The Maker of Swans

by Paraic O’Donnell

  The sun and the moon.

  What good had he done, in all that time? He had seen to the starching of the cloths, to the upkeep of the silverware and the cornices. He had kept the roof in good repair, so that they would not be deluged in their beds. He had tended to them, in his unseen black and grey, had fussed and chided, flattered and pleaded. He had warned them. And they had gone on, the master and the child; they had continued in their grand and heedless orbits. It was useless, all of it. It was foolishness.

  To have thought he might tame such a creature. That he might keep her safe.

  He came to the first door on the landing. It was shut fast, and lacked any kind of knob or handle. He thrust his shoulder against it, not knowing when it might give. He thought of stumbling, as he had on the stairs, but plunging this time into some dank and lightless void. He thought of the dead cold, of water threaded by eels. He waited for the dread to seize him, to press him back. Nothing came, and the door did not hold for long.

  He called out to her as he lurched into the darkness.

  He left Julie’s room while she dressed. When he returned, she was standing with her back to the door. She had put the hat on last, and had turned to the mirror to fasten the ribbon under her chin. She reached back to make a last adjustment, and a barb of her hair slipped free of its ravel, spilling brightly onto her nape. He did not know he had made a sound until she responded.

  ‘You like it, then? I was worried I’d do it up all wrong.’

  He put his arm about her waist and lowered his head to kiss her there, in the tender recess at the base of her neck.

  ‘Let me show you.’

  ‘Is there a trick to it, then?’

  ‘A miracle,’ he said. ‘It is like a miracle.’

  He lit a match, when he had collected himself, and cradled it as he looked about the room. The walls were streaked with filth. At their margins, mould bloomed in dark profusion. Above him, one half of the ceiling was swollen and buckled. The remainder hung in ragged slabs from the joists. From the attic above, with the spilling cold, came small ticks and scratches, steady and industrious. Jackdaws, maybe. Or rats.

  The next room was worse: it was desolate, like the first, and a rich stench had coiled in its stale air. Some meagre carcass – a cat, maybe, or a fox – lay splayed and sunken in one corner. From an exposed beam hung a lank curl of rope, cropped a foot or two from the ceiling. Beneath it, on the floorboards, some message had been daubed with a fingertip. He could make nothing of it; the letters were dark and crudely formed, and his matches lasted only moments.

  The last door on the landing had seized in its warped frame. He heaved at it without much heart before giving up. It was beyond his strength, and no famished child could have forced it open. She had not come up here. Had she entered the house at all? He slumped against the door, doubting even what he had seen.

  I am not myself.

  It was a common enough form of words. It was what people said of themselves at such times as these. Perhaps it was not so much out of the ordinary.

  But the words were not right, not for this. It was a worse thing than becoming someone else, a more awful thing. There was a lack, when he sought himself, an incompleteness. He reached inward and found absences. He felt it when he tried to right himself, stumbling on a skewed board; the heft gone at his centre. Derelict – that was the word. He was derelict, or would be soon. He would stand day and night in the unseen weather, sheltering nothing living.

  Returning downstairs, he trudged among the lower rooms, animated now and then by some dim panic, but forgetting for long stretches what he had come for. In the ruined kitchen, the rain dribbled from the shattered lip of an old sink, spattering the refuse beneath. The room had been flooded. The floor, afterwards, had been swept indifferently to its edges, leaving drifts of muck and broken things that rose almost to knee height. He lit the rest of his matches and puzzled over the oddments: a scoured paintbox; a colourless stocking; a knave of hearts, torn perfectly along its axis.

  He went last to the room at the front of the house, off the hallway whose light had first drawn him in. A bulb hung here too, but the light it gave was feeble and halting, hardly brighter than an ember. As in the hallway, the wallpaper survived in mottled swatches, marked in places by deeper stains. It had been ivory-coloured, he thought, or primrose yellow. It was patterned with songbirds, and might have been pretty once, when the lamps were lit. Perhaps this had been the parlour, when the house was lived in, the room where occasional callers were entertained. Perhaps the children had been called to the hearth to sing. He tried to think of it.

  There was not much else, once he had taken in the rags of burgundy curtain. There was the mirror frame – empty but for a few jags of brownish glass – that leaned against the chimney breast. And there was— he proceeded slowly towards it, making no sense of its shape. It had been laid atop a pair of seatless dining chairs before the fireplace. The arrangement was deliberate, even ceremonial. On the mantel, a wooden cross had toppled and rested on its spar.

  What other purpose could it have, an oblong box of those proportions? It was roughly made, but some pains had been taken over its painting. It was plain and clean, like nothing else in this place. Why else would it have been laid out in just this way, its lid left discreetly askew, as if for the paying of respects? He slowed as he approached it, finding himself unsteady. The box was white, and a little more than five feet long.

  Behind him, the bulb flared and dimmed.

  Outside on the waste ground, the fires had burned down, abandoned by the dogs and their keepers. The doorways he passed were darkened now, and no light came from the upper windows.

  He turned away again, moving now towards the quayside. The exhaustion had all but consumed him. He could walk barely ten paces without stumbling. The ache in his temples pressed against his consciousness, darkening the borders of his vision. He could see the water now, an unmoving skin beneath the darkness.

  The cold alone would do it. It would not take long.

  When the blow came, it seemed a simple and ordained thing. His fatigue had saturated him, or he had suffered a stroke. It had been coming. He came down on his knees, watching the calm lurch of the glistening stones. The shadow slipped from behind his back, becoming a steady presence. He forced himself to focus, to decipher the pattern of the shoes. He looked up.

  The thin man, Abel Crouch, and the gun in his face. Hard and scratched, this close. That unreflecting darkness.

  ‘What were you doing in there? You look like you seen a ghost.’

  ‘Nothing, empty. There was nothing.’

  ‘Yeah? You sound disappointed. I’m disappointed too. You left before our business was finished.’

  Abel waited for him to speak, but he could not. There was nothing.

  ‘Your friend in the nice suit, he paid me a visit. Said he had my money. You know what I told him?’

  Shaking his head. No.

  ‘I told him to keep it. I said, my brother getting killed, we never talked about that. That wasn’t what we agreed. He said I’d have to take that up with you.’

  I am not myself.

  ‘So I come here to take it up with you.’

  I am not myself. All my love, everything gone. The river always.

  ‘Eustace?’

  The barrel of the pistol nudged his cheek, cold and perfect. He brought his lips to it, tasted oil and smoke.

  Eighteen

  When Clara wakes, they have taken her pens and paper.

  She is lying in the bed again, but it is not like before, when she was so much suffused with pain that her body seemed hardly to belong to her. She feels only an ebbing exhaustion, like the strained tenderness that follows long exertion. Her right arm is still in its sling, but it lies comfortably across her chest. She lifts her left arm from the covers and looks at it with vague wonder. She flexes and curls her fingers.

  It is strange, this tiredness, softened by an unfamiliar plenitude. She takes pleasure even in t
he light, its cool acuity on the whitewashed stones. Above the moors, a tear of clean sky has opened in the weather. The buzzards prowl at its apex, then swoon in graceful helices through the clarified air. The snow has begun to melt, perhaps, and they have sighted something living.

  She registers the bare surface of the writing table without alarm. She does not understand what she did with the roses, not fully, but she senses its magnitude. She knew, somehow, that this would be among its consequences. It is tiresome, this new cruelty, and yet she is untroubled. She has learned something new, a language almost. It is full of blood and earth, of dark profusion. She sleeps again, and dreams of it, of the red and secret alphabet.

  She is sitting in the armchair when Nazaire enters. She has been there for some time, gazing contentedly at the changing complexion of the sky. Another week has passed, and it must now be a little after midwinter. The days are no longer waning. He glances at the bed, and at the bare writing table. His manner is composed, as always, his movements unrushed, but he studies her more carefully than usual. In his expression, she thinks, there is the faintest inflection of curiosity.

  He sets a modest fire in the grate and puts out the tea things, arranging the cups and saucers with his customary precision. ‘Dr Chastern will be joining you,’ he says. ‘He was concerned by your behaviour. There are other matters too that he wishes to discuss with you.’

  He inspects the table, plucking a minute crumb from the white cloth, then turns to address her directly.

  ‘It is disappointing, little one. I believed we had reached an understanding. That was why we continued to reward you. Now we must take these rewards away. It is a pity, no?’

  Clara holds a sugar lump on her spoon and lowers it slowly beneath the surface of the tea, watching the slowly spreading stain. She looks up at Nazaire and smiles distractedly, then returns her attention to her cup.

  When Chastern arrives, he is dressed for the outdoors. He wears a tweed suit, and at his throat is an olive-green cravat. The effect is incongruous, even a little comical. As he takes his seat with effortful ceremony, Clara raises her teacup to cover her mouth. He looks at her as he waits for his breath to return, clutching and releasing the handle of his cane. His expression is indignant, and faintly disbelieving.

  ‘The winter,’ he says eventually. ‘It has not yet relinquished its hold. In the weather, we have not yet seen the first glimmering of clemency.’

  Clara selects a chocolate biscuit and nibbles at its rim. She offers Chastern a mild smile and brushes crumbs from her lap.

  ‘Yet in the garden certain changes are already evident. Some of the roses, for instance, have convinced themselves of the arrival of summer. It is a remarkable thing. You had noticed, I suppose?’

  Clara looks away, as if considering the question. She takes a pensive bite from her biscuit.

  ‘It is charming, in its way, but one is always disquieted when such things happen other than in their natural course. It rarely ends well, I’m afraid.’

  She puts her teacup down and looks at him attentively.

  ‘The word “precocious”, you know, has precisely this original sense. From the Latin praecox: that which ripens too soon. Oh, I have seen it often enough, the premature flowering that follows a few days of brightness. But it is illusory, of course. Winter does not surrender quite so easily. The frosts return, my dear, and all those pretty petals shrivel and die. Sometimes, the entire organism will succumb. It has overreached, you see. It has expended too much of itself to outlast the cold.’

  Clara gets up and goes to the window. The snow lies deeply still over the garden, but the morning sunlight is sharp and pure. The new roses glisten perfectly. She smiles.

  ‘We were becoming concerned, my dear, that you were tiring yourself. You were quite insensible with exhaustion when Nazaire found you. You had to be carried to your bed.’

  A little bird – a blue tit, she thinks – alights on one of the rose’s upper branches. It picks at the tender stems in tiny, stuttering movements.

  ‘At any rate, we felt it was prudent to take away your writing things, if only until you have been given proper instruction. It is entirely for your own good, of course.’

  Clara puts her head on one side as she watches the flickering bird. It is a negligible creature, no more than a palmful of bright feather, but there is something dauntless in its colours, its ardent flushes of blue and yellow.

  Chastern is still talking. ‘It is a blow to you, no doubt, but you will find other amusements. You will see, in time, that it was for the best.’

  The bird flits from its perch, darting somewhere out of sight with the morsels it has taken, as if it were nesting. But it is too early, surely, even for blue tits. There cannot be enough food yet.

  ‘Still,’ says Chastern, ‘you mustn’t be too gloomy. There is some good news.’

  Clara turns from the window.

  ‘I had written to your guardian, you see, to assure him that you are well. I mentioned my business with him also, and it seems he has become convinced of his best course. He assures me that he is working in earnest on the item I commissioned. I must leave shortly for the college, since the new term is about to begin. There I will await further news from the Estate, and I look forward to travelling there to oversee the completion of the work.’

  She waits for him to continue, uncertain what all this may mean.

  ‘It was my intention, as you will recall, to arrange for your return once I had satisfied myself that Mr Crowe had done as I asked. And yet …’

  He adjusts his cravat, looking away as if vaguely occupied. Clara remains completely still. She breathes slowly.

  ‘I confess,’ he says at last, ‘that I have never found children to be especially absorbing of my interest. One is aware, of course, that they are generally cherished. One is even persuaded, occasionally, by certain Pre-Raphaelite depictions – some of Millais’ children, for instance, are quite enchanting, and so very decorative. For the most part, though, I have been contentedly incurious about the young. That, at any rate, is how I must account for it – for having overlooked you until so recently.’

  He pauses, but does not look towards her. He stares vaguely still, and appears unsatisfied with his own explanation.

  ‘It was an unforgivable lapse,’ he says, resuming abruptly. ‘But you must rest assured that I have seen my error, that you have had my attention for some time. Of course, it was necessary to wait for some manifestation of your abilities – one doesn’t wish to appear foolish, after all. And how lavishly you have rewarded my patience. What a great deal we shall have to talk about, when I return. It would be such a great shame, would it not, if we were to squander our only chance at becoming acquainted?’

  Clara stares fixedly ahead as Chastern labours from his chair and makes ready to leave. ‘Yes, yes,’ he says, ‘a very great shame. And so I trust that you will not find it too great an imposition if I ask that you remain here, if only until I return. We shall have leisure then to decide what is best. In the meantime, of course, Nazaire will see that you are kept entirely safe.’

  At the door, he pauses and turns to her. ‘Goodbye, my dear. You will remember our chat today, won’t you? You will take care that you do not endanger yourself by your exertions?’

  Clara raises her left hand in a parting wave. She flexes each finger in turn.

  Ordinarily, it is something Nazaire would not have missed. It has occurred to Clara, for instance, that she might keep aside a piece of cutlery, even a teaspoon. In the event, she has always thought better of it. His attentiveness, much of the time, takes the form of habit. As he leaves the room, especially, he performs each task scrupulously, and in unvarying order. After Chastern visits, he returns the tea things to the tray, arranging the teacups neatly on the stacked saucers, their handles nestling one inside the other. The cutlery he arrays in perfect symmetry, forks aligned at the centre, then the knives, each with its blade outwards. At either end, he places a teaspoon, so that the sequence
resembles a palindrome.

  The tiepin, however, has no place in Nazaire’s methodical housekeeping. It was Chastern who brought it to her room, who set it aside as he adjusted his cravat and brushed it from the table as he stood to leave. When Clara finds it, she conceals it first in a gap in the floorboards. If he misses it and returns to her room to look for it, it is a place where it might easily have fallen without her knowledge.

  She waits until the evening of the next day. The urge to retrieve the pin grows so strong that she can think of almost nothing else. She distracts herself by watching the blue tits. She has seen the pair now, diligently scouring the fresh shoots of the climbing rose, returning tirelessly to their hidden nest. Nazaire enters the room while she watches them. It is the last of the three visits he makes each day, and he conducts his inspection quietly, not addressing her until he is about to leave.

  ‘You have grown quiet in your habits, little one. I wonder what it signifies.’

  She watches the birds. They are losing the light, and there is an urgency now in their foraging.

  ‘Never mind,’ says Nazaire. ‘It is in my own nature to be silent. We shall enjoy the tranquillity, both of us, until Dr Chastern returns.’

  Clara waits for ten minutes after he leaves. It is as long as she can manage. She kicks her shoes off and crosses the room in her stockinged feet. Crouching above the crack in the floorboards, she prises the tiepin from its narrow recess. Its shaft is delicately ornate, and at its head is a pearl in a silver clasp.

  She returns to the window. Over the moors, the sky is a wash of sombre violet, fading towards dusk. The birds are no longer visible. She presses the tiepin against her palm, the pearl warming easily against her skin.

  When the feather falls, swooning gently onto the table, a moment passes before she notices. It is slender and white, settling noiselessly by her wrist and trembling with each slight disturbance of the air.