Turning the Stones

by Debra Daley

  As I speak I can feel our boat rushing through the lively waters and hear the sail snapping in the breeze and the creak of the busy rigging. It consoles me to know that Captain McDonagh stands at the helm.

  Eliza cries again, ‘Em!’

  ‘Shhh,’ I soothe her.

  ‘Put down your glass! Don’t drink the champagne!’

  I recoil from her as if I have been slapped.

  Eliza’s eyes flutter open. Shock reverberates through every part of me.

  I gasp, ‘The champagne!’

  Eliza pants to catch her breath. The effort of bringing out this revelation has exhausted her.

  ‘Johnny put something in my glass at the assembly house in London.’

  She offers me a barely discernible nod and closes her eyes again.

  Eliza betrayed me. She was part of it. She was one of the plotters. She played her part in the Waterlands’ scheme to sell me to Barfield. She knew that Johnny had adulterated my glass. In fact, she urged me to drink the champagne. Take a glass. It’s very uncivil of you not to, Em, when Johnny has gone to so much trouble to entertain us.

  A quiver passes across her white lips, but she cannot or will not look at me. I do not revile her. She could not help herself. She was always obliged to fulfil the demands of her insatiable mother and brother.

  ‘Eliza, did you know that Johnny had taken me to Barfield that night of the soirée?’

  A nearly imperceptible nod.

  ‘The plan was decided at Sedge Court,’ I say.

  She whispers, ‘You were right about the bank. The debts must be paid or we will lose our home. What would we do without it? What would Mama do? Barfield offered a bargain. He would marry me if he could have you first. As if you were a douceur.’

  A tear drips down her cheek.

  ‘Johnny took you to Barfield. I was to come the following evening to Barfield’s house to meet the lawyer. There was a marriage contract. It was worth a lot of money to us. But I never met the lawyer. I came to the house, and Barfield was already in the street with his carriage and his footman. He told me you had run away with Johnny. I was hysterical about it. Screaming and screaming. It wasn’t fair. You would be with Johnny and I would be left with Barfield. He threw me into the carriage and told me to stop my noise and I suppose he did not know what to do with me at first, because he was eager to get to a posting house in Piccadilly. His footman had the information that you had gone to Piccadilly. And what would you possibly do there, except get a coach from the White Bear?’

  ‘And he guessed that I was Mrs Ann Jones.’

  ‘We described you to the book-keeper. So we knew then that you were heading for Bristol. I expected Mr Barfield to throw me out, but he changed his mind and said we would find Johnny. Perhaps he thought I might be useful in some way that he hadn’t yet figured. And then we drove on all the way to Reading. By then I wanted to accompany him on the chase. I thought I was running after Johnny.’ She presses her hand to her mouth to stifle her sobs.

  Barfield would have realised that Eliza’s distress reinforced his lying story: that Johnny had disappeared with me. Her presence drew attention away from London and gave credence to the belief that Johnny was still alive.

  ‘Does your mother know that the plan miscarried?’

  Eliza shakes her head. ‘I do not know. I would be very afraid to return to Sedge Court having failed. I had some hope, you see, as I ran on with Barfield, that we would find Johnny and he would conjure a way for us to live.’ Her voice falters. ‘Mama frightens me. She is capable of nearly anything.’

  Eliza’s face twists in pain. I slide my arms around her shoulders – her shift is drenched with sweat – and raise the cup of water to her lips again. With an effort she swallows a few drops.

  I take her damp hand in mine. As I sit with her, listening to the harsh sound of her breathing, I am aware that something has been finished with.

  *

  We have emerged from between two chains of islands into the open sea, where we are forcefully rocked upon the breaking waves. Captain McDonagh orders me to take the bailer and throw out the water that we have taken on. I can see that it would take only one nasty wave to swamp our low-lying vessel, but the Cliona is sturdy and easy to manoeuvre, especially to windward. She points into the waves with a good turn of speed, spray flying from underneath the bow like two wings, and keeps her head up. Captain McDonagh must give me a precipitate lesson in sailing, since it requires the two of us to work the boat in these conditions, but I have already absorbed a surprising amount from my passage on the Seal. In any case, the captain and I have a shared willingness to dare. Since I know him to be a bold man on the sea, I have faith in his ability to bring us safely to our destination.

  Eliza has elapsed into a state of suspension that has remained unchanged these last hours. She breathes and yet she seems hardly alive. As the sun sinks, I duck my head into the cabin in order to remark the light that beams at us from the western horizon. Eliza gives no sign of hearing, but speaking to her is a ploy to keep her attached to life.

  None of this would have happened had there not been such unquenchable desire in Mrs Waterland’s heart. From her riverhead of need flowed the waters that sank so many lives. I do not know how else to explain her actions. The opportune snatching of a child. The exploitation of those who loved her. The moral void. Why do people do the things that they do? I realise now that sometimes we do not know why. Sometimes there is no answer, no matter how desperately we wish to supply meaning to a villain’s chaotic acts.

  I do know that none of us was ever truly alive to her. In that oversight – and its dearth of empathy – lay her crime. It appals me that I mistook this most negligent of women for an ideal mother. Isn’t it terrifying that we take so long to come to the truth of things? And that if we are disposed to believe something, we will not notice the duplicity that lies under our noses.

  An intense crimson cast fills the little cabin. I watch as the fiery eye of the sun sinks into the sea.

  I murmur, ‘It is a wonderful sunset, Eliza.’

  Has she suddenly come awake? Her eyes are shining and her cheeks glow. But I see in the next second that her eyes are only a reflection of the light for they are glazed in death.

  I cling to Eliza’s hand for a long time, feeling it grow cold and light and then Captain McDonagh draws me out of the cabin and invites me to sit with him on the transom and to cry my tears into the spray.

  Eliza could never have argued against the force of her family, I tell him. She never could have admitted that Sedge Court had been brought to financial downfall by the hubris of her beloved brother. Eliza and I were sent down to London to repair the damage. Johnny brokered the trade, of course. He would supply me to Barfield and in return Barfield would marry Eliza and the debts could be discharged and her family would have the ease of her new money and status. Barfield would have the use of me in perpetuity if he so desired. I still could not understand, though, why Barfield’s mother would allow the marriage.

  Captain McDonagh says, ‘Because he was rotten with the pox, I wager. He could not be married to anyone.’

  Then he would have – he would have infected both of us. I gaze up into the sky at the sparkle of the stars. They say there is a pattern of constellations up there, but it is difficult to make them out. They look like nothing so much as an arbitrary scattering.

  Captain McDonagh lifts his chin towards the sky and says, ‘Do you see that speck?’

  ‘The very bright one?’

  ‘That is our pilot star. Shall I show you how we find our way by it?’

  I nod my head, too bursting with emotion to speak. He stands up then and says gently, ‘But first we must help Miss Waterland to take the step that isn’t there.’

  I should like to wrap Eliza in cloth, but Captain McDonagh says that our need of a spare sail is greater than that of Eliza’s for a shroud. I dress her hair and button her habit and the captain carries her on to the deck, just as she is. He recites
words from the scriptures over her body and then he gently gathers her up and gives her into the custody of the sea. There is a splash and she is gone.

  As Captain McDonagh and I stand in the stern watching the wake fan out behind us, I weep for Eliza. The captain says gently, ‘She is in the place of truth now, Molly.’ Then he places his hands on my shoulders and turns me around to face the bow. ‘Go forward,’ he says, and I do as he bids, climbing on to the foredeck and crouching in the V of the boat with my sorrow.

  *

  I awake to the smell of fuming turf. Although I thought I could not possibly sleep, I have done so, dreamlessly. I emerge from the cabin to find that the captain has a few sods burning in a bucket.

  ‘Do you ever sleep?’ I ask.

  ‘I am like a horse,’ he says, ‘I snatch my rest when I can. Are you hungry?’ He eyes the birds that hover behind our stern as if they are part of our procession. ‘I would say there is a pretty shoal out there, wouldn’t you?’

  He ferrets around under the aft platform – there is turf stored there and provisions, dried fish and seaweed and potatoes, and fishing paraphernalia – and brings out a line, hooks and a basket of limpets. We bait the line with the limpets and Captain McDonagh trails it in the water with one hand while the other lies on the tiller. After some while, he draws in the line and discovers three spiky gurnard twitching on it.

  As we feast on our catch, cooked on the smouldering sods, the captain bats at the gulls, which are loitering above our meal. He flicks a fishbone away, and says, ‘Why don’t you call me by the name my friends use and we will get along a little better.’

  I watch the clouds charge along the highway of the sky and the waves flow past. ‘Are you ever afraid?’ My question takes in the entirety of the ocean and the uncertainty of our voyage.

  ‘Only a fool is without fear, but let us do our best to survive. As my father liked to say, a good run is better than a bad stand.’ I like the glint of amusement in Connla McDonagh’s eye. It stirs in me a swift rush of ardour.

  ‘Connla –’ his name sounds strange on my tongue, but I shall become used to it – ‘there is something I should like to say. It concerns the Vindicator. It is only – may I say that I accept the apology you offered me?’

  Connla leans a little way forward and meets my eye with a gladdened expression and something eases between us. Then he and I look out past ourselves at the open vista.

  The foam curls from our bow and the sea and wind rush by. My mother, Nora, and my father, Josey, are alive in me, and Henrietta Waterland has shrivelled away to nothing at all.

  I imagine you racing across the waves on your sea horse. Your long, black hair streams in the wind and your crimson petticoat flutters. Are you coming with me? Ah, no, you have ridden out this far only to see me off. You certainly have a marvellous sky for a playground today. There is nothing much left of those clouds. They are little more than teasings of fleece. And now I would like to ask you, with all the love in my heart, to watch me out of sight with a blessing.

  Author’s Note

  I would very much like to thank my generous and insightful agent, Clare Conville, who has always believed in me. I owe a great debt to the friends who so kindly put me up when I was teetering on the brink and offered me a place to write, particularly Markie and Ian and Greg and Gill. And without my excellent and supportive publisher, Susan Watt, and the team at Heron there would be no book.

  I overhauled the first draft of Turning the Stones after attending Theresa Rebeck’s inspiring masterclass at Hedgebrook women writers’ retreat on Whidbey Island. I am very grateful to Theresa and to the writers I met while I was there.

  I am always charmed by the hospitality of County Galway. My thanks go to a stranger I encountered on Mweenish Island who brought to my attention Séamus Mac an Iomaire’s wonderful mixture of memoir and natural history, The Shores of Connemara, whose translation by Padraic de Bhaldraithe was published by Tír Eolas in 2000. The descriptions of kelpmaking in this book proved indispensable to me. Also, an anecdote about obtaining wood from shipwrecks for boatbuilding gave me the idea to have Nora O’Halloran spot useful logs floating in the sea.

  Among many books and maps consulted in numbers of libraries and museums, I am indebted to the following: Anne Buck, Dress in Eighteenth Century England, Homes & Meier, 1979; Katherine Cahill, Mrs Delany’s Menus, Medicines and Manners, New Island, 2005; E. Keble Chatterton, King’s Cutters and Smugglers 1700–1855, J.B. Lippincott, 1912; Cheshire County Council, Cheshire Historic Town Survey, Chester, 2003; Louis M. Cullen’s various essays on eighteenth-century Irish smuggling, privateering and mercantile networks, published in numerous academic journals; Lady Gregory, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920; Stanley Harris, Old Coaching Days, R. Bentley, 1882; Bridget Hill, Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century, Clarendon Press, 1996; G.H. Kinahan, ‘Connemara Folk-Lore’, The Folk-Lore Journal, Vol. 2 Sept. 1884; M.E. Marker, The Dee Estuary – its progressive silting and saltmarsh development, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 41, 1967; Bernard Mees, Celtic Curses, Boydell and Brewer, 2009; Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England, Yale University Press, 2010