The Maker of Swans

by Paraic O’Donnell

  She looks up. The window is shut, and it cannot have drifted from the chimney, since a fire has been lit. Approaching the desk, she finds that its colour is softened by a gentle greyness. The line of the shaft, a little way from the centre, is strong and faultless. With the utmost gentleness, she traces the soft edge of the vane with her fingertip.

  The surge of recognition is so forceful that for an unbreathing instant she is no longer here. It is long ago, and she stands by the dark water, in the place where things were first made. She waits, knowing that she must be patient.

  But she remembers. Clara remembers.

  Nineteen

  Eustace vomited the moment he awoke, spattering the floor beside the washbasin. Abel Crouch pushed the bowl closer with his heel.

  ‘The dead arose,’ he said. ‘Sleep well?’

  Eustace wiped his face with the sheet and slumped onto his back.

  ‘I had no wish ever to wake again. Why did you not end it?’

  ‘I still might, you play your cards right.’ Abel got up and crossed to the door. He opened it and called down for Jonah. ‘But like I said, you left before our business was finished. There’s other bastards I want to kill worse than you.’

  Jonah, when he entered, was more nervous than usual. ‘Everything all right, Mr Eustace? He said he was your friend, and you was in a bad way.’

  ‘He’s all right,’ said Abel. ‘Clean that up, there’s a good lad. And see about getting a bit of breakfast up here. Mr Eustace has a busy day ahead.’

  ‘Mr Eustace?’

  ‘It is all right, Jonah. Do as he asks. I am unwell, that is all.’

  Jonah swabbed the sour muck from the floor. He brought clean washing water and fresh linen and towels. When the room was habitable, he trudged downstairs, returning after twenty minutes with toast and kippers, a pot of tarry coffee.

  ‘Abel,’ Eustace said. ‘Will you give the boy ten bob? You will find money in that dresser.’

  ‘I already found money in that dresser. That’s how come we’re sitting here all nice and cosy. You want to be more careful, you know. You used to know how to look out for yourself.’

  Eustace waited until Jonah had left. ‘You see how it is with me. There is nothing left now for me to protect.’

  ‘I noticed you didn’t seem that perky. Anyway, be that as it may, you’ve got something to live for now, ain’t you?’ Abel took his pistol out, gestured with it towards his head. ‘So eat your fucking kippers.’

  Eustace shaved for the first time in days. He combed his hair and put on one of the freshly laundered shirts that Jonah had brought. The coffee was foul, but he managed two cups with milk and sugar. He ate a mouthful of toast.

  ‘That’s better,’ said Abel. ‘I almost didn’t recognise you before.’

  ‘I no longer recognised myself.’

  Abel finished his breakfast and lit a cigarette. ‘How long you been here? The whole time, since what happened?’

  Eustace nodded.

  Abel shook his head. ‘You didn’t even look for her?’

  He lowered his face into his hands. ‘Do not think to judge me, not about that.’

  ‘Yeah, well. Not my concern. Don’t look right, though.’

  ‘You think it did not occur to me? That it does not torment me? What do you think they would have done, even if I had found them? You saw for yourself how easily it comes to them. Should I have played at being a hero, even if it put her in the way of more harm? No, they have named their price, and only my former employer can pay it. I could not stand by and wait for him to bestir himself.’

  ‘So, what? You go to the seaside for a bit?’

  Eustace lunged from the bed and took him by the throat. Abel had drawn the gun before he reached him and shoved it against his belly. ‘Shoot me if you are going to shoot me,’ he said. ‘But do not question me in this, or I will leave you with something to remember me by.’

  Abel’s voice was a harsh croak. ‘Don’t fucking tempt me.’

  Eustace released him, returning wearily to the edge of the bed. ‘I came here,’ he said. ‘I came back here and I poisoned myself, I lowered myself into filth, night after night, to make it stop. I am sorry, Abel, for what happened to your brother. Truly I am, but what would you have had me do? I can offer you nothing. Not without her. Not without the child.’

  ‘You want her back,’ Abel said. ‘And I want them, them who took her. We both have a dog in this race. I told you, that’s why I’m here. That’s why you ain’t dead.’

  ‘What of it? What difference does it make that we have common cause? What can we do that I could not have done alone?’

  ‘Shut up and listen for a minute. I been keeping an eye on things, while you been off having a nervous breakdown. I have a few ideas, but there’s things I don’t know. That’s where you come in.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I stayed around for a while after it happened. We had a lot of stuff there needed taking away, and I weren’t exactly sure what I was going to do next.’

  ‘He did not question your presence there? Mr Crowe, I mean?’

  ‘Him and his soprano, they went off the rails a bit after it happened. More than usual, like. I don’t think they’d have noticed if I’d parked a tank on the lawn.’

  ‘I expected no better.’

  ‘Yeah, well. I’ll come back to that in a minute. Anyway, a few days after it happened, this bloke turns up, says he’s been engaged by you. Bit shabby looking, he was, but talked the talk all right.’

  ‘Cromer. Elias Cromer.’

  ‘That’s him. Like I told you, he tries to pay me off. Says you’ve left instructions. I tell him where to shove it. I want to deal with you in person. He says you’re unavailable, but he notes my wishes. He goes on like that a lot. Bit like you, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘It was Cromer who trained me. But his own training was in law. It was among the reasons I sought his services. He is thorough, and he can be trusted.’

  ‘That a fact? He looks like he ain’t got the price of a cup of tea. Anyway, after he’s had his little chat with me, he goes in to see his lordship. He’s in there about an hour, and when he comes out, I have another word. See what I can find out. Now, at first he won’t say nothing, he’s on about client confidentiality and all that. So I get a little bit agitated due to my recent loss, and point out that I’m the only one seems to give a toss about making things right.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Your boy Cromer, he still don’t say much, but he gives me the broad strokes, as he calls them. Says our mutual friends ain’t bringing the little girl back until Crowe discharges certain obligations.’

  ‘That much I knew before I left. Is that all?’

  ‘He don’t go into detail, and I ain’t really all that interested. Like I said to him, all I want to know is whether Crowe’s going to give them what they want. And if he is, when’s it going to happen. Because if he’s got something for them, they’ve got to come back for it, ain’t they? Or he’s got to bring it to them. Either way, I want to mark the occasion. Make my presence felt.’

  ‘What did Cromer say?’

  ‘Not much, except what I can see for myself. That Crowe ain’t doing much in the way of discharging. That he ain’t even compos mentis half the time.’

  ‘Again, that much was evident even before I left. It is why I saw no hope.’

  ‘It don’t look good, granted. So anyway, Cromer goes on his way. Says he’s got other instructions from you. Next day, I get our stuff packed up and leave. See if I can’t move matters forward by myself.’

  ‘How did you propose to accomplish that?’

  ‘By finding the cunts. How else?’

  ‘That was foolish,’ Eustace said. ‘You did not succeed, I take it, and if you had, you would have put the child in danger.’

  ‘No, I didn’t succeed. Oxford ain’t exactly home turf for me, not that he was ever likely to be there. So I decide to move down the list. Come looking for you, in other words. But be
fore I do, I go back to the Estate.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Same reason I stayed in the first place. The more I know about what’s going on, the better my chances of being in the right place when the professor and his mate turn up.’

  ‘You might have saved yourself the trouble. My former employer was much as you left him, I take it?’

  ‘I didn’t expect much, but it turns out there’s been a development.’

  ‘What kind of development?’

  ‘Well, I can see right away that he’s taken himself in hand a bit. Him and the bird ain’t spending all day every day arseholed. I see him shutting himself up in the library a bit. Don’t get me wrong, he ain’t become a monk or nothing, but you could say he’s keeping regular hours. He took a day off for Christmas, which is how I got in there.’

  ‘In where?’

  ‘Into the house. Into the library.’

  ‘And you discovered something?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Abel took a carefully folded page from an inner pocket and handed it to him. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘I had to copy it out so he wouldn’t notice. I probably ain’t spelled everything right. And I couldn’t copy the flower, obviously.’

  ‘The flower?’

  ‘A white rose, pressed or whatever you call it. All dried up and flattened, it was, and folded into the original letter. The letter’s about the rose, far as I can tell.’

  Eustace unfolded it. It was from Chastern to Mr Crowe, and was dated the 22nd of December.

  My Dear Crowe,

  I write to thank you for your recent hospitality, and to assure you that we strive in our lesser fashion to accommodate your young charge in comfort. Though I fear she finds her circumstances rather austere, she has the resilience that one envies in the very young. She possesses a faculty of inventiveness also that we have remarked on as somewhat beyond the ordinary, and we note with relief that she seems always to devise some means of amusing herself.

  It is in this latter connexion that I enclose a keepsake, one that I do not doubt will provoke the sentiments of pride and affection that are proper to a guardian. The flower you find enclosed is from a cherished specimen in my own garden. Though I have, I hope, been assiduous in my husbandry, I have never induced it to flower – as it has done in recent days – while the garden lay in repose under the midwinter snow.

  The serendipity of this occurrence became more forcefully apparent to me when I discovered that our young guest had, in a passage of writing, devoted considerable imaginative effort to the same rose.

  What a treasure you have kept from me, Crowe – what a rare and lucent treasure. I see now why you guarded her so zealously, and you must have no doubt that I shall do likewise. This will comfort you, I hope, until the day comes when she may be returned to the tenderness of your custody. That day, of course, will be entirely of your choosing.

  I trust, in the meantime, that you keep well and that you continue to find some tolerable occupation for your own estimable gifts.

  I remain, as ever, your admiring friend

  Chastern

  Eustace folded the letter and passed it back. He stood and went to the window. Outside the abattoir, a boy sluiced blood and filth from the yard with two or three desultory bucketfuls of water. When he judged his efforts satisfactory, he sat on the upturned bucket to smoke a cigarette. The effluent coursed around his boots, thick with grease and darkening to sienna.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ said Abel. ‘How come Crowe’s sat up and took notice?’

  Eustace spoke quietly. ‘The sun. She was the sun.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘The sun and the moon, remember? She was the one I should have guarded most closely. There were many such miracles, and yet somehow I did not see.’

  ‘The flower, you mean? How’s that a miracle? Remember I ain’t exactly got green fingers.’

  ‘It is not important now. You left the Estate then, after you found the letter?’

  ‘Well, it looked like the professor had only just lit a fire under your boss, so I reckoned I had time. Thought I’d pay you a visit.’

  ‘How quickly could we get there, if the need arose? Do you have a car?’

  ‘Funny you should ask. I have yours, as a matter of fact. Or his, I suppose it is. I fixed the Jag up. Reckoned it wouldn’t hurt to be able to get somewhere in a hurry.’

  ‘There are some small matters I must attend to here before we leave. In particular, there is an appointment I must keep on Thursday evening. It is something I ought to have done last night, in fact, but I was— well, you saw how it was with me. You have no objection?’

  Abel considered this. ‘One condition,’ he said.

  ‘Namely?’

  ‘I’m keeping you company. If we’re going to be held up for another week, I want you coming out in one piece.’

  ‘It is a matter of some delicacy. An intimate matter.’

  ‘More intimate than dying?’

  Eustace stared down at the slaughterhouse. The boy had abandoned his bucket and his spreading delta of waste. The gates to the street had been locked for the evening, but inside the lights continued to burn.

  Twenty

  On the stones, the words cannot be made beautiful.

  It is rough and indelicate work, more scratching than writing, but Clara no longer frets over her clumsiness. Her right arm will be free of its sling soon, and before long it will be strong again. Even then, she expects no great improvement in her technique. The words on the stones are not exercises. She is no longer practising.

  To begin with, there is the question of space. The marks she makes on the stones cannot be erased. She is confined, therefore, to the twenty-four stones that are hidden from view. Twenty-four stones: she counted them the first time she crawled under the bed, contorting herself in the musty darkness to touch and memorise each of them in turn. The characters she etches with the pin are crude and angular. No more than two hundred, she has found, can be crammed onto each stone.

  Twenty-four stones times two hundred. It would amount to fewer than a thousand words, hardly enough for even the shortest of stories. But what she writes will not be a story; it will be like nothing she has written before. It is another kind of making that she has begun, with its own rules and possibilities; with even its own alphabet, though it is older and stranger than any other she has known.

  It contains only a handful of crude tokens, and these must be assembled in clusters of three. They are not like the words she is used to, these triplets. There are hardly more than a few dozen, all of them recurring over and over. These are dull patterns, taken alone, with none of the music or grace of true words, nothing to soften the labour of scratching them out. It is only in the entirety of the sequence, she knows, that its secret grandeur is expressed. Its beauty is hidden in its cadences, in its unseen treasure of colours: its amber and ochre, its opal.

  What she makes will be hidden too, once she has seeded it. It will swell in silence, like chalk or bone, like a tulip bulb or a tusk of quartz. It will be beautiful, in its way, but it will not be perfect. There will be mistakes – not many, but just enough; of just the right kind. If she gets the sequence exactly right, the rest will unfold by itself. The thing she makes will nurture itself. It will quicken and flourish in silence, like something waiting to be born.

  It will be beautiful, but only if she gets it right. This is why she takes no chances, why she writes nothing – scratches nothing – until she has recited it inwardly hundreds of times, until she can envision the chain of marks with such familiar clarity that she feels she could etch it in her sleep. She does this, most often, while standing at the window, where she looks out, only half-seeing, at the thawing landscape and its patient insurrection of colour.

  In this way, too, Clara assures Nazaire that there has been no change in her habits. He is accustomed now to finding her always at the window. He no longer remarks on it, having had little cause since Chastern�
�s departure to speak to her at all. He is watchful, as always, and has abandoned none of his meticulous precautions, but she gives him no new cause for concern. Perhaps, like her, he is simply tired of this. Perhaps he wishes it to end.

  Her long vigils at the window have another advantage. Standing for hours in complete silence allows her to listen, to detect the faint and infrequent sounds that Nazaire makes while he is elsewhere in the house. They are small clues, of course, and she is careful not to place too much trust in them. She does not forget his preternatural stealth. As long as she can hear nothing, he might easily be just outside the room.

  Still, there are certain domestic necessities that even he must attend to. She hears the ragged and shearing cracks as he chops firewood for the stove, the subdued gurgle of plumbing after he bathes or uses the lavatory. She even comes to recognise those occasions, at least once a day, when he leaves the house. He goes to buy provisions, she assumes, and the nearest village must lie a few miles off. He is never gone for less than an hour.

  Clara wastes none of this time.

  The bed is old and sits on a squat frame, leaving a gap that is barely high enough for Clara to squeeze through. When she does, it is like crawling into a collapsing and desiccated mouth. The aging mattress sags between the slats, and the coarse bulges press against her back as she squirms inwards. She feels, by the time she reaches the stone wall at the far end, as if she has been swallowed.

  She is hampered still by her injury. She must crawl into position under the bed using only one of her elbows, keeping her right arm clear of the floor. Twice, she has slipped while twisting to face the wall, trapping her splinted forearm under her torso. She did no serious harm, she thinks, to the healing bone, but even the smallest flaring of the old pain is enough to fill her with dread.

  She is careful not to rush, taking four or five minutes to work herself into place by the wall. She is wary, too, of spending too long in the act of writing itself. While she is under the bed, she has no way of marking the passage of time. Instead, she sets a limit on the number of letters she allows herself to complete. The tiepin was not made for such rough work, and the whitewash makes a poor and flaking surface. Even the simplest shapes can occupy her for long and agonising seconds.