KINGDOMTIDE 2017And so, it came to pass – three became four. The red-haired girl joined the Eldest Girls’ number.
The women of the community had wished for it; they couldn’t say that they hadn’t.
Four corners, they’d talked of, four pillars, a wholesome union of love, faith, hope and luck – the allusions were endless. This would make the girls a balanced group, strong, with no need for their illicit rituals. Though what these women failed to see was that their belief in numerology was an illicit ritual in itself. It could not be trusted, and sure enough, as soon as three became four, doubt made its way in, as slippery as the eel.
The coycrock girl was not the right person to steer those girls back towards the light. The evidence had been there all along; they should have taken note. She loitered in fields, in alleyways and at the harbour. She had been caught meddling with Peter Cedars’ dogs and kept an animal of her own as a familiar, watching it defecate on the cobbles, tying up what it produced in little bags that she carried home for some mysterious purpose. She had been observed in the Provisions Store damaging the fruit. Clearly, the girl was in excellent health with all the wandering that she did, yet still she did not attend school.
The mother was also skiving, from the land and, more recently, from chapel. So many families over the years had applied for a place on the island and been rejected, including one with a trio of hardy-looking sons. What error of judgement had led the Council to choose the Kendricks?
The sympathetic proposed that Deborah Kendrick, an upright, practical and pious candidate, had simply fallen ill and was now struggling to cope. This hypothesis gave rise to panic. Was she battling a mainland disease, one that Lark immune systems might not have the armoury to survive? In the Provisions Store, whenever the woman showed her pale face – what you could see of it beneath those wild curls – she was given a wide berth. Hands went to mouths to avoid the inhalation of germs.
Dr Bishy was forced to schedule a talk at the Counting House to allay the islanders’ fears. It was held in place of the planned session for the public removal of the plaster cast from Andy Cater’s broken wrist, an event the young of the island had been ghoulishly looking forward to.
What Deborah Kendrick was suffering from, the doctor reassured those who sat forward on their chairs in the meeting room to hear, was not a deadly flu strain, or Typhoid. It was certainly not Ebola. The woman had a sickness of the mind, something common on the mainland, something not unexpected at her time of life, with no husband to care for, her childbearing done.
Women of a similar age in the audience shared wary glances.
‘But, be confident,’ the doctor continued, leaning against the raised stage at the head of the room to convey how relaxed he was about the situation, ‘these sicknesses are not sicknesses at all if left well alone, if they are not pandered to or the patient mollycoddled.’ Then he repeated the prescription he had given the woman herself. ‘The only cure is fresh air and hard work – which Lark, I’m pleased to say, is able to provide in bucketfuls.’
Meanwhile, the daughter’s influence on the Eldest Girls was starting to display its symptoms.
‘We refuse to do A Midsummer Night’s Dream as our A-Level text,’ Britta Sayers had announced in class one morning, with a flick of her long ropes of hair.
Dellie Leven was teaching them that afternoon, Mr Crane being indisposed.
A slim volume was pushed across the desk for Mrs Leven’s attention. It had a black shiny cover with a photograph of a white-shirted actor playing the titular role.
‘Doctor Faustus,’ Dellie read aloud, picking up the book.
Anna Duchamp quickly corrected her pronunciation – ‘It’s Fow-stus, miss, I believe, not For-stus’ – then she delivered a short summary of the play. ‘It’s about a man who sells his soul to the devil in return for knowledge and power.’ She said it so demurely, tucking her hair behind her ears.
The teacher immediately dropped the book at the mention of Old Nick, realising she’d grasped the wrong end of the poker. Dellie inwardly cursed herself. She always let the girls do this – bait her – whenever Mr Crane was away. She could never see these challenges coming or head them off at the pass. (‘Was it very painful when you first had sex?’ Jade-Marie had asked her during one lesson, apropos of nothing.)
It was Jade-Marie who spoke now, making a declaration of their intent. ‘We want to study it,’ she said, ‘and we also want to do it for the Easter show.’
It was traditional that the outgoing Sixth Formers gave a performance of their set text, a theatrical swansong before exam season began, and that set text was always A Midsummer Night’s Dream. With no students in the school year above them, the girls would, come Easter, have to don the fluted-sleeved dresses, the wire wings and the papier-mâché ass’ head to give the island its annual show. Come the Easter after that, they would have to perform it all over again.
‘No,’ Dellie Leven replied. She may have avoided confrontation with the girls in the past, turned a blind eye to their wrist bandages, for example, leaving it to poor Miss Cedars to uncover their tattoos, but on this, she claims, she was firm. ‘We will not be using that blasphemous book. Absolutely not. And think how disappointed the little ones will be, come Easter, if they don’t get to see The Mechanicals.’
Dellie’s only error, perhaps, was not to confiscate the offending book, not to notice when Britta Sayers slid it back into her bag. She might have demanded it from them later, if the girls hadn’t returned so diligently to their discussions of meddling fairies, debating the rights and wrongs of making Titania fall in love with a donkey, and more earnestly, the reasons why the young people in the play decided that what happened to them should be considered a dream.
It was Saul Cooper who was challenged on the matter of the intruding play text. His log of the Kendricks’ incoming property had them arriving with an embarrassment of books. Had the Customs Officer checked every title? Could he swear on his ageing mother’s life that not a wrong one had made it through?
Yes, he said, yes, he could.
A likely story. Those who had, in the past, accused Saul of petty bureaucracy as they supped their beers in the Anchor, bemoaning his absence of light and shade in the upholding of the law, how he never let a damn thing past if there was a box that needed ticking, now called him a clock-watcher and a shirker, someone guaranteed to do the bare minimum, and decidedly less if no one kept an eye.
But all this was a wasted discussion, if you considered that the coycrock girl might not have given them the book at all.
She had held out an apple, cupped in the palm of her hand, as a welcoming gift when she stepped into that stone circle – not a play text – according to reports. Others had it as a pomegranate, for hadn’t the girl been seen trying to shoplift one from the Provisions Store? Wasn’t she often roaming through the nunnery gardens uninvited, sneaking into hothouses? The educated curate had once told the congregation the story of a goddess who ate six seeds from that fatal fruit, then found herself bound to the underworld. It wasn’t hard to see what the coycrock girl intended.
The other version of events was that she took them no gift all – gave them only the charm of her tongue.
The Eldest Girls cried out in surprise when the girl emerged from the undergrowth. The mists were known to thin a little in November, before the climate doubled-down, sending temperatures plummeting. The coycrock looked like an apparition in the drifting haze. Here was that minion of Beelzebub they’d been calling out for. Here was Bethany Reid risen from the dead, albeit with the wrong-coloured hair.
‘Who sent you?’ Britta Sayers demanded, for the girl did have the air of a reluctant messenger, pushed forward to speak.
The Eldest Girls could look majestic in their white nightgowns as they danced and called, but they cut ridiculous figures standing stock-still, caught out, their muddied hems dragging, their cuffs hanging lower than their hands.
‘I’m Viola,’ said the girl as she moved closer, across the peaty ground. ‘Hello.’
‘We know who you are,’ Anna had replied cautiously, ‘we’ve seen you in chapel.’
There was a pause, as the coycrock girl searched for a way to break the tension, deciding in the end to thrust forward a hand for the girls to shake – a gesture that could be seen as too late and too grown-up, but one that could also be oddly endearing. It softened Jade-Marie. She stepped towards the coycrock girl, catching her toe in the hem of her nightdress, falling forward with a ‘Sorry, sorry.’
Britta Sayers slapped their two hands apart.
‘Who sent you?’ she demanded again.
‘No one,’ replied the coycrock. ‘I’ve just been watching you and…’
‘Spying!’
‘No! No, not –’
‘She’s the one!’ Britta Sayers swung herself towards each of her friends in turn, hair whipping. ‘I told you someone was reporting back.’
‘It’s not me!’ The coycrock girl’s voice grew desperate. ‘It’s not me! I would never!’
Anna came closer, her tone cool, analytical. ‘Why should we believe you?’
‘Because…’ The coycrock girl was trembling, close to tears. ‘Because who would trust me?’ The Eldest Girls fell quiet at this. ‘They doubt me,’ she added, ‘more than they could ever doubt you.’
Jade-Marie spoke gently, wary of another of Britta’s slaps. ‘She’s from the mainland.’
‘We know!’ Anna sighed. ‘We get it! We understand what she’s trying to say!’
‘No, I mean…’ Jade-Marie adjusted her nightgown where it pulled at her throat. ‘I mean, she will know. She will know things. Just like we thought Mr Hailey would. We can ask her if he’s telling the truth.’
Anna and Britta looked to Jade-Marie, then slowly back at the girl. They bit their lips.
‘Who is Mr Hailey?’ asked the coycrock, nervous under their stare.
And this is where the tone changes, as if a new roll is loaded in the projector, belonging to a different film. The same actresses perform, in wholly different roles.
Accounts have the girls going limp at the knees as they describe the new teacher; they giggle, groan, their language a little oily, maybe hysterical. Oh, his eyes! they say. Oh, his golden hair! Have you seen the muscles in his stomach, and the size of his … Their tongues go sibilant. They are in a trance with their thoughts, reaching for the mounds of their own private parts through the cloth of their gowns.
They start talking of other men in a similar fashion. They grasp at the swell of their breasts, and even though they are wearing layers of school uniform beneath those nightdresses, the detail of their hardening nipples finds its way into the story as it is passed around.
I wonder, says one girl – Britta in some accounts, Anna in others – if that boy with the gun has something else as long and powerful as his rifle.
The girls scream at the idea, urging the coycrock girl to come nearer, to join them in their quivering huddle.
Have you ever done it? they want to know of her. Have you? Have you?
They reach out to touch the strange redness of her hair and stroke the freckles of her cheeks. At this juncture, some listeners want to know if the girls kissed.
‘No,’ says the teller, ‘because they didn’t know they were being watched. Girls only do that when they’re being watched.’
The coycrock girl was pulled into the Eldest Girls’ circle, subsumed by them.
This part of the story seems to hold up, even among its participants.
She had started speaking low and fast, the coycrock girl – like wizards do when communing with the dead, if the Book of Isaiah is to be believed. She told them all the things that she’d seen, all the things that she’d heard, all the things that she absolutely knew. Britta put an arm around her, Jade-Marie too, the sides of their oversized nightdresses becoming wings. They gathered her up, these seeming angels, and whether they laughed there in that close embrace, or sighed, or wept for one another, for all that they had endured, one thing was true, no matter the interpretation – three were now four.
Four became one.