Flood (21 page)

The air was chilled in the manse. Iain Darroch rubbed his hands together as he entered, letting the books under his arm slip noisily to the floor. He ignored them for the moment, switched on the fire in his adequate sitting room, then returned to the hallway, closed the door properly, picked up the books and, his coat still wrapped around him, returned to the faint but growing glow of the fire.

September. The leaves were turning. The summer was over. He looked towards the long winter ahead with morose eyes. In winter the sap really was at its lowest ebb, spiritually as well as physically. He did not relish the prospect. He made some tea in the clutterless kitchen and brought it through to the fireside. He sat down on the sheepskin rug. Sipping the tea, he pulled a book towards him from the small coffee table.

The conversation with Reverend Walker had fired something in him, some need to know his parish as one would know one's ancestors. He had read several books from Reverend Walker's collection, and had now brought three more from Kirkcaldy Public Library. Carsden had a strange, fascinating past. Fife itself was notable as a historic county, but it was Carsden that really interested him. He began reading. His notebook lay beside him, a fountain pen hooked over its edge. Fife, he had found, was riddled with superstition.

The Church had never been as strong, perhaps, as was thought. Witches had been burned in Fife right up until the end of the seventeenth century, and those figures came from incomplete records. Who could say what might have happened thereafter? Robert Baillie, a Presbyterian minister of the time, had recorded that in 1643 thirty witches had been burned in Fife in a few months. James Hogg had written or procured a lyric ballad called 'The Witch of Fife', and there was also a well-known poem called 'The Witch of Pittenweem'.

Pittenweem was near to Darroch's birthplace, and the whole East Neuk appeared to be riddled with tales of witchcraft. Darroch found it all fascinating.

The facts had piled up in his notebook randomly at first, but then more selectively. He thought he had found a kind of connection between two aspects of Fife's history. Cromwell had selected Burntisland as one of the first places to attack (circa 1651?) because of its importance as a port. An Act of 1842 prohibited women from working underground. Thereafter sprang up the superstition that it was unlucky for a woman to venture into a pit. Pit. The very word stirred him.

A pit had been opened by the Queen at Glenrothes in the late 1950s (?). She inspected it. A few years later it was forced to close due to flooding. It was seen as part of the superstitious truth. The Earl of Wemyss had owned many of the Fife collieries, though not those around Carsden. Some of these pits were sunk, according to family records, on the sites of what had been witch-burning places. The people had been given chunks of coal as alms. Coal was a magic rock, a black diamond, mysterious and life-giving.

Carsden had its own witch-burning site, not a colliery now but the local park, which meandered down to a shallow river, aptly named the Ore. Suspected (proven?) witches were placed in a barrel by the good people of the village, and the barrel was then coated with tar and ignited. A lid was nailed on, and the whole contraption was rolled down the meandering slope where children now played and into the river. The screams carried downriver, the barrel smouldering and fizzing like a firework. It was horrible, and it was happening in the seventeenth century. Three hundred years ago. Mary Miller was, in a sense, lucky.

The random jottings had begun to connect for Darroch.

Mining, it seemed to him, was a superstitious occupation, and it had gone hand in hand with the superstitions and witch-burnings of that age. He thought of Mary Miller. Poor woman. The superstitions held fast, gripped by the downtrodden class as a means of creating scapegoats for their bad fortune. It was the easy solution. Instead of raging at the landowners or looking to themselves, they merely picked on an outsider and branded her a witch, blaming her for any misfortune, any hiccup of economics. That made the villagers feel better in their hungry bitterness. They fed on it like a fire feeds on coal. Darroch checked himself. These were his parishioners. He should have patience with them, and Christian tolerance. It was hard, though, with all their chiselling ways. He read his book again, the fire warming his clothes so that they smelled newly laundered and ironed.

The very name of the town worried him. Carsden. It was named, presumably, after Carsden Woods just outside the town. The den was a valley near these woods. But what about the etymology of Carsden itself? There were two possibilities, one of which seemed ominous. He had travelled to Edinburgh, to the National Library, for these notes. He had looked at Grant's Scottish National Dictionary, Craigie's A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, Chambers' Scots Dictionary, and Jamieson's Scottish Dictionary. He had found a kind of consensus. 'Car' meant left or left-handed. It also meant (presumably because left-handedness was considered ominous by superstitious people) sinister, fatal, or wrong in a moral sense. 'Carlin' (also 'carling', 'carline', 'karlyn', 'karling5) meant a witch. This was especially true when used in the Lothians, Ayrshire (another notorious witch-hunting area) and Fife. This had led Darroch to deduce that Carsden would mean den of the witch. He researched into other similar place-names. Carlops, on the road south from Edinburgh to Biggar, was named after its imposing rock. He found that there were two versions of the etymology. One stated that it was a place from where witches had flown, originally Carlings-Loups. The other claimed that the rock was the site from where villagers would hurl suspected witches, shouting at them to fly now if they could. If Carlops derived its name from witches, then why not Carsden? In Jamieson's Dictionary, however, he found that 'car', used as the initial syllable of a place-name, could mean 'fortified place', which would mean that Carsden had been a fortified den. No history of the area, however, spoke of fortifications until the time of St Cuthbert and the building of the kirk. It was a puzzle. Wickedly, he preferred to think of the former as the truth.

But no, no 'witches' had ever flown away to safety from Carlops Hill. No 'witches' had ever survived the grotesque drowning ritual in Carsden. There were no witches. All there was was superstition. He had entered a community where such beliefs still lived on. The mines had closed. Who was to blame? Abstracts such as economics and investment?

You could not shake your fist at them. Better to find a scapegoat instead. That was what they had done. An unfortunate accident had marked Mary Miller physically as an outsider. Misfortune had dogged her publicly. She had been the perfect brunt. Darroch grew angry as he pretended to read. What could he do? He felt like rushing to the woman's house and asking for her forgiveness on behalf of the whole town. He wanted to speak with her, to see her.

She was endurance. She was Christianity. He was a sham by comparison. He had to tell her these things. He had to tell her not to be afraid. Her eyebrows were like lines of velvet or the backs of sleek black cats. Her face was pale but deft. Her hair was silver. Silver and black. He had to tell her. He had to see her.

Reverend Walker had told him that Mary did not work.

Darroch put on his jacket, switched off the fire, and slammed shut the front door as he left.

He examined the character of the town as he walked. It was different now, different, certainly, from that first day when he had looked over his church with pride and hope.

Raindrops dotted his shoulders, but he paid them little heed.

They refreshed him.

It was a longish walk, and the wind blew into his face all the way, as if trying to deter him. Pieces of grit were swirled around Main Street and some picked at his eyes. He bowed his head into the gathering wind and walked on.

The cemetery stood at the top of a steep hill called The Brae. Her house was on the other side of the hill. Sweat was clogging his back beneath the nylon shirt, the woollen jersey, the jacket. He stopped for a second at the summit. The cemetery was quiet except for the cracked voices of the crows at Cardell kirk. He might pay Reverend Walker a visit while he was in the neighbourhood.

He caught sight of a figure tending one of the graves. No, not tending it, but sitting in front of it on the damp grass. Her hair was unmistakable.

He opened the gate to the cemetery and walked across the grass towards her. As he approached, he heard her voice. He realised that she was speaking to her dead parents. He stood stock still, numbed. Her voice was low and soft, like small sticks travelling with the river's current. He hung back, not wanting to eavesdrop so publicly but doing it anyway.

Finally she stood up, turning and seeing him. A quick rising of blood made her cheeks glow against her wind-pinched face.

'Oh,' she said.

He was, however, more embarrassed than she. He opened his arms in contrition. A horn sounded at the gate. She looked past him and he turned towards the sound. A man was waving from the car. She waved back.

'I must be going,' she said. 'My boyfriend. The car.' She pointed, then started off.

'It was nothing,' he said with mock heartiness. 'I was just passing and thought I.. .' She was waving back at him, smiling warily. Then she reached the gates and the car door opened from within. Darroch let his arms fall, then pushed his hands safely into his jacket pockets. She would think less of him now. He had been spying on her. Her graveside. Her parents. He looked at the marble, at the gold lettering. She had been speaking with them. It was the most private of things, and he had blundered in like a ... a ... Her boyfriend. She had a boyfriend. Perhaps, then, she felt happiness too.

So why did Iain Darroch feel dejected?

Only two people had seen the boy and the tinker-girl as they picked their way hand in hand through the fields, the rain like a sheet behind them and the sky the colour of a deep purple bruise. One of these was Matt Duncan. He watched from the country path at the end of his evening walk, and his eyes were deeply focused slits. He felt his brain stir with incoherent thoughts. He slouched his hands into his jacket and cursed.

The other was Mrs Fraser, who owned the local grocery shop. She was on her way home, having delivered some produce to Reverend Walker. He had kept her late as usual, talking about the old days and the new minister. She had been walking home past the field next to the old hospital when she had seen the two shadowy figures on the other side of the wall. They were whispering together and giggling. She stood on tiptoe to see them better. They were past her and could not see her, but she saw them well enough and her mouth opened in a small O as she recognised the boy. She vaguely remembered having seen the girl, too, and knew her for what she was. Dear oh dear.

Mrs Miller (she called her Mrs out of propriety's sake) was a good customer. Mrs Fraser would have to tell her about her son's unsavoury friendship. She would tell her first thing in the morning, for Mrs Miller was always bright and early in the grocery so as to avoid the mass of shoppers. A girl from the gypsy camp. Well well. Perhaps it was to be expected.

Wait until the town found out.

They ate the evening meal in near silence. Sandy was happy enough. His thoughts were on how to broach the subject of Rian to his mother. Should he play on her sympathy, or should he come right out with his request? He was so full of his own concerns that he did not notice his mother's anxious face, the way she glanced at him and only played with her food.

At last she rose from her chair and collected his empty plate. She walked to the sink and began to run the hot tap.

Sandy belched in his seat. He studied his mother's back. Her hair was tied in a thick bun above the nape of her neck.

Tufts of black ran down either side of her neck and disappeared into the shadows of her dress. He wished his own hair was as attractive, but it was becoming slightly greasy, and he could do nothing with it but let it take its own shape and its own line. He scratched at his neck.

'What happened to your grandmother's shawl, Sandy?'

She had turned the tap off and was facing him, her hands on the rim of the sink behind her.

'What?' He knew that the red was already rising to his cheeks. His heart was like a sports car. It had just been let loose along a long, straight road. Oh shit, he thought. Oh shit.

'Did you give it to her?'

'To who?' His mother's consequent laugh was unpleasant.

It had the hacking quality of a witch's triumph. She did not smile.

To the tinker, of course. Your girlfriend.'

'Look, Mum, she's . ..'

'I know what she is! Everyone in this town knows what she is. But they all try to ignore it. It doesn't really concern them. And now you've gone and got yourself mixed up with her. How could you be so stupid?' The final word was like a judgement of fire. Sandy's face burned as brightly as a tongue of flame. He had never, never seen his mother so angry and so disgusted by him. It was hard to hear out the rest of her verdict. 'She's just a slut. You've been lucky, Sandy. You've managed to gain some kind of acceptance in this town. I've worked hard for it. It hasn't been easy for you, and it hasn't been easy for me, and now you're going to throw it all away because of her. That's stupid. There's nothing clever in it at all. It'll be all round the town by now.'

'So?'

'So? I'll tell you so. Don't you think it's hard enough for me as it is without people laughing at me because my son's going out with a hoor?' There were tears forming in the corners of her dark eyes, so suddenly alight.

'She's not a hoor!'

'Oh? What is she then? You tell me.'

'She's ... ' It was impossible. All his pretty speeches, his arguments and his statesmanship had flown out of the window. His brain was soggy. He was up against a cruel and professional opponent. He felt cut, winded, leaning on the ropes with nowhere to go but back into the centre of the ring.

'She's like us,' he managed. His mother opened her eyes wide in astonishment. She laughed again, cutting him deeper.