The Monster's Wife(37)

The day brightened outside. Oona could no longer see the moon’s daytime ghost through the arched window. Cows lowed in the fields, beckoning the women who were late to milk them. Men tugged at their starched collars, longing to be free. Women turned between shushing their bairns and finding a subtle way to scratch beneath their corsets, itching the places where bone pressed hard into flesh. Granny had long since dropped the kerchief that had been poised to catch tears of joy and now tapped her fingernails on the pew in front.

Andrew snapped the ribands holding his breeches aloft many times, each snap more annoying than the last. Now he shuffled closer. Lye-cured fish and sour cider crept up her nostrils. It had enveloped her the night of the bonfire. Bile rose in her throat. She heard him try to begin a conversation with her, so she turned her attention to Margaret and Janet, deep in gossip two rows in front. From the tilt of Granny’s head, she judged that she wasn’t the only one eavesdropping.

“...fine, pale linen with silk ribands in the newest style. Annie’s dress was passed down to her of course, but it didn’t please her.”

“Aye well, lasses like wearing something new. Did she buy shoes at Hamnavoe, too?”

Margaret nodded. “Aye and garters. The something old is her great-grandmother’s lace kerchief tucked in her sleeve. Traditional, at least.”

“Aye, Peg, tradition is best,” Janet nodded, agreeable on every score.

Andrew was murmuring something about how he loved weddings, loved children, loved bonny wee brides, how love was the most important of all things. His fingers crept over her skirts, found her fingers and squeezed.

Oona elbowed him in the ribs. “Hush, for God’s sake.”

“But Oona, I—”

The angry chatter of the guests swallowed his words. Their hush had been an unspoken promise and now it broke.

“How long must we sit here anyway?”

“Is she pulling a prank?”

“That corset was frightful tight. Perhaps she’s fainted, poor thing!”

“Some lasses get quite overwrought, ken. My own Sarah...” Margaret said to the pew behind.

Meanwhile, her boys began a scrap near the tall candles lighting the kirk. Hamish Yule stepped down from the pulpit to part them, his brows burrowing together furiously. Stuart, pink-necked and oily-haired, had sat straight and silent through all. Nobody, it seemed, dared speak to him. When he rose and strode out of the kirk without speaking to or meeting the eyes of anyone, the hush fell again.

Oona’s heart reeled. She’d been an observer thus far, pretending not to hear those who wondered out loud whether she might know where May was. After all, it was just like May, everyone said, so like her to be late just to tease us all, but the joke ended when Stuart walked out.

His face had frightened her. He would search high and low now and he would find May hiding somewhere, in one of her dark moods perhaps, the circle of his coin sewn into her petticoats. Then he would make her suffer for what she’d done today. No-one made Stuart of Flett look a fool.

Oona stood. “Let us go with Stuart and help him search.”

Hamish Yule looked aghast. “Oona! Speaking in kirk again?Really—“Oh, Hamish,” Granny tutted. “At last someone has spoken wisely. In my view, we should move outside at once. My poor hands are blocks of ice.”

“And mine,” Big Dod barked, at the same time gruff and palpably relieved to turn the focus from his own plight to someone else’s.





33


There was nothing so ordered as a search party. It was too hard for people wearing their Sunday best to think that clearly, but it was agreed that after their various quests across the island, they would all meet at the Manse where the wedding feast was to have been held. If May were found, then it would be cause for celebration. If not, they might at least compare their findings and plan the next steps.

A few went to Norquoy, a few to Flett. Some searched the cliffs. Launched on their own hunt for May, Granny and Oona caught sight of Margaret and Janet peering fearfully into caves and gloups, afraid, it seemed, that petals of white linen and silk would float up to haunt them forever.

Granny accompanied Oona as far as the big house. Like all who are keenly aware of their status, she was lost for words upon finding herself in grander surroundings than she’d seen before. She fingered the copper pans in the kitchen like holy relics and absolutely refused to set foot in the hallway. Oona left her to peer at the silverware and went upstairs, thinking as she did of blue eyes that had watched her from the window.

Perhaps May had run across the scarred man and was trapped in the cobwebbed attics or mouldering cellarage – hurt and terrified, or worse.

As far as she was able to discover, May had not been there, nor had Victor seen her for days, he said, touching Oona’s arm fondly before turning back to his work dissecting a hare’s brain.

Granny returned home wringing her hands.

Oona carried on alone to the place she feared going most: Cormick’s shack. In her head was an image she couldn’t shake, of May aged nine, standing in the doorway to Cormick’s bedroom. In her mind’s eye, May’s face was pale and her eyes were wide, but Oona paid little mind to her friend’s fear, distracted as she was by the softness of the kittens Cormick had placed in a basket before her.

At the shack, she found neither May nor Cormick, only a sulky grey cat gnawing bread crusts and fish bones and hissing at her as she searched the stinking pit of a bedroom. When she’d searched every nook, she ran out of the door, her heart suddenly light. Finding May at Cormick’s had been her worst fear, worse even than Stuart laying his hand to her. She didn’t know why, except for their angry exchange of words the other day, May’s tears and the vague memory about kittens.