Beyond the Pale: A fantasy anthology (30 page)

I laughed as Shakespeare tumbled from his
lips. Alec could always make me laugh. “Pax,” I said.

He reached over, took my hand, gave it a
squeeze. “Pax.” Then he dropped it again as we walked along the beach, a
comfortable silence between us.

The tide had just turned and was heading
out. Gulls, like satisfied housewives, sat happily in the receding waves. One
lone boat was on the horizon, a small fishing boat, not the yacht I had seen
earlier, which must already be coming into its port. The sky was that wonderful
spring blue, without a threatening cloud, not even the fluffy Babylonians, as
the fishermen called them.

“Shouldn’t you be out there?” I said,
pointing at the boat as we passed by the smoky fish-curing sheds.

“I rarely get out there anymore,” he
answered, not looking at me but at the sea. “Too busy until summer. And why old
man Sinclair is fishing when the last of the winter herring have been hauled
in, I canna fathom.”

I turned toward him. “Too busy with what?”

He laughed. “Och, Janet, yer so caught up
in yer own preconceptions, ye canna see what’s here before yer eyes.”

I didn’t answer right away, and the moment
stretched between us, as the silence had before. Only this was not comfortable.
At last I said, “Are you too busy to help me solve the mystery of my father’s death?”

“Solve the mystery of his life first,” he
told me, “and the mystery of his death will inevitably be revealed.” Then he
touched his cap, nodded at me, and strolled away.

I was left to ponder what he said. Or what
he meant. I certainly wasn’t going to chase after him. I was too proud to do
that. Instead, I went back to the house, changed my shoes, made myself a plate
of bread and cheese. There was no wine in the house. Mrs. Marr was as
Temperance as Alec’s old father had been. But I found some miserable sherry
hidden in my father’s study. It smelled like turpentine, so I made do with
fresh milk, taking the plate and glass up to my bedroom, to read some more of
my father’s journals until it was time to bury him.

~

It is not too broad a statement to say that
Father was clearly out of his mind. For one, he was obsessed with local
witches. For another, he seemed to believe in them. While he spared a few
paragraphs for Christian Dote, St Monans’s homegrown witch of the 1640s, and a
bit more about the various Anstruther, St Andrews, and Crail
trials—listing the hideous tortures, and executions of hundreds of poor old
women in his journal entries—it was the earlier North Berwick crew who
really seemed to capture his imagination. By the third year’s journal, I could
see that he obviously considered the North Berwick witchery evil real, whereas
the others, a century later, he dismissed as deluded or senile old women, as
deluded and senile as the men who hunted them.

Here is what he wrote about the Berwick
corps: “
They were a scabrous bunch, these ninety greedy women and six men,
wanting no more than what they considered their due: a king and his bride dead
in the sea, a kingdom in ruins, themselves set up in high places
.”

“Oh, Father,” I whispered, “what a noble
mind is here o’erthrown,” For whatever problems I’d had with him—and they
were many—I had always admired his intelligence.

He described the ceremonies they indulged
in, and they were awful. In the small North Berwick church, fueled on wine and
sex, the witches had begun a ritual to call up a wind that would turn over the
royal ship and drown King James. First they’d christened a cat with the name of
Hecate, while black candles flickered fitfully along the walls of the apse and
nave. Then they tortured the poor creature by passing it back and forth across
a flaming hearth. Its elf-knotted hair caught fire and burned slowly, and the
little beastie screamed in agony. The smell must have been appalling, but he
doesn’t mention that. I once caught my hair on fire, bending over a stove on a
cold night in Cambridge, and it was the smell that was the worst of it. It
lingered in my room for days.

Then I thought of my own dear moggie at
home, a sweet orange-colored puss who slept each night at my bedfoot. If anyone
ever treated her the way the North Berwick witches had that poor cat, I’d be
more than ready to kill. And not with any wind, either.

But there was worse yet, and I shuddered
as I continued reading. One of the men, so Father reported, had dug up a corpse
from the church cemetery, and with a companion had cut off the dead man’s hands
and feet. Then the witches attached the severed parts to the cat’s paws. After
this they attached the corpse’s sex organs to the cat’s. I could only hope the
poor creature was dead by this point. After this desecration, they proceeded to
a pier at the port of Leith where they flung the wee beastie into the sea.

Father wrote: “
A storm was summarily
raised by this foul method, along with the more traditional knotted twine. The
storm blackened the skies, with wild gales churning the sea. The howl of the
wind could be heard all the way across the Firth to Fife. But the odious crew
had made a deadly miscalculation. The squall caught a ship crossing from
Kinghorn to Leith and smashed it to pieces all right, but it was not the king’s
ship. The magic lasted only long enough to kill a few innocent sailors on that
first ship, and then blew itself out to sea. As for the king, he proceeded over
calmer waters with his bride, arriving safely in Denmark and thence home again
to write that great treatise on witchcraft,
Demonology
, and preside over
a number of witch trials thereafter.”

I did not read quickly because, as I have
said, parts of the journal were in a strange Latin and for those passages I needed
the help of the dictionary. I was like a girl at school with lines to translate
by morning, frustrated, achingly close to comprehension, but somehow missing
the point. In fact, I did not understand them completely until I read them
aloud. And then suddenly, as a roiled liquid settles at last, all became clear.
The passages were some sort of incantation, or invitation, to the witches and
to the evil they so devoutly and hideously served.

I closed the journal and shook my head.
Poor Father. He wrote as if the witchcraft were fact, not a coincidence of
gales from the southeast that threw up vast quantities of seaweed on the shore,
and the haverings of tortured old women. Put a scold’s bridle on me, and I
would probably admit to intercourse with the devil. Any devil. And describe him
and his nether parts as well.

But Father’s words, as wild and
unbelievable as they were, held me in a kind of thrall. And I would have
remained on my bed reading further if Mrs. Marr hadn’t knocked on the door and
summoned me to his funeral.

She looked me over carefully, but for once
I seemed to pass muster, my smart black Cambridge dress suitable for the
occasion. She handed me a black hat. “I didna think ye’d have thought to bring
one.” Her lips drew down into a thin, straight line.

Standing before me, her plain black dress
covered at the top by a solemn dark shawl, and on her head an astonishing hat
covered with artificial black flowers, she was clearly waiting for me to say
something.

“Thank you,” I said at last. And it was true,
bringing a hat along hadn’t occurred to me at all. I took off the bandeaux, and
set the proffered hat on my head. It was a perfect fit, though made me look
fifteen years older, with its masses of black feathers, or so the mirror told
me.

Lips pursed, she nodded at me, then
turned, saying over her shoulder, “Young Mary McDougall did for him.”

It took me a moment to figure out what she
meant. Then I remembered. Though she must be nearer sixty than thirty, Mary
McDougall had been both midwife and dresser of the dead when I was a child. So
it had been she and not Mrs. Marr who must have washed my father and put him
into the clothes he’d be buried in.
So Mrs. Marr missed out on her last
great opportunity to touch him
, I thought.

“What do I give her?” I asked to Mrs.
Marr’s ramrod back.

Without turning around again, she said,
“We’ll give her all yer father’s old clothes. She’ll be happy enough with
that.”

“But surely a fee…”

She walked out of the door.

It was clear to me then that nothing had
changed since I’d left. It was still the nineteenth century. Or maybe the
eighteenth. I longed for the burial to be over and done with, my father’s
meager possessions sorted, the house sold, and me back on a train heading
south.

~

We walked to the kirk in silence, crossing
over the burn which rushed along beneath the little bridge. St Monans has
always been justifiably proud of its ancient kirk and even in this dreary
moment I could remark its beauty. Some of its stonework runs back in an
unbroken line to the thirteenth century.

And some of its customs, I told myself
without real bitterness.

When we entered the kirk proper, I was
surprised to see that Mrs. Marr had been wrong. She’d said not many would come,
but the church was overfull with visitants.

We walked down to the front. As the major
mourners, we commanded the first pew, Mrs. Marr, the de facto wife, and me, the
runaway daughter. There was a murmur when we sat down together, not quite of
disapproval, but certainly of interest. Gossip in a town like St Monans is everybody’s
business.

Behind us, Alex and Dr. Kinnear were
already settled in. And three men sat beside them, men whose faces I
recognized, friends of my father’s, but grown so old. I turned, nodded at them
with, I hope, a smile that thanked them for coming. They didn’t smile back.

In the other pews were fishermen and
shopkeepers and the few teachers I could put a name to. But behind them was a
congregation of strangers who leaned forward with an avidity that one sees only
in the faces of vultures at their feed. I knew none of them and wondered if
they were newcomers to the town. Or if it was just that I hadn’t been home in
so long, even those families who’d been here forever were strangers to me now.

Father’s pine box was set before the altar
and I kept my eyes averted, watching instead an ettercap, a spider, slowly
spinning her way from one edge of the pulpit to the other. No one in the town
would have removed her, for it was considered bad luck. It kept me from
sighing, it kept me from weeping.

The minister went on for nearly half an
hour, lauding my father’s graces, his intelligence, his dedication. If any of
us wondered about whom he was talking, we didn’t answer back. But when it was
over, and six large fishermen, uneasy in their Sunday clothes, stood to shoulder
the coffin, I leaped up with them. Putting my hand on the pine top, I
whispered, “I forgive you, Father. Do you forgive me?”

There was an audible gasp from the
congregation behind me, though I’d spoken so low, I doubted any of
them—not even Alec—could have heard me. I sat down again, shaken
and cold.

And then the fishermen took him off to the
kirkyard, to a grave so recently and quickly carved out of the cold ground, its
edges were jagged. As we stood there, a huge black cloud covered the sun. The tide
was dead low and the bones of the sea, those dark grey rock skellies, showed in
profusion like the spines of some prehistoric dragons.

As I held on to Mrs. Marr’s arm, she
suddenly started shaking so hard, I thought she would shake me off.

How she must have loved my father
,
I thought, and found myself momentarily jealous.

Then the coffin was lowered, and that
stopped her shaking. As the first clods were shoveled into the gaping hole, she
turned to me and said, “Well, that’s it then.”

~

So we walked back to the house where a
half dozen people stopped in for a dram or three of whiskey—brought in by
Alec despite Mrs. Marr’s strong disapproval. “There’s a Deil in every mouthful
of whiskey,” she muttered, setting out the fresh baked shortbread and sultana cakes
with a pitcher of lemonade. To mollify her, I drank the lemonade, but I was the
only one.

Soon I was taken aside by an old
man—Jock was his name—and told that my father had been a great
gentleman though late had turned peculiar. Another, bald and wrinkled, drank
his whiskey down in a single gulp, before declaring loudly that my father had
been “one for the books.” He managed to make that sound like an affliction. One
woman of a certain age who addressed me as “Mistress,” added, apropos of
nothing, “He needs a lang-shankit spoon that sups wi’ the Deil.” Even Alec,
sounding like the drone on a bagpipes, said “Now you can get on with your own
living, Jan,” as if I hadn’t been doing just that all along.

For a wake, it was most peculiar. No
humorous anecdotes about the dearly departed, no toasts to his soul, only
half-baked praise and a series of veiled warnings.

Thank goodness no one stayed long. After
the last had gone, I insisted on doing the washing up, and this time Mrs. Marr
let me. And then she, too, left. Where she went I wasn’t to know. One minute
she was there, and the next away.

I wondered at that. After all, this was
her home, certainly more than mine. I was sure she’d loved my father who, God
knows, was not particularly loveable, but she walked out the door clutching her
big handbag, without a word more to me; not a goodbye or “I’ll not be long,” or
anything. And suddenly, there I was, all alone in the house for the first time
in years. It was an uncomfortable feeling. I am not afraid of ghosts, but that
house fairly burst with ill will, dark and brooding. So as soon as I’d tidied
away the dishes, I went out, too, though not before slipping the final journal
into the pocket of my overcoat and winding a long woolen scarf twice around my
neck to ward the chill.

~

The evening was drawing in slowly, but
there was otherwise a soft feel in the air, unusual for the middle of March.
The East Neuk is like that—one minute still and the next a flanny wind
rising.