The Monster's Wife(10)

There was not much use in nodding to Oona, their looks seemed to say, if she’d soon be under the hill. This time there was a darker flavour to their silence, a note of deeper hush running under it. Suspicion perhaps, as if they guessed her secret. Oona shrugged the fear off. She sometimes thought people meant worse towards her than they really did.

The kirk was the same size as Oona’s front parlour, small enough that if she stood at the door and spat it would hit the pulpit. Though that would be ungodly. In the darkness, Oona felt the fear of everyone around her like an ache. Stuart’s bold young nephews, Jamie and Roy, were huddled against their mother, crying. Big men who usually cursed and swilled ale were pale and shaking. Without really thinking about it, she found herself making an inventory to ensure that none of the women were missing or short a hand.

Only May was absent and that worried her. Part of her wished she could tell the others about the crates and May and the poor girl’s hand, come clean right now and ask for advice, for absolution and help. But, sitting in the kirk, it seemed to her that their fear was all her fault. In the midst of those who had cared for her and known her all her life, she had never felt more alone.

Hamish Yule stood at his knotty stump of a lectern, polishing his spectacles, finger pressed into the worn innards of his Bible. He was known for his bloodcurdling sermons and the stern stare he used for rebuking sinners. He had a soft spot for Granny, as everyone often remarked, and Oona often heard a rap on the door and looked up to see his raw, high cheekbones and bushy black brows scowling down at her. When his wife took sick he kept to the manse, nursing her whilst the garden that had been her calling went wild. Since she died, Oona often thought he had an air of having glimpsed another world and lost his taste for this one. Though of course he had Granny to comfort him.

The Minister licked his lips ruminatively and Oona knew that soon he would cut through the babble with the firm knife of his voice and lead them in prayer.

Granny sat down two pews in front of Oona, so she could hear more gossip no doubt. Soon she was nodding sagely at Janice’s enervated chatter. Big Dod sat right at the front with May’s mother, Effie, and Stuart. When Dod saw Oona come in, he whispered something to Effie. Whatever his words were, they rippled through Effie’s thin body. She nodded nervously and turned her eyes back to the Minister. Dod stared back, his eyes on Oona’s. His face was sweaty and red as a pig’s head left hanging in the byre. When he heaved himself up and lurched towards Oona, she instinctively looked down at her feet, drew back in her seat as if she could stay hidden. Dod had hated her since she was small and always blamed her for anything May did wrong.

It was too late. Dod was on her, towering over her, his sour breath forming a cloud above her.

“Pray mistress Oona, where’s my daughter?” He seemed to be trying to whisper, but the hissed words filled the church.

“I’m as ignorant on the subject as you are, Sir.”

He leaned into her. “You’re her keeper, girl. Saying where she can go, what she can do.” Spittle hit her ear. “You must know the answer.”

“I’m dumbfounded. What do you mean?” Her voice was harsher than she’d meant. Everyone in the kirk turned to stare.

“I mean, you’re lying.”





9


Dod’s hand gripped her bare arm, his fingers tightening on her freckled skin. Her throat ached around some lump caught in it, as if she were swallowing her tongue.

She looked past him, to where the puzzled faces of everyone she knew watched from the darkness, pale as fingers fished from the sea. Amongst the congregation, Granny’s face was no longer flushed with gossiping, just thin and old, sucked in at the lips and eyes. Whatever she might have done wrong, she did not deserve this. And nor did May. Even if she’d known her whereabouts, she wouldn’t have given them away.

“Leave me be.”

The skin of her arm looked like curds being wrung of their whey, darker where his thick fingers pressed down.

“Release me, Sir.” Oona seized Dod’s rough timber of a wrist with her free hand, twisted the skin hard. She and May often gave each other burns like this when they play-fought. But Dod wasn’t expecting a girl to fight back. His eyes bugged and his grip loosened until it was easy for Oona to slip free of the sweat of his grasp.

She turned tail without looking round again, for fear of seeing a shocked look on the clutch of pale faces. Before the kirk door swung closed behind her, she heard the murmurs begin and Dod’s voice growling above them.

First they would voice their concern over her behaviour, wring their hands, momentarily distracted from the plague that had brought them together. Then the people of Quoy would do what they always did when a storm came, or a frost killed the lambs or the sea rose up on the beaches to smite the matchwood of their little boats. They would turn to that great, white eye staring down over Hamish Yule’s head, turn to it and stare into it with love as if it was the living Christ. And they would beg and promise their best crop, their firstborn lamb, or their most fertile cow, if He would intercede with His Father for them. As she hiked up her skirts and climbed the stony path towards the coast road, she heard Hamish silence them, his words echoing in the little building, the first solemn notes of song. She clamped her hands down hard over her ears and tramped on.

The big house was just along the cliff tops, tangled in dark heather at the foot of the hill where the skuas made their nests. When his lady died, the laird who’d had it in his family since Hedin battled Hogni left for his daughter’s house in Lochailort. He opened it to rich travellers from Europe and America who wanted to play the laird for a summer, drink brandy from crystal glasses and sup on roasted grouse.