Chapter Thirteen Chime for a Change
Chapter Thirteen
Chime for a Change
Bohortha’s tangled cottage remained unsettled the following morning, as though it had absorbed the foul words from the evening prior.
One consolation was the weather’s improvement.
Blazing sunshine had eradicated the mist and set spring firmly on her course to summer.
Blackbirds, robins and wrens cheered the joy of it.
However, on the horizon were lumped clouds.
Whatever fine day had come, it would not last. Kensa could tell as much from her bedroom window.
Upon waking, she stepped clumsily downstairs.
She checked the third chair in the parlour and found it piled high once again with odds and ends.
The Bucka was long gone, yet he had left a peculiar atmosphere behind.
A sense of being watched. As though he had forgotten his jacket on their coat stand and its pockets now gently lipped at their movements, collecting and heaving with all it overheard.
Kensa wrapped her shawl tighter around herself.
On the kitchen table were feathers. The bird cage was empty.
Isolde’s nails had red beneath them. She bid her apprentice to tie twig bundles, combining magpie, dove and jay with birch, ash and holly.
Each item had a meaning, yet to be memorised.
It was hard for Kensa to hold a lesson in her thoughts when her thoughts were already full.
Isolde ran rosemary oil over her fingers, lips twitching with words Kensa could not quite catch.
Around them, the chickens were content to warm themselves on windowsills while Fox slept at their feet, her body curled around the younger woman’s ankles.
Kensa puffed out her cheeks. ‘Why was the Bucka here last night?’
Isolde hit a twig across her palms. ‘Pay attention to your work.’
‘How can I do that when you’re keeping things from me?’
‘Whoever I entertain in the small hours and however I do it is a private matter. Now, bind your damn feathers and do it with a more cheerful disposition. I won’t have you tarnishing the shipping charms or else I’ll have enough capsizes to fill the spare soil at St Gerrans.
’ Isolde’s words had a falsity to them. A studied, practised air, as performative as a dog rose, sweet to spite its name.
‘That reminds me,’ continued the wise woman, ‘I’ll need you to visit Mr Aldridge this afternoon, to ask if he’d be wanting his bees returned and how he proposes to do it. ’
‘What’s that smell?’
Onions, the ones strung together for divining purposes, were weeping. One was blackened and shrivelled, the other oozing clear fluid.
Isolde kept her eyes on the table, feathers and twine in her fingers. ‘Don’t you mind that, it’s nought to worry over.’
Another lie, then. Or at least an inability to tell the truth.
‘Suit yourself,’ said Kensa bitterly.
She was too proud to pry. Even if she tried to, Isolde would never relent.
As ever, there was work to be done. Kensa had no desire to see Mr Aldridge, but it seemed the only way to calm the bees who had begun to pester both the wise woman and her apprentice.
Thankfully, any concerns about being stung were eased when she saw the insects wrapped around Isolde’s neck like a living scarf.
From the kitchen door, Kensa called, ‘I won’t be long.’ Isolde opened her lips, downturned, as though to speak. Her getting-ready rustle paused when the apprentice dropped her boot laces. ‘What is it?’
After a long wait, Isolde said, ‘You mind yourself, now.’
‘Don’t I always?’
Kensa retraced her steps from yesterday and walked up the hill to Gerrans and then along, beside the church, to the curate’s cottage.
The drizzle had finally sulked to shore and brought with it rain showers, quick to arrive and slow to leave.
By the time Kensa was at the clergyman’s gate she was soaked through.
Sadly, there would be no warm or dry reception here.
In fact, after their last meeting, Kensa was apprehensive.
What would be the worst of it? Cruel words, an insult, perhaps the same as spoken at the May Day festival. A sense that she had diminished in the eyes of the village’s most influential resident. Her fear was smallness and she wore it then, in the damp and the cold.
She did feel small, lately.
As though every single word cut her too deeply, too keenly.
Mr Aldridge’s windows were dark and the curtains closed, as they had been before.
This time, however, his door was ajar. It revealed a dim hallway.
Beyond that came singing. It was not Mr Aldridge’s wavering baritone.
No, this was a high, haunting melody which tipped over into cascading, flooding, bubbling laughter.
It was and was not a woman’s voice.
And it was not unknown to Kensa, either. She had heard it only yesterday in church, radiating from that front pew. Her steps were loud in the hallway. ‘Sir?’ At her call, the singing ceased. Drip, her skirts ran puddles. Behind her, the rain continued.
Kensa went to speak again, until she came level with the curate’s front room.
On this grey morning, the beautiful singer she had seen yesterday, the lady called Merrin, was no longer wearing her prim Sunday clothes.
In fact, she wore no clothes at all. She lounged on a small settee and only the day’s dim shadows preserved her modesty.
The wider Kensa pushed the door open, the smaller those shadows became.
A fishy scent rolled through her senses.
‘I was looking for … ’ trailed Kensa, as her eyes adjusted to the gloom in the room and what the gloom held, ‘ … Mr Aldridge?’ There the curate was, propped beside the now-quiet singer on the settee.
He did not resemble himself. There was a shrunken pull to him, skin tight and shiny like a cured ham.
His smile, if it could be called that, was the worst part.
Lips peeled back in a grin, neck bent, nostrils wide and gaping.
‘He’s dead,’ said Kensa, disbelieving.
‘Yes,’ replied Merrin.
‘What will I tell the bees?’
Kensa did not exactly giggle. She was not sure what she did.
A sound left her, unbidden. She could not have moved had she tried.
Dread was a pebble. One dropped from a great height and into a well, stirring the silt at the bottom where instinct lay.
The ones that told her to run. She tried to, she wanted to.
The cushions at Merrin’s back squelched as she adjusted herself, shiny-wet with matter. ‘You are the wise woman’s apprentice.’ She spoke oddly, stilted, as though her mouth were filled with sand. It was then Kensa looked at her, truly looked at her.
Merrin’s feet were webbed and green as sandwort, darkening to sea holly across her body, stomach, breasts and throat.
Gone was the white complexion she had sported prior – the powder to hide her tint.
Here was a monster, almost human in appearance, yet decidedly off.
She was high-cheeked with wide-set eyes, a too-small nose and stringy black hair.
Her dress, chemise and gloves lay torn and discarded on the ornate rug.
Lying beside them was another immobile, lifeless shape: Wenna.
She was the servant who tended to Mr Aldridge’s fires and prepared his meals.
At her neck were bright marks – strangle marks – latticed and leathery, which matched the casing on the creature Kensa now stood before.
‘You – you did this?’ Kensa’s stomach lurched. ‘How could— You did this?’
The single breath where Kensa might have screamed came and went. Her dress continued to drip onto the rug, already sopping and darkly stained.
Merrin tilted her head to the side, watchful.
Those who lived by the shore had names for what this creature was.
Whether from the West Country or the Scottish Isles, local folk knew such beasts existed.
Called them selkie or mermaid or siren or – in Cornwall – asrai.
Kensa had never met one. No one had. Indeed, what lay in the sea was bid to stay in the sea, as far as the Pact told.
Wasn’t that what the Bucka did? Kept them there, within the waves, imprisoned.
Kensa threw up. Upended her stomach loudly across the floor, exactly as she had done the last time she was at Mr Aldridge’s door. With a thin yowl, the asrai pulled her long, webbed feet clear.
‘You killed him,’ said Kensa.
‘He wanted me to,’ said Merrin. ‘Asked for it.’ Her voice was one of coral walls and sandy beds. ‘You saw how he dress-ss-ed for me, buttoned to chin, wrapped as a gift. I enjoy a clergyman’s plumpness – they are fed so well – taste of hypocrisy.’
‘And you killed him,’ repeated Kensa.
She put a hand to the doorframe and steadied herself. The room began to tilt and fly into curves around her. She could not rip her gaze from Mr Aldridge’s stretched, dried face, from the speckled pepper-red marks on the wall behind him, from his ever-staring eyes and the last sight he’d taken.
‘You will be calm.’
It was a simple instruction delivered by the asrai.
It soothed the waves in Kensa’s blood and cooled her heart’s beating: a spell, wild magic, the Old Ways.
Merrin moved from the settee. Came close to bare her teeth against Kensa’s cheek.
Beneath her words was a shrill melody. ‘You will pour me tea.’
Unable to resist, Kensa did exactly that.
She could not remember the action of putting the tea kettle over the range in the kitchen, though her hands must have done it.
Nor did she recall stepping from room to room.
Occasionally, she would blink and realise she had walked or moved or opened a cupboard.
If ever she cast her eyes around her, the bodies no longer evoked emotion.
Mr Aldridge’s dried husk was the norm, as was Wenna’s strangled form.
Besides, there was tea to make, wasn’t there?
‘We are fine ladies,’ said Merrin. ‘This is what fine ladies do.’
Kensa nodded.
Her host was pleased: ‘Yes-ss-ss.’