THE BOOK OF LEAH

Tuesday night, I knocked on her door.

‘I’ve brought a bottle,’ I said, holding out the small, stout vessel – empty now.

‘Did it work?’ she asked. She knew the answer. The skin on my knees was as perfect as it had ever been; old netball injuries from the schoolyard left more lasting marks. Margaritte had allowed me to emerge unblemished from what I’d done. I might even pretend it had never happened.

‘So,’ she said, taking the bottle from me, ‘are you coming in?’

We drew the curtains, lit incense and settled down opposite one another across the green baize. Margaritte leaned heavily on the table as she lowered herself into her seat, wincing at the movement, cursing the cold of December. I looked up unthinkingly for a clock, as if the face of one might tell me where the year had gone.

We worked through our experiences of the recent storms, giving an inventory of the plants in our window boxes that had survived the onslaught, and then, these topics exhausted, she asked, ‘What brings you to me, then?’

‘Tuesday nights are our night,’ I replied.

I smiled, thinking this was enough, that we would not speak of it anymore, that line we crossed when we were last together in my front room, how she had reached within me – seen me. This was the Larkian way. We avoided difficult subjects, lifted the carpet, swept them beneath, carried on.

Margaritte took up the cards from their wooden box, freeing them from their scrap of coloured silk. She shook her head.

‘It was difficult for you to come here.’ She looked up from her unwrapping to see my smile falter. ‘Let’s not pretend it wasn’t.’

With one deft movement of the wrist, she fanned the cards across the table.

‘I had a crisis of the soul,’ I told her, ‘that’s all. But I have decided now that I am going to believe.’

She nodded – a sign that I was to go on.

It should be an effortless task, I explained – to believe – I was merely out of practice. I needed only to remind myself of the good book and how straightforward it was to put one’s faith in that. This skill was surely transferable. Universal, even. I could apply it to every story I was told. For example, if a man came and sat next to me in the midday quiet of the chapel and said that he knew nothing of the girls’ tattoos until I had asked for those bandages to be removed, or if he swore that he had been teaching them science – only science! – then wasn’t I at liberty to believe him? If the story seemed like a noble one, with love and truth at its heart, I was surely duty-bound to put my trust in it. One decision, no going back, no questions.

Margaritte drew the cards into a pile and signalled for me to cut. She wanted more.

I told her that my love for Ben was stronger than my suspicion; that my lack of confidence in him – in myself – seemed unfathomable now.

‘How could I think that he was capable of such terrible things, think that all of this…’ I gestured to the burning incense and the cards in her hand – here was the apology that was most overdue. ‘That this constituted witchcraft!’ I gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘I was thinking like a child!’

Margaritte shrugged. ‘But we are all still children, deep down,’ she said.

I ploughed on, a preacher of wild conviction, telling her how I was back in my stride in the classroom, feeling stronger than ever. When Miriam Calder had launched into a scissoring attack on Dellie Leven in the staff room, questioning Dellie’s judgement during one of Mr Crane’s absences, I had stepped in.

‘That is none of your business, Miriam,’ I’d told her crisply. ‘You are the school administrator and you work for us, not vice versa.’

Miriam stole away to her office and Ruth French started a round of applause – one that Miriam must have heard.

Margaritte nodded in acknowledgement of my account, a basic receipt in return in for its telling.

‘And did your Knight of Cups applaud too?’ she asked.

‘Sorry?’ I took a large of gulp of wine and let my breath catch up with me. The certainty and the triumph I had talked of were all of a sudden gone, scared away by the passion that I’d used to describe them.

‘Ben Hailey – your Knight of Cups,’ she asked again, ‘did he applaud?’

‘He wasn’t there,’ I told her. ‘He was out on a field trip with the Eldest Girls.’ I resisted the urge to ask what she was implying; I shied from it.

Margaritte dealt a small cross of cards onto the green.

‘I like those girls very much,’ she said.

‘So do I,’ I replied – a lie, and not the first time I’d told it, if only by omission.

When Ben and I had sat alone in the chapel, reunited in that pew, he’d expressed worry for the Eldest Girls. They seem fearful of what life will be like for them now that they are almost grown-up, he’d explained to me.

‘I am just as protective of them as you are,’ he’d said, squeezing my hand, and I didn’t correct him, didn’t admit that I had, in recent weeks, wished those girls away. This would have been too terrible a thing to say out loud and too easily misunderstood. It wasn’t that I hated them or wanted any misfortune to befall them, only that I could hardly bear the way they made me feel – like I did not understand my own mind, not just about Ben, but about Lark, about life. It was as if these girls, who should know nothing compared to me, knew everything.

‘They’re our future, the Eldest Girls,’ Margaritte went on, as if she could see my thoughts and was nudging them into line. She tapped each of the cards in my spread, neatening the cross. ‘They’ll be the ones to save us, you mark me.’

I snorted. Save us from what? was the question that rose within but I pushed it down; I hid from it.

‘So…’ she looked down at the spread ‘…you have decided to put your unquestioning faith in Ben.’

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘Yet here you are with questions nonetheless.’

I opened my mouth to object, closed it.

When I eventually spoke, I did so quietly. ‘It will be the last time,’ I said. ‘I promise.’ I didn’t know who I was promising this to – myself, Margaritte, the forces that made the cards land the way they did. ‘Just let me know that I am right to trust him.’

She gave me a sympathetic glance, said, ‘He that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed’ – quoting from the Epistle of James. Then she started turning those cards face-up.

First came the Eight of Cups, telling me what I already knew: that I must turn my back on a way of being, a way of feeling, liberate myself but not lose hope.

Next, the Lovers, marking the challenge that would cross my path: a choice between the holy and the temporal, the teachings of my youth or the possibilities of the future.

The Tower followed this: a symbol of ruin. A structure I had come to rely on would be razed to the ground.

And my guide through the aftermath? The Two of Swords: a blindfolded woman sitting at the water’s edge, her weapons crossed protectively at her chest, unwilling to see, unwilling to know – for now. A difficult balancing act lay ahead, before I could be gifted a final truth.

The last card – more swords, three of them piercing a heart.

Margaritte sat back and sighed. ‘Our deepest fears,’ she said. Then, ‘Death, more death.’

I had been a guest at that table enough times to know that hanged men and punctured hearts were not to be read literally. Even the death card itself, with its skeleton riding a horse into town, didn’t necessarily mean a life would be lost. These cards indicated an end, one that might involve pain and struggle, but one that also offered the possibility of a brilliant, new beginning.

Margaritte’s eyes were red. A tear slipped down the creases of her cheek.

‘We lost ten men fifteen summers ago,’ she said.

I pushed away from the table, confused, perhaps a little scared.

‘I know,’ I replied, ‘but what’s that got to do with –’

‘I think we might lose more.’

‘Right.’ I had no idea why this should show itself in my cards; there were no fishermen in our family. ‘And you think another boat will go down?’

Margaritte shook her head. ‘You weren’t there.’

‘I was there,’ I replied. ‘I do remember.’

I had seen the reverberations at least. I was twelve years old. I understood what the small boats were searching for – wreckage. The wives stood at a safe distance on the East Bay, praying for the tide to be charitable and return the bodies. One of the women started up a call-and-return folk song about hearts dissolved by salt – Come back, my bonny boy, turn back. A ceremony on the cobbles followed in the weeks afterwards, my father part of a choir of men singing ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’, those voices so deep they vibrated within me, as if I was singing too.

Paul had brought up the accident at the breakfast table some time later and Dad had rapped him hard across the knuckles with a spoon, told him: ‘We don’t speak of men who are taken by the sea.’

Then Mary Ahearn was at our door, come the summer’s end, uncharacteristically thin from her grief, a summer dress hanging loose across her collarbones, Jade-Marie in her arms, a baby with springy curls and fat wrists. Mary begged my father for work and when he said that he had nothing, that what she was asking for was unreasonable, impossible, she grew hysterical, threatening. My mother lifted Jade-Marie from her arms and placed the soft animal weight of her in my lap at the kitchen table, before leading Mary into the back garden to talk more privately. Jade-Marie had snuffled and blown bubbles, staring up at me expectantly with her green-brown gaze. So, I had sung to her, because that seemed to be the answer to everything then: ‘Lord of the Dance’ – we had just learnt the harmonies in Sunday School.

Here, my mind stalled. It couldn’t have been that song, the same one that Jade-Marie had, all grown-up, bellowed in chapel at the beginning of term. My mind was playing tricks.

I searched my memory for details that were definitely true.

The huge metal cross at the end of the harbour – that was real. It was still there, erected after a campaign by Jacob and Diana Crane, in memory of the drowned men, to protect the island from another fishing disaster. Single lives had been lost before but never ten men all in one go. Trawlers were usually crewed by four, maybe five. That there had been so many aboard one boat was unnecessary, maybe even dangerous. It must have been a time when we were more desperate for fish.

That harbour cross always nagged at me; I didn’t like it. It was ugly and ostentatious. A contradiction.

‘Not a man has died on the boats since that cross went up,’ Diana Crane liked to boast to whoever would listen, which meant that it was nothing but a charm to appease a magpie god, no different from a rabbit’s foot, or a hag stone, or the stroke of the mane of a black-haired virgin.

I don’t know how long I was lost to these reflections, but when Margaritte spoke, it felt as though I had been in a deep sleep and she was pulling me to its surface.

‘The cross wasn’t put there to stop bad things happening,’ she told me.

I leapt up from the table, red wine splashing across the cards. How did she know what I’d been thinking? My hands went to my scalp, as if I might stop her reaching in and seeing more.

‘The cross was put there to keep a story straight,’ she said. No more tears. She was dry-eyed and deadly serious. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

I shook my head.

‘Trust your instincts,’ she instructed.

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘okay.’ I backed towards the door, smiling because I wanted everything to seem fine, normal. I was lifting the carpet, sweeping it all underneath. ‘I’ll see you next week,’ I told her, leaving as calmly as I could.

That was the first Tuesday of Advent.

The goat was found on Saturday.