Chapter 33 #2
Then the trees give out and the castle is there, its grey bulk against the bright morning, no fog to soften it today, every broken tooth of it sharp in the sun.
Whatever’s in it that I’m meant to hate him for is in there waiting for me, and Alasdair’s expression darkens.
He leads me in through the courtyard and the stones of the great hall, now cold with a dead hearth, up the spiral staircase, and down the corridor.
We go straight to a door I noticed the first time he ever walked me through the castle, one I assumed was just a guest bedroom.
He stops with his hand on the iron ring and doesn’t turn it.
“I built this room before your country existed,” he says, as if that sentence isn’t blowing my mind.
“I’ve kept it longer than anything I’ve kept.
And until this morning, I’d have told you it was the best of me.
But I know better now. So look at all of it, and then let me explain, and if you want to walk home after and not see me for a time, the door down there will let you out. ”
Oh, okay then.
He takes in a deep breath and opens the door.
I brace for horror.
What I find is…another chapel.
Not literally, not like the one I found him praying at.
There’s no altar, no crucifixes. But as I stand in the doorway and take it in, I’m filled with that same feeling of reverence.
First of all, it’s a round stone room rising the full height of a tower, which means it’s probably the tower part I can see from the cottage.
It’s lit by three narrow windows, and around every curve of wall, floor to as high as a tall man can reach and even beyond that, are shelves.
Dozens and dozens of them. Each one shallow, each one holding a small arrangement of objects, and each one with a name cut into the wood beneath it in careful, antique letters.
A comb, bone-backed, gold teeth. A ring. A spectacles case. A hair ribbon pressed flat under a smooth stone. A locket, open, the portrait inside long faded to brown shadow.
I count them.
I get up to seventy-two before I give up.
And the names…Mary Beaton. Sileas. Una NicRath. Pavlina. Margaret Brodie. Catriona Carmichael.
I stop at Catriona’s shelf. A brooch sits on it, thistle-shaped, and a bus ticket, 1962, gone soft as cloth with age, and I think of Effie at her kitchen window writing he knows I know it was him, and my nose burns with the threat of tears.
“You kept them,” I say, my voice echoing. “All this time. You kept…why? What is this, Alasdair? Is this guilt or are these trophies, because I need to know which room I’m standing in…”
“It’s neither.” He moves into the room slowly, and his eyes go shelf to shelf the way mine went, except he doesn’t have to read the names.
“Every woman the creature took, the man came up here after, set down something of hers, cut her name into the wood, and said it aloud. Every year on the day of her taking, I’d come and say it again.
Some of these names I’ve said four hundred times by now. ”
He stops in the center of the room and turns to face me, his expression frank.
“It was how I stayed a man, Iris. The monster doesn’t mourn.
It can’t, there’s nothing in it that knows what it takes.
So the man mourned for both of us, deliberately, like tending a fire, because I learned early what happened when I let the fire go out.
The remembering was the discipline. The grief was the leash before there was a leash.
” His voice drops. “I’d have told you this room was my conscience. I’d have been proud of it.”
“And now?”
“Now.” He looks at the floor, and then makes himself look back up, whistling through his teeth.
“There’s a thing I knew and didn’t let myself know.
The women in the loch, foxglove. My drowned?
You’ve seen them, you’ve felt their hands.
” I go cold, and he nods at my reaction and continues.
“They’re not in the water because the water keeps them.
They’re in the water because I do. The bones, what the creature didn’t eat, what remained.
I gathered them, all these years. They’re below this room, in the old well-chamber, laid out properly.
I told myself it was burial. It was the only burial I could give them. ”
He runs a hand over his face, and sighs.
“But the dead stay where their bones are kept, lass. That’s old law, older than me.
As long as I held them, they couldn’t go.
The mourning that kept me a man kept them in the bay.
Every woman whose hands pulled at you in the dark is down there because my grief wouldn’t open its fist. I rented my soul off their backs for centuries and called it… remembrance.”