Page 3 of The Midnight Secret

Village Bay, St Kilda

Jayne stared down at the humble cross, tacked together from driftwood that had washed up on their single shore long ago and been stored in the coffin cleit, ready for the next death.

Despite their best efforts, it wasn’t much to honour the memory of a girl who had been so radiant in life. Jayne, Effie, Flora and Mhairi had each taken a turn with Effie’s paints, picking out Molly’s name in swirling letters and decorating the spaces with flowers and a tiny motif of the St Kilda wren whose songs she had loved so much.

Jayne sank to the ground and pressed a hand to the lush grass; buttercups nodded in bright greeting but they still made her blanch, even now. She could never forget how they had rained from her hair on her wedding night, daisies and buttercups shaken loose and falling, one by one, until nothing beautiful had remained.

She looked away. She couldn’t believe she was leaving her young sister-in-law behind. It felt like losing her all over again,for there had at least been solace in visiting her grave every day. Jayne had taken to bringing her knitting up to the burial ground and sitting beside the little cross, protected from buffeting winds and prying eyes by the high stone wall that encircled the oval space like a mother’s arms. She sat there most days and kept the girl she’d loved as a sister up to date with all the village news, chatting like they always used to over the kitchen table: Flora and Mhairi were summering with the flocks in Glen Bay; Crabbit Mary was – finally – with child, due any day; Donald had had a nasty fall when they went over to pluck the sheep on Boreray, but he’d recovered well; Effie had fallen in love with an earl’s son who had then, of course, broken her heart...

So much life had been lived since Molly’s death, even here on their tiny isle where supposedly nothing ever happened. Jayne simply couldn’t envisage what awaited them on the other side of the water. She could scarcely believe the evacuation was happening at all. It had seemed like a trick when the news had come in May, everyone stunned. Yes, they’d come to an ‘all or none’ consensus in the weeks that had followed Molly’s passing last November, when Lorna – fuelled by guilt or rage – had argued that no one should die of pneumonia in this age; that if they’d only had the right resources and aid, Molly could have lived. Didn’t they deserve more, better, Lorna had asked?

Moreandbetterweren’t words in the St Kildan vocabulary; but then, Lorna MacDonald was a St Kildan by choice, not by birth. And somehow, as the argument wore on through those dark nights of winter, it had become a petition for evacuation to the mainland.

The islanders had been split when the thought was first mooted: the elders wanting to stay, the younger generationenticed by the comforts found on the other side. There was no denying their number, now down to thirty-six, had dropped to a critical level. Half the population was either aged or juvenile, and they needed strong young men to climb the cliffs to catch the very birds and their eggs they lived on; they needed strong young women to birth the future generations of St Kildans, especially now that Mhairi was betrothed to a farmer on Harris, Flora to her gentleman from Glasgow, and Effie, a wild thing, was no more suited to marriage than the wind was meant for a box. Molly had been the worst possible person to die, for so many reasons.

Jayne had collapsed when she had first seen Molly’s face in a vision; she’d felt her insides turn to dust. There had been no one she could tell, no one with whom she could share her horror. Though everything in her being had wanted to scream desperate warnings, to somehow alter the future and deceive fate, it would have been an unconscionable cruelty to utter them. Her mother had warned her of the futility of trying to ever change what was already foreseen.

The horror of that day lingered still, and as she sat by the grave, flashbacks still tormented her.Picking Molly up from the floor and carrying her to her bed...Norman paling at her sudden deterioration, praying to a God he didn’t believe in...Lorna working with fast hands and a grim look...the darkness buffeting and gathering around them, a rolling energy that was spiriting Molly away like she was a ball of rags...

‘Come on, Moll!’ Lorna urging her patient to rally, to respond, her hands moving faster and faster as time began to run out.

‘Oh God,’ Norman crying, sensing it too. ‘Moll, no!’

Molly’s shallow, grasping breaths drawing out ever longer, pauses outweighing little desperate hiccups for oxygen. Silences steadily becoming ominous – and then deafening.

‘Moll?’ Norman’s voice breaking on the whispered word. The big man sounding small. He had vowed to protect his sister, thinking it meant a rich husband and a house on the mainland; never knowing they would be imperilled by sheep in a snowstorm.

Lorna turning to them, ashen-faced. ‘She’s gone.’

‘No!’ Norman reaching past her, pulling his sister into his arms. ‘Wake up, Moll!’ His hollow gasp asMolly’s head dropped backward in dreadful proof.

A creak of the latch, footsteps...David MacQueen stopping at the sight of Jayne, Lorna, Norman and Molly positioned like marble figurines. His legs buckling, staggering backwards, his face becoming a Greek mask – tragedy pulling down on a gaping mouth, eyes bulging – as Norman moaned a ghostly sound, his soul being dragged from his innards. But it was worse than that.

A man could live without his soul. But his heart?

Norman’s eyes finding hers, sorrow turning to rage – because she had known all this. Foreseen and not stopped it. Given no warnings.

Her body weakening, knowing there would be consequences. There always were.

‘I thought I might find you here.’

The voice pressed over her memories, pushing them back down into the depths of her psyche, and she looked up to find David standing before her. The sun pressed at his back so that he glowed, his edges black and blurred against a bleached sky.

‘Of course,’ she smiled as he sat beside her in his usual way, looping his elbows over his knees as he looked down the hill, back towards the bay. She knew he felt the same as her. Leaving Molly was going to be the worst part about leaving here. No matter the comforts they might find elsewhere, it was only in this spot right here that either of them felt at peace.

This had become their meeting place in the nine months since Molly had gone. Not intentionally, of course; it had never occurred to her that they might become friends (David was three years her junior, for one thing). But they had each needed to feel close to Molly and had found themselves drawn back here, day after day. At first, they had been at pains to give one another space – David had been Molly’s sweetheart, Jayne her sister-in-law. But over time, instead of scattering, they had begun to sit here together and talk about times past with the girl they had both loved. Sharing their memories had become a way of grieving, a new ritual. Jayne recounted the quiet companionship of cooking with Molly at the stove, washing the sheets in the burn, knitting by the fire. David’s reminiscences were more lively: dancing all night at the ceilidh, Molly’s cheeks flushed and eyes bright; how they would flirt in the kirk, hiding messages in their prayer books. He remembered what had turned out to be their last day together, stealing kisses in her bedroom as they hid from Norman, holding themselves back from temptation in the mistaken belief that they had a future waiting for them and all the time in the world. But where had their patience and virtue got them?

‘Is the madness abating?’ Jayne asked now, picking up her knitting.

Everyone had been packing up for days. Mad Annie had been practising walking up and down the street with her spinning wheel on her back, ready for embarking the boat. Effie had been checking the climbing ropes, brushing off all reminders that they wouldn’t be needed on the mainland. Ma Peg’s windows shone even though in two days’ time, no one would look through them again.

‘Only getting worse,’ David tutted. ‘Old Fin’s adamant hehid a sovereign up the chimney thirty years back, but he can’t find it.’

‘How did he come by a sovereign thirty years back?’ Jayne frowned. Theirs was a barter economy of chores, errands and favours swapped between families. The rich visitors who sometimes sailed in, offering shillings in exchange for photographs or woollen socks, had only been coming in any number since the Great War.

‘Says he won it off a captain. Arm wrestling.’

Jayne smiled. Old Fin was in his twilight years now, but thirty years ago? There were few men who could match a St Kildan’s arm strength. The islanders’ survival depended upon cragging; even challenging one of them to a thumb-wrestle was ill-advised.

---