The Monster's Wife(9)

“Don’t dilly dally.”

She let him take the egg from her open palm and scratched him between the ears as he broke the shell and lapped the sticky yolk with his rough tongue. Orpheus kept an eye on them the while.

Her skin twitched as if elvers nibbled at it. She walked to the croft, her new best friend trotting at her heels. No sign of Granny. She must have gone out on an errand, leaving a stack of dirty dishes by the pail. The basket of laundry still sat by the door, unfolded.

She set to the dishes, glad to find some form of penance. As her hands scrubbed and rinsed and scratched at a soup pot - her pale hands with their rough nails - she realised why she couldn’t leave the hand behind. She wouldn’t want her own hands or her own body to be left out there for the crabs to scavenge on. She upended the pot to let the water drain from it and picked up a knife. Its blade was stained dark red with beetroot juice. All it took was a swipe of the finger on one side and then the other to make it clean again, to remove the evidence. Wasn’t that what she had done?

Instead of telling someone what she’d found, she’d hidden a hand in a chicken coop, the hand of a girl just like her. She no longer felt anything like a heroine. Whatever the doctor had been hiding in those crates, whatever awful thing he might be covering up, she and May were both a part of it now.





8


The kirk bell rang for evening prayer. The sky outside was a deep red, scattered with small clouds, the kind May called Lamb Clouds. Normally, she’d be here and they’d lie and pass the pipe and jug, scanning the curdled sky for cloud faces.

Normally before the doctor came, anyhow. If Oona hadn’t grown so used to May’s absence over the past few weeks, she would have been worried. Standing at the window, half-heartedly drying spoons, her back ached from holding bad thoughts at bay: crates thrown overboard by moonlight; a girl’s hand washed up on shore; the people of Quoy armed with pitchforks and pandybats, swarming onto Granny’s land to take Oona away somewhere and punish her.

“There’s an awful fug of prattle over Quoy.” Granny’s voice ripped the fabric of her dark daydream.

“I’ve barely heard a peep,” she said crossly. “You made me jump. I didn’t even hear you come in.”

“Oona the dreamer. You should go abroad sometimes, see how your neighbours are employed.”

Her back turned to Granny, Oona permitted herself a roll of the eyes. “And how are they employed?” She hoped Granny would let the matter drop. She didn’t need it rehearsed again, unless it was with May.

“Well, down at the laundry pool, Mad Bridget said the Selkies were up to something, mischievous creatures.”

Oona laid down a spoon with a definite click. “There’s a story behind her being named ‘Mad Bridget’.”

“Don’t be pert, girl, and look at me when I speak. Your elders and betters deserve your respect.”

Oona took a deep breath, turned around, trying not to think of dead frogs, dead fingers. Invisible cords laced her throat. Granny’s hair had fluffed up the way it always did when she roused from her nap. Her hooded blue eyes were bright from the fever of loose talk afflicting Hoy.

“We paid no mind to her, and besides, Janice said it must be those Frenchies assaulting us with poisoned frogs to cut off our victuals.”

“They’re fighting the Sassanacks, not us. Why would they go to such lengths?” Her face was hot. She had no idea why she was scorning Granny’s notions, since if any proved popular it might clear her of guilt.

“Stuart called on us. He’d been in the Smokehouse—”

“Now there’s a surprise.” Oona picked up a dish. Her hand was shaking. She carefully set it down before Granny noticed.

“He observed that who else but the French would possess such a quantity of frogs? It’s a sign that they plan to invade us.” The puff had gone out of her. “I’m not frighting you, Oona?” Granny’s eyes followed Oona’s tremulous fingers.

“Not in the least.” Oona turned back to the window, hiding her tell-tale hands with her body. “I’m just sick of hearing about it.”

“I thought you hadn’t heard a peep?”

“Why is the kirk bell still clanging?”

“Evening prayer. It always—”

“It’s been ringing continuous.”

Granny gasped. “Hamish must have called a meeting.”

The kirk’s lime-washed walls caught the sun. Moss growing thick on the slate roof made it look like a white pot with a rusted lid. Squashed into the grass around it were herring bone rows of gravestones. Mother’s was a tiny pebble in the shade of the far wall.

Oona and Granny hurried past scraggly ewes and grown lambs grazing the moorland, their drift to new grass as slow as white foam in the firth. The big hill loomed above them, its slopes shrugging off the wrath of the wind and the endless crush of the rain, unmoved by each year’s fresh crop of bones falling under the hill.

As they neared the kirk’s clanging bell and the open door the people of Quoy nodded their hellos to Granny and she nodded back, but not all of them nodded to Oona. The more her fainting fits were spoken of in the valley, the less people liked to meet her eye. Or if they did, they frowned, remembering how Oona’s mother had been so fond of a céilidh until she couldn’t catch her breath to dance any more. How one fine June evening Granny found her lying by the burn and couldn’t wake her.