a million eyes pinned to her secret errand. It was late, all was quiet except for the music from the tavern at the end of the road and the generator going at the police station. Most people went to bed early, tired after the buffeted round of their island lives – except the readers, whose windows glowed as they read into the night: old favourites from the small library housed in Martha Schoones’s study or from the school library, books that were coming apart at the spine.
Frieda turned away from the houses, skirting the main section of the village, and made her way to Sophia’s cottage. It was done. There would be consequences, but that was the way of life.
Chapter Five
“So this is the doctor’s daughter.” Sophia gathered the baby up and cradled her along the length of her forearms, the tiny capped head cupped in her palms. The infant was shrieking, her little legs pulling up to her belly, her face exhausted and crumpled and dry, her tears used up.
“Also my sister’s daughter!” Frieda replied, surprised by her flare of irritation. Light from the fire blazed as Astrid fed and stoked it, light lapped at patches of shadow on the rough stone walls and at Sophia’s soft face, her brow puckered as she peered at the child. It was absurd, thought Frieda, that Sophia refused the convenience of electric light in this day and age.
Sophia lifted her face and looked at Frieda long and hard, turning something over in her mind, as if to say – what? What was in that look? What was there left to say after the tragedy, after the facts of the matter? Here was a baby who needed help. Surely Sophia wouldn’t hold the father against her?
“She’s our daughter,” muttered Astrid, feeding dry grasses into the crackling fire.
Frieda looked at her sharply. Astrid was unpredictable; she felt uneasy in her presence. What did she mean?
“It’s time you did your own crying, Astrid,” said Sophia. “Leave this babe, she carries enough.”
Astrid only laughed at this, a high, loud laugh that shocked the child to silence for a moment, then merged with the cadence of her renewed cries.
“Light the herbs,” instructed Sophia.
Astrid reached up and took a bound plait of dried leafy twigs down from a bunch hanging from a rafter and immersed the end in the flame. As soon as the plait took, she removed it and extinguished it. The glowing cinders unravelled a grey and pungent smoke onto the air.
Sophia took the plait and leaned over the baby. She blew the smoke gently onto her forehead, her chest, her belly. Startled, the baby’s cries choked off into coughing. Frieda restrained her impulse to leap forward and take the child away. The use of herb smoke cleansed the spirit and invited the ancestors in, yet it surely was no good for newborn lungs! It was wrong to have come. Yet she could not bear the thought of going home to more nights of wailing.
“Angelique is here,” Sophia said quietly, putting the baby down on the sofa next to her and lifting the baby’s clothing to reveal her belly.
Frieda tried to sense her sister’s presence in the air around her but failed. Why was it that some were chosen and others not, that some had this gift of seeing and healing? Frieda had known Sophia her whole life – and yet she barely knew her. She remembered her as a wilful and overindulged child, the only progeny of elderly parents who regarded her as a miracle given by the ancestors – yet this supposed miracle had picked on Frieda for being short and fat. Then, as a prepubescent girl, Sophia had become very ill, dreaming dreams that belonged to the deepest hour of the night, growing thin and wasted. Aunt Kora, the local herbalist and midwife, came to explain to the parents that Sophia had been called, and that Kora had been waiting for this sign of a successor. Kora said that if Sophia did not come into apprenticeship, she would become crippled or die. Becoming a healer was the only possible choice for Sophia: this was her destiny. The parents did not want their only child to become a healer, a difficult and exacting life bound by strict ritual, observance and service. It was also a marked life: a potential target of awe and fear in the community. So they consulted the doctor at the hospital. Despite his medication, Sophia worsened to the point of death. The doctor explained that she needed to be hospitalised on the mainland, that specialists could help her; but the next ship was only due to arrive a month hence, and that might be too late. Frieda remembered hearing this news as a child with deep satisfaction. But Sophia hadn’t died. Instead she had convinced her parents to let her go to Aunt Kora, dreaming every night of an elephant that carried her away. By the time the ship arrived, she refused to go to the mainland for treatment, despite the doctor’s insistence that the sickness would no doubt return, that she was only in remission.
Frieda recalled the day Sophia did not come back to school, and her feeling of relief and envy. The chosen child no longer played with the other children and was seen only occasionally, at a distance, by herself or with Aunt Kora, her beautiful braids shaved off, her face washed with white, a stranger, a spirit, unreal. She spent her days walking the island, gathering indigenous plants, immersed in ritual, preparing for life as healer.
Then, some years later, when Angelique was born, Sophia arrived at Frieda’s mother’s house as Aunt Kora’s midwife apprentice. Frieda remembered how she quietly did what she was told, carrying in the basins of water, wrapping the afterbirth to prepare for ritual burial, ignoring Frieda in her own home. Frieda had barely been able to look at her, knowing she was chosen and Frieda was not – even though she knew Sophia got up at four in the morning in winter to gather certain plants, and washed in cold water only, and was not allowed to eat fish.
Yet here she was, asking her old enemy for help, against the doctor’s beliefs and wishes.
Sophia leaned over and put her open mouth onto the baby’s abdomen, drawing her cheeks in with a gentle sucking, so that when she raised her head, she left a reddened oval mark on the baby’s belly. She leaned forward and spat a hissing globule into the fire, then took some oil from a bottle warmed at the hearth, and rubbed it into the baby’s belly, her hand moving in slow circles.
The baby’s sobbing breath, catching on itself, slowed as Sophia began to sing a string of song.
“Stranger to this world you come,
sent by those who know your fate,
love has given, love has taken,
may all storms in you abate.”
Sophia blew gently into the baby’s blinking eyes and open mouth, down onto her chest still lurching with occasional sobs, down to her belly, to her legs which had relaxed.
“Child of poverty, child of plenty,
may your small boat find its bay.
Daughter of shipwreck, child of moonlight,
let your life show you the way.”
Sophia took a length of knotted blue yarn from a basket beside her. Frieda stiffened; not this, not this! “The doctor will not stand for that!” she objected.
Sophia ignored her, tying the yarn around the baby’s belly, blessing it with a few of the old words. “You will find a way to keep it from him. We refuse the way of the ancestors at our peril, Frieda, you know it.”
Frieda shook her head, dismayed, as Sophia pulled the baby’s garments back over her belly. She should have known: the yarn was the old way to keep the child safe, tied to the guidance of the ancestors. But the doctor never bathed or changed his daughter, so perhaps . . .
“What is she
