The Monster's Wife(11)
It was years since his retreat and visitors were far and few. Each winter draped fresh sheets of snow over the grand estate. The damp tugged stones from the roof and warped the rafters. May had told her that, inside, the plate was tarnished and the tapestries mouldered. Spiders darned fine covers for the four poster beds.
Oona’s earliest memories included an imaginary picture of the great rooms of the big house - the sparkling chandeliers and tapestries, the red oriental rugs and gleaming, dark furniture, his great clocks and birds under glass.
All these had been described to her by the succession of maids and butlers and cooks who used to keep the place up back in the old days, when the Laird still graced them with his presence. In their retirement, the old staff delighted in frighting children with stories about the dark cellarage running underneath the ancient pile, an oubliette in the apple cellar that dated to the time of James IV, a damp wall in the upstairs gallery from which a lady in a tall peruke was sometimes seen to wander. And of course, strange smells and screams and things that went bump in the night.
As she sweated her way along the cliff road, Oona thought about how foolish those old ghost stories sounded. The people in them saw terrifying sights and they always acted bravely. She cast an eye on the beach stretching out below her. Gulls had discovered the white-bellied tide and now they gouged and filched and tipped their heads up to swallow, glorying in the carrion.
To them the plague was a cornucopia. They squabbled over it, pecking at each other and flying up to circle the charnel, screeching, before settling to feed again. The stench was so thick, it was hard to think straight as you walked through it. Perhaps that was why, when a real terror came to the island instead of made up ghosts, everyone ran in circles like headless chickens and no-one was brave. Real horror paralysed you. And they didn’t even know about the hand.
She groaned inwardly at the thought that there might be more body parts mixed in with the other offal. Those gulls could be feeding on some poor girl. She was surprised at how quickly her guilt about her own role in it all had changed into anger inside the kirk.
Now that anger ran wild in her, driving her toward the big house. It wasn’t that Dod didn’t know where May was. He knew. But, like all bullies, Dod was a coward at heart and he abhorred the thought of walking to the big house cap in hand and demanding that his daughter halt her cleaning and cooking just because he said so. He was afraid of the doctor and all that had been said about this great off-comer, this man of parts and fortune.
Oona felt no such fear. That being said, when she had passed the gate and the house-cow quietly cropping - square rear-end facing the byre - she slowed her angry march. By the time she had passed the west wing and was nearing the servants’ entrance, she was tiptoeing.
Even so, the gravel crunched loudly beneath her bare feet, sharp pebbles jabbing her calloused heels. She had never imagined she would end up creeping over the Laird’s domain like a thief, shoulder’s hunched, eyes flitting this way and that, poised for some haughty voice to stop her in her tracks.
The kitchen door stood ajar. She stopped and listened. The fire had died down in her and she was half afraid to go in. It wasn’t a voice she heard through the door. Instead, it was a sound both delicate and precise. Music playing from a distance, like none she had ever heard.
The notes reminded her of the piano that Annie Yule used to play on Sundays when she and Granny went round for tea after kirk. There had always been sadness in that music quite different to the hymns in church. Even before everyone knew Annie was dying, the notes were melancholy, the melodies stirring and soft like a loon heard through fog.
More curious now than ever, she pushed the door open.
10
On a long table in the middle of the kitchen, a hare lay, half gutted. Next to it was a peeled onion, a large bunch of bay leaves and thyme, a tall jar made of dark green glass, a spill of salt, left untidied, as if May had run off in the middle of cooking.
Oona walked to the table, hearing now how the notes that came from above were tinnier than a piano. She looked up at the high rafters, from which plucked game birds hung, a pig’s loin, a mutton haunch coiled round with soft tendrils of smoke from a fire burning in the stone hearth.
She’d always wanted to know what the big house kitchen was like, whether it would have a fire in the middle like a normal kitchen, or blue-patterned dishes on shelves like the Manse. It was twice as big as the Manse kitchen, with scrubbed bare boards and lumpy walls that could use a fresh coat of lime wash and great, cobby rafters running across the high ceiling.
Above the rafters, the song stopped and she heard another sound. Birdsong. Not one bird, but many. A wild chirruping and squawking and trilling like the dawn chorus that came through her window each morning, except that it was evening and this birdsong came from inside. It called to her, luring her past the onion skins and carrot leaves, the green medallions of leek and boiled bones and potato peelings in a pail of cloudy water by the fire into the chill of the dining hall, the pale green walls decorated with gold-painted mouldings of wreaths and horns of plenty.
Crystal doves perched on the heavy chandelier that hung high over a polished table. Despite all she had heard, the stories told through her whole life, she was stunned by the richness of it, here on Hoy where most winters they went hungry, losing teeth and hair in their beds. Losing old folk to the cold in their houses and husbands, brothers, fathers out on the frozen sea.