The Wicker Man: A Novel

by Robin Hardy

  ‘Parthenogenesis!’ said Lord Summerisle ringing the word out in his beautiful voice. ‘Literally, as Miss Rose would doubtless explain, in her assiduous way–reproduction without sexual union.’

  ‘What nonsense is this?’ shouted Howie, maddened by this smug Lord of the Manor telling him, Neil Howie, about religion, of all things. ‘You’ve got fake biology, fake religion! Sir, have these children never heard of Jesus?’

  ‘Himself the son of a virgin impregnated, I believe, by a ghost,’ said Lord Summerisle very quietly, but distinctly.

  Howie not only looked outraged, but was, in fact dumbfounded. Lord Summerisle motioned him to a chair.

  ‘Do sit down!’ he said to the sergeant. ‘Shocks are so much better absorbed with the knees bent,’ and he smiled at Howie’s bewildered face. ‘Oh yes, Sergeant,’ said Lord Summerisle. ‘Even Christians believe in parthenogenesis. As for those children out there–they’re leaping through the flames in the hope that the god of the fire may make them fruitful. And really, you know, you can hardly blame them. After all, what girl would not prefer the child of a god to that of some acne-scarred artisan?’

  ‘And you encourage all this … this rubbish, My Lord?’ asked Howie in half a mind not to listen any further. But his training was slowly reasserting itself. ‘To listen is to learn’ is one of the first rules of detection. Let a man talk enough, if he has a will to, and he may well end up by hanging himself!

  ‘It’s most important,’ Lord Summerisle was saying, ‘that each new generation born on Summerisle be made aware that here the old gods aren’t dead.’

  ‘But what of the true God to whose glory monasteries and churches have been built on these islands over the centuries? What of Him?’ Howie could not help asking.

  ‘Oh, He’s dead all right.’ Lord Summerisle said it thoughtfully, but with conviction. ‘And He can’t complain. He had his chance and, in modern parlance, blew it!’

  ‘What!!!’ Howie got to his feet scandalized. He knew, however, that he must not let his personal feelings about God interfere with this vital interview. He strongly suspected the laird of deliberately baiting him.

  ‘How?’ Lord Summerisle was saying. ‘That’s the question you should be asking me, Sergeant. “How?” not “What?”’

  Mutely the sergeant told himself, ‘Set him talking. Don’t get angry! And sort it all out in your own mind later.’ He knew (all the evidence pointed to it) that he faced, in Lord Summerisle, an evil of the subtlest kind. Evil that was camouflaged in the plausible personality of a man of education and intellect, of imagination and flair. Howie disliked Lord Summerisle instinctively but he was pleased to feel that his detachment was returning.

  ‘All right, My Lord,’ he said aloud, ‘how?’

  ‘The people,’ said Lord Summerisle, ‘were persuaded that your God, the God of the Christians, the Jews, and the Moslems, had become less powerful than the old gods who still lived on in the woods and the water and the fire and the stone. That’s how!’

  ‘After sixteen hundred years? You’re joking!’ laughed Howie.

  For the first time in their interview Lord Summerisle looked angry. Howie decided to humour him.

  ‘Who did it then? Who persuaded them?’ he asked dutifully.

  ‘My great-grandfather, actually,’ said Lord Summerisle. ‘It wasn’t all that difficult. The tradition of the arcane and the mysterious cleaves to the people of this island with a tenacity that makes it seem an inherent and inalienable possession. They’re Celts after all!’

  ‘So they are!’ said Howie ironically. ‘But I’m still waiting for you to tell me how!’

  ‘It’s very simple,’ said Lord Summerisle soothingly. ‘In the last century the islanders were starving. Many were emigrating to Canada and Australia. Fishing and sheep brought in a marginal income, much as it does today on our neighbouring islands, but mullet and mutton, so to speak, are hardly the counters of prosperity. Dutifully, every Sunday, the people–Baptist and Catholic, Presbyterian and Free Kirk–bowed as low as their respective religions permitted to the Christian God and prayed for prosperity. But inevitably none appeared. In due course they came to realize that their reward was to be either in the colonies or, as the various priests indicated in a rare moment of agreement, in heaven. Then in 1868 my great-grandfather bought this barren island and set about changing things. He was a distinguished Victorian scientist, agronomist, and free thinker–look at his face. How formidably benevolent he seems, essentially the face of a man incredulous of all human good!’

  Lord Summerisle indicated a large oil painting hanging, in the place of honour, above the fireplace. Howie rose and looked at the picture with distaste. It showed a haughty Victorian figure of Lord Summerisle’s stature, but with a face almost entirely obscured by moustache, eyebrows, and whiskers.

  ‘You are very cynical, My Lord!’ was all Howie could find to say.

  ‘I simply know my family, Sergeant!’ said Lord Summerisle. ‘But let me show you what he did.’

  He steered the sergeant away from the picture and towards a door at the far end of the room. Together they marched through a huge dining room and out onto a terraced garden facing the sea.

  ‘What had attracted my great-grandfather to the island, apart from the profuse source of wiry labour that it promised, was the unique combination of volcanic soil and the warm Gulf Stream that surrounded it.’ He paused for Howie to take in the fecund scene. Palm trees nodded in the breeze, and a magnolia was in full bloom.

  Twenty feet away, enclosing the garden, was the castle’s crenellated, defensive wall above which Howie could see skuas flying, hovering over the unseen ocean beyond. Howie paused, out of habit, to identify the birds. He could see three different kinds of skua: a pomerine, an arctic, and a great, and while none of them was rare in the Hebrides, he had seldom seen them all together before.

  ‘The only Stercorariidae that would seem to be missing from our ramparts today is a Buffon’s skua. But you hardly ever get them here in the spring. I think they nest up in Spitsbergen, off Norway,’ said Lord Summerisle.

  Howie looked, now, at the laird with interest and respect. He knew that the island was a bird sanctuary, like Saint Kilda to the east, but His Lordship clearly ‘knew his birds’, although it was typically pompous of him to refer to skua by their Latin family name.

  ‘Am I wasting your time talking for a moment about birds?’ Lord Summerisle asked Howie, who smiled, certain it would make little difference if he were.

  ‘No, My Lord. Birds are my main hobby. Watching them, you know.’

  Lord Summerisle looked at the sergeant speculatively, as if trying to make his mind up about something.

  ‘Sergeant Howie. Can you keep a secret?’ he asked.

  ‘If it’s not against the law, I’m quite certain I can,’ said Howie, smiling at the schoolboyish mysteriousness of the peer.

  ‘Then come and have a look over the parapet.’

  Lord Summerisle led the way to the crenellated wall and together they looked down the sheer cliff-face at the pounding sea below. Half a dozen different families of seabirds were present nesting, feeding, preening, and flying in huge numbers from the gigantic cliffs that were the natural foundations of the castle.

  Howie could see scoter ducks, gulls, puffins, storm petrels, and gannets, and then his keen eye saw something that made him, for the first time in many years, feel tears coming to his eyes. Diving from a rocky promontory at sea level were some large flightless birds. Howie had seen this bird before–stuffed, never alive, its back a greeny black, its bill not dissimilar to that of a puffin only longer and black, a white patch near the eye and white breast plumage. It used its smallish, prehensile wings as paddles in the water. Howie knew he was looking at a little colony of great auks, a species that, it was believed, man had made extinct in the mid-nineteenth century because the great auks, unable to fly, were so easy to club to death from a boat.

  ‘Your secret will be safe with me, My Lord,’ Howie said
in a voice made a little taut with emotion. God sometimes chose the most mysterious vessels for His Divine will, he thought. Any family that could have guarded such a secret for four generations received at least some of Howie’s respect. But he could not help the somewhat ungenerous reflection that the Lord Summerisles and the great auks of this world had a certain amount in common. Evolution was against them.

  ‘My great-grandfather forbade any mention that we still had ’em here, knowing the last one anywhere else was killed on Eldey Island off Iceland on June 4th, 1844,’ said Lord Summerisle. ‘Nowadays we’d call him a conservationist. But that wasn’t at all his view of himself. He saw himself as a scientist first and foremost. It was a crime against science for any creature, part of the earth’s great inheritance, to be made extinct. It was equally a crime for this island to remain unfruitful when the scientific means to cultivate it were to hand.’

  Lord Summerisle led the way across the terraced garden to a conservatory, equipped as a laboratory might be in a horticultural research station.

  ‘You see, Sergeant,’ continued Lord Summerisle, ‘his experiments had led him to believe that it was possible to induce here the successful growth of certain new strains of fruit that he had developed.’

  Howie gazed around at a row of glass cases containing here a growing graft, there a shrunken apple, apricot, or pear, with its history plainly marked beside it. Clearly this was a kind of museum dedicated to Lord Summerisle’s family’s achievement.

  ‘… And so you see,’ Lord Summerisle was saying, ‘with typical mid-Victorian zeal, my great-grandfather set to work. But of course, almost immediately, he met opposition from the fundamentalist ministers, who threw tons of his artificial fertilizer into the habour on the grounds that if God had meant us to use it, He’d have provided it. My great-grandfather took exactly the same view of ministers, and realized he had to find a way to be rid of them. The best method of accomplishing this, it seemed to him, was to rouse the people, by giving them back their joyous old deities; so he encouraged, as it were, a retreat down memory lane; backwards from Christianity, through the Ages of Reason and Belief to the Age of Mysticism.’

  ‘And didn’t the joyous old deities used to require people to be burnt to death with piles of vegetables and fruit?’ asked Howie.

  ‘The Celtic imagination has much to answer for. Heard of that dreadful old preacher Knox inveighing against “the monstrous regiment of women”? Quite unchristian I’d have thought!’ said Lord Summerisle.

  ‘I’ve read my country’s history and my bible, thank you, Lord Summerisle,’ said Howie a little haughtily. ‘Even the simple folks like me get a proper education on the mainland these days. I would have thought that a healthy dose of the socialism that helped educate me would have done these islanders better than all the mumbo-jumbo your great-grandfather gave them …’

  ‘Really?’ rejoined Lord Summerisle. ‘It’s done damn little for our neighbouring islands … Or hadn’t you noticed?’

  ‘You’re right there, Lord Summerisle,’ Howie acknowledged bitterly. ‘The landlord system is far too tenacious. Anyway, I oughtn’t to be talking politics, in uniform, as you know. I just can’t imagine a sane body of men and women believing in a whole ridiculous family of gods …’

  ‘What about the whole subcontinent of India?’ asked Lord Summerisle. ‘The Hindus–that’s what they believe. Dismiss them all as insane, would you?’

  Howie, who was basically as chauvinistic as any other Scot, was not a bit surprised at anything the Indians might believe.

  ‘Your great-grandfather’s tenants were Scots, My Lord!’ he said, as if there ought to be nothing further to say on the matter.

  ‘And I refer you again, sir, to the spiritual vision of the Celts,’ said Lord Summerisle. ‘No, these islanders needed little urging. My great-grandfather simply told them about the stones–how they, in fact, formed an ancient temple, and that he, the Lord of the Manor, would make a sacrifice there every day to their old gods and goddesses, particularly those of Fertility and Fruitfulness, and that as a result of this worship …’

  Lord Summerisle sounded more and more as if he were talking from a pulpit. His gestures were sweeping as if he were addressing his islanders en masse as Howie had no doubt he often did.

  ‘… The barren island would burgeon and bring forth fruit in great abundance. For an atheist, Great-grandfather had a singularly biblical turn of phrase, don’t you think?’

  ‘Again, if you say so, sir,’ said Sergeant Howie, in a chilly voice, tired of all this patronizing talk about this toffee-nosed lord’s exploiting, robber-baron family. But he realized that he had spoken insolently and knew that he shouldn’t allow his feelings of ‘class-anger’ to get the better of him. But if Lord Summerisle had noticed Howie’s rudeness he didn’t show it, but went right on explaining how the islanders had come under his family’s sway.

  ‘Well, of course, at first, people worked for him because he fed and clothed them. Then naturally, when all the trees started fruiting, it became a different story. The ministers told the people to withdraw their labour as they were “trucking with the devil”. My great-grandfather told the people that if they did so, he would leave, and the island would become as barren again as all the others. In this way, the old gods appear to have defeated the Christian God, and the ministers fled the island never to return,’ Summerisle concluded triumphantly.

  ‘But how did the trees come to fruit, when so many other attempts to grow things on these islands have failed? Don’t tell me your great-grandfather really worshipped the Gods of Fertility?’ Howie almost spat out the phrase.

  ‘Come, come, Sergeant,’ said Lord Summerisle patiently. ‘As I’ve already told you, he worshipped science. What he did, of course, was to develop new cultivars of hardy fruits to suit local conditions. Out here we have his original experimental orchard. Much developed, of course. Come and have a look.’

  Lord Summerisle led Sergeant Howie out of the conservatory into what was clearly an experimental orchard, for there were tags and labels on all the trees.

  Lord Summerisle was about to pontificate further upon the wonders of his family’s achievements in the field of horticulture when at last he really seemed to notice, and take in, Sergeant Howie’s mutinous, offended expression.

  ‘My dear Sergeant Howie,’ said Lord Summerisle, ‘I am afraid I have been guilty of preaching again. I can see it in your face. Guilty of going on about my favourite hobbyhorse, if you’ll forgive the allusion?’

  Howie was almost as put out by a contrite Lord Summerisle as he had been by the peer in the full flood of his proselytizing fervour. He was annoyed that Lord Summerisle had told him only exactly what he wished to impart! Howie had, so far, had little chance to steer the conversation in any of the other directions that might help his investigation. Now was his chance, and he realized it could only help if he took it tactfully.

  ‘It is I, My Lord, who should, perhaps, apologize for being rather prickly on the subject of religion,’ said Howie gracefully, and he intended to go on and probe the possibility of a fruit-related disease being involved in Rowan’s death, but Lord Summerisle interrupted him.

  ‘You know why, of course?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘Why what, My Lord?’ Howie was confused.

  ‘Why I was so anxious to have the pleasure of a friendly chat with you about religion, Sergeant?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because Pinky Stuart-MacEwan had told me something about you. About your background.’

  ‘Pinky …? You mean General Sir Pauncefoot Stuart-McEwan?’

  ‘Exactly, Sergeant. Our Chief Constable, your boss as well as mine, in my capacity of Justice of the Peace, y’know!’ Lord Summerisle gave a matey laugh, as if this made the sergeant and him just a couple of colleagues under the skin.

  ‘I can tell you, in the strictest confidence, he thinks the world of you,’ said Lord Summerisle. ‘“A man of total integrity and devotion. Helped by the fact that
the chap’s a devout Christian. An officer who should go straight to the top!” I’m paraphrasing what he said, of course, but that was the gist of it.’

  Howie had been, naturally, quite overcome by this relayed accolade from his superior. His face reddened.

  ‘Good to see ourselves as others see us!’ said Lord Summerisle kindly. ‘So you can well understand that, when I heard you were on the island, I was looking forward to this little “ecumenical confab” of ours. No fun talking about religion to an agnostic, which is what all too many mainlanders are today. An American, Richard Nixon, once said, “I don’t care what religion a man has, as long as he’s got a religion.”’

  ‘About the apples!’ blurted out Howie, desperate to change the subject.

  ‘The apples?’ It was Lord Summerisle’s turn to be confused.

  ‘I am most interested in your apples. I’d be so grateful if you could …’ he managed a conspiratorial laugh of his own ‘… let me in on a few of the secrets. We keep a small garden back at …’ His sentence was once again cut short by his host’s eagerness to take up this welcome subject.

  ‘Sergeant Howie, nothing could give me greater pleasure. How very kind of you to take such an interest. It’ll mean visiting the ice house, I’m afraid, so be prepared to shiver a bit after this nice warm day …’

  So, chattering ceaselessly on, Lord Summerisle took Sergeant Howie through the experimental orchard to a sunken ice house which was set incongruously in the middle of a lavish subtropical garden. They descended some steps and Lord Summerisle unlocked the heavy door and swung it open.

  Inside the chill was considerable, but there was a marked absence of damp. Howie had to wait in the dark till Lord Summerisle had lit some pressure oil lamps, and then he could see that the whole place was lined with neat stacks of racks containing apples and other fruits.

  ‘How do you keep it at this temperature, My Lord?’ he asked, wondering how this could be achieved without electricity.

  ‘In winter, we get plenty of ice from the pools high on the hills in the eastern part of the island. We gather it, as our ancestors did, wrap it in straw, and stack it behind those metal panels against the summer months. My greatgrandfather built this place before there was any electricity in the Highlands at all. People used their ingenuity in those days. They will again. Look how the sun has been rediscovered and brought back into fashion as a source of energy …’