The Monster's Wife(44)

“Did he confide in you, Oona?” He pulled her towards him. He smelled of beer and sweat.

The basket fell onto the ground and the clothes spilled out of it. “Stop!”

His eyes came into focus and he let go of her. “If you have discovered something, you must tell Stuart.”

“I have told you all I know - last night, I did. You paid no heed to it then.”

Andrew nodded, his hand moving to his eyes and scrubbing at them like a child.

“Save that, I know nothing more than you.” She picked up the basket, brushing at the dirty folds of blanket. “I would say if I did.”

He caught hold of her fingers, gently this time. “Please come and we’ll call on Stuart. He has need of a friend.”

She snatched her hand away. “I was never his friend, or yours.”

“But we could become friends.” He smiled in a manner that seemed intended to please her. “I could begin our friendship by carrying this laundry for you as a gentleman does for a lady.”

She sighed, too tired to resist him today. She let him take the laundry from her and carry it in. Granny smiled at excuses from Andrew that would have made her scold if Oona had spoken them and gave her blessing to their taking a walk. She probably had some foolish notion about wanting to see them married and living in Neaquoy surrounded by bairns. It made Oona sick to think of it.

The old Flett croft had gone to rack since Stuart’s father died. When he and May were betrothed he’d built a room onto the end of the byre for his ma, laughing that his women would fight like cats if they were kept together. The cottage was slate-roofed and built from red stone that Stuart’s folk had risked their necks to bring down from the cliffs. But Stuart didn’t like risking his neck too much, so the wind whistled through gaps in winter and the house sagged at one side where the stones sunk into the peat bog. Old churns and broken ploughs cluttered the field nearest the house.

Stuart sat on a pile of stones with a bucket of tar between his legs and an upended boat in front of him, painting. When Oona and Andrew approached him, he looked up, scowling.

“Any closer to the bride-cog?”

“Small chance of that,” Oona grimaced. She’d felt certain that people were talking this nonsense.

Andrew laughed. “Oona’s a wild beast, but at least I’ve managed to herd her here.”

“Well, don’t linger, will you. I’ve a great task before me with this wreck.” Stuart picked up his brush.

As they came closer, Oona got a better look at the boat Stuart was mending. A red stripe ran across its prow like a wound. The Elver. She leaned over to look at a jagged hole in the hull, clumsily patched with an old plank.

“Why are you tarring Cormick’s boat? Short on barley-broo?” She tried to make the words sound light, but Stuart looked at her sharply.

Andrew laughed nervously. “She does love a joke.”

Stuart let the brush drop into the bucket and moved between Oona and the boat. “Long time since you last called here, Oona. You were in the habit of visiting with May when you both were close.”

The words cut her, as they were meant to. “We are close still.”

“Then tell me where she is.” His lips stretched in that unctuous line that made the other women swoon. “For you do know. I’m sure of it. You and that damned foreign devil, your employer. I think he’s done a mischief to my May and you’re protecting him. We all think that, everyone on Quoy, all of us running about searching like fools while you laugh over your great secret.”

She gulped back the lump in her throat. “I don’t know anything and Doctor Frankenstein certainly does not. How dare you.”

“Oona...” Andrew’s voice wavered.

She flicked her eyes towards him, as if to say is this the reason you brought me here, to accuse me? “You keep more secrets than I do, Stuart, such as patching a hole in the same scuppered boat that had May’s cloak in it.”

Andrew turned pale as a sheet, the brave beer sheen gone. He stared at his boots. Stuart hovered closer. Oona closed her eyes, bracing for a slap.

Nothing.

When she opened her eyes she saw Stuart wiping tears away.

“We had our bad times as everyone does, but I can’t credit her running off as folk say... She always swore that she loved me.”

The look on his face as he sniffed and sobbed and let the snot drip down seemed to demand some sort of forgiveness, and though it was on the tip of her tongue to tell him it wasn’t a case of happy so much as May being ten times too good for him, it would have felt too much like kicking a dog when it was down.

“Maybe she’ll come back.” Oona looked away, wishing more than anything that it were true. Then her eyes found the boat with the jagged hole gaping in it like a maw. Something hid under its carapace, there in the darkness, something worse than any secret May had ever kept.





39


The morning was heavy with wet bed linens and foggy with the steam of the sadiron. Oona drifted listlessly from room to room with the keys that May had once managed, folding quilts into chests and pushing pillows into cases.

Working alone, she had more time to notice the curiosities built into the big house: old chutes that began in kitchen cubbyholes and ended in some cabinet upstairs, bookshelves that she delicately dusted until she found the books were wooden and painted, a dark thing in the cellar that May had said was for punishment. If you looked down deep inside it, there were supposed to be old bones. Most of the upstairs doors required a spell spent trying each key in the lock until it finally clicked and let her in.