Page 14 of Bonetide

There’s a fucking jawbone on the bed.

It’s the shape of a canine’s lower jaw, the small sharp teeth still in it, dark at the roots. Probably a fox. Set on the bed like it’s been positioned there with intent. Centered. The teeth pointing toward the door.

Toward me.

I do not move for a long time.

I stand in the doorway with the knife in my hand and the smell of the old room in my nose and the jaw on the pillow watching me with its small dark teeth. The part of me that wanted to call this the cottage settling has gone really fucking quiet.

Why is there a jawbone here? Is a good question.

When did it get here? That’s an even better one.

Was it always here? The solicitor never showed me the upstairs; I went in after he left. I discovered that closet that takes up the back quarter room was locked, but I was only looking at this place in dim evening light. And after I hit my head the second time, I decided to get out before I maimed myself again. It’s completely possible that the jawbone was here before and I didn’t see it, especially as it somewhat matches the bedspread.

Effie must have left it for me. That’s the only rational explanation.

But that brings me back to the first question: why would she do that?

I don’t know, why did she give the cottage to you only on the grounds that you have to stay here for one year? I think to myself. Why write you a note telling you not to let someone in and that she knew something when you were twelve that you didn’t?

Effie not making sense is something coming from all directions these days.

I chalk it up to some of my great-aunt nonsense—because I have to if I want to get any sleep—and leave the room, closing the door well behind me.

Later that night I lie in bed, staring up at the ceiling as if daring to hear footsteps again.

The cottage is quiet, for now.

Chapter

Four

The flowers don’t care that I had a shitty sleep.

This is one of the things I love about my job. They aren’t customers or colleagues you have to wipe your bleary eyes and plaster a smile on for. They just grow until I come along and cut their stems (respectfully) and give them a new form of existence.

It’s mid-morning, and the fog has mercifully lifted. Not that I don’t love the drama and mystery of fog but out here where I’m isolated and already on edge about my neighbor, plus the talks of drowned wives and missing women, and don’t let him in, and finding a jawbone—it turns out I don’t need that much drama and mystery in my life.

This morning the world has gone to a flat, even grey, the kind of light that begs for watercolors—no harsh shadows, no glare, every color reading exactly as it is. The bay is a sheet of slate. The mountains across the loch have come back in velvet sienna and moss. The castle tower on the opposite spit is a dark smudge against the sky. Not that I’ve looked at it all that much, I swear.

I have decided to make this a working day. I have a deadline for an upcoming wildflower pocketbook—pencil sketches of thirty species by the end of next month—and the woman they hired is currently sitting with a cup of cooling coffee and a half-pulled-together brain because she barely slept last night.

I’m wearing the pair of Effie’s Wellington boots I found in the crawlspace under the stairs and have decided to make my own. They’re a size too big and they’re broken in within an inch of their life. Though it’s still August, the weather is barely what I would call summer. So, I’ve got on thick grey tights to take the rub out of the boots and guard me from the morning chill, and a plaid wool skirt I packed because Maddie said I couldn’t traipse around the Scottish Highlands without one. My cream wool sweater has gone slightly felted from use, so I pair it with a long-sleeved shirt underneath because my body likes the warmth of wool, but my skin despises the prickly texture. My hair is pulled to the side in two long braids and there’s a wicker basket on my arm for collecting flowers. I look like a stock photo for charming American girl moves to Highland cottage to find herself and possibly love. I look so on-brand I could be sponsored.

Most of the plants I want are in the lower meadow between the cottage and the boat shed, where the ground is soft; hardy cream-colored mountain avens, the puffy red heads of rose root, the ubiquitous gorse with its yellow flowers. I work through it slowly. I cut. I lay things in the basket carefully so the heads don’t crush.

While I work, I think about the doctrine of signatures.

This is the part of botany I learned from my dad and never quite let go of, even though it’s mostly considered medieval nonsense now. The idea is that God—or, depending on who’s writing, nature—gave plants visual clues to what they were good for. A walnut looks like a brain, so it’s good for brain ailments. Lungwort has spotted leaves like lung tissue, so it’s good for lung complaints. Eyebright has a small dark spot at the center of each flower, like a pupil, so it’s good for the eyes. And so on.

The doctrine is, scientifically, garbage. The plants don’t signal their uses. A plant has whatever chemistry it has, and any visual resemblance to a human organ is a coincidence we’ve made meaning out of like we tend to do with everything.

But—and this is what kept my dad teaching it, and what keeps me thinking about it—some of the plants do work for what their signatures suggest. Eyebright, it turns out, has compounds that genuinely soothe inflamed eyes. Lungwort has saponins that ease respiratory irritation. The doctrine got there by the wrong route, but it got there in the end. What that says about how human knowledge accumulates, well, that’s something I might get into after a few glasses of whisky. But I think about it every time I’m cutting flowers. It would be lovely if the plants were trying to tell us something. It would be lovely if anything were trying to tell us something about anything. I could go for a fuckton of answers to my life right now, including if I will ever stop feeling like I made a mess of my life before I was thirty? Still haven’t figured out that one; yet another reason why I spontaneously re-rooted my life and ended up here, attempting to start over.

I crouch to cut a stem of meadowsweet and feel my hips inform me, again, that I will be paying for last night’s nervous-pacing-then-poor-sleeping. The portable heating pad is back at the cottage. I should have brought it but I’m too stubborn to go back for it.

I work my way up the slope.