And now the youngest sister, who preferred to take her afternoon nap in an armchair, said, ‘You may or may not believe it, but I too have had a most powerful and important dream.’
The eldest banshee sat up. ‘Was it... by any chance... a dream ...’ she hesitated, ‘a dream about a funeral?’
‘Yes, it was! It was!’ cried the other two. ‘That’s exactly what it was! It was a dream about a funeral!’
‘And was it in the north ... very far north, this funeral?’
‘It was indeed,’ said the middle banshee. ‘It was further north than you can get and still stay in England.’
The youngest banshee nodded. ‘In fact it wasn’t in England at all,’ she said. ‘When I think about it carefully, I see that it was in Scotland. In a small church by the sea.’
‘Such a bleak place,’ said the eldest banshee.
‘So windy.’
‘But beautiful. Unspoilt. Remote.’
‘Yes.’
For a few minutes the three sisters sat in silence, awed and humbled by their amazing experience. Of course, sisters who live together do often catch each other’s thoughts and even each other’s dreams, but this seemed to be more than that. It was as though they were being given a message from above.
It was not till they were drinking their second cup of tea from the blue teapot that the eldest banshee dared to ask another question.
‘Did this funeral ... did it go well?’
Her sisters put down their cups.
‘Oh, no,’ said the middle sister.
‘No, no,’ said the youngest one. ‘It didn’t go well at all. It was a disaster. An absolutely shocking mess. No wonder they were so upset. The undertaker should have been sacked.’
‘All in all, it’s a wonder how the poor things managed to go on with their lives at all.’
‘Though of course it wasn’t exactly their
lives
they went on with.’
There was a long pause. A very long pause indeed. Because by the time they got to their third cup of tea and the mists of sleep had left them, the banshees were realizing that their dream had not come to them out of the blue. It was only partly a dream. It was a dream about something they had once experienced. It was a buried memory which had come up while they slept. When they were young they had been to just such a funeral and seen the disaster that had happened there.
‘I knew we’d seen the poor things before,’ said the eldest banshee.
‘Me too. As soon as we met them at the gravel pit, I felt as though I knew them.’
All three sisters nodded their heads.
‘But the question is,’ said the oldest banshee, ‘what do we do now? Do we leave well alone? Or do we see what we can do?’
Her sisters sighed. ‘We’d better see how we feel in the morning,’ they said.
But they knew really. When a great wrong has been done to someone, it has to be put right. There isn’t really any doubt about that.
T
he last thing the children had wanted was to spend another night in the chapel.
‘We must get back
quickly
,’ said Madlyn. ‘They’ll be so worried about us.
’ But how?
They had come up to Blackscar in the warden’s car in a panic and in the night. Now they couldn’t believe they’d had the nerve to do it.
‘I’m worried about the clutch,’ said Mr Smith. ‘I don’t want to do any more damage.
’ But the matter was settled for them, because when they tried to start the engine nothing happened.
‘The battery’s flat,’ said Ned gloomily. ‘We’ll have to walk to the next village and get a bus, and then a train.’
Madlyn had taken some money from the Open Day tin before they left; there would probably be enough to take them some of the way at least, and when they were clear of the island they could phone Sir George.
There was a timetable tacked to the noticeboard in the church porch, and a map. There was one bus a day from a village called Seaforth three miles away, but they had missed it.
The ghosts were not sorry to have another night to rest. They had felt unwell and uncomfortable in the hotel. Perhaps it was the central heating, or Dr Manners’s toilet water, but Brenda said she had a headache and Ranulf’s rat was off his food. Not that Ranulf wanted to have his heart chewed exactly, but when you are used to something you are used to it.
But the real nuisance was The Feet. They had had to pick up The Feet by force and carry them to the island, and as soon as they got back they had run off to the tombstone labelled ISH again and dug their toes into the moss and refused to move.
They would have been angry at such bad behaviour except that The Feet were so worried and distressed. Every time they were told to come away from the tombstone, drops of sweat broke out all over their skin.
‘If it
is
sweat,’ said Rollo. ‘Perhaps it’s tears.’
The thought that The Feet were crying was of course very upsetting. ‘But we can’t just leave them here,’ said Sunita.
So all in all the ghosts were very glad to rest for another night.
And while they slept a boat chugged quietly into Blackscar bay and tied up at the jetty.
It was a forty-foot trawler, scruffy and battered, with knotted pine planking. It could have been any fishing boat, but fixed to the forward deck was a large harpoon gun.
The boat was a whaler and it was flying the Norwegian flag.
No one was up yet; it would be dark for at least another two hours. The sailors – rough-looking men – turned in to their bunks. Presently they would unload the cargo they had brought, but now they slept.
The Feet felt the slight vibration of the trawler’s engine as they lay under the tombstone, but they did not move. But Rollo heard the noise of the engine and woke... and crept out of the church and climbed up the grassy hill that gave a view over the whole island. The boat had come in, just as Dr Manners had said, to take the cattle to the promised land. He watched for a while; then, as the light grew stronger, he took out Uncle George’s binoculars.
It was a very small boat to transport a whole herd of cattle. It was really very small.
And something nagged at the back of his mind. Something about one of the men he had seen out of the window in Dr Manners’s room – a man he thought he had seen before...
The Mundanians were in their wooden hut, eating their breakfast of beans and fermented goat curd.
There were eight of them: a very old woman with a single gold tooth, a younger, buxom one, and six men, all living in a space the size of a caravan. The huts on either side of them housed chickens.
They looked tired, and the day that faced them would be as hard as all the others. Cleaning out the animal houses, incinerating the waste matter, humping heavy loads to and from the workshops... and other things that they tried not to think about.
Today there was an extra job – unloading the cargo which the whaler had brought.
The hut was bare and cold; the Mundanians could not afford proper heating and their food was what they could scrape from the soil. They were so poor that they could buy nothing, and in any case they were forbidden to go to the mainland.
Dr Manners had not been lying when he said that the Mundanians came from a very beautiful country high in the mountains of central Europe, and that they were of proud and ancient stock. But the Mundanians had not come to Blackscar because they had heard of Manners’s missionary work; they had never even heard of Blackscar. What had happened was that two years earlier a cruel dictator from a neighbouring country had conquered Mundania and started a reign of terror. He had forbidden the Mundanians to speak their language or have their own schools or practise their own religion, and when anyone protested they were imprisoned or killed.
So the two brothers, Slavek and Izaak had taken their family – their old mother, Slavek’s wife and four male cousins – and trekked across Europe to look for a place where they could live in peace. And after months of hardship they had reached Great Britain, thinking they would find a welcome there and a home and a chance to work.
They were horribly wrong. The whole family was shut up in a squalid and overcrowded camp surrounded by barbed wire and told they had no right to work and no permits and no papers and would be sent back to Mundania.
Twice they had been shifted to other camps that were even more crowded and wretched than the first. Then the third time they were moved they managed to escape, and it was as they were trudging the roads that a man had come and offered them work at Blackscar. Not paid work of course (they were not allowed to be paid) and work that was harder than any that was ever done even by the humblest peasant in Mundania, but they knew that if they complained they would be sent back to the camp. They were really prisoners at Blackscar and each day they woke up so wretched and sad and homesick that they did not know how they would bear it. But they did bear it. They had no choice.
So now they finished their goat curd and while Slavek and Izaak went out to fetch the cargo from the whaling ship, the old woman with the gold tooth piled up the dirty dishes.
But before she started on the washing up, she turned on the ancient transistor radio which one of the workmen had given them.
On the whaler they had started unloading. There were four long canvas bags – not a big load but valuable, incredibly valuable; the sailors expected to be paid an enormous amount of money, and they had earned it. The risks they had taken to get their booty had been great; if they had been caught they wouldn’t just have been fined, they could have been imprisoned.
Although the boat flew the Norwegian flag, the men were not Norwegians. They were crooks and riffraff from several countries, but they had one thing in common: they were hunters who knew the sea and cared nothing for the creatures that lived in it if they could make a profit by killing them. To get the booty they were now unloading, they had harpooned close on thirty whales – and not those whales that it was legal to hunt, but rare and protected ones.
The whales they had killed were narwhals, those shy and gentle beasts which live in the icy waters of the Arctic and are rarely seen by man.
Narwhals are not large as whales go, they are seldom more than five metres long. The Vikings called them ‘corpse whales’, not because they ate corpses – they wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing – but because of the blue-grey colour of their skins.
But though they are small, there is one thing about male narwhals that is extraordinary. Growing out of their foreheads is an enormous, single, spiral horn.
Because they are so rare and so amazing, narwhal horns have been prized throughout history. Medieval princes believed they could detect poison which had been put in someone’s food by an enemy. In Asian countries, doctors ground them up for potions and medicines. Carved narwhal horns adorned the palaces of kings.
And just as poachers will hunt elephants for their tusks and leave them to rot once the ivory has been removed, so the sailors who had come now to Blackscar had cut the horns from the narwhals they had slaughtered and thrown the carcasses back into the sea.
Dr Manners too prized narwhal horns – but not to detect poison or to use for potions. He wanted them for quite a different reason. It was a reason that nobody but him and his assistant, Dr Fangster, knew anything about.
Slavek and Izaak had begun to wheel the canvas bags up to the office beside the main laboratory. The bags were padlocked; no one was allowed to open them; what was in them was a strict secret, but the Mundanians were used to shifting loads they knew nothing about. When they were safely stored, and Dr Manners had examined the contents, he would arrange for the sailors to be paid.
They stowed the bags and went back to the hut to fetch their tools for the day’s work.
‘Good heavens – what is it, what is the matter?’ asked Izaak as he threw open the door.
The old woman was sobbing in one corner; Slavek’s wife moaned in the other. The four cousins, who should already have been mucking out the animal houses, were huddled over the radio. Their faces too were streaked with tears.
‘What is it?’ repeated Izaak. ‘For goodness’ sake, what’s wrong?’
The cousins turned from the radio, and wiped their eyes.
‘It has happened,’ they cried, throwing their arms round the brothers. ‘Oh, Slavek, Izaak – it has happened at last! That we should live to see this day!’
On the hill opposite the island, Rollo watched the boat. The sailors had finished unloading; soon now the cattle would go on board. Dr Manners had said they would be washed clean first, restored to their whiteness. Only how would they all fit in? Dr Manners knew everything there was to know about animals; he would not let them travel in cramped or unsuitable conditions; but all the same, the boat was small.
And what about the man who had walked past the windows of the hotel? Of course, he might have been somebody quite different, but if not...
From the doorway of the church, Madlyn called up to him.
‘Come on, Rollo. It’s time to go.’
They had packed up; anything they could not carry was locked in the car. It was going to be a long trek to the village.