frowned. He didn’t want to give way, but the ground had shifted. Besides, it was no business of his. ‘That is correct, sir. The Commissioners don’t generally employ women.’
‘Then I may have a suitable name to suggest, sir, when you return. I take it that the policy of the Commissioners would be to employ a local man?’
‘I think you’d have to approach the Commissioners about that. I’m just the surveyor.’
CHAPTER 9
FLINT RASPED ON QUARTZ: STRIKE … STRIKE … STRIKE … A spark shot up, vanished. Stone on stone: strike … strike … strike … Sparks flew. A spark fell in the tin. Moss smouldered. A tiny fire sprang up, red as blood. Brown fingers picked up the flaming moss, held it to the wick, which sprouted a bead of blue, and then a proper flame, yellow and steady.
The huge dark retreated. The keeill was round them, close and solid, corbelled up to the slabbed roof. The roof was five big slabs like an upside down floor; the floor where they squatted was cold earth. The altar was a single rock with shining white pebbles scattered at its feet. The cross was propped against the east wall beside the altar. You could hardly tell it was a cross: its outline followed the curves of long-ago water over the stone from which it was carved. It looked like a giant gingerbread man with no eyes. You had to look closer to see the faint markings etched on its surface. An abandoned starling’s nest filled the aumbry on the south wall; the stones below were streaked with white. There was a faint chattering from within the walls.
‘Hark to that,’ said Billy, and held up his hand to make Breesha and Mally hush. ‘It’s the kirreeyn varrey. They’ve come back.’
‘Just,’ said Breesha, pleased. ‘It was all quiet two days ago.’ The warbling chatter stopped for a moment, and then started again. ‘That means it’s proper summer now. Not just spring.’
Sure enough, over the reek of earth there was a musky smell like ancient hay: that was Mother Carey’s chickens: the kirreeyn varrey, silent in the daytime, huddled on their invisible nests within the honeycomb of thick stone walls.
Breesha put the lamp carefully in its hollow on the green rock. The green rock was hard as iron and slippery-smooth, and in the lamplight it had a strange dark glow of its own. It had taken the strength of all three of them, a year ago, to roll the green rock from its place on the right-hand side of the altar into the centre of the keeill. You could still see the hollow in the earth where it had lain since the saint left it there. Billy hadn’t wanted to move it, but Breesha had said it was important to have the holy rock in the middle, so they could sit in a triangle round it with the lamp burning in the hollow in its centre.
Breesha held a sprig of bog myrtle in the flame, and watched it shrivel. The scent of myrtle mingled with the smell of singeing. Breesha laid the blackened twig on the green rock, next to the lamp. She made the sign against the evil eye, and Billy and Mally followed suit.
‘Now we can begin.’ Breesha always sat in what Mally thought of as the central place, with her back to the altar, facing west towards the low door. Mally sat on Breesha’s left and Billy on her right. If Mally turned her head to the left she could see a line of bright sunshine at ground level, just above where they sat, and she could hear the cries of the kittiwakes circling above the cliffs. It was reassuring to look at daylight. Once you’d crawled in through the entrance the ordinary world could begin to seem too far away. Breesha said that was all right, because the saint herself had lived here and so this was holy ground. Nothing could touch them, said Breesha; they were as safe as a goat kid inside its mother, always snug whatever storms raged outside. Mam said the same thing when she tucked them up in their beds on stormy nights, but that was in the warm house with the fire burning in the grate and the proper kitchen lamp shining brightly. Mally had never been inside the cold, earthy keeill when there was a storm. She never wanted to, either, saint or no.
‘I’ll tell you what the matter is,’ Breesha was saying. ‘Bad things are happening. There are bad things happening in the far lands, and the trouble for us is that they’re coming here. They could come any day, and once they do everything is going to change very fast.’
‘Yes, well,’ grumbled Billy. ‘There’s no point talking like a fairy story. You don’t really know any more than we do. What bad things? There isn’t a war on, is there? Finn would have told us about it if there was.’
‘Is it a buggane?’ whispered Mally, glancing towards the door. She wished the sun would start to reach in and touch her reassuringly where she sat. But it was still too early, and there was only the thin line of clear white light, as far away as the sky.
‘No, it’s not either of those things.’
‘Well, spit it out then,’ said Billy.
Breesha leaned forward. Her face glowed in the lamplight. Her shadow grew huge and flickered across the gingerbread cross so that its arms seemed to move. Mally looked firmly back at the doorway. ‘I found the letter,’ whispered Breesha, so they had to lean forward to the light to hear her.
‘What letter?’
‘I knew there was something. Something was wrong. There was something they weren’t telling us …’
‘Well, we both knew that. In fact first off, it was me that told you.’
‘Yes, but you didn’t guess it was a letter! But the thing is, it had to be. Because whatever it was happened after Finn went away last time. They were all right when Finn came with the coal last month. They were happy then.’
‘They were laughing,’ said Mally. ‘And Mam made a pudding with currants in it, boiled in the broth, and Finn stopped for a whole tide and had dinner with us, and they were laughing.’
‘Exactly! And nothing has gone wrong with the light, or the island, since then. We’d have known about anything like that. So what must have happened is Finn brought the letter and they didn’t read it till he’d gone. They read it after he went away.’
‘That’s silly,’ objected Billy. ‘They’d open it first thing, soon as they got it. I would. They always do, if there’s a letter. Mind when the letter came from the Duke’s agent about getting the new handcart? Mam opened that the minute it came, and talked to Finn all about it. Stands to reason she’d do that with any letter, because Finn would have to do the arranging about bringing anything.’
‘Ah but, I don’t think Finn gave her the letter when he came. I think he handed it over when he went.’
‘Why?’ asked Mally.
‘Because he’d know what was in it, of course, and didn’t want to talk about it. So he gave it when he was just leaving’
‘I don’t like that!’ cried Billy. ‘That makes Finn a coward, and he isn’t.’
‘Don’t blame me. I’m only telling it how it was – how it must have been. Anyway,’ added Breesha, ‘there are different sorts of coward. Don’t you want to know what was in the letter?’
‘Course we do. I told you before to spit it out! But I don’t reckon you can! You don’t know what was in it, and I bet they haven’t told you.’ And if they have, thought Billy, it will be very unfair, because I’m the man here, not Breesha. He sighed. Thoughts like that worried him: he and Breesha never used to try to get the better of each other like this. All their lives they’d thought
