While You Sleep

by Stephanie Merritt

  30th October 1869

  I am so afraid. The storms have returned and we have no peace, day or night. All Hallows approaches and it is as if I await my own Execution, listening to the ticking of the clock. I cannot pray – I try, but the words are stopped in my throat. Foolish thought! – I forfeited that solace when I first gave myself so willingly to HIS embrace. I have hung my silver Cross around the boy’s neck, though he pulls at it and I fear takes it off when he is out of my sight, though I try not to let that happen any longer. He has no understanding of the Danger; he is a mere child, not yet Seven years. And what use am I, if I cannot protect my Son? I would gladly cut my own throat to save him, though I fear that would not be sufficient. But I will not let him be taken from me, I will not! He is all I have, and I am his whole World; we cannot and will not endure separation. I will hold him closer than any lover, for he is the great Passion of my Life; my great enduring Love, and I will keep him from all Harm, now and for eternity, whatever the Sacrifice. This and this alone is my Duty.

  The Day approaches, and I find myself thinking often of my own Father, and the Scriptures he made me learn by rote.

  “Ye are of your Father the Devil, and the lusts of your Father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the Truth, because there is no truth in him.”

  And his favourite, which my Mother embroidered on a Sampler that hung always above our hearth: “For the wages of Sin is Death.”

  Amen. It is time to go. Let Thy Mercy, O Lord, be upon us.

  Zoe closed the book, startled by a sound from below. She had been so involved in Ailsa’s words that she had lost all sense of time; now she glanced around the gallery to see that the light outside was fading, twilight glittering over the sea. She stood and stretched; it would soon be time to get ready for dinner at Charles’s. Again, she thought she caught a faint noise downstairs, like the creak of a tread. She froze; the sound of footsteps persisted, quite clearly, as if someone were pacing the corridor.

  Telling herself not to be absurd, she crept along the landing and peered over the banister at the entrance hall below. The footsteps stopped. She switched on the light and descended slowly, stopping at each step, straining to listen. The pipes made curious noises in this house, she reminded herself, but her heart was jammed in her throat as she tiptoed along the passage and pushed open the kitchen door. The relief at finding it empty washed through her like cold water; she could feel her hands trembling as she clasped the journal to her chest. She let her gaze travel around the room. Nothing appeared to be out of place; there were no footprints on the floor tiles, or none that were obviously not her own. And yet she couldn’t shake the sense that someone had been in the room an instant before, and she had just missed them; she almost believed she could feel the air stirring in their wake.

  It was those last journal entries, she thought, placing the book on a clean dishcloth on the table. Perhaps Ailsa’s fear was infecting her; any mother would be affected by the intimate confessions of a woman in such obvious distress. Zoe leaned on the back of a chair and let out a long, shaky breath. She knew why Ailsa’s words had upset her so much: they had pierced her carefully constructed armour to skewer her undefended heart with the guilt she had been trying to avoid. Ailsa was right: what use was a mother who could not protect her child? And what did that make her, a mother who had left her child behind because she could no longer hold her marriage together? She should be there to protect Caleb. Perhaps that was what Ailsa’s journal had been meant to show her: the way home.

  She wrapped the book in the cloth to take to Charles, unable to shake the sense of distress. What had Ailsa done on All Hallows after she had closed her journal for the last time? Perhaps no one would ever know the truth. A sudden noise jolted Zoe from her reverie, like a door slamming in the wind, but distant, as if outside. It’s nothing, she told herself, glancing at the clock.

  12

  Charles opened the door to her in a striped apron, his sleeves rolled up and flour on his hands. A rich smell of meat trailed after him. Horace loped at his heel, took her in with mild curiosity, let out a single desultory bark as if giving her clearance, and padded away in the direction of the cooking.

  ‘You found us! Come on in.’ Charles twinkled, nodding her through to a small hallway paved with uneven stone flags. ‘Edward says you have a surprise for me?’

  Zoe felt caught off guard. Edward had pre-empted her; there was no prospect of keeping the book to herself now, even if she had decided to try.

  ‘He told you, then?’

  ‘Only that you’d be bringing something I’d be extremely excited to see. He’s been very cryptic about it, I was about to move to advanced interrogation techniques. Could he have meant that bottle of wine, I wonder?’

  Zoe smiled, handing her gift over as he led her into a well-proportioned kitchen where a vast casserole dish simmered on an Aga and Edward leaned against a counter, a glass of red in his hand. He flashed her a secretive smile as she entered and she felt obscurely pleased to see him, despite the book.

  ‘You stole my thunder,’ she said, mock-reproachful. He held up his hands in self-defence.

  ‘I haven’t told him a thing about it – I left that for you.’

  ‘Is one of you going to put me out of my misery? Red or white?’ Charles turned to Zoe with a bottle in each hand.

  ‘Water for me, thanks. I drove,’ she added, by way of apology.

  Charles gave her a long look, his head on one side. Again she was struck by the extraordinary clarity of those blue eyes in his weathered face, bright as a husky’s. ‘Very sensible,’ he said, setting the bottles on the table. ‘Best to be safe.’

  ‘Are you going to show him?’ Edward asked, impatient.

  She hesitated, turning to Charles. ‘You’ll need to wash your hands first.’

  He complied while she fished the package from her bag, a cloth wrapped around its leather binding. Though she had spent the afternoon immersed in Ailsa’s journal, it was not enough; she wanted more time to re-read every entry and scrutinise the disturbing, familiar sketches, until she could understand what had happened to Ailsa and her son in that house. The answer was somewhere in the writing, she felt certain.

  She placed the package into his open hands and watched his eyes widen, exchanging a glance with Edward. Whatever the old bookseller had been expecting, it was not this. He half turned away, hunched over it as if protecting a newborn, and peeled back the wrapping quarter by quarter, between finger and thumb. In the silence that fell as he opened the first page she could hear only the bubbling of the casserole and the slow rhythmic thud of Horace’s tail on the tiles. Charles’s knees seemed to buckle; she and Edward stepped forward, ready to catch him, but he righted himself, looking back to her with an expression of wonder and disbelief and she saw, to her surprise, that his eyes were filled with tears.

  ‘I can’t believe – so many years I’ve looked for this. I thought it must have been destroyed. How did it come to you?’ he asked, his voice shaky.

  It struck her then, how odd the phrasing was; as if he knew without being told that the book had found its way to her by its own volition.

  ‘It was hidden in the chimney,’ Edward chipped in, eager to claim his part in the discovery. ‘We found it last night.’

  Zoe shot him a pointed look. Charles raised his eyes to her; she did not miss the mild quirk of his eyebrow that told her he could make an educated guess about their having spent the evening together but would not dream of asking.

  ‘A gull fell down the chimney,’ she said, to clarify. ‘It dislodged some bricks while it was struggling. There was a cavity behind them with the book inside.’

  ‘Extraordinary.’ Charles smoothed a hand over the cover, shaking his head fondly and gazing down at it with paternal tenderness. ‘I asked Mick to check every possible structural hiding place when he was rebuilding. I thought she might have found somewhere, you see, but Mick didn’t want me poking around. I think he’d lo
st patience with my quest by then. You haven’t told him about this, have you?’ He glanced up, anxious.

  ‘I told Zoe you should see it first.’ Edward moved across the kitchen to join them, his face open and beaming. He wants to please Charles, Zoe thought, the way you want to impress a favourite teacher; but it was she that Charles fixed with his grave expression.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, inclining his head in deference. ‘You can’t imagine how much this means to me. And now, let’s eat.’

  He handed Zoe the book while he picked up the casserole and led them through to a dining room where a heavy oak table had been laid for three with silver cutlery and candlesticks, pleasingly old-fashioned. Charles’s house was large, rectangular, built from the local brown stone; its frontage appeared symmetrical from the outside, though inside all the rooms, while well-proportioned, felt slightly crooked, off-kilter, the timber beams warped from centuries of standing sentinel at the edge of the village. It was the former manse, he explained, setting the pot down on a trivet and lighting two fat beeswax candles; sold off twenty years earlier when the kirk needed to save money by putting the minister in a small, modern terrace on the new estate.

  ‘So this would have been Ailsa’s father’s house?’ Zoe asked, her gaze roaming over the bulging plaster, the pocked stone lintel over the fireplace, the window embrasures which showed the thickness of the walls. ‘When he was the reverend here?’ She wandered past the table to a mahogany dresser at the far end of the room, beside the window, where shelves of curios glinted behind warped glass.

  ‘That’s right. A pleasing synchronicity. I find it remarkable to think of her growing up in these rooms.’

  Zoe’s eyes swerved to the doorway, as if she might catch the child Ailsa standing there. It was difficult to picture that severe woman with her tightly pulled bun and obsidian eyes as a little girl.

  ‘Did she have a happy childhood?’ She was not quite sure what had prompted her to ask that.

  Charles grimaced. ‘I fear not. She was ten when her mother died giving birth to William and her father was a severe disciplinarian, as befits a Victorian minister. From what survives of his writings, I suspect the concept of sin, and a woman’s particular susceptibility to it, loomed large in her upbringing.’

  ‘Poor kid,’ Zoe murmured, as she laid the book on the dresser and her eye was caught by a silver object in a velvet-lined box on one of the shelves.

  ‘I always wondered,’ Edward asked, ‘did you buy this house because of Ailsa, or did you become interested in her because of the house?’

  Charles smiled. ‘You can’t live on this island and not be interested in Ailsa, however hard the Drummonds have tried to erase her. I’ve been involved with her story for a long time.’

  ‘This is Ailsa’s cross.’ Zoe tapped the window of the cabinet with a fingernail. ‘The one she’s wearing in the photograph.’

  Charles looked surprised. ‘That? No, that one belonged to my grandmother. It’s a traditional design made by a local silversmith – they were very popular with the Victorians. You can buy cheap replicas now in the gift shop at the ferry terminal. You’re not vegetarian, are you? I ought to have checked.’ He lifted the lid of the casserole and stirred the gloopy brown liquid inside.

  Zoe bent to peer in through the bubbled glass. She had only seen the photograph once, but she was convinced that it was Ailsa’s pendant, not merely a similar design. She remembered it vividly from the night she had seen Ailsa’s face in the window: every tiny engraved scroll, every patch of tarnish. But that had been a dream, she reminded herself, a memory of the photograph. Still, she was certain that she was not mistaken. She thought of Ailsa in her final terror, hanging it around her son’s neck.

  ‘Even if I were, I’d turn for that,’ she said, taking her seat at the table. ‘It smells amazing.’

  ‘Venison,’ Charles said, ladling a large helping on to her plate. ‘I have an old friend with an estate in Ayrshire. He sends me a very generous gift at the beginning of the season when it’s freshly butchered and it usually lasts me through the winter. This is a traditional local recipe, with my own secret ingredient.’

  ‘Magic mushrooms,’ Edward hissed, behind his hand, in a stage whisper.

  ‘Oh great – now I’m going to start hallucinating?’ She laughed, playing along.

  ‘You’d hardly know the difference, in the McBride house,’ Edward said. ‘Like poor old Ailsa. Maybe that’s what she was on.’

  Zoe stopped laughing abruptly; she noted how Charles froze for an instant and his eyes flicked sharply to Edward, though he covered it with a smile.

  ‘I’m afraid you two have the advantage over me, as I haven’t read any of the journal yet. You think Ailsa suffered hallucinations?’

  ‘It’s hard to say, there are parts where …’ Edward hesitated, the colour rising in his face. He glanced at Zoe for confirmation. ‘Well – it’s very explicit. But when she describes her encounters with her lover, it’s not clear whether it’s real or all in her head. It often reads as if she doesn’t know herself.’

  ‘Interesting.’ Charles finished serving and replaced the lid of the casserole. ‘Extreme isolation can have profound effects on the psyche, you know. It’s well documented. If you look at accounts by lone yachtsmen, mountaineers, prisoners in solitary confinement, medieval hermits – they all testify to the same phenomena. Auditory and visual hallucinations, and a pervasive sense of unreality – a sort of disappearing, where the boundaries between the self and the material world begin to blur. I’ve experienced it myself. Help yourselves to vegetables.’

  ‘You have? Where?’ Zoe leaned in, her fork poised halfway to her mouth.

  ‘Many years ago I walked a pilgrim trail through Bhutan,’ he said, waving a hand as if it were too far back to consider. ‘I was alone for three months, and even in the monasteries it was almost wholly silent. The mind performs extraordinary somersaults in those circumstances. I walked for a whole day in deep and fascinating conversation with a man who I later came to realise, by all objective measurements, was not there.’

  ‘And you didn’t think you were going crazy?’

  ‘Naturally, one wonders.’ He smiled. ‘But as I mentioned to you before, our culture has decided upon a very reductive definition of reality, and therefore of dreams and madness. I’ve always been interested in experiences that challenged those boundaries. Have you ever taken ayahuasca?’

  Zoe shook her head; she could not work out whether Charles was a delusional old hippy or a sage. But she liked the way he wrong-footed her expectations, though she felt her own life appear small and narrow in the light of his stories.

  ‘Well, it’s not for everyone,’ he continued cheerfully. ‘Anyhow – I wrote a detailed journal entry recounting everything I talked about with my walking companion that day. We discussed the soul, it was all entirely lucid, and when I told the monks at my next monastery stop, they simply nodded, didn’t bat an eyelid. Different understanding of reality, you see. So I have no need for stimulants, I assure you. Beyond this, in moderation.’ He lifted the bottle, winked at Edward and poured him a large glass.

  ‘Auditory hallucinations,’ Zoe repeated, wondering. ‘Hearing voices, you mean?’

  ‘Exactly. There’s sound scientific basis for it too. The human brain is hard-wired to convert sound into language. If there’s an absence of actual language for a period of time, it starts interpreting other available sounds as speech. So you find frequent accounts of polar explorers or sailors hearing singing or cries in the wind. Hence the legends of mermaids and sirens, perhaps. Charles Lindbergh, the aviator, described hearing a voice speaking clearly to him during his flight, though he knew it was only the noise of the engine.’

  ‘They heard singing, but it was the wind?’ Zoe took a sip of water; for the first time in days, she was beginning to feel reassured.

  ‘Do you think that’s what happened to Ailsa?’ Edward asked. ‘The isolation drove her to madness?’

  ‘But it�
�s not madness, Edward, that’s the point.’ Charles set his glass down and turned to him, his face solemn. ‘There are numerous psychiatric studies of prisoners who have been kept in isolation and the symptoms they present are not typical of mental illness, as we would usually define it. Silence and solitude have very particular effects on the brain. It’s more akin to the experience of religious mysticism. Or, conversely, what we might call being haunted.’

  Zoe stared at him. ‘You’re saying – people might have thought Ailsa was crazy, and she maybe even believed she was being haunted, but really she was just suffering scientifically proven effects of isolation?’

  ‘I’m offering up one explanation,’ Charles said evenly. They ate in silence for a few moments while they contemplated what the alternatives might be. Zoe had the unsettling sense of movement from the corner of her eye, at the edge of her vision. A moment later she felt something warm and heavy against her leg; she started and looked down to see Horace’s muzzle resting against her thigh, his mournful chocolate eyes pleading with her.

  ‘Ignore him, he’s a terrible drama queen. Anyone would think he’s never fed.’ Charles clicked his tongue and the dog lay down under the table, his gaze fixed reproachfully on Zoe.

  ‘She didn’t imagine the child though, did she?’ Edward put down his fork and looked around the table as if addressing a debating panel. ‘So there must have been a real lover at some point too. Maybe he left her and she was so grief-stricken that she started hallucinating sex with him.’