The Maker of Swans

by Paraic O’Donnell

  The boy stands in the strange, gaping quietness. A furl of smoke thins above the rifleman’s shoulder, and the river has the blue darkness of mussel shells. From the water, which seems almost still, a voice rises, a great moan of anguish. When he sights the boat again, it has drifted a little way downstream. He strains to make something of the shapes that can be seen.

  His father is slumped in the stern, his head lolling over the gunwale. The pole he had been using juts from the water, almost upright in the silt. He must have clung to it as he went down, driven it into the bed. And Lucy – Mr Crowe stands with Lucy clasped tightly to him. The cap has fallen from her head, and the cloak hangs open about her pale form. He keeps her on her feet, as if he will not accept that there is no strength left in her. When he is not roaring at Swaine, he leans and speaks to her, caressing her hair and clutching at her clothing. As he does so, surely, he can see what the boy can, even at this distance – the drenched and glutted silks of her bodice, and near her heart the seeping nest of ruin.

  Mr Crowe settles her weight on one arm. With the other he points to the shore, where Swaine watches mutely. The alderman’s fists are limp at his sides. He is hunched slightly, and his body heaves with his subsiding rage. Mr Crowe fixes upon him, his hand outstretched. He is possessed by fury, but also strangely intent, shouting something beyond the boy’s hearing.

  And then Swaine is gone. He is simply gone, and a strange silence settles.

  What the boy sees, in the moments that follow, is slow and skewed. His senses seem somehow disordered, so that he hardly trusts that he is truly present. He stumbles to the end of the slip, to the place where Swaine was standing only a moment before. The air above him is ruptured by a maw of unaccountable heat, and the quietness envelops him. He watches the horses tear themselves free of their post, but finds that he cannot hear their hooves as they gallop away along the shore.

  He rouses himself and approaches the rifleman, who has turned from the water and is staring at the place where Swaine stood. His lips move as if he is figuring a sum in his head. The boy looks into his eyes for a moment, then does the first thing. It is the first of the things he must do.

  The act itself is neither hard nor easy. The rifleman does not go down with the first blow, but stands wondering at this new puzzle. He touches his jaw where it is torn open. The boy puts him down and does not stop until there is nothing that can be recognised of a living man. He hears himself say that it was for his father, but that is only because he cannot say her name.

  Lucy. It was for Lucy.

  When it is done, he throws the axe handle aside. Let them find it here. They would pull it from the river anyway. He stoops and picks up the man’s rifle. In a pouch on his belt, he finds a magazine. He stands for a moment to look around himself, to form some memory of the place he is leaving. Beyond the ferry house, he sees almost nothing. It is not quite light still, and the town is only a daub of shadow in the early mist. He sees the eaves of his home, or thinks he does, a little way upstream. Perhaps it is only the reeds, crossing and shivering in the greyness before morning.

  The boy goes to do the next thing. He goes after Mr Crowe.

  Sixteen

  Clara begins to write with her left hand. It is a matter of necessity, at least at first. Her right arm, when she is allowed at last to have paper and pens, is still bound in the sling, braced stiffly against its splint. She cannot so much as pick a pen up in the way she is used to.

  She looks on coldly while Nazaire sets the writing things on the desk. When he has finished, he steps back with a small flourish, gesturing towards the gleaming ink bottle. In answer, she glances down at her injured arm.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he says. ‘It will be some weeks more, I am afraid, before the splint and dressing may be removed. Do not think of removing them sooner. It is a slender bone, and will be vulnerable still, especially so in a child.’

  He is calm and precise, as always. He might easily be mistaken for a doctor, by someone who knew no more of his nature. It might not have occurred even to a doctor to wonder which hand she wrote with, but it is not a detail that Nazaire would overlook.

  Clara glares at him, keeping her face set hard, and takes her seat at the writing table. She takes up the pen with her left hand, her fingers gathering hesitantly as she grasps the shaft. She adjusts her grip slightly, tracing a broad scribble in the air, but her movements are effortful and clumsy. It is as if she has never held a pen.

  When she puts the nib to the page, Clara is even more dismayed. She labours over even the crudest of shapes, forming letters that are scarcely recognisable. No matter how deliberate her movements, what she writes is a grotesque distortion of her intentions, of the graceful succession of marks that she sees so clearly in her mind.

  When she attempts the descending curve of a g, it becomes a hideous barb, like the leg of a smashed spider. The loop of an h is clownishly contorted. Even for a simple e, she manages only a sprawling and unclosed curl.

  Nazaire approaches the desk. Clara stiffens in discomfort, but forces herself to continue without looking up.

  ‘My first language,’ he says quietly, ‘is written from right to left. You have seen it, perhaps, in your guardian’s great library.’

  Clara sits upright for a moment. She picks up the page she has defaced with these first efforts and tears it fastidiously down the centre. She folds the pieces, tearing them in turn into quarters. She repeats this until the page is little more than confetti, then pushes the pile to the edge of the desk.

  ‘When I was taught to write in French,’ Nazaire continues, ‘I struggled just as you do now. It seems a simple thing, and yet it defeats you. You work against something in yourself, as if there were a grain in you.’

  Clara resumes her efforts as if she has not heard. She begins in the simplest way she can think of, writing the letter a over and over again, filling an entire line. She repeats this doggedly until its shape, at least, is unmistakable, achieving no particular elegance. She moves on to the letter b.

  ‘I too was resolved,’ Nazaire says. ‘I sat for long hours, doing exactly as you now do. Your progress, if I remember well, is easier than mine was. You learn quickly, little one.’

  Clara gives no sign that she is listening. She tears the page up, just as thoroughly as she did the first, and begins again. Nazaire laughs softly and moves towards the door.

  Clara writes. She writes until her left hand aches, its muscles protesting at the unaccustomed strains. She writes at all hours, in the greying light of the winter afternoons and, when dusk comes, in the sickly radiance of the room’s single bulb.

  She sets herself tasks, transcribing fragments from the store of books whose pages she can call to mind. She is strict with herself, completing even the most arduous of these exercises, and yet she chooses carelessly, not caring what it is that she happens to recollect. She copies nursery rhymes over and over, or the names and reigns of kings and queens. She conjugates French verbs, puts the common names for plants against their Latin ones. She lists all the white things she can think of, then all the red things. In all of this, she is concerned only with the mechanics of what her hand must accomplish. The words themselves may just as well mean nothing.

  She writes, but it is not writing as she knew it. There is nothing in it that comes from herself. She no longer begins her days as she did, her pen struggling to keep pace with the receding fugue of her dreams. The inventions of her sleep have been darkened by her circumstances. It is inhabited now by things she prefers not to record.

  Still she writes. She forces herself to continue, to sit before each blank page and set herself some new piece of drudge work. Wearily, she reproduces passages of Jane Austen, of Stendhal or George Eliot, hearing nothing of their voices, trudging sightlessly among their thronged and opulent rooms. It matters only that she keep going, that she urge the cramped bundle of her fingers onwards, coax from them the next curve, the next ragged stem.

  At first, she tears up each page as soon
as she has filled it. If a fire has been lit in the grate, she burns even the shreds. After a few days, however, she looks down at a line of George Herbert that she has copied out over a dozen times. It seems to her, though she doubts herself for thinking so, that there is some small improvement. She can manage no more than a scrawl still, but there is a scattered evenness to it, a straining towards symmetry.

  She cannot be certain of this, since she has kept none of her initial efforts. Nor does she have with her any sample of her usual handwriting, though that perhaps is for the best. From now on, she decides, she will keep one page aside for each day of her progress. She will lay them face down so that they do not distract or discourage her while she is busy with other exercises. When a few more days have passed, a week perhaps, she will turn them over and place the first of them side by side with the last. She will know whether she imagined it.

  Clara’s strength begins to return, though that too goes unnoticed for some days. It occurs to her, one day at about noon, that she has been sitting at the writing table since dawn. Though she has stopped many times to rest her fatigued left hand, she has not been forced – as she was so often in her first days here – to return to her bed, stupefied by weariness. That pain too has slowly ebbed from her. She no longer needs the phials that Nazaire brought to ease it, the tinctures that lowered her into dreamless darkness.

  When Nazaire brings her meals, she begins to take them at the small table by the fire. She eats quickly and without any urging on his part, anxious to return to the writing table, but finishing everything, forcing herself to swallow every dull spoonful of porridge. She needs her strength now for what she must do.

  Nazaire, once he has satisfied himself that she no longer eats under protest, does not stay to watch over her as he used to. He leaves her food and water on the table and waits only for her to take her seat. He remarks, in his blandly intent way, that she is making progress. He assures her that Dr Chastern takes great interest in the course of her recovery, that he is pleased she has chosen to make fruitful use of her time. And he looks, of course – he is always looking. Even if he spends only five minutes in the room, he surveys it minutely. He makes clear, though he remains almost expressionless, that there is a reason for his scrutiny, that not the slightest alteration or disturbance will escape it.

  Clara is unconcerned by this. Aside from the writing table, there is not a single thing in the room to occupy her attention. When she was first given paper and pens, and when she had the means at last to scrawl a simple message, she thought that she would ask immediately for books. The lack of them seemed the most desolate thing about the bare room in which they keep her.

  She did not ask, and the urgency of that wish faded. Reading belongs to the other life, to the place she was taken from. There is the room now, and there is the white weather on the changeless moors. There is nothing else, nothing but the work. And the work is the same, day after day. To scratch at the whiteness. To start again.

  Clara writes.

  Chastern comes at last to see her. Clara is at the writing table when he arrives, and at first she does not even look around. She is accustomed now to Nazaire’s comings and goings, and often continues to write until he has set down her tray. In this way, she can continue in her practice until the last possible moment before she must stop to eat. It spares her, too, from having to meet his eyes.

  It is Chastern’s tread that makes her turn. Nazaire’s is discreet but brisk, unvaryingly even. These footsteps are slow and laboured. When Clara turns from the desk, he is arranging himself in an armchair. He is wearing a richly patterned crimson housecoat, and he pulls its velvet collar more closely about him as he takes his seat. His appearance, in daylight, is less imposing than when she first saw him. He seems frail, and slightly shrunken.

  He raises his hand lightly. ‘No, child,’ he says. ‘Do not allow me to disturb your work. Nazaire has told me of your progress, and of how you have been diverting yourself at your writing. I came only to assure myself that you are recovering well, that you do not want for anything.’

  Clara shifts uneasily in her chair, but makes no move to return to her exercises. When Nazaire enters with a tea tray, she is almost grateful for his arrival. Chastern glances at him as he sets out the cups, then stares distractedly into the fire. He appears, as he did the first time Clara saw him, to be faintly disappointed with all that he sees. She feels a profound discomfort in his presence, a sense that beneath his pellucid skin there is some unrecognisable creature. He makes her feel cold.

  ‘I’m afraid I have rather discommoded our young guest, Nazaire. Perhaps it would be better if I took tea in my study as usual.’

  Nazaire straightens. He examines Clara’s expression, then appears to consider something. ‘The child is unused to company,’ he says. ‘And she is not yet at home in this place. I think, though, that there are questions she wishes to ask.’

  ‘Questions?’ says Chastern.

  ‘I have explained only that we were forced to act as we did. It was not my place to say more. No doubt there is more that she wishes to know, now that she has the means to ask.’

  ‘The means?’ Chastern says. ‘Ah, yes, of course. How obtuse of me. Well, I should be delighted, if it would be of some comfort to the child. Come and join me, Clara, do. Bring your writing things, for we must alleviate some of this mystery that so oppresses you.’

  Nazaire pulls out the chair opposite Chastern and sets a place for her at the small table. Chastern watches her as she hesitates. His grey eyes do not settle on things as Nazaire’s do, but pass over everything with the same disdainful weariness. She has no wish to be any closer to him than she is, but it is true that there are things she wants to know. There are things that she wants.

  She makes her way slowly to the other armchair, carrying herself with a little more delicacy than is needed, adjusting her injured arm carefully as she sits down. While Chastern sips his tea, Nazaire makes his customary survey of the room, then withdraws without another word. When they are alone, Chastern falls silent for a long while. He gazes absently about the room and taps the lip of his teacup with a fingernail. He sighs periodically, as if contemplating some sorrowful but dimly remembered occurrence.

  ‘Well, my dear,’ he says at last. ‘You are making do, then, in your reduced circumstances? You must forgive the rather brutal character of these lodgings. I live elsewhere, as you might imagine, but this place offers a degree of tranquillity. And seclusion, of course. You will have noticed that we are not much troubled by visitors here. One need not fear the intrusion of the person from Porlock. You are familiar, perhaps, with the anecdote?’

  Clara grimaces slightly as she takes up her pen. Though she can now manage a laborious cursive, her left-handed efforts are still coarse. She finds it almost unbearable to show them to him, and writes no more than the first couplet.

  In Xannadù did Cubla Khan

  A stately Pleasure Dome decree

  Reluctantly, she pushes the page towards him.

  Chastern picks it up and peers at it. ‘How delightful,’ he says, returning it to her. ‘I had forgotten about your rather singular ability. It is the Crewe manuscript, perhaps, that you reproduce here. You are greatly privileged, you know, to live among such treasures. Your guardian is less reverent, of course, towards the priceless things that he has gathered. Familiarity breeds contempt, and his familiarity is especially intimate.’

  Clara is uncertain of the point of this observation, and decides that she need not respond to it directly.

  I cannot yet write passably with this hand. When my right arm has healed, I will show you.

  Chastern examines the page. He glances at her bandaged arm with obscure regret, as if he is only approximately aware of how it came to be injured. He folds the paper and fans himself with it, sighing as he does so.

  ‘It is all very unsatisfactory,’ he says. ‘Nazaire has told you, perhaps, how displeased I was at your misadventure. I do not see, even now, why it could not
all have been accomplished with less unpleasantness. But then, I am a mere scholar. I am unaccustomed, I assure you, to such practices. It gave me no pleasure to find myself put to such extremes.’

  Clara takes a fresh page.

  Why did you bring me here? When will you let me go home?

  Chastern glances at these questions and returns the page with impatience. ‘Yes, yes,’ he says. ‘I will come to that presently. You will understand, I’m sure, that it is not a simple matter. Someone of my kind does not lightly act as I did.’

  I don’t understand, Clara writes. I don’t know who you are.

  ‘They did not tell you?’ Chastern says. ‘Your guardian and Eustace? No, I suppose they did not. They hoped, perhaps, that it might be avoided, that you could be entirely spared. Well, I shall spare you what I can, but since you have asked, let me answer you in this way. Do you know who your guardian is? Do you know, Clara, who Mr Crowe is?’

  She stares at the page. She begins to write, then falters. She crosses something out.

  He is a writer.

  Chastern laughs weakly. ‘Well, quite,’ he says. ‘Is that all he has told you? That he is a writer? And is that truly what he seems to you to be? You do not suppose, surely, that all writers come to live as he does, that they may choose to seclude themselves in quite such a place as your home? He is a writer, yes, but not at all of the usual kind. You will have heard it said of some authors, no doubt, that their careers have been long and distinguished. It is an odious cliché, of course, but that need not detain us. Mr Crowe’s career has been long – very long indeed, in fact. It has not been distinguished, however, or not in the usual sense.’