The Dolocher

by Caroline Barry

  ‘On New Row, somewhere near there.’ Solomon swallowed. ‘He came out of a wall. I don’t know. It was so sudden. One minute there was darkness, then a faint light and a black pig’s head . . .’

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

  ‘Do you mean am I sane?’ Solomon whispered.

  ‘Are you sure you saw it?’ Her eyes glittered as her expression clouded.

  ‘Certain.’

  Merriment didn’t contradict him. She didn’t smile or rebuff or belittle. Instead she gazed at him, watching every muscle, every infinitesimal twitch his face made, looking for signs of mania or deception.

  He was not lying.

  The bell over the shop door chimed, puncturing the thick silence.

  Solomon glanced behind him and sighed, feeling rushed.

  ‘I have to go, bring Maggie . . .’ He faltered. ‘I could be away two days. I have to pack. See her interred. I’m working on Skinner’s Row, well, you have the note.’

  ‘Hello,’ someone called from the shop, even though Corker had told the woman that Merriment would be out shortly.

  ‘Just a moment,’ Merriment shouted. ‘All right.’ She looked at Solomon. ‘Two days.’ She was surprised that her heart felt sore at the prospect.

  ‘Merriment . . .’ Solomon paused, unable to take his eyes off her. ‘Don’t go out after dark.’

  Merriment shook her head.

  ‘I have a pistol.’

  ‘Listen to me.’ Solomon strode forward and grabbed her wrist. Up close she smelled of rose and her skin was silky soft. ‘A pistol won’t protect you. I mean it.’

  Merriment swallowed.

  ‘You look exhausted, Solomon. Did you sleep last night?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  Solomon wanted to step closer still, wanted to tell her – a woman he hardly knew – that she had spun a web. She had enchanted him, that she was the reason he wanted to stay in Dublin, that something about her stopped him spinning. He could feel his fingers loosening, his fingertips gliding a fraction, wanting to stroke the length of her arms. Merriment noticed the alteration in his touch and blushed. Convinced she was imagining things, she turned quickly and retreated to the fireplace, unsure of why Solomon’s insistence that she stay safe and secure should thrill her so much.

  ‘If I do have to go out,’ she told him, remembering that Peggy Leeson was waiting on a delivery, ‘I will stick to the main thoroughfares, stay under light, make sure I am not alone.’

  ‘Don’t go anywhere,’ Solomon blurted. ‘Just stay inside after dark. I’ll be back in two days.’ He squeezed his forehead. ‘I know you think it is improbable but I swear to you I saw it. The Dolocher is real and dangerous and I don’t want you taking chances.’

  He looked so pale and worried that Merriment nodded.

  ‘I won’t,’ she said reassuringly.

  ‘Good.’

  Solomon hurried out of the room and upstairs to pack. Merriment slipped the fingers of her left hand around her right wrist. Her skin was warm and tingling with the faintest sensation where Solomon’s grip had left a light impression. She frowned at the news he had just given her, convinced by his words and how he looked that what he said was true. The walls of her reason crumbled under the weight of eyewitness testimony and mounting corpses. She clamped her teeth together, frowning at the fact that what she had understood as reality had to be broadened and deepened. For now she had to accommodate the idea that demons really did exist. Chilled to the bone, unnerved and unsettled, she worried about Solomon’s absence.

  Two days, she thought, tapping the oval frame before heading out into the shop to serve the customer waiting patiently by the tea stand.

  16

  We Are Legion

  Wednesday’s edition of Pue’s Occurrences had the headline ‘Staff Editor Encounters the Dolocher’. Solomon had penned a hurried account of his experience near New Row, outlining all the instances and places where the Dolocher had been seen and the two murders committed by the fiend. He made broad recommendations to the public, advising people to travel in groups by night and imploring the city authorities to redouble their efforts to intensify the watch. He left Corker with strict instructions to go to the pawnshop and buy a pair of breeches, a jacket and a pair of shoes and to leave his new clothes at work, changing every morning and evening.

  ‘What for?’ Corker was delighted and confused at the same time, looking in the palm of his hand at the money Solomon had given him.

  ‘So your mother won’t sell them.’

  ‘The bitch. She’d sell me teeth if she could prise them from me head.’

  ‘When the paper comes out I want you to give yourself a good wash.’

  ‘Where?’ Corker squeaked. He wondered where he was going to find clean water, never mind soap.

  ‘I’ll give you a note to bring to Merriment’s. You wash, scrub up clean and go to all the coffee houses and clubs and sell as many copies of Pue’s as you can.’

  ‘Right-oh,’ Corker sniffed. ‘Ye make Pue’s sound like something that should be used to wipe yer arse.’

  ‘Very funny. Don’t let anyone boss you. You work for me. Ignore Philmont and Chesterfield. Use this satchel to put the takings in and bring it back here every day.’

  ‘Right-oh.’

  Corker began cross-hatching his sketch of the Dolocher. He had drawn the beast crouched over and peering down from a towering height, its swinish face in chiaroscuro.

  The office fire blazed in the hearth. Outside the wind was rising, the sniping rain hammered against the window.

  ‘Beats standing in the market havin’ Jody Maguire spitting black juice down at ye, doesn’t it, Sol?’

  Solomon nodded, writing hurriedly.

  ‘When are ye leaving?’ Corker asked.

  ‘Soon as I can dash off this article. Now stop interrupting.’

  Corker grinned, all his crooked teeth shining a faint yellow.

  *

  Solomon bought a second-hand cloak, heavy and dark and warm. He also purchased a tricorn hat and toyed with the idea of a periwig, deciding he hadn’t the time to fuss. At four o’clock he jumped onto the back of the cart carrying Maggie Fines’ corpse in a wicker coffin, and despite the rain fell asleep as the driver crossed the foothills of the Dublin Mountains to the small village of Saggart.

  The rain fell in slants over the cluster of cottages gathered at the crossroads. A young girl he didn’t know bowed over the village well, her hair stuck to her face as she peered across at him. The sudden recollection of Eliza May’s drowned face flashed before his eyes. He looked down the street past the donkey huddled beneath a bush and remembered running to visit Eliza May that first summer. He had been seventeen and full of passion. His heart ached with the recollection of who he used to be. Young and vital and full of belief, and Eliza May was his queen. That halcyon summer she laughed and kissed him and the endless days were filled with sunshine and buttercups and rolling in the fragrant meadow. That was before Eliza May’s moods came, before he discovered that she cried as much as she laughed, before he realised that the girl he loved could not be reached when she was in the doldrums. One evening at twilight he found her sitting on the church stile sobbing like she was grief-stricken.

  ‘You will leave me,’ she wept. And though he held her close, rocked her and whispered, ‘Never,’ Eliza May shuddered, unconvinced.

  Now as he stood in the pouring rain looking along the muddy street Solomon squeezed his eyes closed. The rain clung to his lashes as he desperately tried to shake off the weight of Eliza May’s memory. But her beautiful young ghost hung about his bones.

  ‘Need a hand?’ a familiar voice asked, and Solomon nodded reaching down to lift one corner of the wicker coffin.

  Old Jed Ryan and Tom the carpenter came out to give Solomon and the driver a hand bringing Maggie’s coffin into the house. Maggie’s house consisted of a single living room and a small bedroom. A neighbour had cooped her chickens for the night and left the garden gate
open on the superstition that she would come home alive and close it herself.

  That night Maggie was waked on her kitchen table. The neighbours came in quietly, filing past her luminous corpse, touching her fingers and kissing her forehead and saying goodbye, praying and muttering at the godawful shock of such a nice woman meeting such a dreadful end. Old Mitchel brought a fiddle and Solomon paid Johnny Patrick one pound to roll five barrels of ale and bring ten bottles of whiskey to the wake. Friends and neighbours for twenty miles walked or rode into Saggart that night and by four o’clock in the morning the festivities were developing a second wind with women dancing and laughing in one corner, men playing cards and telling yarns in another corner while three keeners kept up a gentle wail, careful not to intrude on the high jinks and shenanigans. Solomon was quizzed on London and the Dolocher, about Eliza May and Sally Loftus. Others asked him if it was true that he owed a criminal money and Solomon bristled, remembering clearly why it was he had wanted to leave Saggart in the first place. He dodged the awkward questions with bland rebuffs, keeping everything general and impersonal. It was only when Michael Loftus took a swipe at him that Solomon decided he might go and sleep somewhere.

  ‘Ye took her,’ Michael Loftus cried, his plump face red and miserable. ‘Ye destroyed me little girl and we haven’t seen sight nor sound of her.’

  His wife dragged him out the door begging him to ‘whist’.

  ‘But he took her. Couldn’t keep his pizzle in his breeches, the whoring blackguard.’

  ‘Ah now, Mick.’ A neighbour with broad shoulders waved his clay pipe. ‘Not over the corpse, Mick. No profanities at lovely Maggie’s wake. Go on now. Off ye go.’

  Solomon sat in a corner, wishing he could undo all the harm he had precipitated. Johnny Patrick brought him a drink.

  ‘She were keen on ye, little Sally,’ he said, sitting down. ‘Heard ye got her pregnant.’

  Solomon shook his head. For her sake, he didn’t want the truth to be known.

  Sally had set about comforting him after Eliza May’s death. And he had taken the comfort of her arms, losing himself in her peachy soft skin and long blonde hair. Sally was very different to Eliza May. She was a practical girl with sharp edges and she quickly grew tired of his grief. He remembered the day she’d snapped. They’d been fooling around in Paddy Jordon’s hay loft and Solomon was lying on his back staring up into the beams where the swallows had built a nest. Sally clacked her tongue impatiently, sick of his faraway staring. She crouched forward and tugged on her stockings.

  ‘She were touched,’ Sally said, a hard light glinting in her eyes. ‘Everyone could see but you, Sol.’

  Solomon hoisted himself onto his elbows and frowned.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘Eliza May, she was for the birds.’

  ‘She was fragile.’ His voice cracked.

  ‘She was unhinged and difficult, but ye’d got yer head stuck in that many poetry books and stories ye couldn’t see the wood from the trees. Everyone knew it would end bad and why wouldn’t it? This bloody place would get anybody down.’

  Sally stared bleakly at the barn floor below, her expression alternating between smouldering rage and wily calculation. Solomon could see she was prickling, desperate to change her stars.

  ‘Take me with ye to London.’

  ‘Who says I’m goin’ to London?’

  ‘Maggie told me mam y’er thinkin’ of it.’

  Her face filled with bright glee at the thought of moving to such a large metropolis.

  ‘No one would know yer business.’ She grinned. ‘Ye could do yer own thing without tongues wagging or a father to bar yer way.’

  ‘Sally . . .’

  ‘Oh, look at ye,’ Sally chirruped, ‘y’er white as a sheet.’ She bounced to her feet and brushed the straw off her skirts. ‘I don’t want to marry ye, Sol. Y’er all right for a roll in the hay, but ye know. Me and you don’t have that much in common. And I’d love to see London.’

  The weeks following that revelation Sally alternated her tactics, trying to convince Solomon to take her with him. Some days she was nonchalant and offhand, showing him that she’d be no trouble and that she had no vested interest in him. Other days she pleaded, desperate to leave Saggart and her humdrum life behind.

  Solomon turned to Johnny Patrick.

  ‘She wanted to come to England with me,’ he said. ‘I told her to stay. She kept crying that she’d be no trouble.’ Solomon bowed his head, staring at the honey-coloured whiskey in one of Maggie’s good china cups.

  ‘She followed ye so,’ Johnny Patrick said.

  Solomon didn’t answer.

  ‘I heard it from the brother-in-law, he saw her over in London underneath one of the bridges.’

  ‘Did he?’ Solomon winced, knowing the inevitable outcome for a young girl making such a rash decision.

  ‘She were begging. One of her teeth missing. The brother-in-law said he did his best to convince her to come home. Said he’d stand the fare for her passage an’ all. Sure little Sally wept bitterly, said she couldn’t look her mother in the face and that she’d made her bed and must lie in it. The brother-in-law said she was drunk as a newt, sobbin’ for gin and sobbin’ for to come home and sobbin’ ’cause she couldn’t come home and sobbin’ for money.’

  Solomon shook his head, biting on the inside of his cheek, wishing he had just said yes and let Sally come with him. His rejection drove her to desperate measures when a kind word from him would have protected her.

  Johnny Patrick nudged him. ‘She were always headstrong, Solomon. As headstrong as her father there.’ He waved his drink at the open door. ‘Sure if the poor lass rounded the door her father’d beat her from here to Kerry for the shame she brought on his house. Sally is not welcome home and the poor divil knows it. Nothing ye can do there, my friend. Nothin’ ye can do there.’

  The wake carried on until morning, with all the mourners heading home at dawn to freshen up and prepare for the Mass. Late that afternoon, in a tumbledown churchyard, Maggie was laid to rest by her husband’s side and Solomon Fish stood quietly by her graveside thinking of her past kindnesses and of his mother. He wanted to go home directly after the funeral but he knew that he had a responsibility to carry out the details of Maggie’s will, distributing the little that she had owned among her neighbours. He had to sign off on her tenancy agreement and pay any outstanding bills. He would have to spend a second night there and finish off the last of his duties the following morning. He looked through the bleak rain at the dank trees surrounding the churchyard, wishing with all his heart that when he died he would have someone to be buried beside.

  *

  As the rain patted against the shop window and Solomon hoped to be interred next to a loved one, Merriment showed Janey Mack how to prepare Paris quadrifolia.

  ‘It grows on a single stem. The flowers smell rank but it has a purple fruit which splits open and produces lots of seeds. It’s also called True Love.’

  That got Janey Mack’s interest. ‘Is it, miss?’

  ‘Too much of it makes you sick and gives you diarrhoea, makes you giddy.’

  ‘Bit like true love, miss.’

  Janey Mack grinned cheekily and Merriment laughed.

  ‘Did ye never love anyone after Johnny Barden, miss?’

  ‘I did.’ Merriment crushed the seeds with the mortar. ‘It was a long and tragic love affair.’

  She remembered the first time she realised she had feelings for Ashenhurst Beresford. He had come below decks to visit the sick, something he did almost every night. They had both got into the habit of drinking a glass of port in the back office. That particular night he looked pale and Merriment remarked on it.

  ‘Are you worried about your wife?’ she asked, knowing that his wife was unwell.

  Beresford’s head jolted back; he fixed her steadily with his bright eye, his eyepatch glinting darkly when he moved.

  ‘No,’ he said firmly, but his jaw locked and
a nerve danced a moment at the edge of his mouth, like he was biting back a confession. For a while he said nothing, just stared, and Merriment felt pinned to the spot by his oppressive scrutiny.

  ‘You’re beautiful, you know,’ he said sharply before pushing his glass across the table and walking away, leaving Merriment staring at the door frame listening to his footsteps as they paced across sickbay and up the stairs to the galley above. The remark left her heart sundered. That was the moment that changed everything.

  For a full year after that night, they continued to meet and discuss business, both of them pretending that nothing had altered. But they gazed more deeply at each other while they spoke. The conversations lingered long into the small hours and their goodbyes became awkward. A kind of pressure built up between them until one night Beresford came into the back room and, without speaking, slipped his arms around her and pressed his lips to hers. She gave in, forgetting everything, forgetting he was a captain, forgetting he was married, forgetting she was lonely. She remembered Beresford whispering, ‘I can make no promises.’ Sequestered in a tiny cabin on stormy waters with the wind howling and the lantern flickering, his whispers and embrace were enough for her then.

  The passion was brief and laden with guilt. There was a shift in Beresford’s manner once his appetite had been satiated. In fact, there were times when he could be offhand. Six months after the affair began, Beresford returned from one furlough a new man. His wife had been well and something in their marriage had been reinvigorated. He cooled his ardour and Merriment retreated, hurt, nursing a fresh, disappointed pain. For a time things were strained. But the days at sea stretched into months and the months into years and their affection for one another slipped back into its own rhythm. They did occasionally lie with each other by way of comfort, but Merriment knew not to indulge in the fantasy of a committed relationship. Beresford’s passion waned into a respectful friendship that had intermittent sensual benefits for the times when he felt most in need.

  Years passed, full of unresolved intimacy, so that by the time Merriment suggested giving up the sea, Beresford was faintly relieved by the idea. Merriment laughed at his keenness and was amazed to find that she was not cut by his manner but encouraged, particularly when he revealed that he was settling on land too, reinforcing her notion that he wanted to be near her. Confused by his actions, she had remained watchful. Their attachment proved to be more elastic than she had imagined. Somehow, the nights she had cried alone in her bunk faded into the distance. What was exposed was that they both had an affection for each other, a bond of friendship fastened by rough seas and skirmishes abroad. Their connection ran deeper than convention and his insistence on helping her to set up her shop curiously opened a deeper vein in her thinking: perhaps they were bound to always be linked in some way. What should have driven a wedge between them inexplicably consolidated their relationship. Beresford wanted to lend her money; she had taken a little and the small percentage he invested in her enterprise kept them attached in a way that quickened her feelings for him and confused her understanding of what they were to each other. Was that why she felt knocked back when she met him with Peg Leeson? There was a little something in each of them that could not resist the other.