Chapter 4
Chapter
Four
The flowers don’t care that I had a shitty sleep.
This is one of the things I love about my job. They aren’t customers or colleagues you have to wipe your bleary eyes and plaster a smile on for. They just grow until I come along and cut their stems (respectfully) and give them a new form of existence.
It’s mid-morning, and the fog has mercifully lifted.
Not that I don’t love the drama and mystery of fog but out here where I’m isolated and already on edge about my neighbor, plus the talks of drowned wives and missing women, and don’t let him in, and finding a jawbone—it turns out I don’t need that much drama and mystery in my life.
This morning the world has gone to a flat, even grey, the kind of light that begs for watercolors—no harsh shadows, no glare, every color reading exactly as it is.
The bay is a sheet of slate. The mountains across the loch have come back in velvet sienna and moss.
The castle tower on the opposite spit is a dark smudge against the sky.
Not that I’ve looked at it all that much, I swear.
I have decided to make this a working day.
I have a deadline for an upcoming wildflower pocketbook—pencil sketches of thirty species by the end of next month—and the woman they hired is currently sitting with a cup of cooling coffee and a half-pulled-together brain because she barely slept last night.
I’m wearing the pair of Effie’s Wellington boots I found in the crawlspace under the stairs and have decided to make my own.
They’re a size too big and they’re broken in within an inch of their life.
Though it’s still August, the weather is barely what I would call summer.
So, I’ve got on thick grey tights to take the rub out of the boots and guard me from the morning chill, and a plaid wool skirt I packed because Maddie said I couldn’t traipse around the Scottish Highlands without one.
My cream wool sweater has gone slightly felted from use, so I pair it with a long-sleeved shirt underneath because my body likes the warmth of wool, but my skin despises the prickly texture.
My hair is pulled to the side in two long braids and there’s a wicker basket on my arm for collecting flowers.
I look like a stock photo for charming American girl moves to Highland cottage to find herself and possibly love.
I look so on-brand I could be sponsored.
Most of the plants I want are in the lower meadow between the cottage and the boat shed, where the ground is soft; hardy cream-colored mountain avens, the puffy red heads of rose root, the ubiquitous gorse with its yellow flowers.
I work through it slowly. I cut. I lay things in the basket carefully so the heads don’t crush.
While I work, I think about the doctrine of signatures.
This is the part of botany I learned from my dad and never quite let go of, even though it’s mostly considered medieval nonsense now.
The idea is that God—or, depending on who’s writing, nature—gave plants visual clues to what they were good for.
A walnut looks like a brain, so it’s good for brain ailments.
Lungwort has spotted leaves like lung tissue, so it’s good for lung complaints.
Eyebright has a small dark spot at the center of each flower, like a pupil, so it’s good for the eyes. And so on.
The doctrine is, scientifically, garbage. The plants don’t signal their uses. A plant has whatever chemistry it has, and any visual resemblance to a human organ is a coincidence we’ve made meaning out of like we tend to do with everything.
But—and this is what kept my dad teaching it, and what keeps me thinking about it—some of the plants do work for what their signatures suggest. Eyebright, it turns out, has compounds that genuinely soothe inflamed eyes.
Lungwort has saponins that ease respiratory irritation.
The doctrine got there by the wrong route, but it got there in the end.
What that says about how human knowledge accumulates, well, that’s something I might get into after a few glasses of whisky.
But I think about it every time I’m cutting flowers.
It would be lovely if the plants were trying to tell us something.
It would be lovely if anything were trying to tell us something about anything.
I could go for a fuckton of answers to my life right now, including if I will ever stop feeling like I made a mess of my life before I was thirty?
Still haven’t figured out that one; yet another reason why I spontaneously re-rooted my life and ended up here, attempting to start over.
I crouch to cut a stem of meadowsweet and feel my hips inform me, again, that I will be paying for last night’s nervous-pacing-then-poor-sleeping. The portable heating pad is back at the cottage. I should have brought it but I’m too stubborn to go back for it.
I work my way up the slope.
The ground gets squelchier as I go. The grass thins, and there are patches of bog cotton in the wetter dips.
I am very glad to have Effie’s wellies because by the time I’m halfway up the slope, I’m stepping in soft places that would have soaked through anything else.
The boots make the most satisfying sucking sound when I lift them out of the wet ground.
I’m not above the small pleasure of a really good squelch.
I glance up as the bog slopes upward toward the trees.
I’m not going into the woods. I made my deal with the woods yesterday, and the deal stands.
But the thicket at the edge of the woods is fair game, that low, scrubby band where the moor gives way to the trees, a couple of meters of hawthorn and stunted birch and gorse, the kind of edge habitat where interesting plants grow.
Edges are where everything happens, ecologically.
Two systems meeting, a third thing emerging.
The thicket runs in a rough line along the base of the woods, parallel to the road.
I work my way into it, ducking under hawthorn, my braids catching on twigs and pulling a few strands loose.
The light in here is different—dappled, even with the overcast—and a few degrees colder.
The air smells of wet leaf and earth and the green astringent smell of crushed ferns.
Somewhere up the road I can hear the faint baa of a sheep, distantly. The world is very quiet and cocooning.
I find what I am looking for almost immediately: a patch of lady’s mantle holding water in its pleated leaves the way it always does.
There’s also a clump of wood sorrel underneath the hawthorn, the small, three-lobed leaves like clover, the white flowers veined in pink.
Oxalis acetosella. My dad used to crush a leaf and have me chew it: tart, lemony, faintly metallic.
That, he’d say, is the taste of every wood in Britain.
I pick a leaf but don’t chew it. Instead, I press it into the basket between two stems of meadowsweet to flatten it later.
I move further into the thicket, past dark purple and blue foxgloves that are persistent despite the approaching autumn.
The basket is filling up nicely. I’m thinking I might have enough for the day’s pressings already, that I can pack up and head back to the cottage for the heating pad and a pot of tea, when I hear water.
Not the loch. The loch is below and behind me. This is closer. A small running sound, ahead and slightly to the left.
I push through a stand of hawthorn, sweater snagging, and there it is, a small burn a couple of feet wide, running down from the woods and across the boundary between the thicket and the open slope.
It’s dark with peat and moves quickly. It looks like it can’t be more than a foot deep, but it’s deeper than it looks because I know the hard way that the peat hides the bottom.
I stand at its edge, basket on my arm, looking at it.
A wave of unease runs over me.
I don’t know why, exactly. The burn is small and pleasantly babbling. I have crossed a hundred streams like this in my life. But standing here with my basket full of flowers and my oversized boots and the morning around me, I have the distinct sense that I shouldn’t cross it (which is silly).
Actually no, I know why I have that feeling. The drowned women in the pub story. I’m thinking about them now, even though I told myself I wouldn’t. They wait at the edge of the water at dusk. They pull the swimmers down. Don’t go in the loch alone.
But this isn’t the loch. This is a little stream that probably starts as snowmelt up on the mountain and runs down to the bay.
Surely the drowned women don’t have access to a tributary.
Surely the rules of folklore include some kind of plumbing diagram.
Wives confined to main body of water, no jurisdiction over inlets.
Could they pop up in any standing water, in puddles… oh god, in the toilet?
I’m scaring myself. I am scaring myself before anything has actually happened, which is a Galloway specialty. My dad had it too. He could spook himself out of a perfectly ordinary walk by thinking too hard about the wrong thing at the wrong hour.
And, judging by the salt and horseshoes and rowan tree and maybe that fox’s jawbone, I’d say my great-aunt had it too.
I step over the water. I don’t even break stride.
Nothing happens.
But the unease doesn’t entirely leave me.
I’m now aware of every small sound in the thicket.
The cluck of a wren in the bush. A drip of water from leaves still wet with overnight rain, kept cold by the mountain’s shadow.
The wet shift of my own boots in the leaf litter.
The wind that’s just a very faint stir of the upper branches.
Then I notice the bones.
I’d been seeing them without really seeing them as is usually the case with me: small grey-white shapes among the moss and ferns, scattered along the base of the trees. I thought they were rocks at first, but they aren’t.