The Monster's Wife(60)

She only closed her eyes for a moment, but she must have fallen asleep for a long while, because she woke to find the dawn light coming through the windows. She watched Granny hobble around the room, stoking the fire and murmuring to Toby, casting the odd glance at Oona and the chair. She was never long out of it and was probably missing it.

Victor, meanwhile, would be injured and alone, quite unaware of Stuart whipping up hatred in the Smokehouse, gathering a rabble of islanders with fishhooks and torches...

She stood, wincing at the ache in her back. “I must go, Granny. I must warn the doctor.”

“I’m sure Doctor Frankenstein can look after himself, all the trouble he’s brought. And what about you, poorly as you are? You might run into Stuart again and then what will happen?”

“I don’t think he’s lying in wait for me, but in any case, I can’t skulk here hiding.” Oona picked up her shawl. It was still hard to breathe. “Then he’d have won.”

“You’re a stubborn lassie.” Granny frowned. “Just like me.” The last word caught in her throat. “Your shawl’s tangled. Here.” She straightened the worn cloth around Oona’s shoulders and her hands were as frail as blossom petals. “Take care at the doctor’s. You haven’t known him long. Can you trust him to be a good man, as you said?”

“Aye Granny, I can.” Oona opened the door and felt the morning air knock into her like a pail of ice water, purifying her.



The burn was one of two places on the island where a gathering of trees could be found. Crouched in the swaying boughs of willows were small birds hidden in bowers of green leaves. They trilled as Oona trudged down the hill with Victor’s sheets and shirts in a basket on her hip. It had been a relief to go to the big house and find him in the music room just woken, bruised but otherwise unscathed, with Orpheus sitting in his lap clucking contentedly. She made sure to lock the doors and windows before she left.

Under the willows, women scrubbed their linen and sang. They were as small and grey as willie wagtails from where Oona was and she felt a rush of affection, not for any one woman, more for the thought of working beside them. Every so often a song arose as it did at harvest time when the women took their sickles to the fields. It was best to pound laundry with a song in your head. Then the burn’s rattle and the rhythm of cloth on stone were more than empty noises. They were fiddle and drum for the song on your lips that drowned the sound of your life slipping off down-stream.

Oona saw an empty spot on the bank in between Joan Umbesetter and Janice of Flett. It would be good to kneel between women, safe somehow, as if Stuart and the hooded man couldn’t hurt her there. She knelt and placed her basket down beside her.

Chatter tailed off. A woman’s song died mid-note. Oona nodded a hello at Janice of Flett. Instead of nodding back, Janice dragged the dead weight of wet clothes into her basket, lumped them onto her hip and walked off. Frowning, Oona pulled out a sheet and plunged it into the burn’s dark water.

Shivering beneath her, the water told her the reason Janice left - that black smudge round her eye. Janice probably knew her brother had done it. Edith too. Oona wished she had friends enough that they would come to her and offer comfort, sisterhood, as May would have done and as all these women would have done for May. Under the burn, the knobs of her wrists turned to hailstones.

When the sheet was sodden through, she hefted it up onto a flat stone and reached for the next. Down the bank from her, Joan rose clumsily to her knees. Oona caught her eye and smiled. Joan turned her head sharply away. From that moment until she was upright with her hamper on her hip, she kept her eyes averted. Oona stared at the slack, white twist of her neck with a sinking feeling. Janice’s guilt couldn’t have made Joan avoid her eyes. Some other stone had been hurled into the burn, making Janice leave, then Joan, then all of the women. One by one, they got up and flapped the water from a sheet or wrung out a shirt, folded up things for their baskets and left with their lips pursed and their necks turned. Though the birds in the branches stayed where they were and chattered on.

In the end, only Bridget was left washing the rags for her bundle, quite unaffected by whatever was in the air. They knelt and scrubbed and pounded in silence, each woman keeping her own reflection company. Oona drowned another sheet in the icy current and her lopsided self with its black eye and swollen lip faded from view. The world was nothing but a billowing stretch of cloth and the floating red berries of her knuckles, then up and out and today, a certain pleasure felt from pounding cloth on rock. Squinting her eyes, she could see Stuart’s face thumping onto the flat stone, his look of surprise.

She was reaching for the last sheet in the basket when she felt breath on her cheek and saw knobbledy feet being dangled into the burn.

“I’ve washed all the clouts for my wee’un.”

Oona smiled. “Now he’ll be neat as a new pin.”

“Aye.” Bridget cradled the air against her breast, a soppy look in her eyes. “I ken. I ken.”

“What do you ken?”

“That all the folks say he’s not real.”

Oona felt a twinge of guilt. She’d said the same things about Bridget as everyone else. For the first time, she wished she hadn’t. She pulled a scrunched shirt from the basket and plunged it into the burn.

“I ken. I ken. I ken he’s not real.”