When I come to, Nana Merrimore, alerted by her cat, is kneeling, her hand around my wrist. Bracken clambers over my legs. I splutter. Nana sighs – a long, slow release of breath that makes me realise she’s been tracking my pulse. Fear burns bright on her face. So bright it might have frightened me at any other time or place, but I’m alive, aren’t I? My sisters answered my call and in testing me the lake has confided its secret. In my left hand, I’m holding a purple, heart-shaped stone, a hole in the middle.
‘Are you all right?’
I sit up gulping air. ‘The bird…’
‘It’s gone,’ Nana says.
Lifting me to my feet, she helps me back to Carbilly where she runs a hot bath in which she sprinkles oils of lavender and clove. My nightdress already in the bin, the stone on a window ledge, Nana plonks me in the tub and scrubs me clean of my adventure. My toes and nails free of grime, the slime on my legs brushed away, Nana towels me dry. She touches me slowly, tenderly while I wait for her fury to erupt.
I feel it whenever she touches me: coiled rage. And with each caress a crush of emotions I find hard to untangle. Emotions pumped by relief, which increase as she dabs behind my ears, my neck, my belly. She touches me as if she needs to know that every bit of me is intact.
When Nana’s satisfied that I am as clean as I ever can be, she cooks me a breakfast of porridge sprinkled with nutmeg and cinnamon. Porridge followed by a slab of Spanish omelette. We eat in silence, Bracken, a warm curve of tenderness at my feet, while Nana’s fury simmers.
She pours herself tea, then as an afterthought, offers to treat me to a bowl of hot chocolate. Its delicious aroma wafts through the kitchen settling in every nook and cranny of our home, beading the windows with droplets of steam. I watch Nana, her hand stirring a wooden ladle, as she slowly adds milk to melted chocolate. I watch and tremble at what I think I see: Nana’s rage smelted into a strip of steel sharp as a Samurai sword.
She gives me the chocolate and sits down.
She doesn’t wag a finger at me. She doesn’t need to. Not Nana Merrimore! She leaves me churning in misery until I begin to wonder if her anger will peak before I break. Should I say sorry first? Surely, she’ll have to say something eventually?
Just when I’m about to stand up and scream because there’s no way I can endure a moment longer, Nana says: ‘You are never, ever, to do that again, Linet, you hear?’
‘Yes, Nana.’
‘You could have drowned. I’ve told you time and time again, you are never to go anywhere near the whirl of the pool. I’ve told you and yet you did! Why?’
I try to explain. I try to tell Nana that I had, in fact, remembered her advice. Not only that, Bracken warned me not to venture deeper too. I do my best but my stab at truth fails to convince.
An eyebrow raised, Nana frowns, and my voice draggles to a whisper.
‘The lake insisted!’ I say. ‘I couldn’t help myself.’
‘So now you’re telling me you had no choice in the matter?’
I nod.
‘And your sisters? Did they know what you were up to?’
‘I asked them for help, Nana, and they came.’
Nana shudders, shaking her head.
‘They told me to let go. So I did. And then…’ I hesitate, puzzled by a new expression on my grandmother’s face. She gets up to clear the table.
Her back to me, Nana says: ‘Go on, Linet. Tell me what happened!’ Nana turns, hazel eyes searching mine for an answer: ‘What are you keeping from me, child? Did you see something?’
‘Nana, why are you frightened? I’m fine, really, I am!’
‘What did you see down there, Linet?’
I could pretend that nothing unusual took place this morning, but instinct and loyalty to my sisters pushes me in another direction. If you can’t be open with your teacher and guide, who can you be true to? Certainly not yourself! That’s what Nana says.
So I ask: ‘Haven’t you seen them, Nana? The women at the bottom of the lake. Haven’t they told you? Mama tried to drown me…’
Blood drains from Nana’s cheeks as a palm slams over her mouth. When she’s stopped trembling, she says: ‘Go on, Linet…’
‘They’re still there, Nana, and among them is someone who looks like you. Her smile reminds me of yours… When she touched my forehead, I saw what Mama did.’
Tears slide down my grandmother’s cheeks. She brushes them away and opens her arms. I run to her and she draws me in, swaying from side to side, while I cling to her.
Nana, my anchor, my lifeline, my teacher. I hug her. As she weeps, I sweep strands of silver hair from her face, and use the same words she does when I’m distressed: ‘It’s going to be all right, Nana. Nothing’s ever as bad as it seems. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And that’s a promise.’
Nana sniffs and dragging her fingers through her hair, pulls it up with a clip. ‘There!’ she says. ‘If there’s one thing I want you to remember, no matter how events unfold, it’s that your mother wasn’t herself when she tried to harm you. Unhappiness unhinged her. That’s why she left you with me.’
‘She won’t come back, will she, Nana?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Her hand in mine, Nana sits me down. ‘From what you’ve told me, I think what you saw in the lake this morning was the ghost of Hester Merrimore. Old Hester was one of us: a sharp-tongued truth-teller, the first woman in the parish to be accused of witchcraft and murdered for it.’
Nana shrugs as if that’s all there is to it. But there’s more, I can tell. A shadow lurks behind her eyes. She can’t look at me, can’t meet my smile.
‘What is it, Nana? Whatever it is, I want to know.’
She shakes her head, then relenting, sighs. She repeats the action – a single shake of the head – again and again until grudgingly, she says: ‘Very well, if you insist.
‘You may not like what I’m going to tell you, child. There’s always more to seeing a ghost than meets the eye, Linet. There are rumours and stories to consider as well as how that person died.
‘As you can imagine, Old Hester’s drowning wasn’t the easiest of deaths. Her friends and neighbours, encouraged by the local priest, tied her up in a woollen sack and threw her in the lake out there.’ Nana jerks her head in the direction of the drowning pool.
‘As Hester started to sink, a sign in those days of her innocence, the witnesses present held back. They wanted to be sure, you see, certain that she wasn’t in league with the devil. They waited too long. By the time they hauled her from the water and out of the sack, by the time they’d pummelled her chest and tried to breathe life back into her, Old Hester was dead.
‘She was innocent. Cleared of witchcraft, yet for ever remembered for crimes she didn’t commit. That’s how it is with Merrimore women. The gifts the lake gives us, gifts we practise daily and nurture, put us in harm’s way.’
Nana might have left it at that, if it wasn’t for a smell emanating from the pores of her skin.
‘Nana, why won’t you tell me what’s the matter?’
She bends over, kisses the top of my head and smiles her special smile, a smile as surprising as a cat’s lick of sunshine on a winter day: ‘Rumours and stories, child,’ she says. ‘It’s nothing to worry about, but people used to say that once a Linet-girl has seen Old Hester’s ghost, it’s more than likely that the oldest Merrimore alive will soon join her. That’s what they said a long time ago.’
It takes me a few seconds to grasp what she means – seconds for my pulse to quicken, my head to swirl. ‘You don’t believe that do you? Tell me you don’t. Please.’
She gives me that special smile again.
That’s when I ask: ‘Are you going to die, Nana?’