Women of the Dunes Page 25

  Donald scented an advantage. “With a grown-up there, I suppose?”

  “No! My sister and I used to go for miles down the fjord, we’d make a picnic and be out all day.”

  Donald turned to his father. “Dad—”

  “Forget it.”

  “Dad won’t let us out of the bay by ourselves, even on flat calm days,” Charlie remarked in a casual tone, avoiding his father’s eye.

  Laila gave a little smile. “Ah, but Rodri, how will they ever learn?”

  “Yeah, Dad!”

  “Drop it, I said.” Something in his tone got through, and the boys rolled exasperated eyes at each other. “And hop it. Homework done?”

  The boys left, grumbling, and Laila offered to make coffee. Libby was anxious to be off now, having said what she had to say, and the atmosphere had become impossibly strained. She too rose to go, making the students an excuse.

  “They’ll be fine,” Rodri said. “And there’s something I want to show you. I’ll get it and check the charging too. Stick around. Laila makes a mean coffee.”

  “What a strange man he is.” Laila laughed as he left. “Sunshine and showers.” He was gone for several minutes, and as he came through the door Libby caught a grim expression which he rapidly replaced by a rueful one.

  “Sorry, Libby, but the laptop charger was switched off at the socket. My fault. Did I show you this?” He handed her a book they had looked at last time she was here. The mad baronet’s poem. “Take it with you, it’s a proven cure for insomnia.” She took it and sat down again.

  The boys reappeared to say good night, still giving their father dark looks, and he went off with them while Laila poured the coffee. “He is too protective of those boys,” she remarked, then shrugged. “They mean the world to him, of course, and I expect I will be just the same— Will you carry the tray through for me please, Libbee. I will join you in a moment.” Libby went through to the library, set the tray down, then went over to her laptop, which was, as she half expected, fully charged.

  Rodri appeared in the doorway. “How’s it doing?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder.

  “Won’t take long,” she replied.

  “Splendid,” he said, and went over to the tray. A moment later Laila slipped in behind him.

  They took their coffee to the fire and a silence fell. A log moved in the grate, and Rodri enquired politely what work they would do the next day and Libby gave him a very full, and tedious, answer, filling the space. Laila looked bored, but Rodri’s eyes were very much alive.

  He pulled his phone from his pocket. “Ah. Hector again. ‘Looks like it’s going to be an all nighter.’ You know what, Laila, Hector really ought to drink less.”

  She shrugged. “I have tried to stop him.”

  “Tell him it’s bad for the baby.”

  She laughed, a lovely sweet laugh. “I will.”

  “Laptop charged yet?” he asked a moment later with a nod which conveyed the fact that it was alright for it to be charged now. What on earth was he up to?

  She went over to the desk and made a show of looking. “Yep. Fully charged.” She hesitated. “So I’ll be off. Thank you for supper.” Presumably he would escort her to the door, if not back to the camp, and explain what was going on.

  “It was our pleasure. Rodri will help you carry the things to the campsite,” said Laila.

  “That’s kind—”

  “But there’s no need. I know,” he said swiftly. “An independent soul, is our Liberty Snow.” He handed her the laptop and battery with a bland smile. “Laila will see you out, and I’ll go and see the boys are settled. Early start tomorrow.”

  Chapter 26

   Ellen

  Ellen saw from the window of her mother’s cottage that people were gathering out on the headland. Earlier she had seen Alick walking swiftly towards the manse, and a moment later he and Mr. Drummond had come out again and set off to join the group on the headland. Something must have been found there.

  But she would not go to see. She would not leave the cottage, would see no one, speak to no one, thankful only that her mother was too spent to notice her distress. She was dying, and all that Ellen wanted was to die with her.

  Ravens were nesting in the trees above the cottage, skittering on the roof like dark spirits, and she had lain listening to their harsh cawing as they mocked her. They knew what had happened, for she had glimpsed them circling above her in the clearing beside the pool, after he had gone, and now they had come for her mother.

  But she felt nothing. Only numbness. And somewhere, shame. She would not think of what had happened. Not the struggle, nor the weight of him, and the pain—

  —and then the threat.

   Six weeks later, Oliver

  It seemed to Oliver as he walked back home in the fading evening light that his superstitious parishioners could fairly claim that their prophesies had come true. Trouble stalked their little community. An outbreak of influenza threatened his flock; it had already carried off two old people and others were suffering. Ellen’s mother had been in the ground for six weeks, and already a new family had moved into her cottage. Ellen now occupied a room in the manse’s attic and went about her duties like a biddable wraith. For a while he thought that the influenza had caught her too and had watched her carefully, eventually concluding that her pallor and low spirits were attributable to grief rather than illness. Thank goodness he could provide a roof over her head. There might be talk, of course, although Mrs. Nichol lived in, but his credit was now so low in the community he could not afford to sink further. He sensed a coolness even from Lady Sturrock.

  He kicked a stone that lay in his path. And that coolness would turn arctic if she knew that the thought of marrying Ellen Mackay now dominated his daytime thoughts and kept him awake at night. He had already given her ladyship reason enough to have him removed from his position: a dwindling congregation, a desecrated grave, and an alienated community, and taking his housemaid to wife would doubtless seal his doom. And without a living, how could he support Ellen?

  But she was so lovely, and now so lost, and his heart went out to her. If only for her sake, he wished that he had never suggested the work on the headland, for it seemed to have fed her strange obsession with Ulla’s legend, warping and twisting her mind so that it had become a fear in her. She would jump at the slightest sound, her eyes round with alarm, shrinking hollow-eyed into the shadows if he addressed her, the bloom quite gone from her. And there seemed no way to reach her.

  And then there was the chalice, burning a hole in his conscience. Alick had told him to say nothing but to keep it in the manse until they had time to consider what was best to do. It lay wrapped in a clean cloth, hidden in the deepest of the desk drawers, a constant worry and reproach. The thought that it was Odrhan’s grave that had been desecrated haunted Oliver, unsettling his nights, and filled him with an overwhelming sense of shame and wrongdoing. Whoever had laid the holy father to rest had meant him to remain there at peace.

  And at peace he had been until Oliver Drummond had taken it upon himself to propose that they investigate, and the devil of it was that because of all the furore they could tell no one of this extraordinary find!

  A larger and even more disapproving crowd had gathered for the short service of prayer when the bones were reburied in the floor of the desecrated cell, and he had bestowed what dignity he could upon the occasion. On his return to the manse, he had learned from Mrs. Nichol that Ellen’s mother had breathed her last with only Ellen beside her, and he had gone to her at once but had been unable to reach the eldritch girl who had sat, tearless and distant, his words of comfort passing over her head. His failure had felt complete, and the shame of it would haunt him forever.

  Alick Sturrock had started coming more regularly to the manse since then, and Oliver very much valued his company. He too was seeking sanctuary, he said with his wry, beguiling smile, out of range of his mother’s censure and his father’s tongue. “Set against a c
areer as a respected lawyer, that of grave robber sits ill with Papa,” he said. As, Oliver imagined, did upsetting the local tenantry.

  Oliver too had suffered a humiliating interview with Lady Sturrock. Defence would have been difficult had not Alick told her beforehand that the desecration had been Mungo’s handiwork, not theirs. “Nevertheless, Mr. Drummond,” she had said, “the work was under your aegis and the upset caused is far out of proportion to the knowledge gained.” This was undeniable, and Oliver could only apologise again, trying not to think of the chalice which resided, undeclared, in the drawer of his desk.

   Ellen

  More and more Ellen found herself drawn back to the headland, the one place she could find solace. There were signs still of the recent disturbance there, the marram grasses trampled flat and newly exposed surfaces on the stones bare of the bright lichens and slow-growing mosses. Yet this was the place she came to dull her grief and hide her shame, where her senses were numbed and where she could inhabit another time.

  Bones had been found, she had heard folk say. Human bones. But whose were these? The old folk said that Ulla’s bones had been found years back, buried with a golden cross. But it was Ulla’s presence she felt here.

   Odrhan

  Ulla’s pains began the night of the next full moon.

  She cried out, and Odrhan went running for Morag, blessing the moon for lighting his path. Morag came, but slowly, panting as she stopped for breath. “Peace, holy man,” she gasped, her hand on her heaving bosom as he urged her on. They could hear Ulla’s cries as they rounded the bay, and as Odrhan ran on ahead, the moon slid behind a charcoal cloud.

  He burst through the entrance and took her hand, seeing her lips were bloodied from where she had bitten them.

  “Promise me, Odrhan,” she said, as the pain subsided, “that if I die, you will bury me with Harald.”

  He looked over his shoulder. Where was the woman! “You will not die, Ulla! Morag is here.”

  She gripped his hand as the pains came again. “Swear to it, and if I live I will turn to your god.”

  He heard Morag panting outside. “Ulla! I—”

  “Promise me, Odrhan. On your soul!” Ulla’s eyes were wild with pain and fear. “Or I will curse you.”

  And so, not because of the threat but to calm her, he laid his hand on her brow. “I promise.”

   Ellen

  “Ellen!” She had half risen before she recognised the voice and sank back. Alick— He climbed over the rocks and came towards her. “I thought I saw you heading this way. It’s good to see you out and about, and you’re looking better. There’s colour in your cheeks!” His fair hair blew across his forehead and his eyes were kind. “It’ll get easier, you know, Ellen, as you grow accustomed, and she was very peaceful in the end.”

  “How can we know that?”

  He looked surprised. “You were with her, were you not?”

  Of course, he meant her mother. But her mother belonged to another world, one she had shut away, and she hung her head. “I thought you meant Ulla.”

  He stared at her. “Ulla? My dear girl, why would I mean Ulla?”

  She looked down at the tumbled stones. “I feel her very close when I’m here.” And she felt her pain.

  “Oh, Ellen, my dear, this is just your fancy!”

  “It isn’t.”

  He contemplated her a moment, then sat on a boulder opposite her. “So tell me then, what exactly is it that you feel?”

  “Only that. It’s as if she is here, as if they are all here, invisible, but just behind a veil. Ulla and Harald. Odrhan—” and Erik, but she would not say his name. How could one brother be so kind and one so cruel?

  “And only in this place?”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes in others places too.” Like in a hidden spot below the drovers’ bridge where sunlight shafting onto the pool had beguiled her to her fate. She wanted to tell him how she had seen Ulla’s reflection. And not heeded the warning.

  “At any particular time of day?”

  “No.”

  “I see you here in the evenings quite often. Is the feeling stronger then? In the fading light?”

  She frowned. So many questions. “No—” He was peering at her in a rather disconcerting way, but she had his full attention. “Mr. Drummond said some prayers over the bones, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he did. That’s right. People were upset, you see—”

  “But Ulla might have died a pagan.”

  “Ulla might have, but—”

  “So what happens if prayers are said for a pagan who doesn’t want to go to heaven?”

  Alick pulled a wry face. “That question sort of came up on the day the bones were found, but we managed to skirt around it. It’s one for Oli—for Mr. Drummond, not me. The efficaciousness of my prayers would be frankly questionable anyway. I’m not convinced about the reality of heaven and hell”—he gave her a conspiratorial smile—“but don’t tell Mama, or she’d say I was a pagan too.”

  “And are you?”

  It was a simple, direct question, but he laughed. “Well, atheist is the word that’s used now.”

  “Atheist.” She tried out the unfamiliar word. “And it means pagan?”

  “Not quite. A pagan believes in gods other than the Christian God, while an atheist . . .” He paused. “Well, an atheist believes there is no God.”

  No God? His face had taken on a serious expression as he watched the gulls wheeling and diving. But where, after all, had God been that day below the drovers’ bridge? She looked at him, uncertain. “And that is what you believe?”

  He did not answer at once. “I believe in something beyond the physical,” he said at last, and his eyes followed the gliding flight of a fulmar as it skimmed past on powerful wings. It had a nest in the dunes, she had seen it go there earlier, changing places with its mate. “And I believe in the enduring spirit, if not in the immortal soul.”

  She felt excitement stir. “You do?”

  He turned back to her. “I’ve heard people discussing such matters in Edinburgh, and you know, Ellen, there are so many things that are unexplained that there simply has to be something in it. Such a lot is just dismissed as bunkum, but that denies what science is showing us every day. And we are just at the beginning! There are unseen forces all around us, you know.” His enthusiasm was infectious, and she listened, her lips parted. “Take magnetism for example, and electrical currents. They exist but we can’t see them, and yet they’ve always been there awaiting discovery, like invisible waves, in the invisible ether. Evidence of things unseen! And they say that voices can travel hundreds of miles on these unseen waves, so maybe thoughts can do the same. Don’t you think? And there can’t be thoughts without something thinking ’em. And so if you take away the dimension of time, maybe these somethings survive.” He was talking quickly and she struggled to keep up with him. “Let’s call them spirits, shall we, released from their physical bodies, still here, all around us, just as you say, invisible behind a veil.” She stared back at him, understanding very little but feeling a strange surge within her as she listened. “We have to open our minds to these possibilities even where they challenge our cherished beliefs, and that includes antiquated notions of heaven and hell. Perhaps once the spirit is free from the body, it is indestructible.”

  His last sentence leapt out at her. “So when I feel that Ulla is close to me, what I’m feeling is real?”

  “Why not? I don’t know, of course, but it could be. That’s what’s so fascinating about it all, and we have to keep asking these questions.”

  Ellen’s mind was in a whirl. “And so when I feel her in me, as part of me, that’s real too?”

  The light in Alick’s eyes changed and sharpened as if he was only now seeing her. “You feel her in you?”

  “I think I always have.”

  He frowned a little, and his gaze slid away from her. After a moment he spoke again, but in a different tone. “Look, Ellen, these are just ideas
, you know. There’s a lot of research still needed as no one really understands these phenomena. For goodness’ sake, don’t go off with the idea that I’ve said you’re possessed or Mr. Drummond would have my scalp.”

  The radiance in her died. “But you just said that maybe the spirit can survive. And if it can survive, perhaps it can inhabit—”

  Alick got to his feet, and smiled a little oddly. “Look, Ellen, I get carried away. Don’t mind me too much. These things fascinate me, you see, but I had forgotten that for you just now, this is not the time, after recent events—”

  Panic jagged through her. “You know?”

  The bafflement on his face brought her halfway back to reason. He meant her mother again, and for a moment the pain of loss penetrated the icy barrier and reached her heart. And she turned away, saying nothing. “Are you alright, Ellen?” he asked, and she nodded, not meeting his eyes, and he held out his hand. “Let me walk you back to the manse, then. And really, you know, don’t take much account of what I said, will you. Listen to Mr. Drummond instead, he’s a good man and you can trust him, you know.”

   Odrhan

  There was a hollow outside Odrhan’s cell filled with a sandy soil where marram grasses and sea thrift had taken root, and he worked all day, in numb despair, making a place for her. When he reached bare rock, he stopped and gazed out over the steel-grey ocean with unfocussed eyes. It had been a promise made only to calm her.

  Morag had taken the child, a boy, and would find a nurse for him.

  He went back into the cell and gathered her up, holding her close, and then laid her there on the unyielding rocks where he could watch over her, and pray. He took the cross from around his neck and placed it on her breast, and looked his last upon her beauty. A promise broken, aye, but he had to consider her soul.

  God, he knew, would be merciful and take her to his bosom.

  But for himself, he was lost, and cared not. All that was left to him now was to stay close to her, and pray.