The Dangerous Islands Read online

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘Someone. No one ever admits to having done it.’

  ‘Very odd,’ the Colonel said. He looked about him.

  ‘Can one go in?’

  ‘Of course.’

  At the entrance to the burial-ground at Killeen steps led up to a gap in the wall with a tall flat-topped slab in the middle, and spaces on either side. ‘What a curious arrangement,’ he commented.

  ‘That’s the coffin-stone. The bearers heave the coffin up and rest it on that while they go through; the gaps are narrow enough to keep cattle out.’ As she spoke Julia slid through one of them.

  The Colonel followed. But when he stepped inside that circular wall he did a very odd thing. It was his habit in the country to go about bare-headed; but with characteristic Scottish prudence he carried a cap in his pocket in case of rain. Now, as he entered the graveyard at Killeen, instinctively he drew his cap out and put it on. Julia watched with interest. It was a fine warm day—the weather afforded no possible reason for covering one’s head.

  ‘Do you always put your cap on when you go into a graveyard?’ she asked—could it be that Philip Jamieson recognised this place for what it was, so quickly and so fully?

  He looked embarrassed.

  ‘No, usually I uncover my head in churchyards. I don’t really know quite why I put my cap on,’ he said—‘but somehow I did.’ He paused. ‘Julia, I think this must be an evil place,’ her sophisticated friend said, surprisingly. ‘In holy places one bares one’s head; here I somehow felt it must be covered.’

  Julia was immensely pleased. She rather collected the reactions of people to Killeen—and Jamieson’s were particularly important to her.

  ‘Oh, it’s evil all right,’ she said. ‘Come up to the Cursing Stone.’

  They walked uphill between rough grassed-over grave-mounds; Julia paused to show Jamieson an inner circular wall of large stones which encompassed the summit—he struggled up to it.

  ‘But this must be Bronze Age, or at latest Iron Age,’ he called down to her, after examining the massive unmortared blocks.

  ‘I daresay. Come and see the Cursing Stone.’

  The Cursing Stone increased the Colonel’s sense of evil at Killeen. He insisted first on walking round the site, and found the turf-covered remains of a chapel. Below this was the Cursing Stone, a slab of natural rock with nine hollows scooped out of its surface, each covered with a lump of limestone. Julia lifted two of the stones. In the hollow below one of them lay pennies and half-pennies, probably the gifts of women desiring a child; but the other contained more sinister offerings: pins, knife-blades, and the broken-off halves of a pair of scissors, along with more copper coins.

  ‘There you are, you see—cut or stab your enemy,’ Julia said. ‘Steel and iron have magic powers.’

  ‘It’s horrifying,’ Jamieson said. ‘Do you mean this still goes on, today?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ She lifted a penny from between the knife-blades and the broken scissors, and read the date. ‘1956.’

  ‘And yet they make pilgrimages here?’

  ‘Certainly; the children walk round this very slab saying their Paters and Aves on St. Brendan’s Day.’

  ‘God have mercy on us!’ the Colonel said fervently.

  ‘They walk round clockwise to say their prayers, but one has to go widdershins—anti-clockwise—to curse,’ Julia informed him, ‘and turn each stone anti-clockwise too.’

  ‘How on earth do you know that, if no one will say anything about it?’

  ‘Because I was up in the Six Counties, where there’s a far more famous Cursing Stone—it was the centre for the worship of Crom Cruach, who was a sort of Irish Beelzebub. The local parson was a bit of an anthropologist, and studied the whole business for years. There were the most extraordinary goings-on up there! Within living memory the country-people used to row across the Lough on a certain day in the summer, their faces stained black with bilberry juice, and dance on the shore below Crom Cruach’s altar till three in the morning.’

  ‘And this is supposed to be the Isle of Saints and Scholars,’ the Colonel commented.

  ‘Oh, all this is only one angle. Ireland is absolutely full of humble saints too, bursting with faith and devotion—I wouldn’t know about scholars.’

  ‘All the same, this black paganism just below the surface is most extraordinary, in the twentieth century,’ Jamieson pursued.

  ‘Oh, it isn’t so far below the surface either! There are always Baal-fires on St. John’s Eve, the old Midsummer Festival; the isolated holdings light their own. Old Katie, whom you met this morning, never fails to have her Midsummer bonfire.’

  ‘Do they think of them as Baal-fires?’

  ‘No, nor as anything to do with St. John—it’s just “a custom”. I asked Katie once what it was all about, and she came out with a long story to the effect that it commemorated Cromwell’s soldiers having burnt some “patriots”. That means nothing; it’s the Irish complex about Cromwell. Even Father Murphy said once to Helen—“Give the Irish people long enough, and they’ll have it settled that ’twas Oliver Cromwell crucified Our Blessed Lord!’”

  Jamieson laughed at that, but rather uncomfortably.

  ‘I was staying here once in November,’ Julia went on—‘and old Katie came down to see Helen, bringing a pair of black cockerels, alive, dangling from her hand. Helen was out, and I gave her a gin—“a treat” is always worth while with Katie, it loosens her tongue. So Katie put the “cockeens” down on the floor of the gun-room, and she said—“Tell Lady not to be wringing their necks, but to be shlitting their throats, and to shprinkle the blood in the dairy, and the haggard, and the cow-stable. ’Tis lucky.” Now what do you think of that?—the blood of black cockerels! And it was to be done on November the tenth, “Mairtin’s Eve”—that was the day Katie came down.’

  The Colonel stood up.

  ‘I think I’ve had about as much black magic as I need for the moment,’ he said. ‘John Buchan would have loved it, but I don’t.’ He held out a hand to Julia, and pulled her to her feet. ‘Come on.’

  They went down to the curious entrance and returned to the car. Jamieson removed his neat check cap, and stuffed it into his pocket again.

  ‘Goodness, you are superstitious,’ Julia said as she started the engine—but she was rather pleased.

  Chapter 8

  When Julia drove away from Killeen she followed some narrow lanes to the County road, crossed it, and drove on up into ‘the mountain’, where a big valley opened in front of them, enclosed by rocky peaks; close at hand lay a small lake bordered by water-lilies in flower, their pointed petals spread wide to the sun, white as the solitary swan which swam quietly among them. The little lake reminded Jamieson of his meeting with Julia earlier in the summer in Mr. Robertson’s shop at Tobermory, and the tweed she had made him buy. ‘Do they make the waterlily tweed here?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t think so—I’ve never seen it. They use quite a few wild dyes: crottle, of course, off the rocks on the shore.’ She swung right as she spoke, and drove along a narrow track where heather and rushes grew between the wheel-ruts; at intervals on both sides stacks of dried turf, fourteen feet high or more, stood like immense black grave-mounds. Jamieson was struck by the care with which these stacks had been built: all the outer turfs placed slanting downwards and overlapping one another, like tiles on a roof; he commented on it.

  ‘Yes, to keep the wet out. “Winding”, they call it,’ the girl said, twisting the Volkswagen skilfully through the skiddy silver sand of the track between the huge funereal turf-stacks. They were now right up on the bog, whence the whole countryside obtained its supply of fuel for the year; Julia pointed out to her companion the black vertical faces of peat, four feet high—the ‘banks’ from which it was cut. Each household, she explained, had a bank allotted to it—‘That’s Michael’s bank,’ she said, pointing. ‘Oh, how late the Gradys are with theirs—they’ve still got it footed.’ She pointed again at some o
dd little cubical erections, studding the heathy ground above another cutting.

  ‘What is the point of that?’ Jamieson asked.

  ‘To dry the turf. When it’s cut it’s wet; the men throw it out anyhow on the top of the bank, and then someone, women as a rule, comes up to “foot” it—piles the sods up so that the air can get through to dry them. It’s a ghastly job, footing.’

  ‘Have you ever done it?’ the man asked incredulously.

  ‘Oh yes, often—to cheer the maids on,’ Julia said blithely. ‘You kneel on soggy ground, soaking your skirt, and stretch out and pile, and stretch out and pile again—and the turfs are so damp and slimy that it’s a fearful business to make them stand up. Nonie and Attracta do it far better than me,’ she added. She was enjoying showing Philip Jamieson all these things, so familiar to her, so new to him; when he understood, and reacted in the same way that she did, as he had done at Killeen, she felt they had come a step nearer to one another, in a pleasantly sidelong manner. He was not a very easy person to approach directly—his Scottishness, she supposed, fundamentally, and on the surface his cautious official manner. She turned to glance at him sideways: dark, handsome—goodness, he was good-looking; not so completely the Army man as dear Michael, much more intelligent and susceptible; but with a certain rather intimidating rigidity, all the same.

  As she turned away to watch their road, Jamieson looked with astonishment at the figure beside him, in her beautifully-cut country clothes. So she had footed turf! How much she knew that he didn’t know, he thought; and what a beguiling humility, that caused her to undertake such tasks to ‘cheer on’ her cousin’s servants. He must get her to come with him to Clare Island; he would be nowhere without her. In fact at that moment Philip Jamieson, finally and definitely, realised that he would be nowhere without Julia Probyn, as long as he lived.

  The track turned downhill again, and became stony and immensely steep—at the foot of the descent Julia pulled up.

  ‘That’s Katie’s cottage,’ she said, pointing to a thatched cabin. ‘Mind if I just run in and see her for a second? Helen gave me something for her.’

  ‘Not in the least. May I come too?’

  Jamieson had never seen anything in the least like old Katie’s house. They approached it by crossing a gap in a stone wall and following a tiny grassy path across a very wet field, where geese and a couple of cows grazed; hens were scratching in front of the little whitewashed structure, whose door stood open.

  ‘Katie?’ Julia called.

  The old woman appeared at the door, her hands all floury.

  ‘Miss Probyn! You’re heartily welcome, and the gentleman too. Come in—I’m just after making me some bread.’

  The room into which Julia and Jamieson followed Katie had an earthen floor, and contained a small kitchen table, two or three wooden chairs, and beside the open hearth a bed built in against the wall, heaped with hand-woven blankets—‘the nest’; wiping her hands on a cloth, the old woman drew a pair of painted hinged shutters across the bed, enclosing it, Over the open turf fire a shallow iron pan hung from a chain, its lid heaped with glowing embers; a kettle stood among the white ashes on the hearth, flanked by a tin tea-pot.

  ‘Would you take a cup of tea, Miss Probyn? The kettle will boil in a minyit’ Katie said, making to unhook the pan from the chain.

  ‘No, Katie—don’t be spoiling your bread! But Lady Helen asked me to bring you this, if I should be passing.’ As she spoke she opened her handbag and drew out a flask of gin.

  ‘Well may the Lord love her!’ the old woman exclaimed. ‘Lady thinks of everyone. ’Tis pity she’d ever die!’

  Jamieson continued to look about him. On a very small shelf fixed to the wall above the table a tiny oil-lamp burned in front of two brightly-painted statues, one of the Infant Jesus of Prague, the other of Our Lady, adorned by a jam-jar filled with rather faded wild-flowers; the black cloak and shawl which the old woman had been wearing when they picked her up on the road that morning hung from two pegs on the wall. Opposite the hearth and the bed was a recess enclosed by broad-gauge wire netting; the straw which floored it was covered with goose-droppings, which smelt rather strong. Colonel Jamieson’s training had led him to accurate observation—he had looked at the cabin as he walked up that wet field, and realised that what he now saw was the whole house.

  ‘Do your geese sleep in there?’ he asked old Katie, with a gesture towards the wired recess.

  ‘They do that, Sir. The foxes is something terrible, here in the mountain, and geese are slow and foolish. And at night they do be company for me.’

  The Scotchman was extraordinarily moved by those last words. He envisaged the very old woman, all alone in her isolated little house, getting companionship from the presence of the white gentle geese, penned behind the wire, which she could see from her bed in the glow of the fire; and feeling blessed by the two common little statues, which however lamentable aesthetically were, for her, a constant visual reminder of the faith by which she lived.

  He said something of this to Julia when, after she had kissed old Katie goodbye, they squelched down over the wet field again towards the car. Julia was pleased.

  ‘Katie’s very heroic,’ she said. ‘I rather wanted you to see how she lives. The Geraghtys, in that farm up there, are very good to her; if her cows run dry they bring her milk, and they win her turf for her, and save her hay.’

  ‘What do you mean by “win” her turf?’

  ‘Oh, cut it, and foot it, and get it down—in ass-panniers, usually. Katie’s too old for all that.’

  ‘And what is “saving” hay? What we should call making hay?’

  ‘Yes. Only you see here the climate is so frightful that any harvest you manage to get is literally “saved”—at least I imagine that’s how the expression arose.’ She stepped over the gap in the wall, and got into the car. As they drove off she said—‘Katie is the sort of person I had in mind when I said that Ireland is still full of humble saints. I don’t think anyone has ever heard her complain about anything. Even when her daughter, whom she adored, died, all she said was “God knows best”.’

  But there was something on which Julia felt she had to approach the Colonel directly. MacMahon’s reference after lunch to M.I.5 had resuscitated all her worry over Professor Burbage, which had been swamped temporarily by her pleasure at being in Mayo again, and introducing Jamieson to the delightful peculiarities of the place. Nothing could make her next task completely easy—but it was made a little easier by his reaction to old Katie. Where the track crossed a rise above the little valley in which the cabin stood she pulled in to one side, and stopped the engine. In front of them spread the whole expanse of the Bay with its innumerable islands—people say there is one for every day in the year—enclosed to the south by the pointed peak of Croagh Patrick, the mountain from whose summit the Saint supposedly banished all serpents from Ireland. A large blue island, low at the southern end, rising to fall away in vertical cliffs on the northern one, spanned the mouth of the Bay.

  ‘What a glorious view! Is that Clare Island?’ the Colonel asked, looking out to sea.

  ‘Yes.’ She paused, and lit a cigarette. ‘What are you going to do about the Prof.?’ she asked abruptly.

  He turned to her, troubled by this sudden break in their happy mood. When he answered it was with his usual caution.

  ‘For the present, nothing. He appears to be useful to us, now and again, as a pointer to what we’re after.’

  ‘Yes, I see that. But later?’ she pressed him.

  ‘I really can’t tell you—I don’t know. Mind you, we have no positive proof that he is involved; only circumstantial evidence.’

  ‘What do you mean by that? The Russian business?’

  ‘Yes; and the rather curious fact that he never published anything about his discoveries in Central Asia.’

  So Jamieson knew that, too!

  ‘Of course what we heard in Stornoway looked like a certain degree of corroboration,
’ the Colonel went on—‘so did his having been on the Erinishes, and what Mrs. Hathaway said to you.’

  ‘Did you report that?’ Julia asked sharply.

  ‘No. I’ve been trying to play him down as far as possible. Fortunately those three bogus Swedes tracking us, and that Russian trawler coming out of Loch Roag without lights, gave me quite a reasonable amount to report for the moment, without—er—well without using what you learned at that garage, and— and all the rest,’ he ended rather awkwardly.

  ‘Thank you. It would be nice if Mrs. Hathaway and I were the ones whose evidence really convicted him!’ Julia said bitterly, staring out at the blue Atlantic with almost unseeing eyes. If she had been less upset she would have enjoyed telling Jamieson about Croagh Patrick and the snakes, but she was miserable at the thought of the poor old Prof. in the clutches of the merciless official machine.

  Jamieson was upset too; his growing feeling for her disturbed his usual clarity and measured coolness. He caught her hand.

  ‘Julia, do try to have a little patience,’ he said brusquely. ‘Do you think I like it any more than you do, all this trouble about old Burbage?—who must be a very silly old man, so silly that one is inclined to believe him innocent! Why did he have to tell Lady MacIan that he’d been on the Erinishes, if he was really up to no good there? That’s what puzzles me about him, and about the whole business. How silly is he?’

  ‘Oh well, he’s old—and never thinks about anything but archaeology. Yes, I suppose he is pretty silly,’ Julia admitted, somewhat mollified.

  ‘Well please don’t think I like him and his silliness coming between you and me, when we get on rather well, and were beginning to like one another—or weren’t we? Yes or no?’ he asked, increasing his pressure on her hand, which he still held.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well there you are; nothing could be more awkward.’ He paused; the words he wanted wouldn’t come; for the first time in his life Philip Jamieson found himself almost inarticulate, obsessed by the sensation of Julia’s long cool hand in his. He struggled on, gauchely.