The Monster's Wife(50)

The door opened. What stood behind it was dark and she saw neither what lay beyond the room nor the face of the man, only his shadow leaning to shut and lock the door.

He crossed to the hearth and knelt to blow on the peat. Flames spat and crackled into life. She closed her eyes and feigned the low, deep breaths of a sleeper. She did not want him to know she was watching.

There was a long pause and she began to think he’d left the room. She had never heard him speak. He was always silent. Pins jabbed her hands and feet. They were numb and painful at the same time and she wanted to move them but didn’t dare. A chair scraped on the flagstones and its suddenness jolted her. But she kept breathing slowly and deeply. Even when she felt his hand stroke her hair, she was stone.

She squeezed her eyes tighter, shutting him out of her head. Fragments of some lost scene flickered across her vision - the grey sky, heavy with rainclouds, the dark sea growing rougher and the edge of a boat with a woman’s hand on it. The scenes made her feel things. How open the sky was, how huge the sea and the horizon stretching out forever. Being rocked too hard, the taste of bile. Being free.

His hand left her head and air pressed coolly on the damp patch his sweat had made. Stone screeched on stone and liquid glugged into a cup. Her tongue clucked dryly on the roof of her mouth.

She opened her eyes and saw his hand hovering. He lifted her head and tipped the cup to her lips. She drank the warm beer, some of it hitting her tongue and running down her throat and the rest dribbling down her cheeks and pooling under her. As she drank, she watched his chin, the dark holes of his nostrils, his shadow cast on the roof beams bloated like an ogre’s. He held her head gently but still she was bound hand and foot.

When she’d finished drinking, she turned her face so that he’d take the cup away. He rested her head back on the pallet and put the cup down somewhere behind him. In a moment, he’d leave and she’d be alone again for an aching stretch of night. Or day. It was hard to tell. This was her chance.

“What is your name?” Her voice sounded broken.

The man stood listening, his face turned from her, his arm paused mid-stretch. He said nothing. Her heart kicked into a gallop. The wound in her chest burned. She coughed, trying to clear her throat.

“What is my name?”

He turned towards her. Flame shadows licked the planes of his cheeks. He rubbed his hand over his eyes and coughed into his hand as if he, too, was unused to speaking.

“Your name is Eve,” he said, as if she should have known already. “I must move you to another place. You are not safe here any more.”





43


The mountain was a dark beast sleeping – one hip raised to nudge the sky, the other slung low in the soft-breathing, secretive valley. Heather grew thick on the high ground, drunk from the burn that scored a groove across the island. The sky was hot and clear and lichens marked the boulders with their patterned blood. From the fields, the higher reaches of the island were nothing but white cloud.

Oona stopped to let her heart slow and saw in her mind’s eye the red fabric that had lain against May’s skin. To think of it lying tangled in an old creel made her legs weak. Maybe it was Cormick who had taken it and put it there. Maybe Stuart.

He and Andrew were far ahead of her now, crossing the shallow part of the burn. She could make out their outlines and could see but not hear Stuart whipping the stocking at bullrushes as he climbed the boggy meadow that led up to the Scollay croft.

She dug her nails into her palms, hoping fervently that Victor was holed up in the music room dissecting something, miles away from the valley and ignorant of this whole affair. Later, when things had calmed, she would ask him what he knew about the stocking and the blood. Stuart had seemed very quick to call it that given that it was dried and black, as if he knew more than he was telling them.

She followed the pair of them over the burn and fallow fields. It grew rimy, rain filling the buttercups and trembling the frail leaves of poppies, and the wind howled through high ravines, startling the gulls and stirring them into a chorus of shrieks. A crow ghosted her steps, resting on a tumble of stones to stare her down until the wind took it by the wings and tossed it back.

They were closer to the mountain now and the air tasted different. She could see silver ravines and the green scars of burns gouging a path through rock. The Scollay place hunched its shoulders against the mountain. A squat pile of red stones, it might have been her home in another version of life. Instead, wind whispered through gaps in the stones and the only known inhabitant was a nanny goat that had once belonged to the Umbesetters. Renowned for her sharp horns and sharper teeth, she ruled the abandoned croft with ireful grit.

The shower eased, leaving a shroud of rain on everything. When he came level with the rotting byre Stuart turned, sniffed the air. He said something to Andrew. She didn’t hear what. Chest puffed out like a cockerel, he started towards the byre, then swerved past it and walked to the cottage. At the door, he paused, bristled, walked inside.

Oona crouched low behind a lichen-crusted ledge of rock. Wild garlic glowed white from the dark places under the thorn trees. Breathing hard, she watched Andrew follow Stuart and disappear. A few feet away from her, a stoat peaked out from under a pile of rocks, flicked her a look of black-eyed scorn and darted down a hole. Above, a great skua circled, staring down at the place the stoat had been a moment ago. Inside the cottage, a man’s voice cried out brokenly.