The Sea House: A Novel (23 page)

Ropes and a horse were duly fetched from the glebe farm, and we followed in the beast’s sandy wake as it made its slow way up the beach, old MacAllister hobbling alongside me and still garrulous concerning his travels as a young man.

‘Oh aye,’ he continued, ‘there’s a lot more stranger things in God’s Creation than we give credit for. These, now, have seen many a strange thing,’ and he indicated his own prominent orbs. ‘They’ve seen flying fishes off the shores of Venezuela; and great clouds of light down in the night seas of Patagonia; and off the shores of Orkney, a Finnman who sank his little boat in a flash, swam beneath the sea and then came up again where least expected. The Finnmen get their powers from those Norway witches, you see.’

With so much demanding my attention, I found it difficult to properly follow his tale, but I asked him, ‘I hear that there have been sightings of mermaids or seal men along these coasts. Have you ever seen such a thing, Mr MacAllister?’

‘Not with these eyes, Your Reverend, not with these eyes, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I were to.’ He gave a nod to the Arctic dolphin now leaving a sandy furrow behind it. ‘We think we know everything,’ he said. ‘We think we know.’ He tapped the side of his nose.

After supervising the dolphin’s burial, I returned to the manse, this time taking the longer route round the machair fields. I went straight to my desk to jot down my notes, paying particular attention to those anatomical features of the mammal that might throw light upon the physiological adaptations of my sea people. Then I added a brief note on the old sailor’s stories, for my small collection of folklore.

But as I closed my notebook, I was left with an inexplicable feeling of disappointment, and it took me some moments’ reflection to locate the source of this low mood; it occurred to me that without Moira’s bright intelligence there to share in it, my discovery seemed unfinished and uncelebrated.

I stayed up late, searching out references to old MacAllister’s Finnmen, puzzled by his claim that their boats were able to pass beneath the waters for some distance. I did not see how this could occur without the vessel sinking, and felt that there might be something to be gained by understanding this account of a boat with the properties of a seal. I found no further articles to enlighten me on this point, but did establish that the Finnmen of his story were most probably members of an ancient aboriginal tribe living to the north of Norway and Finland.

I read until the small hours, hoping to cheat sleep into its blessed arrival, since the incidents of the previous few days had left me troubled and wakeful. Miss Marstone had failed to attend church on the Sunday following our visit to the fairy house. My cheeks had burned with a fiery heat that morning as I gave a sermon admonishing my little congregation to greater striving, all the while only too keenly aware that it was I, the minister charged with her soul’s welfare, who had driven Miss Marstone from her place of worship.

I had tried to resolve upon a satisfactory course of action, but either to call at the castle uninvited or to write a letter of apology that might fall into the wrong hands seemed unconscionable.

It was a relief to let my thoughts wander among my sea people, to almost hear their distant voices calling to me as they sat rocking upon the deeps – the half-glimpsed flick of a muscular tail as I turned my head and then nothing more than a ripple on the empty sea.

CHAPTER 25

Ruth

I was sewing curtains in the kitchen one morning, the rickety table shaking with the motion of the machine, when a horn sounded. Looking out, I saw the mobile library parked at the bottom of the track. The librarian waved from the window.

‘It did take me a while to find the sort of things you asked for, Ruth, but I think you’re going to be very interested in these. Now, this one on the top is old, so you will have to take great care of it. It’s a report on the islands by Vicar Brand for the Church Missionary Society in 1709. I’ve put a marker in where he records people’s tales of seeing Selkies and mermaids. Then all of these books here are collections of folk stories – lots of stories of sea people in those.’

I took the stack of books from her. ‘You’ve gone to such a lot of trouble. Thank you so much. I’ll bring them back in four weeks,’ I said, turning to go.

‘But wait, I haven’t given you the photocopy. I was so excited for you when I came across this.’

I shuffled the books under one arm as she handed me a photostat. Most of the page was taken up with a long list of names written out in Victorian copperplate. Several of the names were grouped in families, many with large numbers of children.

‘It’s Lord Marstone’s eviction order for the people of Finsbay, for all the men, women and children in the village.’

‘What a horrible man.’ I glanced down at two signatures at the bottom. One was for a Mr Stewart, bailiff and tacksman for Marstone.

But it was the second signature that stopped me dead in my tracks.

‘What’s this?’

She nodded. ‘It’s the only information on your Reverend Ferguson that I turned up. Disappointing really, isn’t it, that he should sign the order for eviction? You’d think he’d have had more heart.’

I stared down at the scratchy and jagged signature – writing done by the hand of Alexander Ferguson. I couldn’t believe it.

‘I always thought that if I met Alexander, I’d rather like him. But now I’m beginning to wonder.’

*   *   *

I carried the books into the sea room, where I was collecting anything to do with Ferguson’s time in a box file. I knelt down on the rug in front of the fireplace and opened the file. I leafed through the photostats of the mermaid baby that Professor Carter had sent. Under them was ‘The Story of Ishbel and the Seal Man’, along with several other diary-type extracts that I’d copied from Alexander’s notebook, as well as a copy of the letter to
The Times
and a tracing of his clumsy mermaid skeletons.

I’d also got hold of a rather dark photocopy of the picture of Alexander and his servants from the museum. Now I added in the photocopy of the eviction order.

I felt frustrated that I still couldn’t get a clear picture of just what had happened during Ferguson’s years in our house; I still had no real idea as to why the little mermaid baby had been buried beneath the floorboards. I took down the writing set and the brass lion paperweight from the mantelpiece and then I knelt back and surveyed my collection.

Michael came in. He was wiping his hands on a cloth, bringing the smell of turps. He shoved the cloth in his pocket and knelt down by me.

‘Quite a collection now. What’s the verdict?’

I gave him the copy of the eviction order to read.

‘Ferguson signed this?’

‘I know. Makes you wonder what he was like.’

Michael left a thumbprint on the paper when I took it from his hands, a trace of the linseed smell of cleaned paintbrushes.

‘Well, it’s certainly a lot more than I’ve got for my own history.’ I’d left a slim envelope on the desk with its six photographs inside. I kept it in the same drawer as my Ferguson notes.

‘When we first got here, I had a mad hope that someone was going to come up to me in the street one day and say, “Aren’t you Ellie’s daughter? We’ve been looking for you. Come on home.” Silly really, but there you are.’

‘You are home, Ruth.’

He leaned over and kissed the top of my head like a blessing.

It had been twenty days since I’d lost it with Michael on the boat. I thought, Come on, I can do this; I just need to keep vigilant, make sure I don’t get into a flap like that again; just stay sensible and reasonable; think about things before I react.

Twenty days of watching how I behaved behind me, a whole lifetime of vigilance in front, but I was determined not to slip up again, determined – and I was so, so tired.

*   *   *

We’d spent weeks wearing paint-encrusted shirts and grubby jeans, so it was fun to make a real effort for the ceilidh in An t’Obbe. Leaf and I dug out long dresses and pooled make-up.

We got there a bit late, but even so, the ceilidh didn’t seem to have started. No men visible, just girls and women. As we sat down by a poster of crofting regulations and a notice for a talk by the Temperance Society, it struck me how nearly all the girls chatting around the empty expanse of floorboards had that same straight black hair and white skin as Mum – and me.

For a moment, I had a mad impulse to go round the room and ask if any of the older women there might have lost a daughter, a girl who left for London one day, never returned, had a daughter of her own.

Michael and Jamie went to get drinks. Most of the men were still out in the lobby, gathered in a siege around the temporary bar; a couple had ventured halfway through the door. They wore white shirts, hair plastered flat and shiny – CalMac men straight from the ferry.

A man and a woman I hadn’t seen before came into the hall. He looked very much like a teacher, in rust-coloured cords and a green jumper. She was petite, with long, dark hair and sloping cheekbones; her hands were thrust into the back pockets of her jeans in that confident way some women display as they near forty. She stood looking around, quizzical and interested.

‘That’s the Montgomerys. She’s the new doctor at the surgery,’ I heard the lady on the next table tell her neighbour in English. ‘Not a real doctor though.’

‘Oh? What sort of doctor is she then?’

‘For people with problems up here.’ She tapped her forehead.

‘Well, she’ll have her work cut out in these parts then.’ The woman nodded over at old Harry, a grey-haired man in a grimy denim jacket who was clutching a carrier bag of beer cans and cheerfully dancing alone in the middle of the floor to the taped music.

‘Oh, but it’s a shame. My niece had the depression. It was bad. She had to have tablets for it.’

‘Yes, it’s a shame when people get like that. Of course, we never called it depression. Hadn’t been invented.’

‘We had hard work. That was our cure. And I hear that she’s an American, the new lady doctor.’

‘Fancy that. From America.’ They shook their heads.

I saw Mrs MacKay come out of the kitchen with a tea towel on her shoulder. She chatted with the Montgomerys for a while and then found them some chairs at one of the tables.

A tall man in a red waistcoat and jeans was walking across the floor towards us, tawny hair brushed and shining. For a moment, I didn’t recognise him, but it was Michael, all spruced up for the evening. I wanted to tell him how I’d just fallen in love with him all over again, but someone on the stage was running their fingers down the buttons of an accordion. Michael put down the drinks. He held out his hand, bowed, and we joined the ladies slowly waltzing in pairs around the hall.

‘I’d forgotten that dress.’

It was a long muslin thing that I hadn’t worn for ages, but it was gathered above the waist and so still fitted in spite of the bump.

‘I got the material caught in a bicycle wheel. I don’t think the mend shows.’

‘You look just beautiful.’

It felt tender and sweet dancing together again, like remembering a lost art. The dances began to get faster and more complicated. As we sat down for a break, I saw Christine MacAulay heading over towards us.

She sat down at our table and pulled her chair closer to mine.

‘Did you not get my message from Jamie the other day? Why don’t you drop by the house and see me tomorrow now? There’s something I want to run by you.’

I nodded. ‘I’ll try.’

Privately, I resolved to forget her invitation, not wanting to go through yet more unsettling speculation.

I was relieved when a ceilidh group from Skye crowded onto the stage. A boy began a thin, nostalgic tune on a tin whistle, and a guitar and violin joined with the melody. A drummer ramped up the beat, then a man in a kilt swung a fan of pipes on his hip and suddenly added a piercing wail to the mix.

As if on cue, the hall erupted, the dancing fast and manic. I watched a grey-haired fisherman, his eyes shut, leaping up and down like a salmon in the middle of a reel of dancers. And those pairs of lovely island girls, with their white arms and pretty faces, were getting wilder and cheekier at pulling the boys onto the floor, sometimes capturing Michael. I didn’t mind. Soon we would go home together. I would light candles along the windowsills in our room, leave the window open to the stars.

We left the hall towards one in the morning. The moon was so bright, it seemed plugged into its own source of electricity. Jamie threw the van into gear and we set out for Scarista, the tarmac in front of us nothing but a sinking ribbon of dark through sheened air. It was chilly now and I leaned into Michael’s warmth.

*   *   *

Michael was in bed and asleep in minutes. I went down to make a drink – couldn’t resist looking through the work schedules again. We needed a new delivery of lining paper; the order for curtain material in the guest bedrooms needed decisions. Since everything had to be shipped over from the mainland, it was important to get the orders right if there weren’t to be delays. As I sat working, I became aware that the baby had gone very quiet, no little thumps or judders; it was something that happened if I got too tired – less oxygen available for the baby. I needed to go to bed.

As I pinned the list back up, I wondered for a moment what it was that Christine MacAulay had wanted to tell me. I snapped out the kitchen light.

Crossing the hall in the darkness, I felt a knot of apprehension, even though I knew now that what had bothered me so much before had been some kind of internal panic and not some otherworldly manifestation. I paused at the foot of the stairs; nothing in the shadowy air but a dull sadness.

A rustle. Something made me look round, eyes travelling quickly over the empty space. And suddenly the horrible fear was flooding in again, my heart thudding faster, air constricted, my palms sticky and hot.

It was starting again.

Just the amygdala overreacting, I told myself. Something had triggered it – the dark, my imagination. I simply needed to stay still, wait for the nerve pathways to stop firing, wait till I calmed down.