TRANSFIGURATION 2018The daughter said that the reward of sin is death. She said this about her own father.
His body was but six weeks in the ground and already she sought to condemn him, calling his demise a correction by the Lord. No other hand was involved in the too-early passing of Peter Cedars, according to this one-time beloved daughter of the Council, the man merely submitted to God’s mercy for his wicked acts.
‘Hearken unto thy father that begat thee!’ was the scripture wielded in response around the island’s tea urns.
‘Honour they father and thy mother, that thy days may be prolonged in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee!’ said those who really wanted to show off.
The curate with the spiky hair, if ever she bumped up against this talk, would come back with: ‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.’
She said this within the chapel walls, and she repeated it at the Anchor at the weekend, one eyebrow raised – an eyebrow that suggested, as heathens do, that the bible can be interpreted to prove just about anything.
She was challenged, of course, asked outright, ‘Are you contradicting the word of the Council?’
To which the curate responded with a question in return. ‘Is that what it sounds like to you?’
It felt dangerous, this way of speaking, the kind of behaviour that risked the full bell, book and candle – or a suspension at the very least. For that is what had happened to the now-not-so-lovely Miss Cedars.
‘It’s not a suspension!’ spat Susannah Cedars at the Provisions Store when she overheard Eleanor Springer filling in everyone on her daughter’s absence from school. ‘It is extended compassionate leave because the girl’s father has just died!’
Susannah Cedars, whose short hair was looking distinctly wild after missing the last two monthly hair salons, dropped her full basket of produce to the floor with a crash, bringing the store to a hush. She took in their stares, understanding that this was her own personal excommunication.
‘You vultures!’ she muttered as she walked away, abandoning her basket, smashed eggs and all. ‘You enjoy your taste of flesh!’
This outburst only served to strengthen the Council’s judgement: Leah Cedars was afflicted with a serious illness of the mind. As is the mother, so is her daughter. Turning up at the Counting House half-crazed, believing she had a right to speak as a member of the Council, appointing herself a conduit of God’s word, dragging with her a bewildered hostage in the shape of the red-haired coycrock girl… it was all very, very sad. The woman was no longer up to her job.
On the Monday evening, after the announcement that Miss Cedars’ class would be led by Mrs Leven until a suitable replacement could be found, the disgraced teacher had been seen thumping on Miriam Calder’s front door, almost wrenching the dolphin door knocker from its plate. The daughter’s hair was as wild as the mother’s, and she was dressed in a strange combination of an oversized man’s shirt and too-short trousers.
‘I was there!’ she was heard ranting at Miriam on her doorstep. ‘Why would you believe him and not me? I have it all recorded!’
She demanded that her version of the meeting’s minutes be published in the next Lark Chronicle.
‘Mr Crane supplies me with the minutes,’ Miriam replied firmly, as Miss Cedars pulled from her pocket a smooth rectangular something that she started flicking and tapping and cursing at, before thrusting it towards Miriam’s ear. (‘I truly thought she would strike me across the face with it,’ Miriam told everyone, after the fact.)
This exchange was brought to an end by Frank Calder, coming to the door with his walrus moustache and his wooden crutch for the wonky hip that kept him from working and going to chapel and any other number of commitments on the island, though it did not prevent him from frequenting the Anchor. He nodded for his wife to step aside and, letting his crutch fall against the porch wall, he took Miss Cedars by the arm and wrestled her away, back down the cobbled slope towards the harbour.
‘Remove the beam from your eye, Miriam!’ Leah Cedars hollered in her wake, as everyone on the southern elevation opened their windows and doors to observe the evening’s entertainment.
What people spoke of later was the eerie parallel between Leah Cedars’ removal from the Calder doorstep and Jade-Marie Ahearn’s ejection from chapel that first worship in September. No one spoke of the fishy miracle that had allowed Frank Calder, all of a sudden, to walk some distance unaided, grappling with a person much younger and fitter than he.
The next day, Lark woke to discover that someone had expressed their disapproval of Leah Cedars’ behaviour by throwing a can of red paint against the front of her harbour cottage. No one was condoning such an act; it was a terrible shame that the white-rendered face of that lovely little cottage had been spoilt, especially as it was likely to be given to someone new, now that Peter Cedars was dead and his daughter had acted in a way that made her, with all due respect, unmarriageable. (Had anyone seen the handsome coycrock teacher at her side amid all this drama? No, they had not.) But if a can of paint was what it took to stop Miss Cedars from shrieking nonsense on people’s doorsteps, perhaps it had been a necessary evil.
She was seen sounding off just one last time on the cobbles, in her pyjamas, as the sun rose and the red paint dried. Saul Cooper was at the sharp end of her tongue this time. He held her by the wrists as she came at him, demanding, ‘You must have seen who did it! Don’t give me that, you know!’
Then she disappeared. To the gamekeeper’s lodge it was presumed, where her mother lived. For now.
As for the Eldest Girls, their curfew still stood, their futures uncertain. Further enquiries were needed – further ‘examinations’ – according to the published minutes of the Council meeting that had been called to discuss Peter Cedars’ death and the issue of the mutilated heart (those decisions being reached after a hysterical Leah Cedars had been expelled from the Counting House).
Though the sword hung from a thread above their heads, it was widely reported that the girls had broken their curfew and returned to the stones, sneaking out at the dead of night.
Mary Ahearn, who some tentatively referred to as the gamekeeper proper, though no announcement of her promotion had been made, was heard in the Anchor at the weekend, stating loudly that she locked her doors and windows when she went to bed and kept the keys beneath her pillow. Rhoda Sayers and Ingrid Duchamp had taken to doing the same, Mary confirmed, ‘to ensure the girls’ safety’.
‘The only way our daughters would be escaping from their bedrooms at midnight is through the keyhole,’ said Mary. Her tone was flat and hard to read, but it was familiar – similar to how Cat Walton had spoken in seeming defence of Leah Cedars. There was a sense that the listener was being played with.
Girls can’t escape through keyholes, of course, everyone on Lark knew that, but witches could. Witches do.
The night before the Feast of the Transfiguration, the island following the Lutheran tradition and celebrating this in February, Cat Walton hosted a meeting at the chapel. The attendees were as follows: the mothers of the Eldest Girls, Margaritte Carruthers, Ruth French, Benjamin Hailey. No invitation was extended to Diana Crane or Elizabeth Bishy, to Eleanor Springer or Hope Ainsley, yet Reuben Springer, of all the hopeless cases, was seen scuffing up towards St Rita’s that night.
‘We were planning the upcoming Easter Celebrations,’ explained the curate in the Anchor after the event, pre-empting the expected objections. ‘We thought we should give other members of the community the opportunity to participate.’ Adding: ‘By that, I mean give the usual volunteers a well-earned break.’ For safety, she tagged on: ‘So they may wholly concentrate on their devotional fasts during Lent without the burden of extra responsibilities.’
At the service for the Feast of the Transfiguration, Father Daniel read from the Book of Matthew, telling how Jesus took Peter, James and John up into the mountains, his face shining. There, a voice from above had told the men that Jesus was indeed the Lord’s beloved son.
‘And Jesus came and touched them, and said, Arise, and be not afraid,’ said Father Daniel, lifting his eyes from the book, receiving earnest nods from the congregation in return.
The Eldest Girls were then ushered to the front, joined by the red-haired coycrock girl who had teased her fiery mane into a long, neat plait, and, like the others, wore a white chapel-best dress, clearly borrowed as it was too long.
All creatures of our God and king, they chimed, displaying their perfect harmonies once more, this time not hidden within the crowd. Lift up your voice and with us sing.
Mary Ahearn started the round of applause at the diminishing of their last beautiful note. Clapping was unusual in chapel, was considered de trop, so not everyone joined in, but those who did made enough sound for the rest. The girls, who were now closest to the altar, were first to receive the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Everyone saw the coycrock girl give a nod, red braid riding up and down her spine, before she made a throne of her hands and received the body of Christ with an Amen. They saw each of the Eldest Girls step forward after her and gently bow, opening their mouths and offering their tongues.
‘Amen.’
‘Amen.’
‘Amen.’
All four drank from the cup.
As the rest of the congregation queued down the aisle, waiting their turn, as the girls stepped humbly away, Martha Signal dipped close to Elizabeth Bishy and said, ‘Well, their bodies show no sign of rejecting the host.’ Her voice contained none of her customary deference to the doctor’s wife; perhaps it even exhibited a note of triumph.
This display of godliness, however, did not prevent the Eldest Girls from attending their Council-prescribed ‘examinations’. They were escorted, in turn, from St Rita’s to the clinic abutting the Bishy house on the southern elevation, a simple brick-built extension with a two-bed medical ward and a compact, carpeted consultation room that overlooked Elizabeth Bishy’s magnificent garden.
Andy Cater, as representative of the Council, was sent to the Reunyon Farmstead to demand that the Kendrick girl also be brought forward for examination, but he returned shamefaced and empty-handed. The girl hadn’t been there, he said; the mother had threatened him with a pitchfork was another version of the story that did the rounds.
Sister Agnes was asked, last minute, to chaperone the Eldest Girls to the Bishy surgery – an error in communication meant the mothers had not been aware of the appointment times, falling as they did during morning lessons. Sister Agnes elected not to accompany the girls into the consultation room itself – their privacy was to be respected – instead she watched them make their way to the far side of the clinic, then retired to Elizabeth Bishy’s immaculate front room for a hand, or four, of gin rummy until each girl returned from her time spent under the doctor’s care.
These examinations were to be of a psychological nature, with the girls’ best interests at heart, but would certainly be rigorous. The learned doctor needed to ensure, through careful probing, that their fascination with sorcery was just that – a passing fascination – and not an outlying symptom of something more serious. Their reactions on leaving his clinic – Anna, mute and dead in the eye; Britta, biting her lip till it bled; and Jade-Marie, weeping and shaking – demonstrated the deep shame they felt for meddling with that goat’s heart, an emotion the doctor should be applauded for successfully extracting.
Elizabeth Bishy relayed this outcome to the women of Lark as she sat, damp-haired, beneath the scissoring fingers of Hope Ainsley. The collected nodded their approval and went back to their reading of the Lark Chronicle and the various ageing editions of mainland magazines.
Except for Martha Signal.
‘Are you sure he didn’t check them in other ways?’ she asked. She got up and idly scooped a few fingersful of grey hair from the floor. These were cuttings from Mr Crane’s time in the chair, swept to one side now the man had gone. The men’s session at the salon was completed first, Mr Crane the last customer that day. Of the women’s session, Elizabeth Bishy always took the first slot.
Hope’s scissors stopped. ‘Checked them how?’ she asked.
‘You know,’ said Martha. She cupped the grey hair clippings in one hand and rubbed them between the thumb and forefinger of the other. ‘Extra nipples, bloody moles, strange warts, that kind of thing.’
‘Why on earth,’ said Elizabeth Bishy, her voice high, constricted, affronted, ‘would he want to do that?’
Martha Signal had winced a little at her choice of verb – to want to. ‘Because that would show that they have felt the devil’s touch, wouldn’t it?’
No one seemed to know how to reply. Eyes skittered from the powerful Mrs Bishy, reduced somehow by the limp wetness of her hair, to the short, dark wife of the island’s accountant, who had recently developed a new and bolder way of speaking.
Martha persisted. ‘And they hide things in there, don’t they? That’s what they say.’
‘What who says?’ Elizabeth Bishy’s voice broke. She fumbled her words. ‘Hide what in what?’
Martha’s palm closed around the hair cuttings.
‘Men say it, mostly,’ she replied obliquely, ‘I would imagine.’
‘Men say what!’ demanded Mrs Bishy, twisting in the hairdresser’s chair. ‘You come back here and tell me what you mean!’
But Martha had already put on her coat, dropped the cuttings into the pocket and exited the room.