Beyond the Pale: A fantasy anthology (29 page)

“He doesn’t look afraid,” I said. Though
he didn’t look peaceful either. Just dead.

“Once he’d lost the stiffness, I smoothed
his face a bit,” the doctor told me. “Smoothed it out. Otherwise Mrs. Marr
would no have settled.”

“Settled?”

He nodded. “She found him at his desk,
stone dead. Ran down the road screaming all the way to the pub. And lucky I was
there, having a drink with friends. I came up to see yer father sitting up in
his chair, with a face so full of fear, I looked around mysel’ to discover the
cause of it.”

“And did you?”

His blank expression said it all. He
simply handed me a pile of five notebooks. “These were on the desk in front of
him. Some of the writing is in Latin, which I have but little of. Perhaps ye
can read it, being the scholar. Mrs. Marr has said that they should be thrown
on the fire, or at least much of them scored out. But I told her that had to be
yer decision and Alec agrees.”

I took the notebooks, thinking that this
was what had stolen my father from me and now was all I had of him. But I said
none of that aloud. After glancing over at the old man again, I asked, “May I
have a moment with him?” My voice cracked on the final word.

Dr. Kinnear nodded again and left the
room.

I went over to the bed and looked down at
the silent body.
The old dragon
, I thought,
has no teeth
. Then I
heard a sound, something so tiny I scarcely registered it. Turning, I saw a
toad by the bedfoot.

I bent down and picked it up. “Nothing for
you here, puddock,” I said, reverting to the old Scots word. Though I’d worked
so hard to lose my accent and vocabulary, here in my father’s house the old way
of speech came flooding back. Shifting the books to one hand, I picked the toad
up with the other. Then, I tiptoed out of the door as if my father would have
minded the sound of my footsteps.

Once outside, I set the toad gently in the
garden, or the remains of the garden, now so sadly neglected, its vines running
rampant across what was once an arbor of white roses and red. I watched as it
hopped under some large dock leaves and, quite effectively, disappeared.

~

Later that afternoon my father’s body was
taken away by three burly men for its chestening, being placed into its coffin
and the lid screwed down. Then it would lie in the cold kirk till the funeral
the next day.

Once he was gone from the house, I finally
felt I could look in his journals. I might have sat comfortably in the study,
but I’d never been welcomed there before, so didn’t feel it my place now. The
kitchen and sitting room were more Mrs. Marr’s domain than mine. And if I never
had to go back into the old man’s bedroom, it would be years too soon for me.

So I lay in my childhood bed, the covers
up to my chin, and read by the flickering lamplight. Mrs. Marr, bless her, had
brought up a warming pan which she came twice to refill. And she brought up as
well a pot of tea and jam pieces and several slabs of good honest cheddar.

“I didna think ye’d want a big supper.”

She was right. Food was the last thing on
my mind.

After she left the room, I took a silver
hip flask from under my pillow where I’d hidden it, and then poured a hefty
dram of whisky into the teapot. I would need more than Mrs. Marr’s offerings to
stay warm this night. Outside the sea moaned as it pushed past the skellies, on
its way to the shore. I’d all but forgotten that sound. It made me smile.

I read the last part of the last journal
first, where father talked about the toad, wondering briefly if it was the very
same toad I had found at his bedfoot. But it was the bit right after, where he
spoke of “formidable visitants” that riveted me. What had he meant? From the
tone of it, I didn’t think he meant any of our St Monans neighbors.

The scholar in me asserted itself, and I
turned to the first of the journals, marked 1926, some five years earlier.
There was one book for each year. I started with that first notebook and read
long into the night.

The journals were not easy to decipher for
my father’s handwriting was crabbed with age and, I expect, arthritis. The
early works were splotchy and, in places, faded. Also he had inserted sketchy
pictures and diagrams. Occasionally he’d written whole paragraphs in corrupted
Latin, or at least in a dialect unknown to me.

What he seemed engaged upon was a study of
a famous trial of local witches in 1590, supervised by King James VI himself.
The VI of Scotland, for he was Mary Queen of Scots’ own son, and Queen
Elizabeth’s heir.

The witches, some ninety in all according
to my father’s notes, had been accused of sailing over the Firth to North
Berwick in riddles—sieves, I think he meant—to plot the death of
the king by raising a storm when he sailed to Denmark. However, I stumbled so
often over my Latin translations, I decided I needed a dictionary. And me a
classics scholar.

So halfway through the night, I rose and,
taking the lamp, made my way through the cold dark, tiptoeing so as not to wake
Mrs. Marr. Nothing was unfamiliar beneath my bare feet. The kitchen stove would
not have gone out completely, only filled with gathering coal and kept
minimally warm. All those years of my childhood came rushing back. I could have
gone into the study without the lamp, I suppose. But to find the book I needed,
I’d have to have light.

And lucky indeed I took it, for in its
light it I saw—gathered on the floor of my father’s study—a group
of toads throwing strange shadows up against the bookshelves. I shuddered to
think what might have happened had I stepped barefooted amongst them.

But how had they gotten in? And was the
toad I’d taken into the garden amongst them? Then I wondered aloud at what such
a gathering should be called. I’d heard of a murder of crows, an exaltation of
larks. Perhaps toads came in a congregation? For that is what they looked like,
a squat congregation, huddled together, nodding their heads, and waiting on the
minister in this most unlikely of kirks.

It was too dark even with the lamp, and
far too late, for me to round them up. So I sidestepped them and, after much
searching, found the Latin dictionary where it sat cracked open on my father’s
desk. I grabbed it up, avoided the congregation of toads, and went out the
door. When I looked back, I could still see the odd shadows dancing along the
walls.

I almost ran back to my bed, shutting the
door carefully behind me. I didn’t want that dark presbytery coming in, as if
they could possibly hop up the stairs like the frog in the old tale, demanding
to be taken to my little bed.

But the shock of my father’s death and the
long day of travel, another healthy swallow of my whisky, as well as that
bizarre huddle of toads, all seemed to combine to put me into a deep sleep. If
I dreamed, I didn’t remember any of it. I woke to one of those dawn choruses of
my childhood, comprised of blackbirds, song thrushes, gulls, rooks, and
jackdaws, all arguing over who should wake me first.

~

For a moment I couldn’t recall where I
was. Eyes closed, I listened to the birds, so different from the softer, more
lyrical sounds outside my Cambridge windows. But I woke fully in the knowledge
that I was back in my childhood home, that my father was dead and to be buried
that afternoon if possible, as I had requested of the doctor and Mrs. Marr, and
I had only hours to make things tidy in my mind. Then I would be away from St
Monans and its small-mindedness, back to Cambridge where I truly belonged.

I got out of bed, washed, dressed in the
simple black dress I always travel with, a black bandeaux on my fair hair, and
went into the kitchen to make myself some tea.

Mrs. Marr was there before me, sitting on
a hardback chair and knitting a navy blue guernsey sweater with its complicated
patterning. She set the steel needles down and handed me a full cup, the tea
nearly black even with its splash of milk. There was a heaping bowl of
porridge, sprinkled generously with salt, plus bread slathered with golden
syrup.

“Thank you,” I said. It would have done no
good to argue that I drank coffee now, nor did I like either oatmeal or
treacle, and never ate till noon. Besides, I was suddenly ravenous. “What do
you need me to do?” I asked between mouthfuls, stuffing them in the way I’d
done as a youngster.

“’Tis all arranged,” she said, taking up
the needles again. No proper St Monans woman was ever idle long. “Though sooner
than is proper. But all to accommodate ye, he’ll be in the kirkyard this
afternoon. Lucky for ye it’s a Sunday, or we couldna do it. The men are home
from fishing.” She was clearly not pleased with me. “Ye just need to be there
at the service. Not that many will come. He was no generous with his company.”
By which she meant he had few friends. Nor relatives except me.

“Then I’m going to walk down by the water
this morning,” I told her. “Unless you have something that needs doing. I want
to clear my head.”

“Aye, ye would.”

Was that condemnation or acceptance? Who
could tell? Perhaps she meant I was still the thankless child she remembered.
Or that I was like my father. Or that she wanted only to see the back of me,
sweeping me from her domain so she could clean and bake without my worrying
presence. I thanked her again for the meal, but she wanted me gone. As I had
been for the past ten years. And I was as eager to be gone, as she was to have
me. The funeral was not till mid afternoon.

“There are toads in the study,” I said as
I started out the door.

“Toads?” She looked startled. Or perhaps
frightened.

“Puddocks. A congregation of them.”

Her head cocked to one side. “Och, ye mean
a knot. A knot of toads.”

A knot. Of course
. I should have
remembered. “Shall I put them out?” At least I could do that for her.

She nodded. “Aye.”

I found a paper sack and went into the
study, but though I looked around for quite some time, I couldn’t find the
toads anywhere. If I hadn’t still had the Latin dictionary in my bedroom, I would
have thought my night visit amongst them and my scare from their shadows had
been but a dream.

“All gone,” I called to Mrs. Marr before
slipping out through the front door and heading toward the strand.

~

Nowhere in St Monans is far from the sea.
I didn’t realize how much the sound of it was in my bones until I moved to
Cambridge. Or how much I’d missed that sound till I slept the night in my old
room.

I found my way to the foot of the church
walls where boats lay upturned, looking like beached dolphins. A few of the
older men, past their fishing days, sat with their backs against the salted
stone, smoking silently, and staring out to the gray slatey waters of the Firth.
Nodding to them, I took off along the beach. Overhead gulls squabbled and far
out, near the Bass Rock, I could see, gannets diving head-first into the water.

A large boat, some kind of yacht, had just
passed the Bass and was sailing west majestically toward a mooring, probably in
South Queensferry. I wondered who would be sailing these waters in such a ship.

But then I was interrupted by the wind
sighing my name. Or so I thought at first. Then I looked back at the old kirk
on the cliff above me. Someone was waving at me in the ancient kirkyard. It was
Alec.

He signaled that he was coming down to
walk with me and as I waited, I thought about what a handsome man he’d turned
into.
But a fisherman
, I reminded myself, a bit of the old snobbery
biting me on the back of the neck. St Monans, like the other fishing villages
of the East Neuk, were made up of three classes—fisher folk, farmers, and
the shopkeepers and tradesmen. My father being a scholar was outside of them
all, which meant that as his daughter, I belonged to none of them either.

Still, in this place, where I was once so
much a girl of the town—from the May—I felt my heart give a small
stutter. I remembered that first kiss, so soft and sweet and innocent, the
windmill hard against my back. My last serious relationship had been almost a
year ago, and I was more than ready to fall in love again. Even at the foot of
my father’s grave. But not with a fisherman. Not in St Monans.

Alec found his way down to the sand and
came toward me. “Off to find croupies?” he called.

I laughed. “The only fossil I’ve found
recently has been my father,” I said, then bit my lower lip at his scowl.

“He was nae a bad man, Jan,” he said,
catching up to me. “Just undone by his reading.”

I turned a glared at him. “Do you think
reading an ailment then?”

He put up his hands palms towards me.
“Whoa, lass. I’m a big reader myself. But what the old man had been reading
lately had clearly unnerved him. He couldna put it into context. Mrs. Marr said
as much before you came. These last few months he’d stayed away from the pub,
from the kirk, from everyone who’d known him well. No one kenned what he’d been
on about.”

I wondered what sort of thing Alec would
be reading.
The fishing report? The local paper
? Feeling out of sorts, I
said sharply, “Well, I was going over his journals last night and what he’s
been on about are the old North Berwick witches.”

Alec’s lips pursed. “The ones who plotted
to blow King James off the map.” It was a statement, not a question.

“The very ones.”

“Not a smart thing for the unprepared to
tackle.”

I wondered if Alec had become as
hag-ridden and superstitious as any St Monans fisherman. Ready to turn home
from his boat if he met a woman on the way. Or not daring to say “salmon” or
“pig” and instead speaking of “red fish” and “curly tail,” or shouting out
“Cauld iron!” at any mention of them. All the East Neuk tip-leavings I was glad
to be shed of.

He took the measure of my disapproving
face, and laughed. “Ye take me for a gowk,” he said. “But there are more things
in heaven and earth, Janet, than are dreamt of in yer philosophy.”