The Salt Marsh by Clare Carson Read Free Book Online Page B

personal fortunes from selling industrially produced natural products to the gullible and guilty middle classes. Softy sell-outs. Luke was concerned that the hippy’s rambling might put other, saner people off – he wanted to stick to the science. She was less doctrinaire than Luke. She saw magic in a kestrel swooping and didn’t see a contradiction between matters of science and the soul. Nature was her spiritual retreat, an escape from her own darkness, solid and real when all else around her vanished. And anyway, she nursed her private, nagging preoccupation with the occult, her dog-eared copy of
Daemonologie
always close to hand.
    The hippy had reappeared at the second meeting in early May. The room was packed this time – Chernobyl had done a better job of attracting people than their posters. He spoke again. The waste transportation routes were negative leylines, he said, emitting bad energy, destroying the earth’s natural magic. People nodded politely. Luke repeated the rational arguments, the risks of nuclear waste transportation, the impacts of exposure to radiation. Accidents happened at nuclear power stations – look at Chernobyl – so why should anybody believe the promises that transportation of nuclear waste was safe? He proposed a local protest at the railhead where the spent fuel rod containers were transferred from the lorries with their sinister black and yellow radioactive symbol to the train heading north to the Sellafield reprocessing plant. A small crowd, a few placards and, if they were lucky, a journo from the local newspaper. There wasn’t much debate; everybody was in favour of the protest. Why not? It didn’t require much effort, there was nothing illegal about it. The lorries weren’t even well guarded. After the meeting, she and Luke had joked about the hippy and his leylines. But in her head, she had marked him down as interesting, tried to classify him. Two types of dark worshipper existed, according to King James and his
Daemonologie
: the treacherous witches that he despised so much and who were nearly always women, and then the male practitioners of magic – the Magi and necromancers who studied the heavenly sciences and summoned the dead. She had decided that the hippy was a Magus.
    Up close, his eyes were solid black, iris and pupil indistinguishable. Stoned, undoubtedly, but something deeper there as well, a magnetic pull.
    â€˜Are you...’ The endings of his words dragged. ‘OK?’
    She nodded, wiped her nose on her finger, sussed him out over the white line of her hand. About the same age as her father, she reckoned. Late forties. Or, at least, about the same age her father would have been if he were still alive.
    â€˜I thought you were somebody else,’ she said.
    He seemed thrown by her statement – as if he half thought he was somebody else too – and he turned away, waved his hand at the silver Channel. ‘I’d be a bit careful down here at night. It can be confusing, the sand, the water. And the tide is...’ His sentence drifted off.
    â€˜I’m not staying much longer. I just came down to see a friend.’ She was wary of giving too much away. ‘I’m driving back to London soon.’
    He nodded. ‘Would you like a cup of tea before you set off?’
    Now she was thrown – the prosaic nature of the offer, the prospect of being alone at night with a man she hardly knew. What if he was a nutter?
    â€˜It’s OK, thanks. I’m fine.’
    â€˜If you change your mind, I live...’ He pointed north along the shore. ‘The cabin with the grey window frames.’
    He stepped away, respecting her space and solitude, she noted. She was the only nutter on the beach – shouting at the shingle, waiting for her boyfriend to turn up. She could do with a cup of tea. She had often wondered what the clapboard fishermen’s cabins were like inside and, anyway, he