The Wicker Tree (28 page)

The gifts people gave were supposed to be precious or dear to them personally but not necessarily financially valuable. Everything from a once favourite toy, when Tressock still had relatively young children, to a pet canary singing in its cage. Images of limbs and organs, carved from wood, were supposed to invite godly intercession for the cure of rheumatics or even cancers. Of course, Lachlan did not personally hang these objects, but merely supervised, while young men and women with ladders did the work of attaching them decoratively to the branches. Around the base of the tree dry brushwood was piled ready to be lit.

About the time Beth was coming into hailing distance of Lachlan, he was calling for more kerosene to be poured on this kindling. He personally used a hand pump device to spray the lower branches with gasoline so that they would quickly catch fire when he ceremonially lit the tree. Standing to one side was a young man with a flambeau, a sturdy stick tipped with flaming tar. He stood by, waiting to pass this to the Laird when he was ready. A piper, too, was at hand to play the 'Morrisons' Lament' when Lachlan gave the signal – an air the ancient family had brought with them from the island of Lewis, and probably from their Viking home in Norway before that. For these Morrisons were not truly Border people, but transplants from Scotland's Hebridean Islands. A hoary family joke was to wonder whether they were over-staying their welcome. Lachlan turned to the youth holding the flambeau. 'Are you ready, Eric?' he asked, but the youth was staring, slack jawed, at something that was happening behind Lachlan. Eric was a rather slow-witted boy, a nephew of Mary Hillier's, selected for this honour to please her.

'The Queen, sir. The Queen. It's herself coming right at us.'

Lachlan was irritated at this absurd suggestion, but he turned to see what utter nonsense could be so distracting.

She stood now, no more than fifteen feet away from him, looking like an avenging angel in a Renaissance painting. Her whole body, in its clinging, fairy queen dress, was tinged with the golden light of the dying sun. But more striking by far than that rigid, defiant little body was the expression on her face. Lachlan saw in those terrible accusing eyes a nemesis he could never have imagined. Here was a terrible creature of his making – alive, vengeful and perhaps beyond his control. Behind her, the people of Tressock, his people, watched him as closely as they watched the Queen.

'Where is Steve? Dead? He can't be dead. Is he really dead?' she shrieked at Lachlan, holding up Steve's hat.

He hesitated. No clever, witty answer, no easy lie would work here. For he was not simply answering her. He was answering her in front of his people. How they judged his answer was almost as important as what she did next. She was like a genie who had escaped from a bottle. He had no idea how he would get her back into it. But he must try:

'Steve won, dear Queen,' he said. 'You should be very proud of him. He was the finest Laddie we ever had.'

'Had?' Beth looked around at the crowd, silent, sobered, listening intently. She spotted Donald Dee, Bella and Paul among those standing at the front. 'So, Donald with the wonderful voice – is Steve really dead?'

'Yes, he is, my Queen. And no one will ever find his body. It is all gone. But his spirit, his new self, is in a heaven beyond our imagining – remember the song? He will have a horse of the gods' own breed. He will have hounds that can outrun the wind. Play it, Piper, for our Queen.'

And the piper, who had been wondering when his cue would come, gladly pumped a few times and started to play the 'Laddie' tune. Beth, finding that she could not be heard over the sound of the pipes, moved forward so that she was just a few paces from Lachlan.

'Bullshit!' She spat the expletive furiously in Lachlan's face. 'You cannot seriously believe all this. Jesus says I must forgive you, for you know not what you do. I'm going to try, really I am. But I'm not the law. You just can't seriously believe in all this stuff about the sun being a kind of god. God, my God, created the sun and the moon and the stars all in just four days.'

'Have you seen your God?' asked Lachlan. 'No. But you can see the sun. Would anything grow without the sun? Ask a farmer. Could you live in perpetual night with hundreds of degrees of frost? Not for a nanosecond. Do you believe that on the day that Biblical Israel is once more one country, Jesus will come again..?'

'Of course I believe it. It says so in the Bible.'

'Has anyone thought that through? Jesus is back. What happens next?' Lachlan was playing for time. Where was Delia? 'Yes, what happens if Jesus is back? There he is at Tel Aviv airport. Planes leaving for all over the world. Does he go east to meet the Dalai Lama? Does he schedule a meeting of Christendom at Rome, hosted by the Pope? Has America invited him to visit Ground Zero while offering him the Congressional Medal of Honour and his very own programme on the Fox Network?'

While Beth listened to this horrific description of Jesus – as if he had returned to earth as a kind of travelling salesman for God – she saw with enormous clarity what had been obscured by sheer shock and all the fantasy going on around her. She was face to face with Steve's murderer. However it had happened, he had planned it. Jesus may have been for forgiving. God, the Father, in the Old Testament, was all about 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' Now she saw Lachlan very clearly; this clever sophisticate – Big Bill's typical European. The totally amoral, condescending murderer of her Steve was feet away from her, blaspheming.

What Beth did next came from no plan, but simply a reflex driven by bitter, furious anger and hunger for revenge at any price.

Shouting: 'Blasphemy, you murderer!' she ran straight at Lachlan as hard as she could. When she collided with him, her head lowered so it impacted with his gut, he crumpled, winded and in pain, staggering backwards to fall onto the great pile of kerosene-soaked kindling behind. Standing over him for no more than a second, with Steve vividly in her mind, she dropped Steve's hat and grabbed the burning flambeau from the stunned Eric and thrust it first into Lachlan's face and then into the kindling. The Laird's scream was almost lost in the crackling roar of the fire as it took off up the tree. Lachlan tried to rise but the flames had engulfed him. Almost every part of him was on fire. His hands seemed to claw upwards. But they were now two burning brands.

Anyone who had been anywhere near the tree had now fled and as Beth, the flambeau still in her hand, turned quickly away from the horror of what she had just done, she saw that the villagers had retreated somewhat and were now talking animatedly amongst themselves. They had heard nothing of what had passed between Sir Lachlan and the Queen because of the piper playing the 'Laddie' song. Perhaps they expected something from her. Perhaps she should make a speech. Perhaps they all intended to kill her and deliver her to Beame. But somehow she didn't think so. Deprived of their leader they seemed a little lost. For some reason, the Queen of the May had killed Sir Lachlan. For some reason she had not been ritually killed and stuffed. For some reason she was alive and in a vengeful mood. Beth guessed that these were mysteries to them – and as to why she had not been stuffed, like the other Queens, that was a mystery to her too.

What Beth did not know was that for the people of Tressock she was still in a sense the Goddess that the Queen of the May represented, almost an avatar – her very presence, alive amongst them, was divine.

She decided that if, as seemed the case, they still found her kind of awesome (why otherwise had they not come forward when she killed Lachlan?) the best thing she could do was to play out her role with as much authority as possible.

She waved the flambeau in the air, until the crowd, sensing this was a signal from her to attract their attention, fell completely silent.

'I want all of you to go home. When you get there, pray for Steve. Pray for Lachlan. Pray to my Lord Jesus Christ for forgiveness. I am the living Queen of the May. Now go home. Go! Go!'

There was little hesitation. A muttered conversation between Peter McNeil, Murdoch and Danny, in which they kept staring curiously at her, continued after the vast majority had started back down the hill to Tressock. But they soon followed. She was left alone with the blazing tree, from which branches had started to crack and fall and upon which occasionally an offering, a toy or a clock, would explode in the heat.

Now she prayed to God, her God, thanking Him for her deliverance. So far. And she asked further protection and help, which she just knew she was going to need if she was ever going to see Dallas and Texas again.

'Lord,' she prayed, 'I know I'm not safe yet. I have just killed a man and broken one of your most important commandments. But I believe he was a deeply evil man and he had killed Steve who was as good a man as you could find. I ask for your forgiveness, not only for what I have just done. But, Lord, if I ever make it to a safe place in this country I just want to go straight home. I don't know what these people will do now. But if I am going to die, please take me straight to Steve so we can be together with You for ever and ever. Amen.'

Now she saw that there was a figure approaching with a bird fluttering on his arm. This could only be the weird guy who talked in riddles. The guy with the rotary telephone.

'Bless your beautiful hide,' he said as if he was pleased to see her alive and intact.

Jack had walked past her far enough to see Sir Lachlan's remains. The Laird lay there like a grotesque charred marionette amid the ashes of the still fiercely burning tree. Nevermore fluttered around the tree cawing hoarsely, then flew back to Jack's shoulder. He strolled towards her, although she held her flambeau defensively pointed at him, and as he came he spoke to her, in his unique way, reassuring words, up to a point:

'Our Gods have little quirks

Their world and all its works

Are subject to

One weird taboo.

They hate the pride of CEOs

Conceited Moguls are their foes.

For pretty girls they'll come disguised

As Bulls or Swans for virgins prized.

And you sweet Beth,

They'll save from Death.

But never think you know their rules.

They love to make us humans fools.'

'So who would worship gods like that?' asked Beth. 'Anyway, who the heck are you?'

'The oracle round here. Or so it would appear,' answered Jack.

'So you knew the future and you let it happen?'

Jack nodded his head sadly.

'That's right,' shouted Beth. 'You knew and you did nothing. Damn you to hell!'

Her bellow of anger frightened Nevermore into flight. The bird cawed anxiously and took off across the hillside for the distant church tower. Jack laughed and went on laughing even after Beth had hurled the firebrand at him. All he did was turn and walk off in the direction of Tressock.

BETH STOOD ALL alone alongside the grisly horror at the foot of the blazing tree. She found that she could gaze anywhere except at what remained of her mortal enemy. The series of fantastical events that had occurred since awakening to find Beame by her bed kaleidoscoped in her memory. She could still not grasp that they were real – but the merest glance at the crumbling, charred figure of Lachlan was so real that she could not bear to look longer.

The eminence upon which the tree stood allowed her a view of Tressock below, its street lights just coming on in the gathering dusk. Beth could no longer hear the chattering of the retreating crowd, but the hillside still wore the guttering bonfires around which so recently humans had behaved like beasts, if beasts could ever imitate humans. These people had obeyed her, but for how long? She had not seen Delia in the crowd. She must be down there in the castle. However much the Laird's wife had already been involved in Steve's murder and the plot to kill the Queen of the May, the news that Beth had killed Lachlan would surely make her an implacable enemy. It was only slowly dawning on Beth that there was no one – absolutely no one – she had met or seen in Tressock who was not implicated in the murder of Steve, in her murder too. A lynch mob in Texas, that was something you could understand. People thought a wrong had been done. They took Justice into their own hands. Beth thought that was against God's law. It was plain evil. But this? Was Mary Hillier evil? Was Bella? Were the guys who'd played at the preach-in gig? She'd seen them all there in the crowd.

Looking to the west, where the sun had only just sunk below the hills, the silvery Sulis meandered through meadows in a valley skirted by pine woods. No road was visible. Beth knew that was the direction she must take. She could dimly see a village with tiny pin-pricks of light on top of a hill. There just had to be a telephone there so she could call the police. But Beth had a nagging memory that, back at the nuclear power station, the police she'd seen seemed to answer to Lachlan. She tried to think what she would do if she was in Texas. Suppose she had just killed the Mayor of Osceola in front of hundreds of witnesses, because she had reason to believe he had killed Steve – would the police be the first call she'd make? Hardly. She'd call her lawyer. Terry had mentioned the American consulate in Edinburgh as the place to go if she was in trouble. They'd help her for sure, and they'd have access to a lawyer. But the consulate number Terry had given her was in her room at the castle.

Frightened to hesitate any longer, Beth started to run down the hillside towards the river. The terrain was covered with heather, patches of fern and nettles and, every now and then, a drainage ditch, which she either saw and jumped or else, several times, fell into, grazing her shins. Gorse bushes caught at the gossamer material of her dress, tearing it, and one of the gilded buckle shoes she was wearing lost its heel. Still, she was covering ground fast and was within about a quarter of a mile of the river when a figure loomed up before her. It seemed to be standing on a stile. The head was silhouetted against the shiny surface of the river beyond. It took a few seconds, while her headlong rush brought her closer, for her to see that it was a boy, about ten years old. His face was smiling and he had put out his hands to stop her colliding with the stile.