The Mistletoe Bride(19)

The church bell rang out again across the coastline. Gaston felt himself drawn forward, this time towards two children. As thin as he was, he knew he was not one of them and wanted to pull away, yet he found himself powerless to resist. The waifs clutched at him with skeletal hands, dragging the jacket from his shoulders, their tragic voices high and shrill like the desperate wind.

Gaston tried to cry out, but his voice was swamped by the voices of the drowned. Why was no one helping him? Why were the villagers standing by and allowing this to happen? He heard the tenth strike of the bell. Now the children were pulling at the buttons on his thin shirt, desperate to consign everything to the pyre before the final stroke of midnight.

‘Help me,’ Gaston called out, finding his voice at last. ‘They will take me. They want to take me with them.’

He tried to wriggle free, but the children’s hands were clamped fast around his ankles, his wrists.

The eleventh chime.

‘Help me please.’

At the very last moment, Gaston managed to shake himself free and leap back out of their reach. The children, cheated of their prize, threw off their cloaks and cast them onto the bonfire. It was now burning twenty feet into the air. The sparks danced against the night and the final stroke sounded.

The final toll of the bell.

Immediately, silence. Immediately, the ghostly congregation fell still. None of them, now, paid any attention to Gaston. They were as transfixed by the fire as he had been transfixed by their apparition.

Gaston realised that he could hear the surf once more. The sea was in motion, a gentle swell sending shallow waves up onto the sand. Normal for this time of year. The flames were diminishing. The magical garments of fire had almost consumed the stack of hazel bundles.

Then, the villagers on the far side of the flames drew back the hoods of their dark cloaks. Gaston gasped, recognising Régis’s mother and Monsieur Hélias too, standing to one side of the semicircle. As the bonfire burned down, Gaston saw the curate and, standing to his left, Mme Martin. None of them seemed to be able to see him, though. At least, they gave no sign of it.

One of the drowned stepped forward. A man with broad shoulders, though he was all bone and seaweed now. He paused and then bowed low to the living. The curate answered his gesture. The dead man leant forward and plucked a white-hot ember from the ashes, then turned to face the sea.

He held the ember aloft, as if in triumph, then he began to pace purposefully, steadily back down the beach towards their drowned village. The others fell into step behind him.

Gaston watched them go. Some of them seemed to hesitate before treading reluctantly into the surf. One after another they disappeared beneath the black waves until finally only the two children were left. They paused for a moment and turned back, whether towards the fire and its warmth or to invite Gaston to come with them, he could not say.

Then a few steps more and they were gone.

All at once, without his jacket and shirt, with the fire burned down to ashes, Gaston fell to his knees and sobbed, the tears running down his face and over his hands. Crying for those condemned to come ashore once a year to light their kingdom under the sea, crying for the grief and loneliness inside him that drew him to their company. Crying for his parents.

Then, the warmth of real arms around him and he was being pulled to his feet. The sound of a familiar voice.

‘Gaston, how do you come to be here?’

It was Mme Martin’s voice.

‘I didn’t mean to . . .’ he tried to explain. ‘I fell asleep. I didn’t know, I didn’t mean to spy.’

He felt a cloak being wrapped around his shaking shoulders.

‘You’re safe now, don’t worry. Everything will be all right.’

She walked him up the beach. ‘Everything will be all right.’

Monsieur Hélias picked him up in the trap, promising that Régis was back at the farmhouse and there would be a good meal waiting. He didn’t seem angry now and Gaston thought, perhaps, he had misjudged the man. As they rounded the headland, he turned in his seat.

‘Look,’ he said.

Some two hundred yards out at sea, where once the island had been, a light was burning. The drowned islanders had relit their warning lamp from the embers of the bonfire.

Mme Martin smiled. ‘Yes.’

‘But how is it possible?’ he said. ‘How can it burn beneath the waves?’

‘How is any of it possible?’ she laughed. ‘Perhaps it’s just a trick of the light.’

‘Even so,’ he said quietly. ‘I saw it. It must be true, somehow, mustn’t it?’

‘Who’s to say?’ she said. ‘We must trust to providence.’