Folly (32 page)

She tugged cautiously at the ancient burned fragments of wood, which crumbled in her hands, and at the vigorous tangle of blackberry vine that covered the back of the fireplace. She shoved and yanked and fought to keep her footing, she sweated and burrowed into the unexplored wasteland behind the tower wall, she cursed and thought of turning back, after just a bit farther.

In no time at all, she found Desmond Newborn.

Desmond Newborn’s
Journal

April 30, 1925

Ten thousand miles and eight years separate me from the trenches, but the ghosts visit me still, dart away from the corners of my eyes, moan beneath the sound of the wind, reach out from the stench of a rotting seal carcass on my shore. Yesterday I looked up from my work on the rear tower and there was Harper standing among the trees. “You left me to drown in the mud,” he told me. And indeed, I did so. He was alive when the wiring party crawled past him, buried past his waist in the eternal muck, and he was dead, toppled forward until only the back of his head was to be seen, when we came back fourteen hours later. We had spent the day ourselves in a shell-hole only marginally drier than his, pinned down by a Maxim gun. “We had orders,” I told his ghost. “No stopping to rescue the wounded. We tried to pull you, and five of us couldn’t break the mud’s hold. Digging would have meant the wire didn’t get laid. Going back for reinforcements would’ve meant a bullet from the Sergeant. You know that.” “It is an evil way to die, alone and drowning in the cold mud.” “I am sorry,” I told him. “I am sorry.”

He faded away after a while, leaving me with a half set bucket of mortar at my feet. A stuff, incidentally, that brickmasons call “mud.”

We’re all mad, I believe, all of us who came out of the trenches. A twenty-three-hour stretch of earth-quaking, bone-rattling, sky-splitting hell from the big guns, and even the most solid nerves dissolved. And that was only one bombardment. Georgie Abbot, a cattle farmer, a man
who went out to pull a friend back from no-man’s-land under a murderous line of fire, a man who made a game out of how many rats he could impale in a day on his trench knife, a man who was always one of the first up the ladders, singing under his breath a rude version of a hymn called “Onward Christian Soldiers”—this same stolid farmer broke under one prolonged shelling. He began to giggle, helpless as a tickled child, then he shed his helmet, dropped his rifle into the mud, and before anyone could stop him, over the top he went. He walked out into no-man’s-land with his arms outstretched as if to greet a loved one, striding as strongly as he was able over the pitted ground. He made it nearly to the wire before the disbelieving Germans had to dispatch him.

I saw Georgie, too, one day last month, flickering through the bushes down near the water. He looked happy.

The ghosts are not threatening. Now that I have come to accept their presence around me, they even make for a peculiar sort of companionship. I find myself talking to the aptly named Mason, the cleverest trench builder I ever saw, who made his living laying dry-stone walls in Yorkshire and who is as helpful with my own tower as ever he was with sandbags in the French soil. And evenings I often call to mind Jimmy Hurlstone, older than any soldier in the company but with a younger man’s face that got him past the enlistment sergeant. Jimmy was a slow and deliberate teller of deliciously ridiculous stories, who would keep us entertained on the most miserable of nights. I would never mention it to another soul, but in truth, some of the tales Jimmy tells me here on my island I would swear that I have never before heard.

They keep me company, my ghosts do. And I think perhaps they need me as well, to help them live out their days. I do not mind sharing my life with them; for every ghostly wail that comes to me out of a storm, jerking me straight back to the night after a battle with the piteous, hoarse screams of dying men reaching out of the dark, there are ten hearty, crude, cheerful, courageous men, lending me their memories.

One thing can be said for an experience like the Western Front: There’s little to be dreaded about death afterward. I do not fear death, although I will regret if I be alone when it comes for me, and I can only pray that it be not an unquiet end, that my shade does not have to travel the earth in search of a vessel to help it live out the fullness of its days.

All I ask is a continuation of the peace I have found here.

There was an unexpectedly intense pleasure to be had in delaying revenge, he reflected; anticipation of The Thief’s face, on realizing that the time of reckoning was suddenly at hand. All alone in the middle of the deep blue sea, mad Thief and cool Victim meet, and balance would be restored.

As far as Rae could figure, the heap of rotted wood and ash behind the house meant that Desmond had possessed a fairly well-stocked woodshed behind his house, in the L-shaped structure that filled the gap between the back wall and the rock face, wrapping around the fireplace to the rear tower. The rotted material would need rakes and buckets to remove, which Rae had planned to do once she had a second story on which she could fix a boom-and-pulley system—a minor building project that would save her hours of scrambling, to say nothing of twisted ankles and imperiled bones.

Now, however, she was concerned only with tracing the outlines of this peculiarly Desmond-esque wood storage box, to see if she could understand why he had gone to the effort of building an elaborately enclosed space when a six-by-six-foot lean-to would have done. She stepped down gingerly from the rock face to the soft soil, hoping to avoid the worst of the buried nails, and found the surface firm enough that her boots only sank in a couple of inches. She pushed with the head of the hammer against the nearest brambles, and when they were bent she systematically crushed them flat under her boots before tackling the next patch.

The narrow space ended in a dank corner where the moss-covered orange stones of the rear tower joined the rock face to Rae’s left and the black fireplace to her right. Approaching the end, hedged around by rock walls both natural and man-made, Rae felt as if she were wading into the bottom of a well.

Although the soil had looked uniform in depth and quality, she found that the farther back into the well she pushed, the shallower the layer of organic matter grew. Low light and solid rock at their roots made the plants thin and lank. The L-shaped woodbin must have been more fully loaded just behind the access door, which made sense—who would need a filled bin the width of the house? Maybe Desmond had envisioned an East Coast blizzard out here, Rae speculated sourly as she peeled the claws of a Nootka rose out of her jeans. Arctic snowfall that would have buried him inside for weeks, forcing him to tunnel through the access door into the depths of the—

Wait a minute. What was that?

Her tugging at the spindly bramble had loosed a small rockfall from the hill above, scarcely an arm’s length from the corner of chimney and tower, but instead of tumbling down to bury the toe of her boot, the scree had simply vanished. She scraped at the rock face with the side of the hammer’s head, then shifted it around and drove its strong, straight claws into the soil, and pulled. A bushel or two of rock and dank soil came down across her feet, but Rae did not notice.

There was a hole, into the rock.

Scraping with the hammer could only do so much. Rae, suddenly impatient to find what Desmond had been hiding behind his woodpile, waded back over crushed vegetation, broken rock, and black humus and through the newly framed wall. She dropped her tool belt and went to fetch a shovel, a couple of buckets, and the big flashlight.

She shoveled at the place where the rockfall had disappeared, and in the end did not bother with the buckets, simply heaving several cubic yards of greenery and soil away from the tower and concentrating on the hole. For hole it was. More than that, a small cave—or at any rate, a cave with a small entrance.

When she had scraped the vegetation and soil clear, Rae was standing in front of a neat hole in the rock face slightly more than two feet in height, somewhat less in width. A chisel had bitten into the stone all around the edges—a heavier tool than anything Rae used, but its mark instantly recognizable. She picked up the flashlight and went down on her knees.

The beam shone back into the hill, Rae was not surprised to see. Indeed, it extended so far that the back wall was only palely illuminated. She hesitated, but could think of no reason not to go inside. If the cave’s
roof hadn’t collapsed by now, odds were pretty good it would go another day—if she avoided bumping into anything she shouldn’t, or making a loud noise.

Rae took a breath, and crawled forward into the belly of the island.

This was, she realized, the same stratum of sandstone that dove and warped its way through the harder stone of the island. Elsewhere it carried water; here it carried … what?

Air, perhaps, though stale and utterly without motion, even three feet inside the opening. And water somewhere, since the air felt moist and every few seconds she heard a
plunk
of falling drips. The floor and walls here were dry and smooth, and she inched forward down the uneven tunnel, looking for the source of that noise.

She did not find it, not that day. What her flashlight beam found instead, tumbled together at the end of a short side passage that came in from the left, was a heap of dust-colored clothing draped across a collection of pale bones: long shins, curling rib cage, naked wrist, grinning skull.

The next twenty seconds decided the question of the cave’s stability against loud noises and sharp jolts. For three of those seconds, Rae froze there on her hands and knees, gaping back at the naked skull, and then all the hair on her body rose up and she shrieked, dropped the flashlight, and scrabbled her way to the entrance, tumbling out into the soft pit she had dug and clawing her way between rock and fireplace, through the studs as if they had been a doorway, sending her abandoned coffee mug flying as she leapt across the floorboards and down the hill to the safety of her workbench. She slapped her hand on the surface with the gesture of a medieval felon claiming sanctuary at an altar, leaping around to its far side and gaping at the house as if awaiting pursuit. She gulped three enormous breaths; then she clapped her hand across her mouth and started to laugh, halfway to hysteria.

The emotional storm blew through, leaving her light-headed and trembling, and she tottered across to the canvas chair to sit before her legs gave out on her. First, though, she turned the chair so that she had a clear view up the hillside.

She lowered her head nearly to her knees and waited for the world to stop swimming, glancing up at the two towers every few seconds. Nothing moved. The adrenaline faded, and she began to feel distinctly queasy. After a while, she stood up on a pair of legs that didn’t feel like hers to
make herself a cup of tea (no milk, it being Friday). She drank it, and began to feel less shaky.