Chapter Text
march, 1719, somewhere off the coast of wales
Up on the bluffs the air is thin and sweet and unhurried. Knocking flower heads together, running hands through the grass, catching in the stray wisps of hair that escape from Ed’s braid. Below, the sea boils white against the rocks. A distant, constant murmur that follows him from cliffside to field to forest. It’s still early. The light is still thin. Ed nudges the toe of his shoe to a loose rock at the cliff’s edge, and watches it tumble down down down until it falls out of sight.
He imagines the splash. Imagines its descent to the sea’s unforgiving depths. Imagines how it drifts, and how it settles; how the sand covers it over until it’s part of the sea floor. Then he dips a hand into the pocket of his smock, and rolls himself a cigarette. His knee is aching. That dull pain that comes before rain.
Clouds have clumped up on the horizon by the time Ed pitches his cigarette butt away from himself. Moody, low shapes against the steely sea. Ed appraises them for a moment, some reflex from a previous life — cloud drawing down, the front’s coming in, will rain by noon, early evening if we’re lucky —
A gull wheels through the sky. Ed lets his attention catch hold, and then drop away. Turns away from the cliff’s edge. Away from the clouds, from the sea; from its insistent pull at some distant and animal part of him.
Down in the dell the world is warm and fragrant. Peat, moss, wild garlic; the vague sweet scent of gorse. By May the whole island will be ablaze with it; hot yellow flowers dressing the hills in their springtime colours. Ed eases into the thicket; green spines catching at his hands and wrists as he plucks the young, budding flowers from their stems. Pulling at his hair, at his clothes, until he shakes himself free with a grunt.
“Bloody buggering —” He huffs, pressing his mouth to the back of his hand, where a deep scratch oozes a thin line of blood. On the other side, bisecting Ed’s palm; its ruddy twin shines in the weak sunlight. Still healing. Still waxing, waning, settling into his skin. A wound deep enough that now Ed can’t close his fingers all the way.
It’s with clumsy hands that he forages. His scratches still weeping blood as he bends and plucks and bends and plucks. Tiny shears hanging from his belt, swinging with his movements. He snips at wild leek, wild yarrow, wild garlic. Picks clover and blackberries and ferrets his fingers along the underside of damp logs; plucking pale white mushrooms from the giving wood. Back aching along with his knee; along with his hand, its cold, nerveless scar. But a good, clean sweat is gathering along his hairline. His mind is blank. Fingertips stained red with berry juice.
By the time he follows the path back into the dim silence of the woods, the sun is awake. Pushing thin fingers of light through the canopy, turning the leaf litter gold, giving him something warm to pass through. On his hip, his knapsack is full. Hands stained and torn up and smelling like garlic. At a thin, burbling stream, he bends to sink them into the water. His knee cracks. The water is freezing, and fast-flowing; shuddering the green heads of the weeds that cling to the low banks. Ed thumbs at his palms, scratches his nails across the backs of his hands. Feels the sting as the cuts open back up, and that cold water beats against his raw flesh.
Somewhere, a bird is trilling. The sunlight warm and settled gently on the nape of his neck; bared to the sky between collar and hair. A perfect spring morning. Ed lets himself fall back onto his ass; his oof loud in the quiet woods. Wipes his hands dry on his shirt, and then delves into his knapsack; pushing aside glass jars and bundles of fragrant leeks until his fingertips hit the familiar smooth curve of his flask.
It sloshes when he pulls it free. That hollow sound of a bottle teetering on empty. Ed holds it to his ear. Shakes it. Shrugs. Uncaps it. Blackberry wine, down the hatch. Sweet on the tongue, bitter on the stomach. Ed draws his good knee to his chest, and rests his chin on it, flask dangling from his fingers as he tracks the meandering path of a bumblebee to his left. The scratches on his hands throb.
Idly, he wonders exactly when any of this is supposed to start feeling good.
——
Ed’s mum liked to sit him between her knees to comb his hair; right there on the floor like they were both little kids. His hair wet, spotting the shoulders of his nightshirt, the comb making sharp paths over his scalp as she hummed softly in his ear. Afterwards, he would sit and watch her rub lanolin into her hands; would play at being her little maid for a while afterwards as the balm melted into her skin. Fetching her things just so she would smile at him, so he could feel useful. A cup of water, an apple, her reading glasses. Each time, her chapped red hands taking them, holding them, eyes curving warm as she said, thank you, sweetheart. The warm rush of happiness that followed.
She liked to tell him that happiness came from working hard. Perched at the kitchen table, candlelight sliding through the rims of her glasses, through her black hair, the lanolin shining on her sore, cracked hands. Ed is older now than his mum was when she died. He’s still not figured out what kind of hard work she meant.
The smell of the sea is thick inland; the wind a little sharper now that he’s out of the forest. Again, Ed eyes the clouds on the horizon. Rubs at the back of his hands. Noon, he thinks, amending his earlier prediction. Noon, latest.
The island is inhabited, but only just. The convent houses maybe fifty nuns; a selection of low, white buildings on the brow of the hill, the chapel standing tall over their shoulders. Walled in on all sides, though Ed has never worked out whether that’s to keep the world out or the nuns in. In another life, he might’ve tried to find out. Might’ve scaled the walls and run roughshod through the corridors; trying to catch the nuns in their nightgowns. Anything to scandalise; anything to get the blood pumping. But all Ed has done since landing on the island’s long, pale bracelet of a bay is keep their boilers fed. Chop trees for firewood. Learn how to milk cows; deliver lambs; to seed vegetables. In exchange, he stays in a small tin-roofed building on the grounds and has all the time he needs in which to drink and wander and watch the sun’s endless rise and fall.
Today he stops there long enough to drop his knapsack on the table and refill his flask from the demijohn in the closet. Inside, the room is dim and stuffy. Ed cracks the window. He scoops up his gloves from the kitchen table, kicks the cat’s bowl out of the sunlight, and leaves the front door swinging as he sets out for the day.
He thinks the hard work his mum talked about was the kind of hard work they don’t make anymore. Or that it was some mental thing; that the way his brain came together means he might never find it. He found happiness just once. And it was easy, so easy. Too easy. If he and his mum have anything in common, it’s their ability to put their hearts in the hands of the wrong man.
Ed has her eyes. He has her hair. He has the star she was born under tattooed over his heart. And he has her fatal flaws too.
It’s a long, uphill wander to the convent. Ed takes swigs from his flask as he goes, feet scuffing against the track, knee burning that good, maddening burn. Like the bones have sand caught between them; grinding everything in there down to dust. The gloves tucked in his belt bob with his footsteps. The wine beats against the inside of the flask. Rising up before him, the whitewashed walls of the chapel glow in the morning sunlight; angled just so to get the first rays of the day. He can hear them praying in there. The low, continuous hum of their chanting. Sometimes, between them and the murmuring sea, Ed feels like screaming. Just to bring something discordant into the mix.
Ed only knows the back end of the convent. Its boiler room, its wood store, the pens where they keep the animals. As far as he knows, he’s the only man-shaped thing on this island. Him and the rooster, vying for position. It’s through the toolshed that he drags himself now; the transitional place between the island and the convent’s outer walls. Beyond it, the church, boiler room, grange. Beyond those, things only Ed can guess at. Sleeping, bathing, eating; all those secret human things.
Ed is occupied only by the practical things. The agricultural things. Those he can touch with two hands; things which work his body and not his mind. On the seas, he was strong. On land, he is weak enough to want more.
The shed is small and low-ceilinged; Ed has to round his shoulders to fit. White walls, white floors, run through with growing circles of brown damp. In the beams, a house martin roosts. Ed can see the gaping yellow mouths of its young when he abandons his flask to the bench, and hefts the ax that waits for him in the corner. Opening, closing, endlessly starving. He lingers there to watch them, standing in the shed’s dusty light until their mother comes home and pushes food into those gasping beaks.
Outside, the morning prayers are louder. Or Ed is just closer. He cocks his head toward them as he wanders along that long, high wall; listening to the foreign words, their particular cadence. Ed’s never believed in anything. Not a god, not his parents, not any one of his many selves. The closest anything came to a god for him was the sea. But he doesn’t even have that anymore. On an island thick with God, he’s the only empty vessel. Praying to his demijohn and his cigarettes, and to the bluffs where he goes to be alone.
The work is hard and unforgiving. Ed needs it in the way some men need religion. He chops wood until the impact of the ax to the log seems fit to rattle him apart. His wrists, his shoulders, his grinding knee. Until the air is thick with the smell of cedar, until there’s sweat running in his eyes and pinning all the loose threads of hair to his throat. Cedar; the smell that clings to his clothes from mornings doing exactly this. But also — the memory rises, unbidden — the smell of the trunk where Stede kept all his most beautiful clothes. Silks so fine they glowed, and slipped from Ed’s rough hands as though made of air.
The sound the ax makes when it bites into the wood is a dull thunk. The memory is like touching a flame. Ed brings the ax down again and again, until the thunk drowns out the distant prayers, and his mind settles back from its past.
He stops only when he’s got no more logs to make smaller. All around him, the packed dirt semi-circle that connects boiler room to wood store, it’s covered in pale splintered chips. His stomach turns; unhappy with its breakfast of wine and the exertion that followed it. Ed spits into the ground. His wrists ache. He spits again.
Four times a day he trudges up the hill to feed the boiler. It gives his days a strange kind of rhythm, one that throws him out of balance with the rest of the world. Not that a balance is easily found here. The nuns pray from dawn until dusk. Ed spends his time mapping the island on foot; rattling from field to forest to cliff to inlet. Returning every few hours to rake coals, open dampers, to poke wood into the boiler’s red belly.
He builds the fire back up; flooding the coals with fresh air, laying kindling until the fire grows big enough for chips. His face and hands feel hot by the time he swings the door closed; boiled, like he’d spent a day squinting into high summer sun. On the backs of his hands, the cuts have stopped bleeding. Just to be contrary, Ed rubs at them, making them sting anew. Then it’s back down the hill; back to the shed and its stuffy warmth, its starving chicks, their overworked mother.
“Kids, eh?” Ed says, taking a long swallow from his flask. But if she hears him, she doesn’t stop to say so. Just flits away out the open door, which Ed makes sure to leave ajar when he goes.
Wood, fire, milk. Ed’s own morning prayers. He squats in the loose straw that blankets the cow’s pen, and rests his forehead to her flank as he milks her. Here, the warm smell of silage and dung and sleepy animals. Things which live and do not think. Sunlight dusty and lethargic. The nuns are still praying when Ed leaves the milk pail at the back door, and scoops up the small bundle that waits for him there. Praying so hard the leaves on the trees and all the little flowers shooting up through the ground are dancing, shivering, putting palms to the sky. Either that, or the storm’s rolling in faster now. Here in the green circle within the boundary wall, Ed can’t see the sea to judge it.
Inside the neat cloth wrap is a round of cheese and a fresh brown loaf; a small string-tied parcel that when pried and picked at, reveals itself to be herring. Tit for tat. Fire for food. Hard work for happiness.
The sheep are out and grazing by the time Ed leaves the convent behind him for the morning. Tiny dots of white against the green of the distant field; a dozen at most, no more. Ed wanders close to the fence to watch them, feeling pleasantly loose-headed. Whether from the work or from the wine, he doesn’t know. The sheep chew their cud. Ed tears chunks from the loaf in the crook of his arm, and eats with them.
Coming up off the waves is a cool breeze; the smell of gathering rain. Ed closes his eyes and turns his face toward it, leaning forward over the fence until he can rest his temple to it. From this angle, the world is abstract. Slanting lines of green and brown and grey, running off to some faraway disappearing point.
Here I am, he thinks. And where are you?
The cold scar in the valley of his palm throbs. Its first sensation in months.
———
Night comes, and with it the past.
Ed dreams in red and black. Dreams of a red moon over black water, of red blood spilling from a black fist. Straight razor, flintlock, wine dark sea. Silk so fine and soft that it feels like his insides. Like pulsing guts. Bloodied palms. Fingers pushing inside his mouth to scrape nails against the inside of his cheeks. He dreams of wading through hip-deep bilge-water, something heavy and prone lashed to his back that he never gets a chance to see. The dark water around him, his burden motionless but breathing — an awful breathing. Graveyard breath, rising bile, albatross weight. The consuming knowledge that he’s done wrong. That there’s nothing to undo that wrong. Nothing; not gods or prayer, nor cold steel.
And then the dream, it circles itself. A viper with its tail caught between its teeth. Ed dreams of a red moon over black water, of red blood spilling from a —
The rain is thunderous on the shack’s tin roof. So loud that it consumes everything, until it doubles back and becomes nothing. Ed wakes to darkness. He wakes to the roar of this new silence. He wakes to the cat pressing her paw to his sternum, and Ed thinks, dream-eater, soul-stealer, little bugger.
Her delicate ears flick backward. The floor of Ed’s small room floods with sporadic moonlight, as whoever is on the other side of it knocks hard enough to bend the old wood.
Ed groans, and he reaches for his pants.
“Mr Thatch,” the sister says, white hands making knots in front of her belly when Ed flings the door open to peer down at her. She’s indistinct between the lashing rain and the huge slicker she’s swimming inside of. A round, pale face peers out; the moon’s little double. “I apologise, I wasn’t sure if you’d hear over the rain —”
Ed, chest far too bare to be stood in front of a nun, head still heavy with the wine he drank before bed, croaks, “Who’s dead?”
The nightmares still cling. He’s straddling the line of reality and dream with a sailor’s sway.
“Nothing yet,” she says, and the moonlight puddles white in all the dark folds of habit and oilcloth as she takes a step away from the doorway. “An ewe, she’s lambing, though we’re not sure if she’ll survive.”
Nuns are good at lambing. They have small hands, good hearts, even temperaments. Ed has seen them at it; watched silently from the barn’s doorway as they coaxed life from blood. But what most nuns aren’t good at is killing, even in mercy. This is where Ed comes in.
The dirt track he wandered along during the day has turned into a mile of sucking mud under the hammering rain. He and the little sister tramp through it; Ed wet to his skin despite the slicker he slung over his clothes. Something grim in their twin silence; so much so that Ed doesn’t dare break it. There’s prayer in silence too. Prayer in the slosh of their boots through the puddles; in the determined, white grip of the sister’s hands in her skirts.
Overhead the pines tilt crazily in the wind. The rooster weatherwane on the convent’s roof spins circles against the black sky. Ed thinks about the windfall tomorrow. He thinks about his bed. He wonders, briefly, if it’s just as bad out at sea.
The barn is a beacon in the wind and rain. Yellow light at the windows, bleeding out into the night. Puddled and running on the ground. Ed steps through it; comes from the nighttime cold into the fragrant warmth of the lambing pen. The tang of blood so thick in the air that he tastes it. The straw-covered floor wet with it; black in the flickering shadows the candlelight creates. Ed, mouth dry and head pounding with his hangover, touches his hand briefly to the lintel. Wobbles there on the threshold; death overseeing birth.
The ewe is on her side. Belly heaving, slitted eyes rolling. A nun kneeling at her backside, black-clad and businesslike as a carrion crow. Sleeves pushed up around her elbows; revealing lean white arms streaked with blood. At her knee, a lamb — newborn, sticky with caul — stirs, and understanding dawns. Twins, difficult twins. Ed touches the lintel again. He tugs on his beard. Spring is as much of a dying season than it is a living one. Ed had died in the spring.
During his first month on the island, Ed had put down a lamb born with two faces. Teased his knife to its little throat, and then let flood the arterial spray. It was over before it began. All four eyes growing dull.
His secret: he only ever kills for mercy.
The wind howls around the eaves of the barn; rattles at the thin glass windows, stirs the straw up against the nun’s habits. Around Ed’s hastily-drawn-on boots. Inside, his feet are cold and damp and bare. One of the nuns has a tattoo on the underside of her arm; five grey dots like those on a die. Mark of a thief. Ed watches the muscles of her forearm jump and move under the skin as she heaves the sheep closer.
The ewe moans; a harsh, guttural noise. Outside of the circle of lamplight, the other pregnant sheep watch on. Shuffling, bleating, eyes glowing. Pressing against the far wall of the barn as if they know that death is catching. Ed presses his thumb into his palm; skates it over the smooth length of his scar.
The lamb slips free into the thief nun’s lap.
For a moment, between the flickering candlelight and the heave of the storm and sudden burst of relief that floods the small space, Ed is confused. Shifts from the threshold just to see better — slickshine of blood, white caul, the nuns’ brisk murmuring as the ewe pants and bleats. No lamb.
“Oh, Lord,” the thief nun murmurs, and then her skirts begin to move. Tremblingly, haltingly, something brand new and born in the teeth of a storm. Born in blood, under the slitted eye of a waning moon. A black lamb. Its mouth opening, pink tongued, to taste its first lungful of air.
The nuns’ pale faces lift toward him. Three night-blooming flowers. Ed swallows. Clutches his hand around the blade of the knife in his pocket, and then releases it.
“I’ll take it,” he says, voice alien to his own ears. The small barn is thick with the smell of new life. “Please, can I take it?”
Ed had died in the spring. But he had been born then too.
———
A year ago, Ed took his blade and he pressed it into the palm of his left hand. He pressed it until blood started pumping hard enough that he couldn’t see the shine of metal anymore. He pressed it until he stopped feeling his fingers. Then, just for good measure, he pressed it a little more.
Today, his left hand doesn’t close properly. It doesn’t grip things like it used to. When he milks the cow, swings the ax, rolls dough against a floured counter. But as everything does, he adapts. He’s the tree trunk growing inexorably around an iron fence. He’s the three legged dog, running after its master. The oyster and its grain of sand; its eventual spit-covered pearl.
Not that Ed expects to ease a pearl from the red scar in his palm anytime soon.
Up on the bluffs the air is cool and clean. The tide low. The sand glistening in the sunrise. Ed stares at the horizon until his eyes begin to water. He stares at it until his cigarette burns low and then burns him; a sharp little jolt to the system. Loose rocks clatter into the clinging cliffside gorse. Under Ed’s chin, the black lamb bleats, plaintively.
“Sorry,” he tells it, and rests his hand to his chest, where it’s tucked into the front of his work coat. The warm lump of its body. “Sorry, shit.”
Below them, the waves beat against the shore. The sea’s endless, tireless roil. Ed misses it. Like a clipped dove misses flight. But he’s afraid. Afraid of what might happen if he set himself back out on it; who he might find himself compelled to find.
I’d go to the Republic of Pirates, he thinks, watching the play of dawn light on the water. His flask is in his hand and unscrewing between his fingers before he registers reaching for it. Ask every face I see until someone coughs up the truth. Then I’d find him. Hurt him. Kiss him. Shake his bloody fool head off his bloody fool shoulders.
Rattling through the plan always soothes him. Ed turns away from the cliffside; beats his usual path back through the trees. Since the storm, the island has bloomed. Spring, sprung. All the trees that were tipped before with tight, rosy buds now hang heavy with flower. The blackthorn, first; goat willow and wild cherry hot on its heels. And along the cliff sides in a hot yellow lick of flame, the gorse. Ed’s never spent to much time on dry land as he has this year. On a boat, seasons come and go with little to mark them besides the weather. But here it invades all. Out of habit, and perhaps some misplaced petulance, Ed prefers the muted world on the water. As if he hadn’t run aground here himself.
He murmurs to the lamb as he forages; an open jar in Ed’s nerveless hand, his other busy plucking blossoms from the wild cherry trees that droop over the path. “Gotta put you in with your mam while I’m doing the wood,” he tells it, letting a palmful of flowers drop into the waiting jar. “And it’ll make you really grateful that I’m your mum now, after a little time with that old bag.” Gently, using a knuckle to press the springy blossoms down when the jar threatens to overspill.
Against his chest, the lamb is quiet. Ed’s worn it there since that first, blood soaked night, when he saved it from the nuns’ superstition. Thinks that it must be used to it now, to sleep so soundly. Like Ed is something to be trusted. Some kind of safe harbour.
If only you knew, he thinks, sap sticky on his fingers, the past lurking in shades of red and black behind his eyes.
Ed’s father used to tell him he was born under a bad star. His unlucky black-eyed son. His mum used to stroke his hair away from his tear-stained face and say, Ed, the world is hard for people like you. Only, he never found out what kind of person he was. Some nights, he used to pillow his cheek to the windowsill and try to find his bad star; as if by seeing it, he could get away from it. But he never knew what he was looking for. And his father had been right in the end. His mum, too.
The morning passes. The smell of cedar, of cherry blossom, heave of the waves against the shore. In the shed, the white floor is stained with bird shit. The handle of his ax too. Ed wipes it off with the cuff of his shirt, dully amused. Outside, the fledgelings tumble in the dirt. Fluffy and gawky, peeping incredulously when Ed steps carefully past them with his birdshit ax on his shoulder.
“Cat’ll get you,” he tells them. “Learn to fly faster.”
Inside the walls, the nuns are praying. Ed lingers between the headstones to listen to them, eyes closed, the sun on his face. It’s quiet in the churchyard. The kind of quiet you can only find amongst the dead. Somewhere, out of sight, a bird is trilling. Ed flexes his bad hand around the ax’s smooth handle, and then sets it aside. Back in the barn, the lamb is waiting for him. In the boiler room, the fire. But Ed finds himself drawn towards the chapel; its high white walls, its latticework windows. He’s never been inside. Never seen the stained glass saints paint the floors with their coloured sunlight. Never smelled the incense, nor felt the cool, dusty solemnity that always exists within places of Christian worship.
The door is ajar. Ed loiters there, sunlight on his shoulders, listening. The first time he’d heard this praying, he’d been half-dead with the wound in his hand festering. Their constant praying had sounded like the wind.
He wonders if the thief nun is inside. He wonders if her god has forgiven her.