Free The Salt Marsh by Clare Carson Page B

fighting off the curses with my withy wand.’
    â€˜Withy?’
    â€˜It’s another name for the willow.’ She swished the stem above her head, wrote her name in the night with its tip. ‘The willow is the only tree to perish from the inside out. Heart first. That’s the curse of the bitter withy.’
    She pointed the wand at Luke.
    â€˜Are you cursing me?’
    â€˜No. I’m blessing you, protecting you from the darkness.’
    A branch on the campfire flashed green and he jabbed the flames with his boot, sent a puff of burning ash skywards. She watched the smoke mingling with the mist, spotted the shadow of the barn owl as it circled, drawn by the glow of the campfire, wings spectral in the night.
    â€˜Do you believe in ghosts?’ she asked.
    He said, ‘I believe people can be haunted, have ghosts in their heads. What about you? Do you believe in ghosts?’
    She hesitated. ‘No, I don’t believe in ghosts. But sometimes I think I see my dad. Glimpses. I’m sure he’s there and then he’s gone.’ She found it easy to tell Luke about Jim; he wasn’t judgemental. ‘Seeing him makes me wonder whether he is dead after all, whether it was his corpse in the morgue.’
    â€˜Wasn’t it you who identified him?’
    â€˜Yes, but I was in total shock, out of my mind. Scared. I felt like I was tripping, I couldn’t tell what was going on. When Liz saw the body in the morgue she gave him one look, said he was an imposter and walked off.’
    â€˜Really?’
    â€˜It was an emotional reaction. I think. But maybe his death was a fix after all and I didn’t spot it. A con job, like everything about his life.’
    She hadn’t realized how much she censored everything she said before she met Luke. How much she had never said, to anybody. When she was with Luke, she could speak and watch her words fly away; bonfire cinders in the night, red sparks fading to grey then vanishing. Being with him was a release. He accepted her for who she was – spikes and all – she didn’t have to explain, apologize.
    â€˜I suppose it’s not impossible that his death was a fix,’ Luke said.
    He was never dismissive of her fears, never suggested she was a fantasist, which made her less defensive. Hearing somebody else accept her darkest anxieties made it obvious they were improbable.
    She said, ‘Well, it’s hard not to think that anything is possible. He was a spy and the state asked him to fake another life for himself, so why shouldn’t the spooks also fake his death and then resurrect him? But, when I think about it rationally, I know it’s my anxiety. Not real. It must have been his body in the morgue.’ He definitely had been killed by a hitman behind Vauxhall Bridge, she told herself. ‘I know it’s mad to think he’s still around,’ she added.
    Luke said, ‘It’s not mad. It’s grief. Although, I think grief is a form of madness, an infection.’ He should know – he was an orphan; his father had died when he was six and his mother, Monika, had died of cancer when he was twenty. ‘It’s temporary. It’s not who you are, it’s something that lands on you, a cloud. Grief smothers everybody at some time or another. Everybody has to deal with death, it’s part of being human.’
    It was a relief to hear him talk about grief in that way, not a regimented process in five stages, but something that descended and then moved on, lapwings flying to the next field.
    â€˜Time doesn’t heal,’ he said. ‘But it makes loss easier to live with. Makes you feel less mad.’
    He had more emotional intelligence than she did. Liz had once told her that relationships weren’t like the crosswords she so obsessively completed. But as far as Sam was concerned, relationships were like cryptic clues. She had to work them out, stand back, parse the