The Mourning Field

Chapter 1: The Crossing

The ferry didn't go to Eilean Mòr. That was the first thing Sophie Underhill learned when she arrived at the harbour in Mallaig, her rolling suitcase catching on the cobblestones, the salt wind stinging her eyes after three hours on the A830 from Fort William.

"No ferry service to Eilean Mòr," the harbourmaster said. He was a weathered man in his sixties with a face like a crumpled paper bag, standing behind a counter in a shed that smelled of diesel and old rope. "Not for years. You'll want Calum Firth. He does private crossings."

He pointed through the smeared window toward a blue-hulled fishing boat bobbing at the end of the quay. A man in a dark green waxed jacket was coiling rope on the deck, moving with the unhurried economy of someone who'd done the same thing ten thousand times.

Sophie thanked the harbourmaster and stepped back into the wind. It was late September, and the Scottish west coast had already begun its long surrender to autumn. The sky was the colour of old pewter, and the sea beyond the harbour wall churned in shades of grey and green. Somewhere out there, beyond the scatter of closer islands, Eilean Mòr waited.

She checked her phone. Three messages in the group chat.

Isobel: Train delayed. 40 mins behind. Don't leave without me!!

Suzanne: Already in Mallaig. Having coffee at the place by the war memorial. Where is everyone?

Yvonne: Parking. Be there in 5.

Sophie typed: Found our boat. End of the quay. Blue hull. Look for the man with the rope.

She pocketed the phone and stood for a moment, watching the sea. She'd been dreading this trip for weeks, even though it had been her idea. Six months ago, suggesting a retreat to a remote island had seemed inspired — healing, even. The four of them had been meeting every Thursday evening in the community centre on Barlow Road in Edinburgh, sitting in a circle of plastic chairs under fluorescent lights, sharing their grief with strangers who became something more than friends. They became witnesses. Each of them had seen the others at their worst, had heard the rawest, most private agonies spoken aloud, and that created a bond that went deeper than ordinary friendship.

But now, standing at the edge of Scotland with the wind pulling at her jacket, Sophie felt the familiar weight settle in her chest. The weight that never left, not really, but that she'd learned to carry with a kind of grim competence. The weight of Jamie.

Her son. Fifteen years old. Dead eighteen months ago from bacterial meningitis that had gone from headache to hospital to coffin in less than seventy-two hours. She'd held his hand through all of it, had watched the monitors flatline, had screamed at the doctors, had been sedated, had woken in a different room with her husband — ex-husband now — sitting in a chair with his face in his hands.

Eighteen months. It felt like eighteen minutes. It felt like eighteen centuries.

Sophie pulled her jacket tighter and walked toward the boat.

Calum Firth looked up as she approached. He was younger than she'd expected — mid-forties, maybe — with dark hair going grey at the temples and eyes that were startlingly blue against his tanned skin. He had the build of a man who lifted heavy things for a living.

"You'll be the Edinburgh lot," he said. Not a question.

"That's us. Sophie Underhill. There are four of us altogether — the others should be along shortly."

He nodded, glancing at the sky. "Best get across before the light goes. It's an hour and a half in calm water, and the water's not calm today."

"Is it safe?"

"Safe enough if you don't mind getting wet." He almost smiled. "The Mòr's not an easy crossing. Current's tricky around the headland. But I've been doing it since I was sixteen."

"How often do you take people out there?"

"To the island? Not often. Couple of times a year, maybe. The cottage gets rented through the estate — it's owned by a family down in Oban, the Dunbars. They let it out to walkers, birdwatchers, that sort. You'll have it to yourselves. No one else on the island."

"No one at all?"

"Not a soul. Hasn't been a permanent resident since the sixties. Old Fergus MacLeish was the last — he kept sheep out there. Died in his sleep one winter. They didn't find him till spring." He said this with the matter-of-fact tone of someone reporting the weather.

Sophie felt a small chill that had nothing to do with the wind. "Lovely."

"It's a beautiful spot," Calum said, and this time he did smile. "Wild, though. Very wild. You'll want to keep to the cottage after dark. The ground's uneven, and there's no light out there except what you bring."

"We've got torches."

"Good." He turned back to his rope. "I'll be ready when your friends arrive."

Sophie sat on a bollard and waited. The harbour was quiet — a few other boats, a gull standing on a post like a sentinel, the distant clang of something metal in the wind. She watched the sea and tried not to think about Jamie, which was like trying not to breathe. He was in everything. The water reminded her of the time they'd gone to Portobello Beach and he'd run into the Firth of Forth in February, shrieking with laughter, coming out blue-lipped and triumphant. The sky reminded her of the watercolour set she'd bought him for his twelfth birthday, the one he'd used to paint a surprisingly good seascape that still hung in her hallway. The wind reminded her of the way his hair had stuck up in every direction, immune to combing, a source of constant adolescent anguish.

Everything reminded her of Jamie. That was the problem. That was also, she knew, the only thing keeping him alive.

"Sophie!"

She turned. Suzanne Buckley was striding down the quay with the purposeful energy that characterised everything she did. She was fifty-three, tall and angular, with short silver hair and the kind of face that looked like it had been designed for expressing disapproval. She wore hiking boots, technical trousers, and a fleece that probably cost more than Sophie's entire outfit. Suzanne was a corporate lawyer — had been a corporate lawyer — who'd taken a leave of absence after her marriage of twenty-four years had detonated in a series of revelations about her husband's other life. Not an affair, exactly. A whole parallel existence, complete with a second flat in Glasgow and a woman named Kirsty and, unbelievably, a child.

Suzanne's grief was not for a dead person but for a dead life. For the version of herself that had trusted, that had believed, that had built something real with someone who'd been performing the whole time. In the support group, she'd been the last to cry and the first to analyse. She approached her own devastation like a legal brief, looking for precedent, for logic, for someone to hold accountable.

"Found the boat, then," Suzanne said, eyeing the vessel with the expression of someone who'd been expecting a yacht. "It's rather small."

"It's a fishing boat. It'll get us there."

"And back?"

Sophie gestured toward Calum. "He picks us up Sunday morning. Four nights."

Suzanne looked at the sea, then at the sky, then at the boat again. "Right. Well. I've packed waterproofs."

Of course she had.

Yvonne Mayer arrived next, appearing at the top of the quay steps with the tentative quality she brought to most things. She was the youngest of the group, thirty-one, with a round, kind face and dark eyes that always looked slightly startled, as if the world kept doing things she hadn't anticipated. She wore a puffer jacket that was too big for her and carried a rucksack that looked too heavy.

Yvonne was a health and safety inspector — or had been, before the accident. She'd been conducting a routine site visit at a warehouse in Leith when a section of racking had collapsed. Her colleague, Paul Devlin, had been standing directly underneath. She'd watched it happen from fifteen feet away. Close enough to see his face in the moment before the steel hit him. Close enough to hear the sound.

She hadn't gone back to work. She hadn't gone back to much of anything. In the support group, she spoke quietly and apologised constantly, as if her grief were an imposition, as if watching a man die in front of you was something you should really be over by now.

"Sorry I'm late," Yvonne said, which was her standard greeting regardless of whether she was actually late.

"You're not late," Sophie said. "We're still waiting for Isobel."

"Her train was delayed."

"I know. She texted."

Yvonne nodded and stood beside them, looking at the boat with an expression that suggested she was mentally cataloguing its safety deficiencies. Sophie suppressed a smile. Some things grief couldn't change.

They waited twenty minutes before Isobel Joyner came running down the quay, her auburn hair flying, dragging a suitcase with a broken wheel that scraped and stuttered on the stone.

"I'm here! I'm here! The train stopped for sheep. Actual sheep on the track. I thought that only happened in films."

Isobel was forty-six, a primary school teacher from Stockbridge with a laugh that could fill a room and a warmth that made everyone around her feel looked after. She was the heart of their group, the one who remembered birthdays, who brought biscuits to sessions, who texted to check in on bad days. She was also the one whose grief ran deepest and quietest, like an underground river.

Her mother, Margaret Joyner, had died of pancreatic cancer seven months ago. They'd been extraordinarily close — Isobel had moved back in with her mother during the final months, had administered morphine, had changed sheets, had held her hand through the long nights. Margaret had been a music teacher, and in her final weeks, when speech became difficult, she'd hummed. Old lullabies, folk songs, hymns. The humming had continued almost to the end, a thin thread of melody that Isobel could still hear in her sleep.

"Right," Calum said, appearing at the gunwale. "All four of you? Let's go, then. Tide's turning."

They loaded their bags aboard and climbed down into the boat, which rocked alarmingly under their weight. The cabin was small and smelled of fish and engine oil. Calum started the motor with a cough and a rumble, and they pulled away from the quay, nosing out through the harbour mouth into open water.

The crossing was rough. The boat pitched and rolled, climbing swells that seemed too large for such a small vessel and dropping into troughs that made Sophie's stomach lurch. Suzanne sat rigid and white-knuckled, gripping the bench. Yvonne had gone green. Only Isobel seemed unaffected, standing at the rail with her hair whipping in the wind, watching the water with an expression of something close to exhilaration.

"Magnificent, isn't it?" she shouted over the engine noise.

"That's one word for it," Suzanne muttered.

Sophie stood beside Isobel and looked ahead. The mainland was falling away behind them, the lights of Mallaig shrinking to pinpricks. Ahead, there was only sea and sky, grey on grey, with the occasional dark hump of an island breaking the horizon.

"Which one is it?" Sophie asked Calum.

"Can't see it yet. Another forty minutes." He adjusted the wheel slightly. "She'll come up sudden. One minute there's nothing, then she's right there in front of you. The Mòr's like that."

Sophie nodded and pulled up the collar of her jacket. The spray was constant, fine and cold, coating everything in a sheen of salt water. She could taste it on her lips.

Forty minutes passed. The sea calmed slightly as they moved into the lee of a chain of smaller islands, and then Calum pointed ahead.

"There."

Sophie looked. At first she saw nothing — just more grey water and grey sky meeting at an indistinct horizon. Then, as if it had simply decided to exist, the island appeared.

Eilean Mòr.

It rose from the sea like the back of something enormous, a low dark shape against the sky. There were no trees — that was the first thing she noticed. The island was entirely bare of anything taller than a person, covered instead in a dense carpet of grass and heather that gave it a strange, furred appearance, like the pelt of an animal. Cliffs marked the western edge, dark rock streaked with white where seabirds nested, but the eastern side, where they were approaching, sloped more gently down to a rocky shoreline.

And there, set back from the shore on a slight rise, was the cottage. White-walled, slate-roofed, with two chimneys and small windows that caught the last of the afternoon light. It looked sturdy and practical, built to endure rather than to charm.

Beyond the cottage, further inland and higher up, Sophie could make out another structure. Darker, smaller, half-ruined. The church.

"How old is that?" she asked Calum, pointing.

"The kirk? Twelfth century, they reckon. Maybe older. There was a monastery on the island before that, back in the time of Columba. The monks used it as a retreat — a place for prayer and penance." He paused. "Some folk say it was a place they sent the ones who'd gone wrong in the head. The ones who saw things, heard things. The monks thought the island could cure them."

"Could it?"

"Well, the monks left eventually. Make of that what you will."

The boat nosed into a natural harbour — a curved bite in the shoreline where the water was calmer, sheltered by two arms of rock. Calum cut the engine and drifted the last twenty yards, then jumped out into knee-deep water and pulled the boat up onto the shingle.

"Right. Careful getting out. Rocks are slippery."

They climbed out one by one, handing bags down the line. The shingle crunched under Sophie's boots, and the wind hit her full in the face, carrying the smell of salt and peat and something else — something green and alive, the smell of the grass that covered the island like a second sea.

Calum helped them carry their bags up to the cottage. The path was a faint track through the grass, which grew waist-high on either side, and Sophie was struck by how it moved. The grass was in constant motion, rippling and swaying, but not always in the direction of the wind. Sometimes it seemed to move against it, or in patterns that had nothing to do with weather — circular motions, sudden stillnesses in one patch while everything around it thrashed.

She told herself it was just the complex air currents of an exposed island. Different elevations, different wind speeds. Nothing strange about it.

The cottage was unlocked. Calum pushed open the heavy wooden door and they stepped into a hallway that smelled of peat smoke and cleaning fluid. The interior was simple but comfortable — a main room with a fireplace, a kitchen with a gas stove and a fridge that ran on a generator, two bedrooms each with twin beds, and a bathroom with a gravity-fed shower.

"Generator's round the back," Calum said. "Diesel. There's enough to last the week if you're not wasteful. Hot water takes twenty minutes. Phone signal's patchy — you might get a bar on the hill behind the cottage, but don't count on it."

"What about emergencies?" Yvonne asked immediately.

"There's a VHF radio in the kitchen cupboard. Channel sixteen for the coastguard. But you shouldn't need it. The island's safe enough if you're sensible."

He looked at each of them in turn, and Sophie thought she saw something flicker in his blue eyes — not quite concern, but a kind of assessment, as if he were measuring them against some private standard.

"I'll be back Sunday morning, eight o'clock," he said. "If the weather turns bad, it might be Monday. The forecast's decent, though. You should be fine."

"Thank you, Calum," Sophie said.

He nodded, turned, and walked back down the path to his boat. They stood in the doorway and watched him push off, start the engine, and motor out of the little harbour. The boat shrank against the grey water until it was just a dark speck, and then it was gone.

The four of them stood there in the silence. Not silence, exactly — the wind was constant, and the sea was a low roar on the rocks — but a silence of human things. No traffic, no voices, no music, no engines. Just the island, breathing around them.

"Well," Isobel said, rubbing her hands together. "Who wants tea?"

They unpacked and settled in. Sophie and Isobel took one bedroom, Suzanne and Yvonne the other. The cottage was warmer than it looked — thick stone walls that held heat, and the fireplace drew well once Isobel got a peat fire going. The kitchen was stocked with basics — tinned food, pasta, tea, coffee, a startling quantity of whisky — and they'd brought fresh food from Mallaig.

Suzanne made pasta while Isobel explored every cupboard and corner with the enthusiasm of a child on holiday. Yvonne checked the generator, the radio, the smoke alarm, and the fire extinguisher, and reported her findings to no one in particular. Sophie stood at the kitchen window and looked out at the island.

The light was going. The sun had set behind the western cliffs, and the sky was deepening from grey to purple to black. The grass was still moving, catching the last light in silver ripples. Beyond the cottage, up the slope, the ruined church was a dark shape against the sky, its broken walls like teeth.

She felt something then. Not fear, exactly, but a kind of attention — as if the island had noticed them. As if their arrival had changed something in the balance of the place.

Don't be ridiculous, she told herself. It's an island. It doesn't notice anything.

She turned away from the window and went to help with dinner.

They ate at the kitchen table, the four of them crowded together, and for the first time in weeks Sophie felt something close to normal. The pasta was good, the whisky was better, and the conversation had the easy rhythm of people who knew each other's worst moments and had decided to be kind about it.

"To us," Isobel said, raising her glass. "To getting away from it all."

"To getting away from Edinburgh, at least," Suzanne said. "The 'all' tends to follow you."

"Not here," Yvonne said quietly. "Here there's nothing but us and the birds."

They drank. Sophie felt the whisky burn pleasantly in her chest.

After dinner, Isobel found the guest book. It was a hardback notebook with a tartan cover, sitting on a shelf in the main room beside a stack of outdated walking guides and a copy of a book about Scottish island birds.

"Oh, listen to this," Isobel said, curling up in the armchair by the fire. She opened the book and began reading aloud.

"'June 2019. What a wonderful week! Saw puffins, guillemots, and a pod of dolphins from the cliffs. The cottage is basic but charming. Would definitely return. — The Henderson Family.'"

She flipped forward. "'August 2019. Came for the birdwatching, stayed for the sunsets. The island has a peace you can feel in your bones. Highly recommended. — D. Kerr and P. Ogilvy.'"

"'October 2019. Beautiful but bleak. The weather turned on day three and we were stuck indoors for two days. Bring board games. — S. Watt.'"

She read several more — all positive, all the usual holiday-cottage fare. Beautiful scenery, basic facilities, wonderful peace and quiet. Then she paused.

"'March 2020. Came for solitude. Found it. But the island is different after dark. We heard things from the old church that we can't explain. Left a day early. Would not return. — J. Napier.'"

The room was quiet for a moment. The fire crackled.

"Heard things?" Suzanne said. "Like what? Owls?"

"There aren't any owls on the island," Yvonne said. "No trees."

Isobel read on. "'September 2020. The season is turning and so is the island. The grass knows. The church knows. We should not have come so late in the year. — No name given.'"

"That's a bit dramatic," Suzanne said.

"There's one more." Isobel's voice had changed slightly. She was reading ahead, and her face had gone still.

"What does it say?" Sophie asked.

Isobel read: "'Don't go to the church after dark. Don't answer if they use a voice you know.'"

The fire popped. A log shifted, sending up a spray of sparks.

"Well," Suzanne said after a moment. "That's clearly someone having a laugh. Trying to spook the next visitors."

"Probably," Isobel agreed, but she closed the book and set it aside.

"People do that sort of thing," Yvonne said. "In holiday cottages. They think it's funny."

"It's not funny," Sophie said, surprising herself. The others looked at her. "Sorry. I don't mean — I'm not spooked. It's just not very funny, is it? Trying to frighten people."

"No," Isobel said gently. "It's not."

They moved on. More whisky. Isobel told a long, complicated story about a school trip to a farm that had gone spectacularly wrong. Suzanne described, with forensic precision, the worst client she'd ever represented. Yvonne laughed at both stories, and Sophie watched her friends and felt a warmth that had nothing to do with the fire.

These women had saved her. Not dramatically, not in any way that would make a good story, but in the slow, grinding, daily way that grief demanded. They'd listened. They'd shown up. They'd sat with her in the terrible silence after she'd said everything there was to say about Jamie and there was nothing left but the absence.

She loved them for it. She loved them fiercely.

At eleven, they began drifting toward bed. Suzanne went first, claiming exhaustion from the drive. Yvonne followed. Isobel banked the fire and Sophie washed the glasses, and they went to their shared room and changed in the comfortable, unselfconscious way of women who'd stopped caring about such things.

Sophie lay in bed and listened to Isobel's breathing slow and deepen. The room was very dark — no streetlights, no light pollution, nothing but the faint glow of the banked fire seeping under the door. The wind had dropped, and the silence was immense.

She closed her eyes and tried to sleep.

She was almost there — in that liminal space between waking and dreaming where thoughts become untethered and drift — when she heard it.

"Mum."

Her eyes opened.

The room was dark. Isobel was breathing steadily in the other bed. The house was still.

She'd imagined it. She was on a strange island, in a strange bed, and the guest book entries had put ideas in her head. That was all.

She closed her eyes again.

"Mum. I'm outside."

Jamie's voice.

Not an approximation. Not something that sounded a bit like him. His voice, exactly as it had been — the slight crack of a teenager whose vocal cords were still settling, the rising inflection he used when he wanted something, the particular way he said "Mum" with the vowel slightly elongated, almost "Muuum."

Sophie sat up in bed, her heart hammering.

It was coming from outside. From the direction of the church.

"Mum, come outside. I need to tell you something."

Every cell in her body wanted to go. The voice was so real, so perfectly Jamie, that for one wild, irrational moment she thought — what if? What if this island, this strange, treeless, wind-scoured place, was somehow a thin spot in the world? What if the dead could speak here?

She put her feet on the cold floor.

Don't answer if they use a voice you know.

She stopped.

The voice came again, fainter now, as if Jamie were walking away. "Mum. Please."

Sophie pressed her hands over her ears and lay back down. She pulled the blankets over her head and squeezed her eyes shut and breathed in the smell of clean cotton and old wool and tried to think about nothing.

The voice called twice more, then stopped.

Sophie didn't sleep. She lay in the dark with her hands over her ears and her eyes wide open and her heart breaking all over again, because for a few seconds she'd heard her son's voice, and the cruelty of that — the exquisite, surgical cruelty of it — was almost more than she could bear.

When dawn came, grey and slow, she got up and went to the window. The island lay before her, wet with dew, the grass silver in the early light. The church ruin stood on the hill, dark and still.

Nothing moved.

Sophie stood at the window for a long time, watching, and did not speak about what she'd heard.