The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

by Michelle Lovric

  I began to raise my trembling, ineffectual fist. He took hold of my arm. ‘Look at this little nub of an elbow out at the sleeve! Shall we retire now to that copse over there?’ he said thickly. ‘And I shall lie down in that pleasant soft grass and you will hang this hair like a tent all over me. And I can put some manners on its great wildness with my brush.’

  He wound his other hand around my hair and used it to drag me towards the trees.

  My scalp afire with hurting, I whimpered, and flung my eyes around. The rat-grey back of Harristown House hunched in the distance, its blank windows indifferent to me. The lane was deserted in both directions, with nothing but eddies of the dust rising that we in County Kildare deem ‘fairy-blast’. It was, for a rarity, not raining, though the slow crows hung like widows’ laundry on every still-sodden branch. The light was dimming and the lowering sky took on a magical, churning quality, half of silvery gnats and half of my own giddy terror, by which the clumps of moss that beetled the parapet now seemed to commence to crawl and swarm. Below me to the right, the limpid Liffey flowed into the seven maws of the bridge, which mashed its composure into foaming ruin on the other side.

  No more could I hold back that man’s desires than the river could resist that bridge. He was back at my parting, sniffing like a dog and moaning like a sick person asleep. His arms snaked round to press me against his thighs, where something thrummed against my unwilling chest as if he swished a fox’s tail before the fatal lunge.

  ‘I’m going to have you now,’ he told me.

  Chapter 6

  That troll gentleman and I were halfway into a bush when a horse’s clop struck the road from Brannockstown way. A scorch of a swear roared out of the man. I shook his teeth off my hair, rolled my whole weight upon the elbow whose fist was far up my skirt and sprang to my feet. I stamped hard on the hand that tried to claw at my ankle and kicked the ivory hairbrush deep into the bushes. Then I ran up the path towards home, a madness of tears puddling down my face. Apart from my own breath and pelting feet, everything was suddenly so quiet you could hear the milky grass stems parting the earth and the slow crows crunching the snails’ shells for their flesh. It was too much quietness; it forced into my head an idea for evading trollish attentions for evermore.

  ‘You’re that late coming home with yourself, and looking like something pulled through a hedge backwards,’ growled Darcy when I erupted through the cottage door. ‘Mooning over the book stack, was it, Manticory? Your potato’s gone cold waiting for you—’

  ‘But I saved it for you,’ Annora assured me. ‘It’s still got God’s goodness in it.’

  Averting my wet face, I lunged straight at the press drawer where Annora kept her mending scissors. I was out of the door in a moment, with Darcy complaining, ‘And now what is ailing the creature?’

  Behind the woodshed, I held the iron beak open over my unravelled plait, still slick at the ends with the wetness of the troll gentleman’s mouth.

  Poison to kill, I thought, those slavers of his on my hair. No amount of washing will see them off.

  In my shaking hands the scissors chattered in the manner of a cat who sees a bird. I rehearsed in my mind the sound of the metal shearing through my hair. I let the beak close an inch, and a single curl whispered to the ground. Then Berenice came bustling round the corner and stopped dead to see me there like that. She screamed.

  Berenice could not scare it out of me, the reason for my flirting with the scissors, for I knew there was shame in what had nearly happened by Harristown Bridge and feared the most of it being pinned upon myself. I feared blame and a beating. Berenice ran for Darcy. Then I had the cruelty of her hands on my hair until my sight crumbled at the edges. Only when she placed her knee upon my neck did I mutter an incoherent confession that included my vision of the troll swishing a fox’s tail and the moss seeming to crawl across Harristown Bridge in the giddy twilight. Still Darcy’s hands did not leave the hurting heat around my scalp. Faintly I heard her laughing, ‘Not a troll but a foxy rich gentleman then!’

  Soon she was berating me. ‘What have you got the feet for? Sure you could outrun an old man in breeches, and you with divided drawers and skinny legs like a chicken, you miserable bliggard. What is it you are? Now tell me what he looked like, exactly.’

  She left me sobbing by the privy midden. As she walked off, she made a swishing motion with her right hand behind her. ‘Like this, was it, the old fox’s tail?’

  I sobbed harder.

  She turned and swished her left hand in front of her thighs this time. ‘Or was it like this instead? Don’t you know the difference between the front and back of a male creature yet, and you brought up in Harristown, you tralloping great cretin!’

  She laughed again and went on her way, waving a threatening finger over her shoulder at me. ‘Don’t tell anyone else, do you hear? It’ll be the worse for you if you do.’

  I rolled myself into a jointy ball and wept until I fell into a recurring dream in which the parapets of Harristown Bridge rolled open to devour me in a hungry leer. My dream feet kept approaching, for I had nowhere else to go, and each time I was swallowed up and crushed by its stones.

  It was fully dark when I was awoken by a rustling near my head. A hand reached out of the long grass and offered me the corner of a smock on which to blow my nose.

  The Eileen O’Reilly, the butcher’s runt, squatted down beside me, so close that I smelled the manure of frightened beasts on her shoes.

  ‘What is it, Manticory Swiney? Is ye took sick on yourself, is it?’

  I nodded, whimpering, ‘But shouldn’t you be at home, and the moon high up now?’

  ‘Sure they’re that busy they never miss me so. Or scuttered with the gin so it’s better to be out of sight.’ Her voice caught on the last words. I gave back the damp handful of smock and she blew her own nose on the other corner. We sat together in the companionable misery of silence punctuated by little tearing sobs.

  ‘Is that a book in your pinny?’ she asked me presently.

  ‘It is,’ I said, showing her my tattered little volume of stories.

  ‘I wish I could fill a page like ye do, Manticory Swiney,’ she said. ‘And read. But the words do swim in front of my eyes like tadpoles themselves.’

  Popular among the pupils for her crubeens alone, the butcher’s runt was generally in disgrace with my beloved Miss Finaughty. She was still at school, despite the nineteen years on her. They were masked by her slightness and the fact that she had failed to master her letters beyond a young child’s clumsy runes. The Eileen O’Reilly was a proud one, though. There was no other girl who could approach her in that respect. So she pretended that she had her letters: she pretended bravely, evidently having a good ear and a memory to match. But I had noticed how, when called to the blackboard, she always struggled to place her ‘t’s and ‘h’s in appropriate conjunction; her ‘p’s were back to front and her ‘h’s sometimes somersaulted upside down.

  ‘I’ll teach you to read,’ I offered. ‘There’s a great pleasure in the thing once you stop suffering over it.’

  ‘See the big words trippin’ out of your mouth, even in the state ye are in,’ she marvelled. ‘Big but worth the money.’

  The Eileen O’Reilly commenced to cry again. ‘Would you really be so kind, and me always raggin’ on your sister Darcy?’

  I murmured, ‘It is the greatest comfort to me that you do. Consider it by way of thanks to me.’

  Darcy’s voice boomed out of the dark, ‘Well isn’t this so very cosy? And is it the runt having herself a little old snivel? Perhaps she’d like something to snivel about?’

  ‘Bad manners to ye, Darcy Swiney. Ye are a baste of a girl for wanting to be fought wid—’

  I felt the blow to the Eileen O’Reilly’s ear as if I had taken it myself. She stumbled off into the darkness of the lane, howling, ‘I’ll call the consthables on ye, Darcy Swiney. And up that arse on ye with a crooked stick besides.’

  Darcy harrumphed a
nd pummelled me to my feet. I watched her face anxiously for any sign that she had overheard the part of my conversation with the Eileen O’Reilly in which I promised to teach the girl to read. But Darcy was muttering cheerfully again about the foxy gentleman on the bridge. Then she stopped short and glared into my face.

  ‘Were you telling the butcher’s runt about him at all?’ she demanded. ‘Is that what you were moaning and weeping about?’

  With the full force of truth, I answered, ‘No, I would not tell her any more than I would tell . . . the seaweed boy.’

  Satisfied, Darcy hauled me inside the cottage, where Enda folded me in her arms. ‘Manticory, I was that worried! Hours, you’ve been out there. Come here, sweetheart, you’re wet as dew! For why do you look so sorry?’

  Annora poured me a thimbleful of buttermilk and kissed the top of my head while I drank it. She wiped the tears off my face with a clean rag.

  Then, and every stretched minute afterwards, I longed for the solid comfort of confessing everything to Enda and it was sorely lonesome to keep a secret from her. I longed for Annora to take my part and bring down God’s wrath on the troll. But I was too afraid to disobey Darcy’s injunction of silence, especially because I could not fathom her delight in the situation or her calculating look every time she laid eyes on me for the rest of the week.

  Nor could I meet Miss Finaughty’s eye the next day or rejoice in the volume of Thackeray she pressed into my hand.

  ‘Are you sickening for something?’ she asked.

  The Eileen O’Reilly was not at school. I worried that Darcy had deafened her for life with that blow or put some great hurt across her brain.

  I managed to keep the secret of the man on the bridge until Sunday. By then I had decided that not even Darcy would have me withhold him from God. I calculated finely, finding I was slightly less afraid of Darcy than of a long slow roast in Purgatory. For my confession, I struggled to assess whether my part in the incident constituted a venial, grave or mortal sin, so I listed it as an evil that was a tint worse than a sharp word to Ida, somewhere between grave and mortal.

  When I mumbled my little rigmarole about how I had disobliged a fine gentleman on Harristown Bridge, Father Maglinn tugged hard at the single hair I’d fed as usual through the grate for him to hold.

  ‘So you tempted a man away to a copse?’ He began to ply a welter of questions as to the disposition of various bodily parts, the man’s and my own. I could not force myself to revisit the scene in such detail; I cried silently.

  ‘But is it a good girl you still are yourself ?’ Father Maglinn demanded squeakily.

  Was I still a good girl myself ? I assured him in sobs that I was, but the fact was that his very query had just possessed me with the opposite of goodness. I was suddenly seething with black anger from my scalp to my bony behind numbing on the wooden bench.

  For should not the priest have asked, ‘Were you grossly imposed on, poor child? Where is the divil that did it? You shall be comforted and the evil done unto you shall be dealt with!’

  I was reminded of my confession by a rasp at the grate. Father Maglinn was huffing like bellows.

  ‘Is there any other sin you’d like to be telling me about?’ he asked greedily.

  I blurted, ‘I think Darcy did away with our father and buried him in the clover field.’

  ‘What’s that you’re blethering? Phelan Swiney dead?’ asked the priest. ‘Your mind is running away with you, child, tugged along by that heathen-coloured hair on you. ’Tis round the village that you’ve your nose in some book every second minute. The stories are breeding in you like worms, child. Don’t be trying to load your sins on your poor sister Darcy. She’s very frightful in herself, that girl, I’ll give you, but your wanton slander is the worse evil. Ten Hail Marys just for that alone. And for the rest . . .’

  He laid a clatter of penances on me.

  I did not say them. I had some other words for God and his henchman Maglinn. God had sent the English and the Famine down on Ireland. He had allowed Darcy to be the way she was. And as God saw all, so He had seen the troll on Harristown Bridge. Had He sent down a fork of lightning to spear that man through his dark heart? No, He had countenanced the evil quite tranquilly. Bad luck to Him! I shouted my thoughts out loud to the hedgerows on the way home, half expecting them to wither at the root. They did not, just to prove my point.

  I brooded a week on His failings, until Darcy beat the back of my legs with a rake, ‘To put the smile back on you, which would be a small improvement on that sad puss you’re wearing.’

  Annora dosed me with something swarthy in a bottle from the Kilcullen dispensary. When Miss Finaughty asked me what was ailing me, I simply shook my head.

  ‘And where is the Eileen O’Reilly?’ she asked my assembled schoolfellows. ‘Does anybody know?’

  Two dozen faces answered her with hungry silence.

  Mass, the following Sunday, merely confirmed me on my Godless path, for I received the additional revelation that half the men in the chapel, while watching the Swiney girls at song, were doing the same thing with their eyes as the gentleman had done on the bridge. I even saw some fingers coiling and uncoiling in their laps as they mimicked my Harristown Bridge gentleman’s unravelling of my hair. I imagined foxtails swishing behind them in their pews. There would never be any getting away from them. The men would be doing the same at St Joseph’s Chapel over in Yellow Bog and at the Sacred Heart in Kilcullen. The whole of County Kildare, no – Ireland – was full to the brim of men who loved to prey on girls’ hair, the brutal-looking foxy devils! I clamped my teeth down on the communion wafer and crunched God’s Body in angry bites.

  Was it only the Catholics? The third Sunday after the troll, on the way to chapel, I told my sisters I was cramping in the belly. Darcy eyed me sharply. I felt her black gaze on my back as I hobbled away, theatrically resting against the sodden trunks of trees from time to time until I believed myself safe from scrutiny.

  Instead of returning home, I ran down the back paths to Carnalway where the Anglicans kept their so-called Church of Ireland establishment. Annora would have wanted me exorcised merely for standing in its graceful shadow. I hid behind the La Touche family crypt by the graveyard and crept into the outer vestibule only after the service had started so that I might observe proceedings while the congregation had its back to me. I peered up at the polished wooden barrel of a roof and read the words Holy, Holy, Holy picked out in Gothic gold script over blue in an arch above the altar. Annora’s frail influence proved stronger than I’d thought it could be for I began to shake. The heretics chanted their unholy songs and I felt myself close to fainting. A shaft of sunlight gilded the clean heads of the men in the last row, the one closest to me. I emitted a quiet sob and one of those heads turned to me. It was the man from Harristown Bridge, holding his hymn book in the hand he’d laid on me.

  At the same moment, Darcy’s hand clapped the back of my neck.

  ‘That’s him, is it?’ she hissed in my ear. ‘Your foxy old troll?’

  She rubbed her third finger against her thumb. Then she pointed to me, struggling in the custody of her other hand. She pressed her finger to her lips.

  He nodded, bloodlessly.

  Darcy grinned like a snake and dragged me outside. When the service was over, the man emerged quickly, ahead of the congregation.

  Darcy impaled him on the trajectory of her stare. He writhed a bit and then his morale settled down to die. Behind the La Touche crypt, with me crumpled at her feet, he counted the coins into Darcy’s hands until she unfixed her eyes from him.

  When my sisters came tramping home from chapel, I was sitting on the bob-seat by the fire, stirring seaweed soup in the three-legged pot on the backstone, and reading a Bible verse to Annora. The tears had stiffened on my cheeks and my chest had ceased its heaving. Darcy was out in the yard, patting down the soil under which she had just buried her bounty.

  She’s a good one for burying things, I noted sourly. />
  Chapter 7

  How much Grey Manchester, White Richmond, White Duchess and Drab Sateen lacing passed through Annora’s wet hands in those thin years? She was nearly transparent with the taken-in washing and with the wringing of her hands over the state of her purse.

  Like many Catholic girls, Darcy and the twins were earning now, crocheting Thornton lace panels and boudoir slippers, seated around a single candle with three bottles placed in front of it to magnify the light. But they had come into the business too late. The rival lace-makers of Clones were in the ascendant. And the thin geese were overly fascinated by the lace-making. Every so often, one of them caused a great commotion by flying up to the window and launching itself through a lace flounce in its frame, ruining the work of three days. Poor tousled Ida was kept home from school to chase the geese away. School was not doing for her what it should, anyway, on account of what Annora called her ‘airy fits’.

  Evenings, I myself was put to work writing missives for the many Harristown folk who did not have their letters. Joe the seaweed boy brought me commissions from his own village on the coast to supplement my earnings. Unbeknownst to Darcy, I did Joe free favours for his mother. His brother was a Fenian who’d run off to America on her. Joe’s mother relied on me to read his letters to her boy, who memorised them and repeated them all the slow way home. The journey took Joe an age because his horse had been bled too many times in the Hunger and walked like the corpse it nearly was.

  The united labours of the Swiney sisters did not provide enough to feed us. And all the while we were trying to grow, and our prodigious hair wound like a voracious parasite around our heads, seeming to consume all our small helpings of food before it reached our stomachs.

  ‘The Lord will open a gap for us soon,’ Annora promised, and she offered up novenas for the rich ladies of Dublin to prosper in their love of lace and for a long-distance romance to bloom between an illiterate Harristown labourer and a girl away in Dublin to keep me in love letters.