‘What honour, you wanton woman?’
He turned her round, and pressed his hot body to hers. ‘They all wanted you,’ he whispered fiercely. ‘How many of them touched you here?’ Hands on her breasts. ‘Or here?’ Hands on her buttocks, the buttocks a fancy gentleman once paid to see.
She arched against him and kissed him back hard, tasting ale on his lips. Her assailant had been drinking, heavily. She made to push him away, her arms suddenly as weak as her knees.
‘No, I want you now,’ he protested, ‘for I have to ride tonight.’
‘Where to?’ She could barely speak through the sweetness, his lips now moving lower.
He mumbled into her bosom. ‘Over the hills and far away.’
‘I have to go back,’ she protested. ‘I must serve the regiment. But,’ she smiled till the dimples came, ‘come to my room after closing time. Then you can have all you desire.’
‘And your husband?’
‘He’ll never know.’
A final kiss. ‘He’s a damned fool to take his eyes off you for an instant.’
Then he straightened. Groaned. ‘Would to God they would all go,’ he said in his normal voice. ‘I would close the bar right now if you’d let me.’
Kit smiled at her husband. ‘Not when they are so free with their shillings. It won’t be long now till closing.’ She laid a hand on his hectic cheek. Richard turned his head, kissed the hand and was gone.
Without him, she was suddenly ashamed of their game. Her cheeks flamed. Little fool to have her head turned by a red coat, like any camp-follower. Like her mother. She did not want a soldier, didn’t want to keen and cry every night wondering where her man was. She wanted Richard – safe, sweet Richard. She forced a smile and followed her husband upstairs.
Then the smile died. A snatch of song floated down the stair, wreathed her ribs and stopped her heart.
Oh, me and my cousin, one Arthur McBride,
As we went a-walkin’ down by the seaside,
Mark now what followed and what did betide …
She had to lean on the wall. She had to listen.
‘Arthur McBride’. It was a Jacobite song, and she had heard it at her father’s knee every night of his leave. She had not heard the song for eleven years, had not known that she even remembered it. But she felt her lips moving as she mouthed every word.
‘Good morning, good morning,’ the Sergeant he cried.
‘And the same to you, gentlemen,’ we did reply,
Intending no harm but meant to pass by,
For it bein’ on Christmas mornin’
‘But,’ says he, ‘My fine fellows, if you will enlist,
Ten guineas in gold I’ll stick to your fist,
And a crown in the bargain for to kick up the dust,
And drink the king’s health in the morning.’
She was ten years old again, watching her father leaving their farm on a frosty Christmas morning, his boots making perfect footprints in the rimed grass. Her father turning once to wave, the sunrise igniting his red hair, her father smiling at her with dimples like her own. She’d followed in his footsteps, as her mother had screamed at her in French to come back, that she’d catch an ague. Unheeding, she’d fitted her little footprints into his huge ones, until he’d outpaced her, and left her behind.
Kit mounted the cellar steps and faced the crowded bar and the song. Every mouth bawled the words of the song from every direction, with drink-fuelled enthusiasm.
For a soldier, he leads a very fine life,
And he always is blessed with a charming young wife,
And he pays all his debts without sorrow or strife,
And he always lives pleasant and charmin’,
And a soldier, he always is decent and clean,
In the finest of clothing he’s constantly seen.
While other poor fellows go dirty and mean,
And sup on thin gruel in the morning.
Kit’s ears were ringing, and she had to lean on the bar. Just as she thought she must fall, the song ended and another began. A faster song, one she knew, but one that did not have the power to chill her blood.
She looked for Richard. Suddenly exhausted, she longed to lie down – it was gone midnight, and some of the soldiers were melting away. Richard could close up, Richard and Aunt Maura. But, just for the moment, she could not see her husband. She went on serving, by rote, and answered the soldiers’ bidding with the ghost of her former smile.
Another hour passed, and the soldiers became increasingly rowdy. One of them shot at a wine barrel, making a neat hole – the wine sprang forth like blood and each redcoat held the great cask above his head in turn, gulping at the scarlet gore. Kit looked round for Richard once more – the regiment had to be curbed, before Kavanagh’s lost all their stock. She crossed the red lake to Aunt Maura at the bar. ‘Make sure you charge them,’ she mouthed, nodding to the wrecked barrel. ‘And where in the world is Richard?’ Maura, pipe in mouth, shrugged.
Kit bit her lip with irritation. Richard liked a drink, and had the gift of mixing easily with their customers, but she could not believe he had gone carousing with the regiment when there was so much work to do. It was another hour before the last redcoat had finally gone; the doors were locked, the shutters were put up and Kit began to collect the tankards to wash. ‘Where can Richard be, Aunt?’ she asked. ‘Drinking with the regiment somewhere,’ she snorted.
Aunt Maura eyed her. ‘He must be drinking from his shoe, then,’ she said, ‘for his tankard is over there.’
Kit walked across the bar, her feet crunching on crusts and broken glass, to where Richard’s tankard stood. The tankard shared its time between a hook behind the bar and her husband’s right hand. She did not think she had ever seen it set down. She picked it up. It was empty. No; not empty.
She tipped the thing upside down and something fell into her hand.
Something round and heavy.
For the second time in her life Kit Kavanagh turned over a single coin in her palm, a coin which would change her life. But this time the imprimatur was a queen’s head, not a king’s, and the coin was silver, not gold.
The Queen’s Shilling.
Suddenly she was sitting on the floor, amid the detritus, without knowing how she got there. Numbly she looked about her, and all she could think about in that moment was what a mess the regiment had left, and that now she would have to clean it up on her own. How could Richard leave her to clear up by herself? Such a mess! Crusts, buckles, scuffed playing cards, the blood-red puddle of wine, nutshells, papers, broken glass, even a horsewhip. Yes, the regiment had left a high old mess.
But it had taken her husband.
Chapter 2
As for their old rusty rapiers that hung by their sides …
‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)
‘Kit.’ Her father stooped near, his red hair and hers entangled, the threads close. He put something into her hand, a heavy something, wrapped in canvas. She opened the cloth. ‘A paring knife,’ he said, ‘so you can help your mother in the kitchen when I’m gone.’ Little Kit looked at the knife unenthusiastically. The thing was small, with a wooden handle. The curved blade looked sharp enough but it was not the blade that she craved. Her father’s sword, that he hung high out of reach when he was not campaigning, was the stuff of legend to her; it held, in those three feet of tempered steel, the song of all the tales he told her at night-time. Gathering her interest, her father had taken her to the meadow and taught her swordplay, month by month and year on year. He taught her with a hazel switch, and the hazel switch grew as she did, but she was never allowed to touch his sword. Then the hazel switch became a stave, so that she could know the weight of a blade, but still she never held his sword in her hand. Her mother had sneered at her, jealous of their time in the meadow, asking what use swordplay was to a maid, telling Kit she was second best to a son.
And now, now her father was called to battle, he would go and the sword would go, and she
would be left with her mother and a paring knife. Vegetables and fruits would now be her adversaries. ‘Learn to wield that knife,’ spat her mother, ‘and you’ll actually be of use to me while Sean is gone.’ She never called him ‘your father’ to Kit, as if she could not bear to share ownership.
It had been the day before her father had gone that he had held her white hand in his freckled brown one. ‘Now be brave,’ he said, ‘I’m going to make you and the knife friends.’ And he drew the blade across her palm; gently, but the flesh parted one iota, the breadth of a red hair. He kissed the cut. ‘No need to fear it now,’ he said. ‘For a blade that cuts you once can never hurt you again.’
Kit sat suddenly upright in her bed at Kavanagh’s. Her hand throbbed from the dream-cut. Her father was gone, Richard was gone and the dark was silent.
Kit was alone, and awake, as she had been alone and awake at night for the three months since Richard had been taken.
Maura had sent a fast rider to follow the regiment to Dublin, but of Richard there was no trace. When Kit glanced across the bar expecting to see him, or across the pew in church, or across the coverlet, acres and acres of space seemed to yawn where he had been. Kit, groping through the black bereavement for some sort of sense and logic, felt that it was all, somehow, unfair; that she had been cheated. For he was only a man. How could a man, a man of middle height and weight, take up so much space, leave such a hole? She saw in her mind’s eye the barrel of claret which had been shot by the redcoat on the night Richard was taken – the wine spilling forth, the red lake on the floor. She became obsessed with the image. The smallest breach of a castle wall could let the enemy in; a single cannon shot in the midships could sink the greatest galleon. And even a small bullet hole could empty a barrel.
Worst of all, her grief had a racking familiarity – the hole Richard left, so vast and cosmic, so small and domestic, was the same shape as the hole left by her father. Her body remembered this pain – she woke with the same sick, churning stomach, and lived her days with a constant, dull ache of unhappiness caged behind her ribs. Her mouth was dry and tasted metal, as it did when she held her hairpins in her mouth. Eating became a functional necessity, not a pleasure, for food was dust in her dry mouth. Her clothes ceased to fit. Her hair fell dark and lank. She felt herself emptying, that leeching, bleeding loss she had felt as a child. Sometimes her father’s fate and Richard’s became so muddled and entwined that she forgot that Richard was alive. It hardly seemed to matter; he was gone.
Aunt Maura tried to comfort her – she had sent letters to the magistrate, to the mayor, even to Kit’s second cousin, Padraic Kavanagh, who had gone for a soldier. Kit would hear word soon. Richard would get leave eventually and return from wherever he was with a healthy commission. But Kit could not be comforted. She wandered around the gravestones of Glasnevin, reading the names on the headstones. The words beloved husband etched themselves into her mind as firmly as into the stone. She would stand for long moments, glassy eyed, before the tombs where husband and wife were buried together, envying them their eternal, night-black embrace under the earth. She would calculate how long they had been married, those brides of bone; then count the days she had been married to Richard. Then she counted the days he had been gone; marking them neatly with a stub of pencil on a piece of paper, as a prisoner might mark the walls that held him. Dreading, living through, then passing day thirty; the day which marked a dreadful milestone. Day thirty, the day when he’d been gone as long as they’d been wed. She kept the dreadful little tally of pencil marks folded in her bodice, where her sadness lived.
Day thirty-one without Richard. Day thirty-two without Richard. She had to remind herself constantly that he wasn’t, as far as she knew, dead. Now he was gone she was sure that Richard was all she had wanted, that moment of doubt forgotten. Now she was left with the old folks and the regulars she realised how much she loved him and missed him. She would replay their first kiss, their first coupling, their every minute interaction. Even the time when he’d smiled at her, that last day, and she’d been too slow to smile back until he’d turned away. And this brought it home to her. The guilt. For of course, it was her fault Richard had been taken. That one, idle moment at the bar, when she had wished for more and missed his smile. That instant when she’d imagined Richard in a red coat, when she’d acted that sick little scene with him in the cellar, had she cursed him then and doomed him to the pressing? If she’d taken Richard upstairs to bed after they’d kissed in the beer cellar, if they’d left Aunt Maura to close up, he would not have been pressed. But the lure of those silvery shillings, those tinkling tempting coins, had been too much. And one, just one of those shillings they’d so greedily craved, had been his undoing.
Sometimes she was angry with Richard himself – could he not escape? But she knew too well from her father’s tales that to escape from the army was to be flogged to within an inch of your life, or shot for a deserter. But surely he could write? Maura had refused to have a dolt in her house, so had taught the young Richard his letters as she’d taught Kit – so Kit interrogated the poor post rider each day of that first month, before he’d even dismounted his lathered, dancing horse, for letters from her husband – but every time the answer was the same: no word. The mayor could not aid them, nor the magistrate, and the missive to Padraic Kavanagh simply came back marked ‘Gone Away’.
Gone Away. Like Richard. Of course, it occurred to her that she could go after him. That she could plant her footsteps in his, just as she’d once planted her childish footsteps in her father’s in that frostbitten field. Her father was dead but Richard was alive; somewhere and alive. And she was no longer a child, to wait by her hearth for a soldier to come home. But she could not leave Maura – Aunt Maura who had given her a home, a profession, a husband.
Kit realised now how little she knew of her aunt. Oh, she had heard snippets of tales from the bottle washers; Maura Kavanagh had killed a feral dog in the alleyway with a single blow of a blackthorn shillelagh. She had brained an ancient suitor with a bottle. She had chased a debt collector from Kavanagh’s door, shouting after him like a fishwife that she owed ‘no such sum’. ‘No such sum! No such sum!’ chanted the pot washers, full of admiration and fear. Kit did not know whether the stories were true, or when in a long life they had happened. Maura was free with other people’s stories but she kept the silvery onion skins of her own histories tucked inside her, one within the other, secret and safe. And she would certainly never share the severity of her condition with Kit. ‘We’re all dying,’ was all she would say. Kit was Maura’s heir and queen of Kavanagh’s and must rule it even if she ruled alone, like Queen Bess. Lonely, powerful Queen Bess.
Now Kit listened carefully to travellers’ tales of the army. There was trouble between Spain and France – she remembered it had been the Spanish king who had died – but such distant conflicts could have nothing to do with Richard. When she closed her eyes she saw him bleeding, dying, on some battlefield, mouthing her name. But in her brief dreams he was always on Aughrim field, bleeding into the grass which once had swallowed her father’s blood. And that is why she no longer slept, in the bed which had been hers at fifteen, and theirs at twenty, and now hers again. Hers alone.
She must have cried out in her dream, for the chamber door opened and someone was in the room. A bulky black shadow on the wall, a bite out of the candlelight. Kit could not see; the tears had sprung to her eyes.
A weight on the bed, on the cambric coverlet. Kit blinked and the tears fell on the weave. Aunt Maura placed her hand on the coverlet, twig-thin bones wrapped in papery skin and tethered with blue veins. Kit covered the hand with hers, and found a smile from somewhere. ‘Are you come to tell me a story?’
When she’d just moved to Kavanagh’s Maura had told her stories at night; no book in hand, timeless stories that lived in her memory. Kit had been too old for stories, but she’d had no one to tell her one since Da had gone, and had found comfort in the ritual, as did her chi
ldless aunt. The candling shadows had been peopled with wicked stepmothers, benign faeries and obliging giants. In that deep darkness that lived in the corners of rooms and the nooks of beams, Kit found capital letters that looked like animals, animals that looked like capital letters, boars, elves, imps, sacred hinds, many-headed serpents and nameless creatures that dwelt under bridges. And queens, of course, there was always a long-haired queen. These queens would employ their useful hair for multiple purposes. They would use it to tether a dragon, climb down it like rope, or cast it on a sea loch to net wish-giving fishes.
‘Yes,’ said Aunt Maura. ‘I’m here to tell you a tale.’ She smoothed back Kit’s hair with those frail hands.
‘Is it about a queen?’ asked Kit, playing the game. If she had been too old for stories when she’d come to Kavanagh’s, she was certainly too old for them now.
‘Just an ordinary girl,’ said Aunt Maura. ‘No: not ordinary. She is an extraordinary girl, who doesn’t know it yet.’ She sighed and settled, wincing and moving her bony elbow away from the tender breast. ‘This girl married her man. They were as happy as a queen and a king. But the man was taken for the army. And the girl started to die.’ Kit stilled, her breathing suddenly shallow. ‘Her aunt saw it,’ the peat-soft voice went on, ‘because her aunt knew how dying felt.’ Kit clasped the old hand, but the bones pulled away and scrabbled in a nightgown pocket. ‘One night, the girl got up from her bed, because she wasn’t sleeping much anyway. She cut her hair and put on her husband’s clothes. Then she went to Dublin harbour to find the sign of the Golden Last, there to enquire after an ensign by the name of Herbert Laurence.’ A scrap of paper, with a direction upon it, was pushed into her palm. The bony fingers were now under her chin, and she met Aunt Maura’s currant eyes in the candlelight. ‘I was wrong about Richard. He did something I didn’t expect. But Mary and Joseph, Kit, you don’t have to wait to be rescued. Go and rescue him.’
Kit Page 2