Women of the Dunes

by Sarah Maine

  She looked up and saw that his expression had darkened, and she felt her own face flush. “You saw the hallmark,” she said.

  “You thought I hadn’t?”

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  The Sturrock frown deepened, but he looked perplexed rather than angry. “What sort of an answer is that! Twice now I’ve seen you go white as a sheet over those bones, and you a professional! And then your expression when you found that cross. Not thrilled, as you might well have been, but almost horrified. I know what Laila’s all about, but not you. And I’ve been wracking my brains to imagine.”

  She knew then that she should have spoken earlier, not waited to be wrong-footed like this. She started to pack the papers back into the box, giving herself time to think. But where to begin? Then he straightened and went over to the mantelpiece and extracted an envelope from behind the clock and put it in front of her.

  “And while we are at it—explain that.”

  She picked it up, cursing herself for not having had the sense to talk to him before this, and pulled out a letter. It was dated March 13th, 1893.

  Dear Lady Sturrock,

  It is with the deepest regret that I write to inform you that I have once again failed in my endeavours. A passage was certainly booked and I thought that I had traced him, travelling with a woman, to this little township, but the trail has gone cold. Several couples from Scotland have settled here in recent years but none fit the description that you gave me, or bear your son’s name, and no one can cast any light on the matter. I will return to St. John’s and take a passage home, then come to see you, but unless you have new information I fear there is nothing more that I can do, but I remain your obedient servant,

  John Robinson

  Gosse Harbour, Newfoundland

  Gosse Harbour. She lowered the letter.

  “You mentioned that place the other day.” He came round to the end of the table, watching her face. “Yes?”

  “Yes. I did.”

  He nodded. “Right. Well, suppose we go and make some coffee, Liberty Snow, and you can explain to me why you’re here.”

  She’d had no time to prepare, no time to shape her own thoughts into something which made sense. But then nothing ever had— She followed him into the kitchen, the letter still in her hand. There were too many trailing ends, too many unknowns, and now this letter— But central in her mind just now was the knowledge that she had priceless property belonging to the estate in a drawer back home in her flat. And she ought to have told him so.

  Silently Rodri made the coffee, assembling mugs and milk which he set on the table. Then he gestured to a chair opposite and sat. “Gosse Harbour,” he said. “I looked it up, tiny little place.”

  Libby sat and reached for one of the mugs. “And as good a place as any to begin, I suppose. Just four hundred people, and shrinking. Mostly old folk, but it was bigger once, before the fishing finished.”

  “And you spent your summers there, you said.”

  “Christmas too, a few times. It’s a special place, and my grandmother still lives there. She’s ninety-five.”

  With a long memory, and a head full of stories. Still living in the small clapboard house where she had been born, supported by a community who revered her. A natural story-teller whose reminiscences had brought alive a vanished world of topsail schooners and dories, of seal hunts and hunger. She had seen bodies brought ashore from ill-fated Atlantic convoys, and watched the death of a fishery which had been the people’s lifeblood. And she had absorbed it all with the calm acceptance which defined her. The thought gave Libby strength.

  Rodri’s eyes were still on her. “So she must have been born when? Nineteen-twenties?”

  “1917.”

  “At Gosse Harbour? Or somewhere else?”

  “At Gosse Harbour. It was she who told me the story of Ulla and Odrhan, and of this place.”

  “Really?” He sat back and hooked an arm around the back of the chair. “Go on.”

  “And she learned it from her own grandmother, Ellen Macdonald.”

  He gestured to her coffee mug. She drank half of it, and he filled it from the pot. “And so who then was Ellen Macdonald?”

  A crazy lady, a mad crone, a demented old woman who had gripped her granddaughter’s hand and told her that she was Ulla and that murder had been done. Libby swallowed. “She used to live here, in a cottage beside the manse.”

  She had his full attention, and he gestured to the letter Libby had placed on the table. “The woman who was travelling with a Sturrock son, I presume?”

  “I suppose so. But I hadn’t known that bit.”

  “Which bit?”

  “The Sturrock bit.”

  He glanced at her, as if deciding whether to believe her, then pulled the letter towards him and looked at it again. “Some time before 1893, it would seem.”

  “Yes.”

  “So what happened? What’s the story?”

  “I don’t really know.” He looked sceptical. “But that sort of answers your question. I’m here to try and find out.”

  “But for some reason you didn’t say? I wonder why— But go on.” And she found herself wondering too why she hadn’t. Was it only the cross, or had the way her grandmother spoken of Ellen’s later years somehow transmitted to her a sense of her own unease? “They presumably didn’t marry, this Ellen and the Sturrock man? Or was she Sturrock before she was Macdonald?”

  “No— At least, I don’t know. As I said, the Sturrock connection is new—” And would take some absorbing.

  “Did he leave her?” Rodri persisted.

  “I don’t know that either. She was only ever Ellen Macdonald in my grandmother’s stories.” Libby looked down and traced the grain in the wooden table, noting the cuts and chips where knives had scored the surface over the years. Had Ellen once sat here, where she now sat? But even if Ellen’s avowal of murder was true, and that she had a part in it, the crime was long past having consequences. Her own possession of the cross, however, needed explaining, and now was the time.

  She began in a rather disjointed way. “She simply told me that Ellen came from Scotland, from here where she’d been in service, and that she brought the legend with her. Nothing about who she came over with. As a child I loved the legend, but as I got older Nan told me other things too.” She hesitated, then continued, “She’d lived with Ellen when she was a child, you see, although it was her grandfather, John Macdonald, who really looked after her. He was the schoolmaster in Gosse Harbour.”

  “A Scot too, I presume.”

  “Yes, I think he was.”

  “Go on.”

  Libby got up and walked over to the window; if she was going to be anything like coherent, then she couldn’t be hurried. “Ellen was unstable, my grandmother told me, considered crazy by the standards of the day, and there were long periods when she never left the house. I suppose she had some form of dementia.” She paused again. “When I got the job on the dig here, I wrote to tell my grandmother, and she sent me some of the things that had once been Ellen’s. Amongst them was a sketchbook . . .” She hesitated again.

  “Keep going.”

  Rodri had brought the drawing of the cross and the chalice with him, and it lay on the table in front of him. Libby went and sat again and stared down at it. It had to be said: “. . . and with it, tucked inside, was the gold cross. That one. The real one.” His eyebrows went up at that, but it was easier now she’d started. “She said Ellen used to wear it on a chain around her neck, and when she died it was put away and everyone forgot about it. Nan thought I’d like to have it.” Thousands of pounds’ worth of eighth-century antiquity wrapped in bubble wrap and popped in the post. She could still remember the shock of opening it. “I don’t think she had a clue what it was.”

  He was staring at her. “And where is it now?”

  “In a drawer in my flat.”

  “Good God!”

  Then, to her astonishment, he gave a shout of laughter. “Wa
s that it? And so, Liberty Snow, you’ve been concealing stolen property.” The tension had gone out of him and he rocked back on his chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and contemplated her with an odd smile.

  “I should have told you.”

  “I’m still wondering why you didn’t.”

  “Just as you said—it’s probably stolen property, and I didn’t understand how it got there. I’ve written and asked Nan if she knows more, but she’s not replied. Ellen must have taken it, I suppose. It’s very valuable, you see.”

  “Then don’t tell Laila.”

  His reaction was totally unexpected. He looked genuinely amused, and there was a new warmth in his eyes. “What are you planning to do with it?”

  “That’s just it. I’m not sure what to do. It’s awkward—”

  He gave another laugh, letting his chair come forward. “I’ll say! Imagine the headlines: ‘Archaeologist Hides Priceless Stolen Antiquity amongst Her Knickers.’ Not great, eh?” He leaned forward, elbows on the table and his chin on his hands, and contemplated her.

  “There’s more,” she said.

  “I thought there might be.”

  “It’s as bad—worse, in fact.”

  “Go for it.”

  In some ways this was just as difficult. “My grandmother said Ellen was always strange, prone to fits of wild anguish—panic attacks, I suppose we’d call them now—and increasingly so as she got older. Her husband had to fight off the authorities who wanted to put her in an institution, and by the end of her life he kept her virtually under house arrest, locked in for her own safety.”

  “Poor woman.”

  “My grandmother said she became obsessed by the legend, and believed that she was Ulla. I’d written it off as some sort of dementia, but one of the things she said was that she’d seen murder done, and was to blame. A man had been killed.”

  His expression sharpened. “What man?”

  “Harald, she said.”

  “Harald!”

  “But if she was telling the truth, I suppose it could have been—”

  “—a well-shod gent with a gold filling in his tooth.”

  Chapter 18

   June 1890, Ellen

  Ellen began to feel hunted.

  It was not her imagination, she was sure of it. Mungo Sturrock, finding life dull, had taken to stalking her. He was doing it in such a way that gave her no grounds for complaint, had she the intention of making one, but it was relentless. Usually she was able to elude him, doing her chores in the library first thing in the morning while he slept, then slipping into his room while he ate breakfast, and only entering the drawing room when she knew for certain that he was not alone there. Once she had miscalculated and met him at the door of his bedroom. “Leaving so soon, Ellen?” he had said, and she had held the chamber pot in front of her as a shield, meeting his look and ready to tip it on him.

  He had laughed that time, and let her pass.

  By contrast she would linger in Mr. Alick’s room, hoping that he might return there while she was cleaning or making the bed. Sometimes she was rewarded, and then she would dawdle, rearranging his silver-backed hairbrushes and collar box, polishing the bedposts and dusting places newly dusted while talking to him on all manner of things. She lived for such moments.

  The day after she had met Mr. Drummond on the road home, she found Alick in his room and backed out as she had been taught to do, but slowly, hoping—

  “Come on in, Ellen. Don’t mind me. I’m just off,” he said.

  She went over to the bed and began making it while he stood at his mirror, adjusting his collar, and looking at her through the glass. “How are you, Ellen?”

  She addressed his reflection, saying what was uppermost in her mind: “I told Mr. Drummond yesterday that you should stop what you are doing at the headland. It’s wrong to disturb that place.”

  He swung round to her. “They’re only old tumbled stones, you know. Nothing fearful.”

  She shook her head at him. “Things feel unsettled there now.”

  He turned back to the mirror, still wrestling with his collar stud, a little frown on his forehead. “Do you think so? But if Mr. Drummond has no concerns, then neither should you.”

  “He thought I was a ghost!”

  Alick swung round again with a laugh. “Really?”

  “And that was before you started shifting the stones. He thought I was Ulla.”

  “Did he say so?”

  She hesitated, trying to remember exactly what the minister had said. “He said he’d been thinking about Ulla and then looked up and saw me, and I could see he was startled. So Ulla’s spirit must be there still.”

  “This is child’s stuff, Ellen! You’ve let your imagination run on—”

  “But everything happened to Ulla out on that headland. You know that. Her lover died there, her child was born there, and she herself might be buried there. It had all settled, but you disturbed it again.”

  He was staring at her in a strangely intent way, and she felt that at last she had his attention. “How extraordinary,” he said. “What are you suggesting?”

  She wasn’t sure. He cocked his head on one side and waited, and then: “Are you suggesting that things which happened there have somehow left their mark on the place, seeped into the soil, so to speak? And we’ve released them, like a gas?” She shrugged, not quite understanding him. “What an extraordinary idea! I wonder what Oliver—Mr. Drummond—would have to say to that! I must ask him. You know, I went to a lecture once— But never mind. Is it a question for the church, or for a psychic, I wonder?” He seemed to have forgotten her. “It’s not what the church would have us believe, of course, like so much,” then he met her eyes through the mirror and smiled. “But you mustn’t be fearful, you know, Ellen. Whatever happened there, it was hundreds of years ago, and it can’t hurt you.”

  Her fears diminished with his smile. His complexion had caught the sun since he had been working outdoors, and the laughter lines seemed more pronounced, aging him a little perhaps but making him more handsome than ever. “But time passing doesn’t change what happened there.”

  He came away from the dressing table and sat on the side of the bed. “No— But supposing that the past can seep into the soil like you say, I wonder— Does its presence decay over time like flesh on bones?” He paused. “Or is it as timeless and eternal as the soul, and so beyond mortality?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, wishing that she was not so ignorant and could understand him better.

  “Years, after all, are only numbers. Time is a continuum, but is it linear or coiled in cycles? This lecture I went to . . .” He had lost her again, but she liked to listen to him when he talked like this, spinning ideas in her head like the flat pebbles he used to skim over the water when they were children, and when life was sweet and simple.

   Odrhan

  Little by little his prayers were answered and Ulla began to speak to him. Harald had been her first love, she told him, but had been forced to relinquish her to his older brother, who took her as wife. But Erik was impotent, she had discovered, and beat her as if the fault was hers. Her life was made unbearable, so she and Harald had conspired together to leave. “He had always loved me, and he was a good man.”

  From fury Odrhan’s feelings had swung to remorse and then to pity, and from there to an emotion he did not recognise.

  At first he had slept outside the cell, rolling himself in hides. It mattered not where he rested because the anguish of guilt robbed him of sleep. But as the weather worsened she insisted that he sleep indoors, though he stayed close to the entrance as if modesty was served thereby.

  She still visited Harald’s grave, and would take long walks along the shore, returning at sunset as he grew anxious. Once he had gone looking for her and came upon her swimming, and he had stood and watched her lithe form, his pulse racing, ashamed but unable to move.

  And, as summer faded and autumn storms battered the walls of
Odrhan’s cell, the warmth of the fire drew him further in, and Ulla smiled at him more.

   Ellen

  Next morning, as Ellen cleared the ash from last night’s fire in the library, her mind turned again to what Mr. Alick had said, and to the troubling idea of the past seeping into the soil. Was that what she had meant? She wasn’t sure, but the image of a gas released into the air was troubling. She went over to the painted window and saw how the low sun, filtering through the moving branches outside, seemed to shift the folds of Ulla’s gown and lift her hair, while counterfeit swells rose beneath the painted ocean. Could the past really live on?

  She was so engrossed in the thought that she failed to hear the library door open, and then quietly close. “Run to earth at last,” a voice said, and she spun round.

  Mungo. He was leaning against the door, his hands deep in his pockets, surveying her alarm with amusement. “You’ve been very adroit at avoiding me, m’dear.”

  Trapped.

  “The fire,” she said, gesturing wildly towards it. “I’m here to light the fire.”

  His eyebrows rose to mock her. “Oh, sweet Ellen, that’s already done—”

  “No,” she said, and panic lit tiny sparks behind her eyes. “But I’ll do it now.”

  The smile he gave her was a dreadful parody of his brother’s, and fear set her heart thumping. She went quickly to the fire and took the matches from behind the clock. Her hand shook as she struck one, knowing that he was watching her; it went out, and the second did the same.

  Mungo held his position by the door, barring her escape. “Allow me to assist,” he said as she let a third match fall.

  Lazily he heaved himself off the door.

  “No!” she said, fumbling frantically with the matchbox, striking another, which she dropped with a cry as the flame licked up at her fingers.

  “Poor finger,” he said, coming towards her and taking her hand. She tried to pull away, but he lifted her scorched finger to his lips, and next moment it was inside his mouth, hot and wet.

  “Let me go!” she said, trying to pull away.

  He held it tight. “But you’ve not lit the fire.”