remote place.

  Freya trudged on, sneezing. A louder sneeze; she stopped and wiped her nose. Below, in the mist, something moved.

  Freya squinted. What was that? The air had thickened considerably.

  Walter? Had he come back to find out if she was okay? She picked up her pace as the track flattened out, hurrying toward the blur of half-broken walls. Whatever she’d seen, it had been about midway between . . .

  Close to the ruins, Freya paused. This was the place, wasn’t it?

  She turned in a circle. “Walter, hello?” There was no answering voice, but mist muffles sound. “Of course it does.”

  Why was it comforting to hear her own voice? Because no one’s here. That’s why. She’d been mistaken. A trick of the shifting light.

  Feeling better after a bath—no shower, she must have been hallucinating—and breakfast (proper, sticky brown-sugar porridge from stored oats in the small pantry), Freya sat down at her father’s desk. It felt like the right thing to do.

  The small package lay in front of her. It looked like a present; did she still like surprises? Freya touched it with a finger. There was something hard beneath the wrapping. Metal? She picked it up—oddly heavy, for such a small thing—and shook it gently. It was solid; nothing shifted.

  Freya put the package down and stared around the room. It seemed different, the mist beyond the windows adding white diffusion to the morning light. An elegant room, yes, but . . . sparse. Spartan, almost.

  The couch, for instance, was a modest two-seater upholstered in charcoal gray wool (how did he get that up the track?), and there was only a single armchair beside it. With clean lines, it was a shade between gray and black, and this chair at the desk was its cousin—brushed steel and leather webbing.

  A large rug—a tribal Afghan in reds and blues—covering most of the board floor was the one concession to color. And books, books, more books . . .

  Frighteningly tidy, Michael Dane. Self-sufficient, orderly—that’s what this room said.

  Just like me. In Sydney, her mates had laughed at Freya. They’d called her She Who Puts Things Away, and it was true. She liked order; it was the only way when you couldn’t afford anything but a studio flat.

  That had got in the way sometimes.

  No, truth to tell, it had got in the way a lot, especially with boyfriends. She did not easily share her meager space or enjoy having her things moved around. But no man likes being tidied away either; tidied out of her life, more like—more than one had told her that. But if there was fleeting regret, there was also rueful acceptance. She liked her own company and always had, liked a sanctum that was just hers.

  You are my daughter, deny the genes if you can.

  Freya jumped. It was a shock to hear his voice, as clear as if Michael had leaned down and spoken in her ear. She shook her head impatiently.

  Sleep had pretty much abandoned her last night. The wind had been a presence, as well as the sea storming into the cove below as the gale rose—that, and her busy brain, which just would not lie down. She’d jerked awake before dawn, her body clock saying it was time for lunch. Of course she’d made herself wait before she ate breakfast to speed up the process of acclimatizing.

  No wonder she was seeing things. And hearing them too.

  Get on with it. Elizabeth.

  Really, what with him and her mother in her head, Freya thought she might just go mad. All this isolation. She smiled. One day soon they’d find her raving, ranging over the hills, dancing naked among the standing stones.

  Freya laughed. But there it was, still, the little parcel. She was reluctant to open it, for a reason she didn’t want to analyze.

  Sitting back in his chair, her feet up on his desk, Freya Dane saw what her father must have seen, working here.

  On the far side of the double-glazed window, she could just make out the rough turf rolling away to the lip of the cliff. No one would call such an expanse lawn, but it was certainly green and, at this time of the year, growing well. If she stayed, she’d have to mow it—or get a sheep. A flock of sheep? There was a lot of grass on the island—shame to waste it.

  It was an engaging image, sheep in an open boat traveling to Findnar. If the fog ever broke up, she’d go down to the cove hoping the unfriendly workshop man had given her good advice. Then she’d be the one on the water, but going the other way, toward Portsolly, toward the little town with its own guardian cliff hanging above in the sky, like a granite curtain. Meanwhile . . .

  It was like diving off a high board, that moment. Her father wanted her to have this, and after reading his strange letter, she knew there had to be a reason.

  Freya slipped on a pair of white cotton gloves. They were too big but lay ready on the desk, along with a selection of sable brushes and various dental probes and scrapers—the things her father would have used when coaxing dirt or calcification from the surface of something delicate.

  Shredded, the wrapping revealed a lidded box not much bigger than one of her palms. It was made of lead.

  She turned the artifact over carefully. Engraved on one corner was an equal-armed cross within a circle, and the lid was secured to the body of the box with a hinge that ran the length of one edge, held in place by a delicate bronze pin. It was a beautiful, simple object, but it was hard to open—the lid was dented, as if it had been dropped. It took Freya some
moments of patient work, but inside was a snap-lock plastic bag, and inside that, interleaved with finest-quality tissue—and a small sachet of moisture-absorbing crystals—were a number of pages covered with tiny, dense black-letter writing.

  Freya sighed. “Latin.” She was properly annoyed with herself now—this was the language of so many primary sources. She’d taken two semesters at college but switched to medieval English, because Latin grammar and the declensions of all those verbs were too much of a slog. Now, rightly, she felt like a slacker.

  “All right, Dad. Where are the card files?”

  Freya pushed Michael’s chair back and stretched. Lined up on the desk was a small battalion of her father’s card-file boxes—she’d found them stacked and neatly labeled in a cupboard beside the fireplace. Now, after reading her way through years of his work on the island, Freya’s head was stuffed with so many unanswered questions she needed a larger skull.

  It was clear from the dates on the cards and the amount of activity recorded that Michael Dane only gradually recognized Findnar as a mostly undocumented archaeological site of great importance.

  In his first year, each of the cards contained just a few dates with one or two brief descriptions: records of site observations, for instance, or where the walls of vanished buildings might have run as part of a survey of the remaining aboveground structures.

  Then from around spring of the second year, Michael had begun to dig consistently. He’d started with the ruins Freya had seen from the top of the hill. Systematically sinking test trenches, he’d uncovered steps, drains, even the foundations of a cloister next to the remains of a church—a structure he thought was older than many on Findnar. Finally, he believed he’d defined the extent of the ecclesiastical buildings, and from that point, records of other finds increased.

  By the end of the last year of his life, each card case was crammed with documentation of Pagan artifacts, Christian objects, and also the burials he’d found. Quite a lot of burials, though these were mostly Christian, judging from their alignment and lack of grave goods.

  But it seemed to Freya that Michael had become obsessed and possibly secretive about his work on Findnar, for she could find no mention of articles he’d written, or collaboration with other archaeologists.

  She stared sightlessly at yet another site drawing of a find: the remains of a sword excavated in the area of the cloister.

  She sat up. A sword—in an abbey? “So, where’s the undercroft, Dad?”

  In the kitchen, Freya stared at the staircase that led to the bedrooms. It climbed diagonally across the wall that divided the back half of the house from the front—the part that wasn’t occupied by the dresser with its plates and cups and bowls.

  And then she saw there was a door beneath the stairs, wide and not very high. A storage cupboard? She pulled back the simple bolt. The door opened on oiled hinges—it wasn’t a cupboard, but it was dark in there. Freya hesitated after lighting one of the paraffin lamps but then ducked through.

  Light picked out the edges of a steel staircase leading into the void below. The treads were fixed to the wall with massive bolts, and irregularities in the stone glittered like powdered glass as, step by step, she descended. Ahead, there were four small windows, through which daylight struggled. Freya had not noticed them on the outside of the building.

  But something else was down there, something big. As she stood on the stone floor of what was, undeniably, an undercroft—a crypt such as a monastery might have—awe feathered her spine.

  The granite obelisk was much taller than she was, and it was considerably weathered, but she was startled by the symbols carved on its surface. Touching the incised markings gently, Freya traced the lines. There were twining serpents and double circles with dots in the middle like the pupils of eyes, and something that looked like a hand mirror used by high-status women; she recognized that from finds she’d seen as a child. Memory nudged. The Picts. These were Pictish symbols.

  She walked around the other side, and here there were Nordic runes. If they were Elder or Younger Futhark, Freya did not know, but one thing was clear: the obelisk had been reused, very deliberately, in antiquity, by two separate peoples.

  She held the lamp higher and turned a complete circle. The placement of the stone was strange: it was planted in the floor near the bottom of the stairs like a tree that had somehow lost its forest, but the groined and vaulted ceiling placed this space somewhere between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries CE, as did the slender, twisted pillars that supported the roof and marched away into darkness.

  As Freya’s light traveled over the landscape of this new subterranean world, it did not touch the ends or edges of the space—so this was a very large area, possibly even more extensive than the footprint of Compline House.

  And then she saw the storage Compactus. She couldn’t imagine the difficulty her father must have had and all the time and labor it would have meant, but somehow he’d brought these steel cupboards down here and assembled them, piece by piece, panel by panel onto their tracks. Perhaps he’d had help—maybe Walter had lent a hand? The Compactus certainly answered one of the questions that had nagged Freya; here was storage space for his finds, and lots of it.

  Was it locked? Freya pulled on the handle at the end of one row of cupboards—there were five—and the first rolled smoothly away from its neighbor. The shelves were organized and orderly, but they were packed, crammed with containers. Anonymous cardboard boxes with lids but all labeled, all cross-referenceable with Michael’s records upstairs.

  Freya scanned the numbers on the shelves and selected a box. In a nest of cotton wool was a gold torque, something a king might have worn much more than a thousand years ago. Michael’s notes had said he’d found it when cutting peat for the fire—one of the random discoveries he’d made in what had once been a marsh.

  She opened another and saw arm rings, also gold; these had been lying close to the torque in the bog. “You said they were here, Dad, and I didn’t believe you.” Only two boxes out of . . . who knew how many others.

  Freya replaced the second lid very carefully. Findnar was a treasure-house—a really, really serious trove of precious objects.

  She pushed the last cupboard back, and as she turned, her light slid over a surface that seemed to writhe—dark figures squirmed, all popping eyes and teeth like knives.

  But it was only a carving, just a piece of blackened wood. Propped up against the wall beyond the windows, this panel was several meters long but narrow at one end and with a long, curved edge. It had been deep in shadow before, but now, etched in high relief, Freya saw the savage little figures were linked together in patterns; whorls formed by arms and legs, swords and axes spun out into ever greater circles of repeating motifs. There were animals too, many-legged horses and snarling hounds.

  Freya put the lamp on the floor. She knocked with one careful knuckle on the surface of the wood. This was very old, Viking age at least, and museum quality, as were all the finds she’d seen.

  She closed her eyes. Her head was tight and aching—as if there wasn’t enough skin to properly stretch over her skull. Time to ask a few questions of the living.

  CHAPTER 8

  LATE IN the morning a fresh wind pushed the fog away. Hauling on the backpack and zipping her wet-weather jacket tight to her throat, Freya closed Compline’s back door. She resisted the urge to lock it.

  The little cart was waiting in the shed, and Freya picked up the handles. It was heavier than it looked and would be cumbersome on the cliff path, but if she bought provisions in Portsolly, it would beat carrying them home. Home. Hmmm, bit premature that.

  Head down against the wind, Freya walked the narrow trail to the cove. Natural buttresses forced the path to curve along its length, and she tried to avoid looking down at the rocks below. When she reached the beach, she put the cart down and flexed her shoulders, scanning the headland at the other end of the cove. The granite was black against the white sky, and it was
hard to pick out detail except where light caught on the knobs and spines of rock, but there it was. A void, at sea level—a different shade of dark beneath a natural arch of stone.

  Workshop Man was rude, but he was right. This had to be the sea cave.

  Heartened, Freya trudged along the hard sand above the tide line. It was tough pushing the cart, so she tried pulling it. After a time her arms quivered with the effort, but she slogged on virtuously—this was better exercise than in any gym, and it was free. Of course, the real price would be paid when she tried to get out of bed tomorrow.

  Closer to the headland, Freya began to appreciate how useful this sheltered beach must have been to the islanders. Sand and shingle sloped gently into the water, and landing boats must have seemed easy on Findnar compared to the rest of this difficult coast. And, too, the headland blocked the worst of the weather from the strait. The air was gentle in the cove, and warmer, a contrast to the cold buffeting she’d had on the cliff path.

  Nearly there, now, nearly . . .

  She could see the opening was many times her height though narrow, and a tongue of shingle licked out of its shadows.

  But there was one further trial; swollen by water cascading from a rent in the cliff face, a stream guarded the entrance to the cave. The rain last night had turned the trickle to a minor torrent, and it would be hard going indeed to pull the cart to the other side.

  Freya made a mental note. Enough with the wooden wheels—she had to get something with a tread for this cart and gum boots too for her; no, make that waders.

  Panting, wet beyond the knees, Freya finally shoved the cart inside the cave. And there it was—a small cruiser, nothing elaborate but solid and well used. Amidships, there was a proper cabin for protection against the weather, and the seats inside were comfortably padded, including a high chair for the driver, plus there was a substantial panel-mounted VHF radio. Below there was space enough to sleep a couple of people on narrow benches; a tiny, simple kitchen; and tucked away under the nose, a microscopic toilet. Michael must have made the trip to Portsolly and back many, many times and in all weathers. Maybe, thought Freya, he liked exploring the coast as well. Comfortable and dry, that’d be his style.