A flicker of a smirk touched Senga’s lips. ‘Shoosh before I change my mind. Now, listen, an elder doesn’t just see everything. They must see without judging, and be alive to what’s happening in people’s hearts. You only get one chance a year to get this right. Do you understand?’
Carenza nodded, and Senga pressed the cloak into her arms.
‘Next year on Walpurgisnacht, converge at exactly three in the morning upon the oak. Tell no one. Be seen by no one.’
‘I won’t.’ Carenza thought she had never received so special a gift, at least until she saw the thing Senga had been holding behind the cloak.
‘This was my mother’s lantern,’ she said, holding up the simple wood and glass lamp with its candle unlit inside. Carenza felt Senga hesitate in handing it over. ‘Look after it, mind. It has been’ – her voice shook – ‘very important to us.’
‘I promise I will.’ Carenza wondered how long a lineage of Gifford women had lighted that lamp and set out before dawn on their yearly mission to spread love and encourage continuance. She knew she could never ask her. She already understood that after tonight Senga would never breathe a word about the elders to anyone ever again.
Now that the items were safely bestowed, Senga fell silent. She gave Carenza a weighted look that told her not to make her regret her decision, before skirting around her, and she was gone from the little wood, leaving Carenza with the feeling of having received some kind of sacred benediction. Senga’s words rang in her ears.
She must learn to see without judging, and be alive to what’s happening in people’s hearts. She only had one chance to get this right.
She placed the cloak and lantern inside the inauspicious carrier bag, feeling the world somehow shift a little in her perception of it. Everything was so strange tonight. She’d never known anything like it.
She checked the slim gold watch at her wrist. One minute to nine. She had work to do.
28
A glowing Sachin Roy and the other band members sagged with exhaustion as their set came to an end and the whole field roared like it was going into battle, while drinks sloshed over the rims of their cups, and feet stamped thunderously upon the earth, adding to the din of hands clapping.
Sachin’s thanks, spoken into the mic, were drowned out by the town’s noisy appreciation, and Carenza was there to take the mic from him.
The sight of her on the stage hushed the crowd and there were a few grumbles of consternation. ‘Look out! The fun polis have arrived,’ cracked one joker in the crowd. ‘Hide your bottles, a’body,’ said another.
She smiled through their ribbing.
‘Thank you, Mr Roy and the uh… What are you called again?’
‘Down in the Dhol Drums,’ Sachin said into the mic. ‘And that was our first gig in twenty-five years!’
This raised another bout of cheering and whistling and Aamaya Roy couldn’t resist pulling her rockstar husband down into the crowd for a hug. Carenza waited until all the whistling abated.
‘Thank you for your impromptu performance,’ she said, and her voice boomed from the speakers. ‘I hope Mr Roy and the rest of the band will consider this an official invitation to open the celebrations for us next Beltane?’
Surprised gasps and looks of confusion gave way to more celebratory yelling.
‘And thank you to all the stallholders and the people of Cairn Dhu for coming together to make our Beltane Bonfire and Sausage Sizzle a truly remarkable and unforgettable night.’
More cheers followed this. In the crowd, the sight of Peaches and Euan cheering through cupped hands caught her eye. She waved to them, wishing there was more she could do in that moment to show them she really had been learning a lot tonight, but it was nine o’clock and the moment had come.
‘Please follow me over to the hill on the Knowe to crown this Beltane’s King and Queen,’ she told the people.
To her utter astonishment (and in a moment she would never ever forget) she felt herself lifted bodily from the ground and held aloft on the shoulders of, well, who exactly, she didn’t know, but she suspected from their staggering and the smell upon their clothes of burnt chemicals it was her drunken nemeses, the men with the fireworks. All the town followed in their wake.
The men delivered her up to the top of the Knowe hillock where she straightened her skirt and waited for the people to amass once more. The schoolchildren made their ways to the front and lay on the sides of the gentle hill looking up at her, while Jolyon and Shell muscled their way right to the centre at her feet, determined not to miss a single word of this.
Carenza spotted Senga with her arms folded and her sister by her side on the edge of the crowd, her features set blankly as though nothing special at all had passed between them tonight. Nevertheless, Carenza lowered her head in gratitude.
‘Get on with it!’ someone shouted, setting off laughter and shushings across the crowd, until astonishingly, every person stood in complete silence, not something Carenza thought possible in a people so fond of blethering.
‘The elders,’ she shouted, since she had no microphone now, ‘have decided!’
Instead of more cheering, like she’d expected, the silence held. The air stilled between the granite walls of the wide mountain valley as though generations of unseen ancestors were trying to hear.
Carenza fumbled getting the slips of paper from her pocket. She showed the crowd the handful and the silence deepened. The children lining the hill turned their heads as they exchanged looks of excitement.
