by Helen Slavin
“But why do it?” Charlie pushed.
“To have it done with. Stupid day. Stupid event. Can’t wait ’til the whole bloody thing is over and done with.”
And with that Anna put down her fork and left the room.
* * *
The evening light glinted across Pike Lake in bright slices, the surface ruffled by the light breeze.
Hettie Way was returning from her patrol of Havoc Wood and felt the cold pinch in a little under her black waxed raincoat. She tugged the sleeves of her jumper further down. Her knee creaked a little, sounding like the bending branch of a tree, as she stepped down from the edge of the wood to take a stroll along the sandy lake edge.
She saw the figure move around from the rear of the cottage, looking out for her. She was not expecting a visitor.
Calum Atwood looked pale and tired, his hands deep in his trouser pockets. He looked formal in his suit jacket and tie and had clearly come straight to Cob Cottage from school.
“Evening,” Hettie greeted him with a nod.
“I’m sorry. I probably shouldn’t have come.” He looked as if he might run.
“The fact that you are here shows that your reason for coming is an important one.” She halted, waiting for his response; fight or flight.
“This wedding.” He took in a deep breath. “The whole thing. It’s a big mistake.” He was shaking his head.
Hettie Way stepped up onto the porch and opened the door.
“Come in,” she said.
* * *
A week or more passed, and Anna Way had turned up for her dinner shift at the Castle Inn. She was glad to get away from yet another day of wedding planning. She was looking forward to the heat and steam of the hotplate, and the soft chink of cutlery on the white tablecloths of the dining room. She couldn’t recall what today’s battle had been about, but Calum’s mother had taken the time to phone her and shout about it. Anna pushed open the kitchen door and left the thoughts in the yard. She glanced in at the dining room. It was empty and rather dark.
“Oh, you’re not supposed to be here.” Casey looked panicked. Anna was confused, but Lella was glancing at the clock and already unfastening Anna’s pinny.
“I don’t need you tonight. You need to knock off.” Lella was in a particularly bossy mode, looking at her diving watch.
“What? But… it’s been on the timetable for a week. I’m definitely down for the dinner shift.” Anna felt even more bewildered as Casey was now shaking her head. There was something off about Casey and Lella, and Anna couldn’t quite pin it. Something to do with Casey’s hair, possibly. It was not tied back in her usual swirled bun. It was woven with intricate plaits. Lella had her fancy jacket on, as if she was heading out.
“No, you’re wrong. I’m on dinner shift this evening.”
“No.” Lella shook her head.
“Definitely not. You need to go home,” Casey insisted.
Anna put her mistake down to the wedding.
“Oh, I’m sorry. My brain is like a piece of fudge left out in the sun at the moment,” she confessed, and Lella was sympathetic.
“A wedding will do that to you. Remember my sister battling her future in-laws?” Lella’s eyes widened with remembered horror. “You know my parents have never spoken to them since the ceremony, and it’s been what, four, five years?” Lella rolled her eyes in confirmation of the ghastly nuptial facts as Anna reached for her jacket.
“Well, my mum is a scientist, so she’s treating the Atwoods as if they were a socio-anthropological case study.” She smiled, and Lella held the door open for her.
Anna had offloaded many of her wedding woes onto her mother of late, and Vanessa had proved a good listener. She had turned many a bad situation — the Flower War for example — into an extended practical experiment: just how far were the Atwoods prepared to go?
“Mars? They could go to Mars. You’re a scientist, make it so,” Anna had pleaded, but she understood all too well that the Atwoods were not leaving the planet any time soon. At least, not until they had won the wedding. All the small victories conceded, Anna still expected that when Reverend Kaylie asked if anyone knew of any just cause or impediment, it would be Mr Atwood Senior who would stand up, pull on his reading glasses and take out a list.
She left the Castle Inn and decided to head home via the chapel to clear her head. As she shoved at the rusted-in gate, Charlie pulled up alongside the kerb. If Anna was being honest, it appeared as if her sister had, in fact, skidded to a speedy halt and was parked at too steep an angle. She was jumping out of the driver’s seat.
“What are you doing?” she demanded. Anna stared at her as she walked down the chapel path towards her.
“Just heading home. Thought I’d clear my head a little with a wander round.” She gestured to the graveyard with its waist-high grasses and hogweed, the sun now dappling the building with a glorious evening light.
“Get in the car.” Charlie was pushing through the gate, her hand reaching for Anna’s arm and hurrying her towards the car.
“What?”
“I’m giving you a lift.” Charlie was commanding as she fastened Anna’s seat belt.
“What are you…?” Anna watched Charlie slam herself into the driver’s seat with a glance at her watch.
Her watch? Charlie did not possess a watch. This must be a gift from Aron.
“A lift where?” Anna asked as Charlie sped away from the Chapel, her gears grinding them up Old Castle Road.
As they turned onto the broken tarmac, the gravel and then, at last, the dirt track, Anna felt a little panicked.
“Is it Grandma? Is she okay?”
“It’s not Grandma.” Charlie shut down the engine and reached to simultaneously release Anna’s seatbelt and open the door.
In the kitchen at Cob Cottage, there was a large parcel on the table. The brown paper had been folded back, and the string was in a small tangle beside. Charlie reached into its crumples.
“Put this on,” she commanded. The dress unfolded from Charlie’s hand. It was, in fact, far more than a dress. It was a gown of several green fabrics stitched and patched and embroidered together into a landscape of texture. Damask and silk, linen and wool, shot and slubbed, woven and knitted. Anna looked at it and gasped. She took the gown from her sister. The panelled skirt swished with a sound like leaves. It was, to Anna Way, a fairytale gown, exactly like the one they had had in a picture in a storybook long ago.
“Mossycoat,” Anna whispered. Charlie nodded.
“It had to be the right dress,” Charlie said, her voice cracking just slightly. To cover her emotion, she looked once more at the chunky and oversized watch.
“Get it on or we’ll be late,” Charlie chivvied her sister.
* * *
The wedding gown was made of stern enough stuff to withstand the short hike from the clearing at the edge of Top Hundred, where Charlie parked the car, to the rise just to the east of Pike Lake. This spot, called Crow Houses, looked out over the heart of Havoc to one side, and the pewter bowl of Pike Lake rested on the other. A group of oak and elm had formed long ago into a natural amphitheatre, a place where Anna and her sisters had spent many a summer afternoon, because it was cool and shady, and still more autumn days when it had proved sheltered and cosy.
Hamish and Calum waited with Hettie at the centre of a circle of friends and family formed of Vanessa, Emz, Casey, Lella, and Winn, and those of Calum’s colleagues and best friends who were disreputable enough to have been vetoed from the wedding guest list by the In-Law Atwoods. As Anna entered the circle, Charlie took up her place, and the ring of loved ones was sealed.
“Hie thee all to the handfasting,” Hettie began, holding her hands out for the couple to take, and as they joined her hands, so she joined theirs.
“Be you, man of the castle, held in the heart’s thrall of this woman of the wood?” She turned towards Calum. “How say thou? Aye or Nay?”
Calum stretched a little taller as he address
ed Hettie.
“Aye, say I.” His voice echoed around the hill. Hettie Way looked up at her granddaughter.
“Be you, woman of the wood, in the heart’s thrall of this man of the castle?” Hettie asked. Anna found she could not speak, she could only look at Calum, at the way the breeze was ruffling his hair, at the faces beyond, her friends and family, at the wood beyond that, her home, and it was only a nod from her grandmother that pulled her from her thoughts at last, just at the moment that Calum, looking stricken beside her, thought he might have played this all wrong.
“Aye… say I,” Anna almost yelled. Calum squeezed her fingers. As he did so, Anna felt a rush of images from him: their life in memories, Calum in armour, Calum by starlight, Calum in the kitchen, this mental event finishing with a flourish of white lightning, wide and vast and silvered and filled with spooked jackdaws. It was beautiful and intense, and Anna gasped, tears trapped in her throat.
“Before you are bound, we ask the bounty of the gods and the boon of the goddesses,” Hettie declared.
Guests began to step forward, each proffering a small found object to a basket placed at the feet of the couple. A bird’s egg in a nest, hunted down by Emz.
“By the boon of the goddesses, may your nest be a tightly woven basket, wind warm and down soft. May it be fecund and fruitful as the bramble,” Hettie said, as Emz placed the nest into the basket. Anna looked at its perfection, the grasses woven and strong, the egg speckled and splotched.
Hamish stepped forward with a blackbird’s wing taken from the sorry victim of a cat attack. The wing was perfect as he opened it out and placed it in the basket.
“With this wing, may your love catch on the wind. May it soar and glide.”
Vanessa offered a small cushion of moss. To Anna, it looked unfamiliar, a bright miniature starburst of greens like a constellation caught on stems. The pale evening light seemed to flutter and sparkle within diamond drops of rainwater within it.
“May the gods and goddesses break your fall.”
Charlie stepped forward with a flagon of ale she had brewed.
“May the gods slake your thirst with sweetness and savour.”
Hettie Way reached a tangle of ivy from the pocket of her black, waxed raincoat, the leaves dark-green, three-pointed stars, Anna’s favourite. Hettie had been very careful to choose the right one. She began to wind the ivy around their wrists.
“Hand over hand,” she intoned, “fist over fist.” She bound them tighter. “With the linking of fingers, we bind thee.”
As she wound the ivy round and round, the guests repeated the incantation.
“Hand over hand, fist over fist, with the linking of fingers, we bind thee.” And at a signal from Hettie, everyone joined hands, linking fingers, as Hettie twisted a final knot into the ivy itself.
“Now we art done, and thou art begun. Two tied with ivy, strong-rooted, vital.”
Anna could feel how strongly Calum gripped her hand, feel every knuckle of his fingers. Once more, the lightning illuminated other memories: Calum’s face in all its expressions, a flickerbook of love.
“Birch and elder. Elm and oak. Ash and thorn. Your oath is sworn.” Hettie’s voice called out and seemed to set a breeze through all the branches. As Calum kissed Anna, the trees around them rattled and creaked in a wild chorus.
* * *
It was some three weeks later when the Other Wedding took place, and Anna pulled on her Milsom’s wedding dress, and the ivy, tangled into her bouquet, kept its handfasted secrets.
4
Family Feeling
“Why has this come up?” Vanessa looked pained as she and Anna sat at the fold-out picnic table in the as-yet-unfinished kitchen at Half-Built House. Anna had brought their meal from the Castle Inn, a spinach and feta filo pie left over from the lunchtime shift with accompanying new potatoes and peas. “Is this the Atwoods again?”
To Anna’s ears, her mother sounded aggressive. “I tell you, I don’t know what business it is of theirs poking about in your ancestry.”
Anna could see that the subject of her father was more of an issue than before.
Dr Lachlan Laidlaw had always been an issue. He had been absent their entire lives, none of the sisters ever having met him or received communication of any kind. It had not seemed strange to them; this odd, one-sided family life was, after all, their norm. It was only when an outsider pointed out the issue that it bubbled up again.
So who was he, this Dr Lachlan Laidlaw, eminent…
“Polar Bear,” Charlie had joked, the first one to break the Arctic mould of myth that surrounded their erstwhile dad.
“Polar Bear?” Anna had an image in her head of a cave, a mournful fairytale bear, a trapped and enchanted prince.
“He may as well be. He lives at the North Pole, doesn’t he?” This was not strictly true, but, as the years had gone on, they came to view nothing about their father as ‘strictly true’.
“He could be Father Christmas!” Emz, who had been about eight at the time of this particular discussion, was wide-eyed at the fantasy.
“Ha. If he was, he’d have come to visit at least once a year,” was Charlie’s harsh rejoinder.
Their father was a mythical beast to them. There were no photographs of him, no mementoes or keepsakes.
“Do you think he exists?” Charlie had theorised. Emz just six, Charlie thirteen, Anna almost eighteen.
“What are you talking about?” Anna, very sensitive at that point in time, took offence, but Charlie continued the theory.
“Well, you know she works at that research place. She might have sperm donors or…”
Anna rounded on her. “No. No. No.”
Her heart had creaked. Of all the sisters, she had the most vivid myth of her father. It was solid and unchanging and came in dreams of a man walking across a white snowscape towards a black wolf. The dream was always beautiful, and, in the absence of Dr Lachlan himself, Anna clung to it.
Charlie shrugged. That week school had been a battleground rather than a playground. It finished with a spat where a rather horrid boy by the name of Conrad suggested her possible sci-fi origins. She did not have a dad. She was, in Conrad’s nasty jibe, “a jar baby”. Charlie had been swift to retaliate, pointing out that Conrad’s dad was in prison. The moment the words were in the air she understood the mistake she had made, the hurt she had caused, but she could not take one syllable back. She stood in the schoolyard, her back against the old oak tree, surrounded. Faces shouted, fingers pointed, and she was alone. Her father was unreal. He had not been head chef at the barbecue last summer like Conrad’s dad, helping out with the bouncy castle and balloons. Her father was a shadow, and now, as the “Jar Baby” chant battered at her, Charlie felt she was a monster.
To protect herself Charlie scribbled any thoughts of her father from her mind. He was the invisible dad, so let him be invisible in her mind. Gone. Vanished. She had her mother, her grandmother, her sisters, and they were enough.
* * *
“Why are you asking this now?” Vanessa looked almost teary, and Anna felt her own emotion choking her so kept silent. Her mother busied herself with the dishwasher, only partly installed, the outlet pipe currently draining via the sink. A cup slipped from her hand and shattered. Anna moved to help her mother, picking up the brush and dustpan from the cupboard under the sink, as her mother cleared the bigger pieces.
“Dammit.” Her mother’s finger was striped with a thin red line of blood. Anna moved to help her. As they touched hands, Anna squeezing tight to stop the blood flow, she was assailed with a memory flickerbook of images. These were not memories she shared with her mother. These images were of snow kicked up by horse hooves, of the green and purple swathing light of an aurora, a man, his hair grey and black, his face turned away, a glimpse of runes tattooed on skin. Vanessa pulled her hand away.
“I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” she fussed. Anna took a moment, her heart fluttering, her mother keen not to meet her eye, t
urning away, back to the dishwasher, her head lowered for a moment.
“He’s a good man,” Vanessa said at last. “And it has always been a very difficult situation.” Anna was disturbed. She could hear the crack in her mother’s voice, an anomaly for the usually cool, calm, uncrackable Vanessa.
“Why are you asking? Why now, Anna?” Vanessa could only just get the words out. Anna gathered herself.
“Because Dr Lachlan Laidlaw, whoever and wherever he is, is going to be a grandfather,” she said.
* * *
On the porch at Cob Cottage the Way sisters and their grandmother were celebrating the baby news with tea and cake, though Anna had found she could only eat lemon drizzle cake. It was beyond a craving; it was an addiction. There was some component of lemon that sated her hunger in a way no other foodstuff was currently able.
“What did you go digging around that for?” Charlie asked when Anna related the circumstances of her conversation with their mother. Grandma Hettie, who had been quite quiet anyway, seemed to accumulate a further, cosier blanket of silence. Anna only looked at her through the corner of her eye.
“I don’t know. The baby. Just, you know, thinking about family.”
“Dangerous stuff,” Emz advised. The silence spread out from Hettie and hugged them all. They sat for a long time watching the lake, Hettie getting up to pour them some fresh tea, to cut more cake, wedges that sat untouched on the pretty plates.
“Do you ever dream about him?” Anna asked. There was a further silence as she waited. When no response came she offered her own perspective. “I only asked because… I do, regularly. I dream about a man in a snowscape…”
“Walking. Weary,” Charlie said. “As if he’s been walking really far for a very long time.” She kept her gaze on the surface of the lake.
“The sky is green,” Emz said. “And there’s a wolf waiting.”
