Читать книгу Light - Margaret Elphinstone - Страница 15

CHAPTER 9

FLINT RASPED ON QUARTZ: STRIKE … STRIKE … STRIKE … A spark shot up, vanished. Stone on stone: strike … strike … strike … Sparks flew. A spark fell in the tin. Moss smouldered. A tiny fire sprang up, red as blood. Brown fingers picked up the flaming moss, held it to the wick, which sprouted a bead of blue, and then a proper flame, yellow and steady.

The huge dark retreated. The keeill was round them, close and solid, corbelled up to the slabbed roof. The roof was five big slabs like an upside down floor; the floor where they squatted was cold earth. The altar was a single rock with shining white pebbles scattered at its feet. The cross was propped against the east wall beside the altar. You could hardly tell it was a cross: its outline followed the curves of long-ago water over the stone from which it was carved. It looked like a giant gingerbread man with no eyes. You had to look closer to see the faint markings etched on its surface. An abandoned starling’s nest filled the aumbry on the south wall; the stones below were streaked with white. There was a faint chattering from within the walls.

‘Hark to that,’ said Billy, and held up his hand to make Breesha and Mally hush. ‘It’s the kirreeyn varrey. They’ve come back.’

‘Just,’ said Breesha, pleased. ‘It was all quiet two days ago.’ The warbling chatter stopped for a moment, and then started again. ‘That means it’s proper summer now. Not just spring.’

Sure enough, over the reek of earth there was a musky smell like ancient hay: that was Mother Carey’s chickens: the kirreeyn varrey, silent in the daytime, huddled on their invisible nests within the honeycomb of thick stone walls.

Breesha put the lamp carefully in its hollow on the green rock. The green rock was hard as iron and slippery-smooth, and in the lamplight it had a strange dark glow of its own. It had taken the strength of all three of them, a year ago, to roll the green rock from its place on the right-hand side of the altar into the centre of the keeill. You could still see the hollow in the earth where it had lain since the saint left it there. Billy hadn’t wanted to move it, but Breesha had said it was important to have the holy rock in the middle, so they could sit in a triangle round it with the lamp burning in the hollow in its centre.

Breesha held a sprig of bog myrtle in the flame, and watched it shrivel. The scent of myrtle mingled with the smell of singeing. Breesha laid the blackened twig on the green rock, next to the lamp. She made the sign against the evil eye, and Billy and Mally followed suit.

‘Now we can begin.’ Breesha always sat in what Mally thought of as the central place, with her back to the altar, facing west towards the low door. Mally sat on Breesha’s left and Billy on her right. If Mally turned her head to the left she could see a line of bright sunshine at ground level, just above where they sat, and she could hear the cries of the kittiwakes circling above the cliffs. It was reassuring to look at daylight. Once you’d crawled in through the entrance the ordinary world could begin to seem too far away. Breesha said that was all right, because the saint herself had lived here and so this was holy ground. Nothing could touch them, said Breesha; they were as safe as a goat kid inside its mother, always snug whatever storms raged outside. Mam said the same thing when she tucked them up in their beds on stormy nights, but that was in the warm house with the fire burning in the grate and the proper kitchen lamp shining brightly. Mally had never been inside the cold, earthy keeill when there was a storm. She never wanted to, either, saint or no.

‘I’ll tell you what the matter is,’ Breesha was saying. ‘Bad things are happening. There are bad things happening in the far lands, and the trouble for us is that they’re coming here. They could come any day, and once they do everything is going to change very fast.’

‘Yes, well,’ grumbled Billy. ‘There’s no point talking like a fairy story. You don’t really know any more than we do. What bad things? There isn’t a war on, is there? Finn would have told us about it if there was.’

‘Is it a buggane?’ whispered Mally, glancing towards the door. She wished the sun would start to reach in and touch her reassuringly where she sat. But it was still too early, and there was only the thin line of clear white light, as far away as the sky.

‘No, it’s not either of those things.’

‘Well, spit it out then,’ said Billy.

Breesha leaned forward. Her face glowed in the lamplight. Her shadow grew huge and flickered across the gingerbread cross so that its arms seemed to move. Mally looked firmly back at the doorway. ‘I found the letter,’ whispered Breesha, so they had to lean forward to the light to hear her.

‘What letter?’

‘I knew there was something. Something was wrong. There was something they weren’t telling us …’

‘Well, we both knew that. In fact first off, it was me that told you.’

‘Yes, but you didn’t guess it was a letter! But the thing is, it had to be. Because whatever it was happened after Finn went away last time. They were all right when Finn came with the coal last month. They were happy then.’

‘They were laughing,’ said Mally. ‘And Mam made a pudding with currants in it, boiled in the broth, and Finn stopped for a whole tide and had dinner with us, and they were laughing.’

‘Exactly! And nothing has gone wrong with the light, or the island, since then. We’d have known about anything like that. So what must have happened is Finn brought the letter and they didn’t read it till he’d gone. They read it after he went away.’

‘That’s silly,’ objected Billy. ‘They’d open it first thing, soon as they got it. I would. They always do, if there’s a letter. Mind when the letter came from the Duke’s agent about getting the new handcart? Mam opened that the minute it came, and talked to Finn all about it. Stands to reason she’d do that with any letter, because Finn would have to do the arranging about bringing anything.’

‘Ah but, I don’t think Finn gave her the letter when he came. I think he handed it over when he went.’

‘Why?’ asked Mally.

‘Because he’d know what was in it, of course, and didn’t want to talk about it. So he gave it when he was just leaving’

‘I don’t like that!’ cried Billy. ‘That makes Finn a coward, and he isn’t.’

‘Don’t blame me. I’m only telling it how it was – how it must have been. Anyway,’ added Breesha, ‘there are different sorts of coward. Don’t you want to know what was in the letter?’

‘Course we do. I told you before to spit it out! But I don’t reckon you can! You don’t know what was in it, and I bet they haven’t told you.’ And if they have, thought Billy, it will be very unfair, because I’m the man here, not Breesha. He sighed. Thoughts like that worried him: he and Breesha never used to try to get the better of each other like this. All their lives they’d thought as one, and lived as one. Everything was going wrong between them suddenly, and he didn’t like it. Maybe it was because of this horrible letter. But he didn’t know that. Where was the proof? Breesha could have made up the whole story about the letter. But she never told lies. Not unless she believed them herself, that was. Billy shook his head. It was all too complicated. The sun was shining outside. He dragged his eyes back to the little flame floating in its pool of oil. ‘Anyway, if you do know, just spit it out and be done with it.’

‘That’s what I’m trying to do! But you have to listen! I knew there must be a letter. And a letter would go to Aunt Lucy, not to Mam, if it was important, because she’s the lightkeeper. So if Aunt Lucy had hidden it, it would be with her things. In her chest. And I looked, and it was. It was folded in with her clean petticoat, halfway down her sea chest. It was addressed to the Light Keeper, Ellan Bride, and there was a red seal on it.’

‘A seal?’ repeated Mally. ‘There can’t have been! Not wrapped in a petticoat! It would be much too big and wet. Do you mean dead?’

‘Not that sort of seal. A seal,’ said Breesha mysteriously, ‘is like putting a lock on a letter. If you break the seal everyone knows that someone has read the letter who shouldn’t have. But this seal was broken already.’

Mally tried to imagine the broken red seal. It was still seal-shaped in her mind, like a little slug, or a drop of blood-coloured water sliding down the window.

‘What was on the seal?’ demanded Billy.

‘I didn’t look—’

‘Well, you should have. That way you’d know exactly who you were up against.’

‘How …’ began Mally.

‘—because it was more important to read the letter,’ went on Breesha as if neither of them had spoken. ‘Besides, I didn’t know how much time I had. And it was all in script so it was very hard to read.’

‘But you always say you can read script!’

‘There’s script and script. And this was a hard sort, so I couldn’t work out all of it. But listen! The important bit—’

‘We are listening. We’ve been listening for ages! Just spit it out for goodness sake!’

‘All right, I will. They’re going to build a new lighthouse on Ellan Bride, and they don’t want us!’

For a long moment they were all struck dumb. Breesha, having spoken the terrible words out loud for the first time, was as stricken as any of them. She felt guilty, as if by having said the thing, she’d made it real. They all stared at the little yellow flame as it burned unflinchingly, untouched by their troubles. Which might be a good thing or a bad thing, thought Breesha. Callous, and yet reassuring.

‘What?’ Billy tried to gather his thoughts. ‘What? I mean who? Who says this?’

‘A man called Wm Rae says it. I think it’s Wm. He writes from the Commissioners of Northern Lights.’ Those words had been easy to read because people talked about them so often. The Calf Lights were Commissioners of Northern Lights. St Bees and Skerries were Trinity House. The South Rock and Haulbowline were the Ballast Board in Dublin. But Ellan Bride was none of these things. Ellan Bride was a Private Light, and belonged to the Duke of Atholl. But the Duke had never come to claim his light and now he was dead. Ellan Bride was their Private Light. It was Private because no one else ever came, except Finn with the supplies. Ellan Bride was the safest place in the whole world, or had been, up till now.

‘But they can’t come here!’ said Mally, echoing Breesha’s thought. ‘They wouldn’t know how to land! Finn wouldn’t bring horrible people to Ellan Bride. No one else could.’

‘Wm is short for William,’ said Billy numbly. ‘I could write Wm for me if I liked.’

‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’

‘No,’ said Billy. ‘I need to think, though.’

‘Think about what?’

‘What we’re going to do, of course.’

‘What does it mean, they don’t want us?’ asked Mally. ‘Does he mean because we’re children?’

‘Not us, silly. He means they don’t want any of us. They don’t want Aunt Lucy to be the lightkeeper any more.’

‘Is that what the letter said?’ demanded Billy, ‘Or did you just think it from what was in the letter?’

‘The letter said an … an … alternat-ing arrangement.’

‘Altern-at-ing? Maybe he means a revolving light like the ones on the Calf. But that would be silly, because the whole point of the Calf lights being flashing, and ours not, is that the ships know which is which. Anyway, Mam would still be able to work that. Maybe they don’t know yet how good she is at working things. But my Mam could work any machine they chose to invent, I reckon. And I could help her, anyway.’

‘She could do it anyway, without any help. But that’s why it’ll be,’ said Breesha. ‘They’ll think she can’t work the lights because girls don’t. If you were grown up –’ she flung at Billy, ‘– I bet they’d keep you on!’

‘It’s hardly my fault I’m not grown up!’

‘I didn’t say it was!’

But Breesha had been accusing him of something. Billy stared unhappily at the lamp, willing himself not to get into a fight with her. This news was far too important to squabble over. ‘What exactly did the letter say?’ he asked her. It crossed his mind he’d never have dared to look for a letter, even if he’d been the one to guess it was there. Certainly he wouldn’t have had the courage to read it, even if he had been able to read script, which was not the case. No one had ever had a secret letter on Ellan Bride before, but Billy knew very well that they were supposed to steer clear of one another’s secrets in other ways. Breesha, he felt, had not only been clever but also brave enough to be bad. He had to hand it to her. ‘Anyway,’ he added, because it was only fair to say so, ‘it was something that you read that letter. Otherwise we wouldn’t even know. And we need to know, so that was pretty good, you doing all that.’

Breesha’s face lit up like the sun coming out; her moods changed so suddenly these days that Billy was bewildered. He hadn’t said anything that special, only what was true.

‘But why are they going to build a new lighthouse?’ asked Mally. ‘I don’t see why, when we’ve got one already.’

‘I expect they want a better one,’ said Billy. ‘Ours is quite old. Finn says the ones on the Calf are much more modern than ours, and even those are quite old already. They have Argand burners and we don’t. And now there are new sorts of lenses too. They’re better than reflectors. You can see them much further away, specially in bad weather. I don’t mind if they build a lighthouse with a new revolving lens. But it’s the bit about us. Are you sure the letter said that about not wanting us?’

‘They don’t want us,’ Breesha repeated dully. ‘That’s what the letter said.’ The light that had swept across her face when Billy praised her had vanished as fast as it came. Suddenly she clenched her fists, and tossed her head. ‘If anyone comes to Ellan Bride and tries to make us go away, I’ll kill them.’

Mally gasped. The lamp never flickered, but she was sure there was a small movement in the shadows above the altar. The gingerbread cross loomed behind Breesha, listening balefully. For the first time in her life Mally made the sign against evil without Breesha telling her she must do it.

‘Don’t be so silly,’ said Billy crossly. ‘You don’t know how to kill anyone. And you wouldn’t if you did, because you’d be hanged, and you’re not silly enough for that. If this is a proper meeting, we ought to be talking about what we’re really going to do if anyone comes to change everything. We ought to be making a proper plan.’