The afternoon grew cooler then. Teige worked with the horses with little luck, walking and standing and talking to them. He did not get close to the colt again all that long day. By the time the evening was beginning and there were small bats flying in the air, Clancy returned and told him to come with him to the place where he could stay. It was a stone building with a strong roof in a clean courtyard. The coach horses were stabled there and the hunters for the manor house. The youth who was called Pyle came and brought him food and stood by while he ate and then took the bowl away again. Stillness settled over the place then. The May night was calm and mild and held the tangled smells of woodsmoke and horses and the sweetness of the gorse blooming. Teige lay on straw bedding and thought of those on the island. He thought of his father watching the sky as if hunting there traces of the lost portion of his family. He thought of where in the world Finan and Finbar might be and if he would see them again. But from each of these considerations his mind wandered. He stared upward at the blackness that was unstarred. And it was then as if a map had been redrawn and he no longer possessed with surety the coordinates, for he drifted from all things in that sleepless state and time after time returned only to the image of the laughing girl.
The following morning he was up before the cock crew. When Clancy found him he was already in the field with the horses. Teige asked him what the horses were being fed and asked that he be allowed to change their diet. He pointed out too some that needed special care and should be withdrawn to other pasture. All of this Clancy agreed to without dispute, for he considered himself a judge of men and placed his legs apart and rocked on his heels with his hands on his hips and told Teige that whatever he asked would be done. He left him then and Teige returned to the horses. Later Pyle arrived and they separated some and steered the lesser or ailing animals into the farther paddock. For the rest of that morning Teige was alone with the remainder. Showers of drizzle came and went. The sky cleared and clouded and cleared again. The birds of that place were many and when the rain passed they chorused and flew and it seemed to Teige that he had never seen such a multitude. From the woods nearby they flickered and darted, thrush and sparrow and tit and robin. They sang full-throated. The song of the corncrake was there, too. And all such harmonies were intermingled in the air like threads of fine colours. Whether it was this or not, Teige progressed slowly with the horses that morning. He seemed to have lost some of his gift and was for the first time uncertain. He walked about the field in circles and held out his hands and spoke quietly, but the horses, sensing something in his manner or spirit, shied. He grew impatient then and at some times jogged futilely toward an animal that soon took off and left him there. He was so engaged when the ladies walked the avenue again. This time he saw them coming, for in truth some part of him had been all morning watching. He stopped his small running and the horses cantered away from him and turned at the far end of the field. The birds were everywhere. He watched the movement of the light-coloured dresses from the corner of his eye. He saw the golden hair. He saw that she was sauntering closer along the fence and felt himself foolish to be standing there in the empty part of the pasture with no horse near him. If he walked down toward the horses now, he would be walking away from her. The two desires to stay and go twisted about inside him and he found himself doing neither. He just stood there, the birds flying about him. Then he heard a small tinkle of laughter and there was some jostling and the crunch of the gravel pebbles, and then the girl with brown hair called out to him:
“What are you doing there?”
Teige did not move.
“Hello? Oh, hello?”
Again the noise of whispers and urgings and some scuffling of pebbles, and Teige heard the girl say, “Wait, wait, he will.”
He turned around then. They were standing there, the girl with the brown hair looking directly at him, the other turned aside and studying the smallness of her white shoe.
“We were wondering,” the girl said. “What are you doing?”
He thought to stay where he was and shout across to them. He thought it and decided on it and then was walking closer. There was a drift of perfume there. It hung like a silk. He came within it and stopped and tried to draw deeper than a shallow breath. He was looking past the girl who looked at him. He was looking at the girl now wearing a cream-coloured dress.
“Hello, do you understand? Maybe he can’t understand. What… are… you—”
“I am training the horses,” Teige told her.
“You do understand. Well, that’s what I said you were doing, but yesterday we saw you get knocked down and Elizabeth said you weren’t, you couldn’t be, because you’re not supposed to get knocked down, are you? But I said, I do think he is training them, and Elizabeth said that she supposed it could be true and maybe he’s just not very good at it.” She arched one eyebrow and her lips curved in a tightened smile.
” ‘Tis true, maybe,” Teige told her.
There was a pause of sunlight and birdsong. Then Elizabeth lifted her eyes to him and said: “I didn’t say that.”
“You did.”
“Come on.” Elizabeth pulled at the other’s arm. “Come on, Catherine, I am going back.”
“Wait, maybe he’ll show us. Won’t you show us? Go on, do some, we’ll watch. Train them. You’ve to choose one for her, you know”
“I’m going.” Elizabeth took steps away and Teige’s eyes followed her and absorbed all that she was.
“Spoilsport,” Catherine said after her, and then looked at Teige and laughed and skipped and ran and caught up with her and they were gone.
The rest of that day Teige managed even less with the horses. He moved toward them like one in a dream and they swept past. Sometimes in gathering desperation he ran then, sprinting alongside, pumping with his fists and sucking and blowing the air through his teeth. Briefly he was like one of the ancient Fianna or Indian braves, a figure mythic and noble and swift, until the horses opened gait and were gone and he was left panting and slumped in the empty grass. That evening when he lay in the straw bed he watched the image of the woman his eyes had captured. She lingered before him awhile as he stretched there with hands behind his head and the hushed darkness filled with the movement of the bats and the noises of the horses sleeping. Then he rose and went outside. The night sky was quickened with cloud. Light from a gibbous moon came and went. He walked barefoot across the courtyard and then out around by the short avenue that he knew led to the big house. When he saw it, all of its windows were dark. Two wolfhounds lay on the top of the steps to the front door. They raised their heads to look at him and Teige shushed at them and they lay down again. He stood there and studied the house and felt the feelings of his father years before standing before the house of the lord. He slipped around by the side then. He touched the walls as he went. He arrived at the back of the house where in latter years an addition had been built to the kitchen, and this he climbed until he was on the cold slates of its roof. He moved along it low and catlike until he came to a window. With the tips of his fingers then he slid it upward and watched the reflection of his face vanish as a thin curtain of muslin blew softly outward. This he moved like a veil and then stepped quietly inside.
4
He was in a corridor. There was timber flooring and it creaked beneath his foot. He heard the noise travel and listened in its aftermath for any response. But there was none. He brought the second foot inside and stood there, growing accustomed to the quiet, listening within it to hear the sounds of sleeping. He moved down the corridor then. A pulse in his brain beat and he seemed to hear it along with another in his neck. He paused to still them and failed and moved on. He came to the first of the doors and pressed himself flatly against it, his ear and the palms of his two hands against the timber. Shut-eyed, he listened. Then he moved farther down the hallway to the next door. With each he did the same, but it was no use. He could not tell. He turned and arched his head back and leaned against the wall and his chest heav
ed. The moonlight shone on him. He waited. Then suddenly he turned and held the porcelain knob and opened the room door next to him. It made a small click. He held it tight and leaned in and smelled the strong powdered air of the room and saw in the rumpled bedclothes a woman large and a man small. Teige withdrew as silently as he had entered. He moved down the way to the next door. This time he squeezed the lock back and there was no click. The moment the door was only slightly ajar he knew it was hers. He was informed by some instinct not attributable simply to scent or sound or sight. He knew, and stepped inside and closed the door behind him.
She was lying on her side. The bedclothes were white. Her right hand lay on the pillow beside her head. Teige stood there. He heard his own breathing and held it and wished it might have stayed so and he a silent and invisible presence there, timeless, witness only to this creature sleeping. The room stilled about him once more. When his pulse had steadied he took a step closer to the bed, and then another. He beheld her. He beheld the way her fair hair fell there and how her eyelashes quivered in sleep, how her lips were pursed. He studied the line of her nape, the delicacy of her ears. Such things. He did not move closer to touch her. He stayed there and the night passed on about him and the sleeping house rumbled sometimes and made airy noises and creaked with the traverse of ghosts and dreams. She moved in dreams of her own, too, and turned away from him and then back again, making small moans in her throat that Teige could not decipher as pleasure or pain. He matched the rhythm of his breathing with hers, and when he had achieved this he closed his eyes, and was so, and found a kind of peace in that union.
Time sped on. The moon flew through the sky and dragged her stars and still Teige was there in Elizabeth’s bedroom. He could not leave. He stood and was sentry to that beauty and could not have put in words his hopes or desire or told how long he might have stayed. Then she turned in the bed and her hair crossed her mouth and she brushed at it with the back of her hand and opened her eyes and saw him.
She did not cry out.
Teige raised his hands palm outward and made as if placing them gingerly to settle some disturbance in the air. Then he took a step backward, and then another. Without taking his eyes from her, he reached behind him and felt for the handle of the door and twisted it and then quickly turned and was gone.
5
That morning Teige struggled once again with the horses. The day was soft with rain and the ladies did not come on their walk. Time was slow and stretched out and in the absence of the obscured sun seemed not to pass at all. Teige walked about and through the horses and spoke to them and waited, wondering if Elizabeth had told and he was to be summoned at any moment and ordered to leave. In his wet shirt his chest was tight, his eyes were glossed with intensity and glanced sidelong toward the avenue. Where was she? What was she thinking? The sleek flanks of the horses glistened in the rain, their hooves making short, sucking sounds where the ground had mucked. The birds stayed occluded in the trees, and their song from there seemed to Teige strangely despondent. The long day was like an ache. When the redheaded fellow Pyle came and brought him his food, he told Teige that the men said the weather was an ill omen. There was no health in it.
“It is neither true rain nor real sun, but lifeless drizzle, they say. It is like fine netting, we need a storm to move it off us.”
Teige ate silently and felt the day press more firmly upon him. When the other had gone, he returned to the horses but in a short time realized that it was useless. He had no connection with them and at last hunkered down and sat in the middle of the field in the falling rain. Slowly, in the gradual passing of that afternoon then, the horses began to move closer to him, and it was as if he were a rock or a bush or a tree or any other part of their domain and they did not shy or move away. Soon they were all about him there and grazing at the grass that was by his side. He sat and a foal approached and then nipped at the shoulder of his shirt. The black colt with the white blaze was less familiar and stood off and sometimes pawed at the ground and blew. But Teige appeared indifferent to all and made no movement toward any of them. At some time then he heard noise in the gravelled avenue and lifted his head and saw a coach and horses pass down that way, and from the curtained window the face of Elizabeth’s friend appeared and disappeared. The coach did not slow or stop and he could not tell how many were inside it. He watched until it was gone.
That night he awaited the darkness. It fell slowly, the light lingering a long time in some higher part of the heavens where the sun had stayed all day. When at last he had to wait no longer, Teige rose and hastened as stealthily as he could past the wolfhounds to the kitchen. He climbed as before, this time slipping twice on the wet slates and pressing himself flat there for moments, awaiting alarm. But none came and he made his way to the window and opened it and stepped again into the corridor, darker now without the moonlight. Where he stepped, his feet printed wet on the floor. He dripped to her door and held his breath and screwed tight his eyes to squeeze the handle and twist and open it, and all the time he was both fearful that she had gone away and expectant of her cry. The scent was the first thing to meet him. It arrived in his nostrils while the door was only slightly ajar and caused a quivering in his spine. The darkness of the room was deeper than the night before, and at first he could make out nothing at all. He stood there and heard his breathing and again tried to quieten it and as he did he heard her move.
“Hello.” She spoke across the darkness. She did not seem surprised.
Teige took a step back to the door and they were still as shadows to each other as she spoke again.
“It’s all right.”
A pause, in the stillness his breathing.
“I knew you would come again.”
He stood and tried to understand what he should do. Then he heard the match struck and saw it aflame and she was lighting a small waxen candle at her bedside. The amber light glowed and he saw her within it and saw the white linen nightdress she wore and how her hair fell loose on her shoulders to her breasts. She lay back on many pillows then and looked at him with her eyebrows arched.
“Well,” she said.
Teige had lost his tongue.
“You can sit down.” She pointed to a wooden chair near the bed.
But Teige did not stir.
“You can’t just stand there,” she said. She moved and released an invigorating scent from the lavender pillow at her side.
“I wanted to see you,” he said at last.
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
She smiled. She smoothed the smooth quilt covering.
“What is your name?”
He didn’t want to say. He didn’t want to talk to her at all, only stand there and look at her and hear her voice and smell that scent.
“I can find out,” she said.
“It’s Teige, Teige Foley.”
“Sit down, Teige.”
He did not move.
“You must do what I tell you. Sit down.”
So he sat then and placed his hands on his knees and lowered his eyes briefly from her and felt an obscure shame or guilt as though he were a thing unworthy or had brought her by deceptive means down to this earth.
“Tell me about the horses,” she said. “Have you found one for me?”
He told her he had not and she told him he must, that she would want to go riding in the summer, that friends would come visiting and he could have horses ready for them, too. She drew her knees up under the quilt. Her face shone in the candlelight. She said she had been to town that day to buy a summer dress. She thought blue suited her, but the shops were so dreadfully poor and not at all like the ones in Cork where she mostly lived.
And all that she said Teige listened to, not for its meaning but for the sound of her voice that was to him then like a charm.
“You can look at me, you know,” she said. “You can.”
And he did. He looked boldly at her eyes and her lips and the hollow of her neck and the curving li
ne of her breasts, and she turned her head slowly this way and that for his better admiration. And they stayed so that way for some hours, he seated in the chair and she laid out on the goose-feather pillow, telling him things about her taste in flowers and dresses and friends and whatnot. The candle burned low. When at last she tired, she told him that he must go now. He stood up.
“You can kiss my hand,” she said, “before I sleep.”
She offered it in the air.
“My uncle will kill you if he finds you here, you know that,” she said as he approached.
“I know that.”
Teige reached and touched her fingers and balanced them a moment on his and then bent and kissed them.
“Good night,” she said. “Go on now. Go.”
She snuffed the candle.
“You can come again,” she said, and in the sudden darkness Teige turned then and slipped away.
6
So it was that he visited her there in her bedroom every night after that. All the nights of May and into June he crossed the courtyard in the darkness and climbed onto the kitchen slates and across them to the window. The hounds no longer lifted their heads when he passed. The owls and bats that hooted and flew in the soft crepe blackness of the night knew his shadow, as did the yellow-eyed fox creeping furtively through the dark to sniff at the door of the henhouse. To all such he was as familiar as a star and crossed the night with the same mystery and resolve.
The Fall of Light Page 18