More disbelief . . . “An’ they put them back up again as well, a few years later, trying to placate the ones who had cursed them. It did’nah work. Leave your pack and guitar here for the moment—there’s no one here to bother them. Come on, climb with me, and . . . well, please try to feel this place.”
She took his hand again when he shed the pack and gig bag. She led them through a small gate in the drystone fence and out to the field with the mound and stones. She felt Colin shiver involuntarily as they passed between two of the stones and started up the slope toward the summit of the mound, and she allowed herself a small smile at the realization. Yeh see, Niall; he feels it. He does . . . Underneath their feet, the high grass was dotted with red clover, dog violets, and St. John’s Wort. The hawthorn tree was storm-battered and weary; it leaned heavily to the east, as if the sea winds had forced it that way over the centuries of its life, but the life within it was tenacious, unrelenting, and strong. The feel of the tree’s stubborn energy surrounded the mound, as solid as the ring of stones.
The climb up the mound wasn’t strenuous: the mound was less than a hundred feet high and the slope was gentle. Still, when they stood at the top under the spread of the low hawthorn canopy, they could see the open sea thrashing against the rocks of the shore a few hundred yards from the encircling stones on that side down a steep cliff, and they were high enough that the roofs of the village and the small harbor were visible—in their walk, they’d already nearly circled the island back to the village. “Look here, will yeh,” Maeve said. She touched the trunk of the hawthorn near where they stood. A rusty axhead stuck there, bark growing black around it as if to seal up the wound, the handle rotted away but for a few lingering fragments.
She saw Colin’s eyes widen as he realized what it was. He ran his fingers along the edge, the rust staining his fingertips. She could nearly hear his thoughts. “Someone took a chop at the tree. That’s certain,” he said.
“But?” she prodded.
“But that doesn’t prove anything except that someone once took a swing at the tree. The rest of the story . . .” She heard his breath shudder with a deep inhale. He looked at the tree and the blade, not at her. “Maeve, I was raised Catholic, but I don’t practice that faith anymore—which, believe me, has caused me no end of trouble with my family. I stopped believing in gods, religions, and mythologies all the way back in high school.” Now he looked at her, and she wasn’t sure what she saw in his face. “I stopped believing in fairy tales long before that,” he added.
“I’m not asking yeh to have faith in yer Holy Trinity again, Colin. I’m actually not asking yeh to believe in anything unless yeh want to. I’ll let yeh make up yer own mind when it comes to it. I promise.”
“Make up my own mind about what?”
She only smiled at that. “Yer daiddeó, your grandfather, did yeh learn nothing from him about belief?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he answered, but she saw his hand touch his sweater as he spoke, and she saw the outline of something underneath the wool. She felt it then: with his touch, the cloch’s energy flared up, so strong that she nearly gasped with it. She wanted nothing more than to snatch it from him, to hold it again herself, to use it to open up a window into that other world, the Talamh an Ghlas, where she could have once gone herself.
But she could not. For this to work, he must use the cloch on his own. Freely. As his daiddeó might have, had he not fled from me. So instead, she smiled at him, and touched the arm of that hand so she could feel the tingling of the power through him. She leaned against him.
“’Tis cold here,” she said, “and warmer in my house.”
Maeve’s house was nearest to the mound of any in the village—a four-room, thatch-roofed cottage with freshly whitewashed stone walls. She led him there as the sun was easing down below the Atlantic horizon. Keara was inside, setting food on a dining table in the front room. Colin seemed startled to see her, and even more puzzled when Keara gave a curtsy to Maeve as she entered. Maeve stopped her and brought her up again with a slight shake of her head as Colin stared. Maeve glanced over the table as Colin set down his backpack and guitar, leaning them against the wall near the door.
“This all looks lovely, Keara,” Maeve said. “Thank you so much.”
“’Tis my pleasure,” Keara answered, and Maeve was pleased that Keara remembered not to use her title. “Would yeh like me to serve?”
“No, but thanks. We’ll be fine. G’wan back to the village; we’ll join yeh later at the tavern. I’m sure Colin will be interested in the music and hearing yeh play.”
“I’ll let the others know,” Keara answered. She started to curtsy again, then stopped herself, glanced at Colin with a hint of a knowing smile. “I’ll be leaving, then. Enjoy the evening, both of yeh. I’ll just get my things from the kitchen and let meself out.” Keara went into the kitchen. Maeve could hear the quick clatter of metal and the rustling of cloth, and a moment later a door opened and closed at the back of the cottage. Maeve saw Colin watching Keara from the small window at the front of the house, as she strode toward the lane leading into the village, a basket under her arm and her cloak billowing in the wind.
“Yeh’ll be making me jealous, staring at Keara like that,” Maeve said to Colin’s back, amused. He turned. “Though she is very attractive,” she added. “But already spoken for.”
“No, it wasn’t that,” Colin said, hurriedly. He turned back to Maeve, habitually pushing his glasses back up his nose. She smiled at the unthinking gesture, so much a part of him. “You’re much more . . .” he started to say, then the words trailed off. She could see his face flushing even in the dimness of the cottage. “How is it that you have someone fixing dinner for us and offering to serve? I thought Keara was going to call you ‘m’Lady’ or something at one point.”
So he could hear it without it being said. “I asked her if she’d mind doing it, ’tis all. Wouldn’t yer sister Jennifer do the same for yeh?” As Maeve spoke, she went to the desk against one wall and plucked a wax taper from a glass, lighting the wick from the kerosene lantern there. She cupped the flame in one hand as she went to the table and lit the candles Keara had set on the tablecloth. Colin watched her, and she knew he had noticed that there was no electricity in the cottage at all.
“Jen might do that,” he admitted, “but you can bet I’d hear about it—and there wouldn’t be any curtsying and I can flat-out guarantee she wouldn’t be offering to wait on us at our table. So is Keara your sister?”
Maeve blew out the taper and gently shook her head as the wisps of smoke curled away. “We’re very close, but she’s nah my sister.” She didn’t elucidate any further, only gestured toward the table. “Let’s talk while we’re eating. I’d hate to have Keara’s hard work going cold.” She sat at the table herself, watching as Colin took the seat across from her. She passed him plates. Keara had outdone herself: the bread was fresh-baked and hot, and the potatoes were soft and steamed with white clouds when opened. The fresh-churned butter melted into a golden puddle on the potatoes. The lamb was done to a medium-rare perfection with the juices still slightly bloody, and the meat seemed to simply dissolve on the tongue. The red wine was dry and deliciously tart, leaving the palate with a splash of undertones.
“This is fantastic,” Colin managed around bites; she watched him stab another slice of the lamb with his fork. “I haven’t had a meal like this in . . . well, a long time. If the Coffeys had eaten this way on Inishcorr, they’d still—” He seemed to realize what he was saying, and stopped abruptly. “—be here,” he finished lamely. Maeve laughed.
“The Coffeys could have had suppers like this—and likely did at first,” she told him. “The land and the sea provided enough for all for ’em, and would have continued to do so. All they needed was to pay attention to the right things.”
“Like not bother the sidhe under the mound?”
She didn’t answer directly. “Colin, whether yeh believe it or nah, there are places around Ireland where the connection to old beliefs and that almost-forgotten world before Christianity came to Eire is still strong, though those places are fewer and fewer each year. Inishcorr is one of ’em.”
“Is that why you came here? Because you believe this is one of those places?”
“Aye,” she answered simply. “Tell me honest now, did yeh feel nothing while we were standing on the mound under the hawthorn? Nothing a’tall?”
“I . . .” He shook his head, looking toward the window. The sky had grown dark; Maeve knew he could see little in the window but their own reflections, the two of them at the table. “I don’t know how to answer that,” he said finally, turning back to her. “I felt strange there, but after your tale about the Coffey family, that might have just been the power of suggestion.”
“Or it might have been real.”
“Maybe. What about Rathcroghan? Is that one of your ‘places,’ too?”
Rathcroghan . . . The stone remembers, even if he doesn’t. “Why would yeh ask about Rathcroghan?”
Colin shrugged as if it had just been a coincidence, and Maeve nearly laughed at the poor deflection. “Just wondering,” Colin said. “Have you ever been there?”
She nodded. “I have. Some time ago. And yes, it’s another place like Inishcorr, or at least it was. If ’tis now, I do’nah know.”
He seemed to consider that for a long time, his fork scraping the plate. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s real or not. Every once in a while, if I went to church with my parents at Christmas, there’d be this fleeting moment when I’d feel what I used to feel when I was a kid and still believed, like there was some presence there watching, but that moment never lasted more than an instant and I knew it was just the incense and sounds and sights dragging back some ghost of a memory.”
“Is that what it was now?” Maeve asked him, keeping her voice carefully dry and noncommittal. “And at the mound what did yeh think yeh felt?”
“At the mound . . .” He shrugged. “I don’t know what I felt. There was a moment, when we entered the ring of stones . . . But Maeve, you set it all up for me, with that spooky story of yours. You made me all ready to feel something even if there was nothing there but a mound and a tree with an ax in it. Don’t you see?”
“I do’nah, though I thought I did,” she told him. She placed her fork and knife carefully on her plate and took a sip of the wine. “So yeh don’t believe any of those old songs yeh say yeh love so much and yeh sing so well? To yeh, they’re just words spouting nonsense and blather?”
“No,” he said. She could see the confusion on his face. “It’s . . . I love those songs. I like . . .” He looked down. “I like to imagine what it would have been like to live back then, to imagine that you could see mysterious beings in the mists and fogs, that sometimes the ones who died lingered here with the living . . .” As Maeve watched, he bit at his lower lip, glancing at the guitar in its gig bag, leaning against the whitewashed wall near the door.
“What would it take for yeh to believe in something, Colin?” she asked, and that brought his head around again.
“I have to feel it,” he said. “Here.” He tapped his chest where the cloch still lay hidden. “I have to be able to see it and hold it and feel it. It has to be solid and real.”
“Like the pendant yer wearing?”
Behind the lenses of his glasses, she saw him blink. “How . . . ?”
Maeve laughed. “I can see the silver chain around yer neck, and the outline of something under yer sweater. Let me see it.” She watched him pull it out slowly from underneath the sweater and lay it there. She felt the possessive need inside her again, as she had in Rothcroghan. She remember the voices inside the cloch and the instructions they’d given her. She had to resist the impulse to lean across the table and snatch it from his neck. “That’s very nice,” she said instead. “I’ve a necklace with a green crystal very like that.” It’s not time yet. But soon enough, now that I know the cloch is here . . .
“I know. I saw you wearing it the first night at Regan’s. I almost showed this to you then.”
Which is why I wore it. “But yeh di’nah. Yeh di’nah trust me?”
“No, that wasn’t it. It’s just . . . This was my grandfather’s. He brought it over from Ireland when he left.”
“Did he now? Was there a tale with that as well?”
“Yeah, there was, but . . .”
“But ’twas another thing yeh had trouble believing.”
He nodded in silent answer.
Maeve pushed her chair back from the table. She stood and walked over to him. He watched her, not moving. She leaned down, tilting her head so she could kiss him, her lips parting after the first tentative brush of lips, her hand going around his head to draw him closer to her, tasting his breath and the rising urgency with which he kissed her in return, his hands stroking the sides of her body. She took his hand in her own as she drew back from him and placed it gently on her breast.
“I’m solid and real enough,” she said softly. “Will yeh believe in me?”
A few hours later, walking from Maeve’s house into the village, Colin would have sworn that Inishcorr was abandoned once more. It was a pleasant night, but no one was walking out along the single main street. A few of the houses had lanterns throwing yellow light against curtained windows, and peat smoke curled from the chimneys, but otherwise Colin and Maeve had the lane to themselves. Across the street at the harbor, Colin could see the Grainne Ni Mhaille still tied up at the wharf: rising, falling, and rolling with the slow pattern of the waves.
Twinned wedges of lamplight spilled across the uneven stone flags of the square from the pub, just up the cobbled street. The establishment was fragrant with the aromatic smoke of cigarettes and pipes. Colin could smell it before they even opened the door—it seemed that the ban on smoking in public places wasn’t followed here. Through the half-opened windows on either side of the door—Colin assumed they were trying to keep the air inside semi-breathable—he could hear voices in conversation and occasional laughter, along with the dull clink of glasses on wood. Someone was playing a fiddle, noodling with the melody of “Come to the Dance” while a mandolin strummed quiet chords behind.
This, then, was where most of the Oileánach had gathered. Colin shrugged at the strap of his guitar case, feeling his stomach flutter a bit. He pressed his glasses against the top of his nose. Maeve must have sensed his unease; she squeezed his hand once and pushed open the unlocked door with her other hand.
The room went silent, as if a hidden switch had been shut off with the movement of the hinges. Over Maeve’s shoulder, Colin could see dim, shadowed faces staring toward the door. “Maeve!” a female voice called from the smoke-hazed shadows. He thought it might be Keara. “Cen chaoi bhfuil tú?”
“Tá mé togha,” Maeve answered. From the smattering of Gaelic that Colin had managed to pick up, he knew that one: I’m grand. Maeve started to enter the tavern; Colin would have released her hand, but she only gripped his fingers tighter. “No reason to hide anything,” she whispered to him as he ducked his head under the low wooden lintel. “They’re going to know anyway.”
He could feel them watching, could feel their speculation as he and Maeve stood there with hands intertwined, but it lasted only an instant. Heads turned away, conversations started up again, if a shade too heartily. In the back corner on a small stage, the fiddler—Keara, he noted—started up again. Two men rose from the nearest table and moved off to the bar; one of them gesturing to Maeve to take the vacated seats. She inclined her head toward the table. “G’wan with yeh,” she said to Colin. “I’ll get us a couple of pints.” She let go of his hand and headed toward the bar, talking to some of those gathered there. Colin unslung the gig bag from his shoulder and went to the table. Both chair and table
were crude but sturdy, looking as if they’d been hewn from ancient timbers a century or more ago, the marks of an adze still visible along the thick legs; he wondered if perhaps one of the Coffeys had made them.
As he sat, he glanced around the room. The tavern was deceptively deep, and there must have been three dozen or more adults, male and female, gathered here, sitting at tables or on benches along the walls, standing at the bar or in small groups in the corners of the room or gathered near where Keara and two men were playing music. A few children ran among the tables or were sitting on parents’ laps. The conversations flowed around Colin—mostly in Gaelic rather than English, he noted. Though no one addressed him directly, he saw many quick glances toward Maeve or himself, adorned with shrugs or conspiratorial nods toward their companions.
And Niall was there as well. As Colin scanned the room, he found himself making eye contact with the man, who was standing near one of the front windows. Niall pushed himself off the wall and, pint in hand, came over to Colin’s table. The black-brown stout inside the glass shivered as Niall set it down hard on the table. His face looked well-battered and almost certainly sore to the touch, the bruises from the fight at Regan’s turning green and purple. “Havin’ a good visit, are yeh?” Niall asked. His slitted eyes behind the thick swellings appraised Colin; there was no smile on his face.
“It’s been good enough so far,” Colin answered. He forced himself to hold Niall’s unblinking stare.
Niall was leaning on his hands, fisted on the table in front of Colin. “Maeve fancies yeh, and that’s plain,” he said in a low growl of a voice, sounding like he had a horrible cold and couldn’t breathe through his broken nose at all. “’Tis her choice. I don’t care for it and I don’t trust yeh, but I ca’nah go against her. I tell yeh now, though, between us, that if she casts yeh aside, yeh’ll find no sympathy in me. And if yeh hurt her, then it’s more than just me you’ll have to answer to. Do we have an understanding?”
The Crow of Connemara Page 19