‘After what ye wrote in yer article,’ Corker said, ‘I thought ye might have hightailed it.’
Solomon didn’t answer. Around him, women hurried, some with the ends of their shawls pressed over their faces, shielding their noses from the stench. Men strode purposefully, their eyes fixed dead ahead, their expressions closed off, obviously anxious, wary of the latest development and completely at a loss as to what the vanishing herds of dead swine could mean.
‘Did he really change ye?’ Corker asked.
‘Sorry?’ Solomon took out his key and held it suspended before the door to the apothecary shop, bemused to find the door painted a different colour.
‘What ye said about facing the devil and burning like Dante in the circles of hell. Did the Dolocher really whisper to ye that ye had to change?’
Solomon winced, painfully self-conscious.
‘Figuratively speaking,’ he said, turning the key in the lock and, pushing the door, he snapped his hand away, confused by the sticky layer of paint coating his fingertips. It opened a fraction, stopping when it hit the nails Merriment had hammered into the frame the night before.
‘Hello.’ Solomon pushed again, this time with a single index finger. The door resisted.
Corker leaned against the wall and whistled. ‘Looks like y’er barred.’
‘Merri,’ Solomon called. He heard a door open and Janey Mack’s feet patter on the parquet floor. Her face appeared in the slender space between the door and the nails.
‘Go away,’ she hissed.
‘Janey,’ Solomon said softly.
‘Go away and don’t come back.’
Janey Mack pushed the door shut and locked it from the inside. Solomon stared at the dark green sheen. His fingerprints had spoiled the glossy surface.
‘She’s not the full shillin’,’ Corker said, tugging on Solomon’s sleeve and directing him towards the slender alley that cut through the line of shops into a series of backyards and sundry rubbish piles. ‘This way.’
The entrance to the narrow alley was low slung and slender as a doorway. The ceiling was barrel vaulted and decorated with calcified stalactites, the walls on either side so oppressively close that a wide man would have to turn sideways to navigate along it. A single gutter split down the middle, carrying effluvia and rubbish out onto the street. The tunnel stank of excrement and the high overnotes of fermenting waste, and Solomon was grateful to step out of it into the fresh daylight and the network of backyards running either side of the exit. They passed a pigsty owned by two sisters who ran a bakery. The sty was empty, the gates left open, the dung stained with pools of red. Solomon picked his way along the cobbles, glancing at Corker’s bare feet smeared with filth. There was a sore above his left ankle caked in dirt.
The yard behind the apothecary shop was broad and open. The rubbish pile where Janey Mack had been scavenging on the first day she met Merriment leaned against a wall opposite the back door. Solomon looked up; the tall brown buildings surrounding him jutted into the sky, the roofs hidden by parapets. Circling the chimneys, reaching into the cold morning air, was a flock of wailing seagulls. Pink and golden clouds streaked across the bright blue sky and sharp sunlight glittered on the lead guttering that descended along the red brickwork. He took a deep breath and knocked on the back door, longing to see Merriment. He called out her name, listening, searching the flaking red paint as he waited for her to appear.
Corker spit on the ground, shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and shivered.
‘Did ye make it up?’ he asked. ‘What ye saw.’
Solomon shook his head.
‘It’s just . . .’ Corker ran his tongue over his crooked teeth. ‘I thought, for the money, ye know, ye’d embellished.’
Solomon could hear Janey Mack pleading as Merriment slid back the lock. When she opened the door Merriment looked shockingly pale, her long hair thick and wild about her face. Dark circles framed her sockets and her eyes glistened with a feral light.
‘What is it?’ Solomon reached for her arm. ‘What’s happened?’
Janey Mack called from the interior darkness, her small round face almost floating in the gloom, ‘Maggie said ye were cursed, that a trail of disaster follows ye, that ye have only ever brought sorrow into a house, that all who knew ye died or disappeared.’
‘Janey.’ Merriment swung the door open. The daylight seeped slowly into the airless anteroom as Janey Mack rushed forward.
‘He’s not to be trusted.’ She clenched her right hand. ‘Maggie loved him, miss, and look what happened to her, and his mother loved him and she died young, and his betrothed loved him and she flung herself in a river, and Sally Loftus loved him and she has disappeared, and if he stays in this house we will be found dead in our beds.’
‘That’s enough.’ Merriment swept a hand over her face. In the cold light of day, her skin prickling in response to the chill morning, surrounded by sharp clear sunlight, her lungs filling with clean fresh air, she became uncertain of what she had seen the night before.
‘We didn’t sleep well,’ she said wearily to Solomon. ‘The business with the culling has upset us. Come in.’
She stepped to one side and Janey Mack smacked her hand on the table, shook her head vigorously and shouted, ‘No.’
‘Here we go,’ Corker muttered, leaning on the door frame, watching Solomon pause and search Merriment’s face.
‘This is ridiculous.’ Merriment spun on her heels and went to fetch a glass, chiding Janey Mack as she spooned powdered asafoetida into water. ‘You can’t speak to Solomon like that, Janey. Besides, everyone says the Dolocher is dead now.’ Unable to suppress the recollection of its evil eyes staring at her from the gloom, Merriment stirred the water briskly and frowned, hiding her agitation.
‘No, he’s not,’ Corker piped up. Solomon pinched his arm. ‘Ow, what did ye do that for?’
‘This will help calm you down.’ Merriment tapped at the glass.
‘Ye can’t stop me saying what I have to say,’ Janey Mack protested, defiantly jutting out her chin. Her pale face looked furious and upset. ‘I know ye like his face and his manner,’ she whimpered. ‘I know y’er going to send me back to Hoppy John ’cause I’m cheeky and didn’t I tell ye I say it like it is. I warned ye I had a blisterin’ tongue.’
Then, pointing at Solomon, she started to cry. ‘It’s yer fault. That’s what ye do, ye ruin things ’cause people get attached to yer face and wit and don’t see yer badness. I’m only saying,’ she sobbed, and folding her arms onto the table she buried her head and cried and cried. ‘He has a rope.’
Merriment closed her eyes and sucked her lips between her teeth. She felt exhausted, trapped in a bind, with Janey Mack weeping on one side and Solomon looking wounded on the other.
‘Did Maggie say all those things?’ Solomon whispered.
Janey Mack nodded and went back to crying.
‘And if I told you that I was that bad, that selfish, but that I wanted to be better, would it matter to you?’
Janey Mack shook her head.
‘No,’ she sniffed. ‘Ye brought the Dolocher with ye,’ she blubbered. ‘Ye came to Dublin and he appeared. And I like ye an’ all, Sol, but I can’t let me heart rule me head. Facts is facts.’
Corker laughed scornfully. ‘Yer brains are loose, rattlin’ about in yer skull like a dried pea in a jar.’
Janey Mack stuck her tongue out and then went back to crying. Solomon stepped across the threshold.
‘Eliza May killed herself because I abandoned her. I was seventeen. I had just got a place in King’s Inn.’
Solomon avoided Merriment’s eyes. He could feel her watching him as she slid into her chair, feel her reading his face, searching his body language for truth. The air in the room was thick and stale as he tried to explain why he carried a rope. He moved closer, stepping into the gloom, feeling the weight of all the accusations hurled at him. He wanted to crawl away from his bones, climb out of his skin and take to his heels. He
gripped the back of the empty chair, anchoring himself to the spot. The Dolocher’s deep black sockets flashed in his mind. Swallowing back his resistance, determined for once not to wriggle free, he glanced at the polished flagstones. He wanted Merriment to know. He wanted to tell her everything. He took a deep breath.
‘I got Sally Loftus pregnant,’ he blurted.
Merriment looked away. He felt the withdrawal of her gaze like a physical blow. He stayed gripping the back of the chair, satisfied that he was to be rejected. The punishment was apt. He thought of all the reasons why she would be better off without him. He was feckless, a magnet for bad luck, a whoremonger, a gambler. He recalled Pearly suggesting that he should borrow money from her and he knew it was only a matter of time before Billy Knox’s gang squeezed him for more money and pressured him to drag Merriment into the mix. For her own sake, it would be better if he moved on. Trouble was, before he left, he wanted Merriment to know the truth. Somehow, losing her, sacrificing the possibility of ever being with her, felt in a strange kind of way like atonement. Perhaps he had changed.
‘Sally followed me to London,’ he continued. ‘She lost the child and is currently drinking herself into an early grave.’
Janey Mack stopped crying. She didn’t lift her head from her arms; instead she rested in the crook of her elbows, her eyes closed, listening as Solomon Fish confessed all his bad doings.
‘My mother died young because she was sick.’
Solomon stared at the candle butt in the centre of the table.
‘Eliza May,’ he whispered, ‘destroyed me.’
For a long time nobody spoke. Merriment stared at Solomon’s face. He looked gaunt and haunted. His cloak draped across his slumped shoulders, all the mirth and light-hearted blitheness she had seen in him that first day was gone.
‘The evening we pulled her from the river . . .’ He hung his head as he squeezed his eyes closed. ‘Her lips were blue and her eyes were open and all I remember is the birdsong. She was laid out on the bank, her hair tangled with weeds and . . .’
He shook his head trying to empty the image from his mind.
‘The birds sang all around her. She had been so beautiful. So young.’
He paused a moment, looking for a way to explain.
‘The thing with Eliza May, she was either laughing or crying. There was no in-between for her . . .’
Solomon trailed off. He could feel the gap in his heart widening, Merriment’s silence crushing him. Outside, the thrum of carriages rattling along Fishamble Street grew louder. A hawker selling rags and bones shouted out his sing-song rhyme to draw people’s attention and somewhere in the distance a dog barked.
‘I got a rope the day she was buried and’ – Solomon smirked shamefully – ‘I intended to hang myself. Some grand gesture.’ He bit the inside of his cheek, smiling scornfully. ‘Of course, I couldn’t do it. I like my pretty neck too much.’
Janey Mack lifted her face and wiped her cheek with the back of her hand.
‘I didn’t want my mother to find me swinging from the rafters,’ Solomon tried to explain. ‘It would have killed her. She worked hard to save for my tuition fees.’
He shrugged off the memory of his mother’s desperate face.
‘I didn’t hang myself. I couldn’t.’
He wanted to say, I hadn’t the nerve. Instead he said, ‘I like life too much,’ and was faintly surprised. ‘So,’ he continued, ‘I carry the rope from that day to this. A grisly memento, really, of a pretty girl who drowned herself.’
‘That’s awful.’ Janey Mack blew her nose in her skirt and then showed Merriment. ‘Sorry, miss, it’s habit. Ye’d never have known with me old skirt.’
Then, turning back to Solomon, she stood staring at him, waiting, like she expected more.
Merriment shifted forward in her chair. ‘Janey, we all need a second chance, don’t we?’ she said.
Solomon glanced at Merriment’s face. She sat poised regally, her long fingers smoothly falling along the arms of the chair, her legs crossed, her shirt collar open, the line of her lips soft and plump, her eyelids glistening pearly pink above her sheer blue eyes. In the half-light, with her hair falling in long auburn tresses she looked like a Renaissance oil painting of a heroine dispensing fine judgement, saving his head from a noose.
Janey Mack examined her healing hand.
‘Suppose,’ she acquiesced.
Solomon lengthened his spine and flung his shoulders back. Standing up straight and tall, he drew in a deep breath. Despite his stance he felt curiously vulnerable. Now that Merriment had the full measure of his character she would retreat, observe a cautious distance. Righting past wrongs had to come with a price, he thought solemnly, and the notion that such an intricate woman as Merriment would consider him as a worthy partner combusted with the incendiary accusations Janey Mack had levelled at him. His broken attempt to show his remorse didn’t come across as noble, of that he was certain. He knew he sounded flush with self-pity, but he was tired of running, tired of evading and slipping into the shadows, tired of living on the edge. For the first time he was willing to take his punishment. He fumbled with the rim of his tricorn hat, awkwardly wondering how to salvage the last shreds of his tattered confidence. He was about to excuse himself when Merriment looked at Corker and asked, ‘You looking for water?’
‘If it’s not too much trouble,’ Corker sniffed.
‘Bring him upstairs into Solomon’s room,’ Merriment said to Janey Mack.
‘But—’ the little girl protested.
‘And maybe you should lie down in my bed, get a bit of sleep,’ Merriment continued. ‘Solomon and myself have something to discuss.’
Reluctantly, Janey Mack led the way as Corker told her how all the pigs were missing, that the Dolocher was ‘after stealing them. To show how powerful he is.’
Merriment closed the door behind them and signalled to Solomon to sit down. She left the back door open to refresh the air and draw more light into the room.
‘Have the pigs vanished?’ she asked, pouring them both a glass of milk.
Solomon nodded. ‘Everyone’s baffled. The bailiffs are scratching their heads at the top of the street.’
‘All of them?’ She frowned, calculating the logistics of the operation necessary to remove so much livestock. When Solomon nodded, Merriment perched on the edge of her chair and pressed her fingers to her lips.
‘I saw something,’ she whispered. ‘Last night, when they were killing the pigs. Out there, to the right of the door. I saw . . .’ She dragged her lower lip between her teeth like she was uncertain of letting the words issue.
‘I think I saw the Dolocher.’
Solomon sat back, letting out a long, slow exhalation.
‘Spiny black bristles, large head, tusks, deep black sockets?’
Merriment nodded. ‘And a cloak.’
‘Half man, half beast.’
Merriment’s heart raced. ‘Now what?’ She searched his face.
Solomon stood up. ‘You did right to bar the door.’
‘I know this is foolish.’ Merriment frowned, her hands shaking. ‘But I am thinking of getting the place blessed.’ She stood up and left her glass on the table, twisting it restlessly, unable to keep easy, uncomfortable with the shift in her thinking. ‘Funny how fragile logic is in the face of primal fear, isn’t it?’ She tapped her left temple.
‘It’d be folly not to respond instinctively,’ Solomon reassured her. ‘This is no time for grand theorising. We’ve both seen something profoundly strange, inexplicable.’
‘And we rush to church, to rituals I have no more faith in . . .’
‘The best of us are confounded,’ Solomon said. ‘Nobody knows what is going on. How do you explain it?’ He stepped closer, his voice soft and caring. ‘I knew when you opened the door that something was wrong. You’ve had a shock. You look exhausted. Perhaps you should leave the shop closed for the day.’
Merriment shook her head. She thought
of Dolly Shelbourne’s husband and worried that she hadn’t heard the last of him. Over on the mantle the hurried note to Beresford lay propped against a candlestick. What was she going to do? What if Dolly’s husband returned? What if the Dolocher returned?
Solomon slipped his hand gently across Merriment’s back, letting it rest in the natural curve of her spine.
‘You need sleep.’
‘I . . .’ Merriment moved, turning slightly, stepping back, confused by Solomon’s touch. He removed his hand, his fingertips still tingling, his heart falling away, realising he’d been too intimate.
‘Janey Mack is convinced . . .’ Merriment bowed her head, her thoughts spinning. What if? she wondered before briskly asking, ‘Is it following you?’
Solomon’s jaw dropped. He stared out the back door. The sunlight spilled over the threshold and he noticed a red hue like a fine film gleaming on the cobbles. Outside a gull cried shrilly; its plaintive caw rang through the bright sky, mournfully acknowledging Solomon’s loss.
‘You want me to go,’ he said quietly, shaking his head, understanding that there was some kind of universal moral law that made this the right thing to do. He could set up in a tavern and Billy Knox and Pearly could lament the possibility of extorting money from Merriment. Without him, Billy Knox would have no conduit to her. At least she would be safe. Still Solomon could not move. Could not take his eyes off her. Merriment didn’t answer, instead she gazed out the door, preoccupied.
Her fingers were fanned out, gleaming as they pressed against the table, her long, lean form muted by the cool shadows of the room. The longer she remained silent the more Solomon convinced himself that it would never have worked with Merriment. He had been vain enough to think that there was something in her gaze, a quality in her eyes that hinted at her favouring him. He had been so fixated on the way that she moved, seeing every movement of her fingers as they wandered over objects as a sure measurement of her sensuality. He had wanted to unravel her.
The Dolocher Page 30