He saw her. She wore a dress of pale blue that touched the ground. She carried above her head a parasol and crossed slowly to the stables. There she stopped not ten feet from him and made to look in on one of the other horses stabled there.
“Are you going to say hello to me?” she said at last. She had not turned. She was hidden beneath the parasol and studying the gelding that had come forward for her touch.
Teige stood. He looked across the yard, but there were only the hens in retreat. He turned back to the door of the mare’s stable and stood and looked within.
“You heard I am married now?” she asked him, still not showing her face.
“I did,” he said. His voice was low, his breath seemed to move through ashes.
She reached her right hand and touched the long face of the gelding.
“And what do you think?” she said.
“I have to tend to the mare, that’s what I think,” he said then, and opened the door and stepped into the darkness.
“Teige?”
He heard her say his name, but he did not answer. He took brushes from where they lay in the straw and with swift, arcing motion set about grooming the horse. When he paused later he listened and then came up to the door and looked outside and she was gone.
That night he lay in the straw and could not sleep. He watched the occluded moon cross the partly clouded sky. He heard owls and bats and others nocturnal traverse the dark. The mare shuddered in dream and lifted her hind hoof sometimes and stamped as if in crude imitation of one demonic. Then she stilled again and her breathing resumed its slow and steady heave, filling and venting the vastness of her chest in rhythm hypnotic. Mice myriad and minute scuttered over the stones, vanished into the walls and under the doors. Teige rose and walked out. The vaulted hood of stars glittered in revealed fragments as the clouds passed. Cassiopeia shone her tale of tragedy to all that might read it there, but Teige did not delay. He crossed the yard and by instinct and memory moved to the shadows beneath the wall. He pressed himself close to these and followed their line around by the house. He did not see the red-haired fellow that saw him. He came around by the kitchen and found then the holds between the stones for his fingers and climbed up onto that first low roof. He crouched low and was a shadow and again did not see the shadow of the youth below in his wake. He came to the window and found the sash partly raised. He lifted it with two hands then and waited to still his breath before he stepped inside onto the floorboards of the hallway.
All was an umbrageous hush. Ghosts and their shades ambled and paused momentarily, quizzical and looking askance to see one living among them. Then, in the grave and somnolent manner of their kind, they passed onward and were as shadows as they went about their ceaseless business in the halls of that old house. Teige stood and listened, the dreaming and the dead alike making the softest sounds. Then he stepped forward barefoot and with hands out as if to fend off attack or to balance on a rope. He came to the door of the room where she had slept before and he pressed his ear against it and could not hear the breath of any. Slowly he squeezed the handle around and opened it inches and then he leaned in and saw that the bed was empty. He blew a long, thin breath and tried again to still himself, and while he did he passed through brief, sharp agonies of indecision familiar to all such lovers, and then he went down the hall to the next door. He listened. She was not there. He went on, around the turn of the corridor, emboldened now and grown more reckless as he proceeded. The floorboards creaked, ghosts and dust and dreams astir. He came to a door then and stopped and knew that she was within. He tried to still himself. Then he reached and opened the door.
There were shadows on the bed. The darkness was jumbled with shapes and shades, tones grey and pewter. Teige stood, strange like a creature incorporeal. He waited, attendant on some discovery and incipient disaster, and with the passing of each moment could not quite believe that none came. Slowly the shadows assembled and were the shapes of a man and woman sleeping. He moved a step closer and could see her then where she lay with the man’s arm outstretched across her, a pale raised line like the weal of a scar. Teige moved again and this time knelt down on one knee and was close enough now to be enveloped in the smells of her. Her face in sleep was calm and very beautiful and Teige studied it then without haste or anxiety, as if the progress of all time had since ceased and such perusal were his business eternal. Then she moved and the man’s arm moved and she pressed her head back and angled in the pillow and showed the line of her neck that was fine and white like a fabulous bird’s and Teige reached and touched it.
Elizabeth opened her eyes. She opened them quickly and wide as if seeing a vision, though yet she did not seem to be seeing at all. There was a brief hiatus, a frozen instant. Teige’s fingers touched her lips and her eyes turned to look at him. The man beside her sighed like a sea cavern. None moved. Then very slowly Teige got up and her eyes followed him and he stepped a step back from her and another and all the time she watched him. He came to the room door and reached and opened it and already she was easing herself from the body that lay by her. Teige stepped outside into the corridor and turned and pressed himself flat against the wall and tried to draw his breath.
“You’re mad.”
She closed the door. Her voice was a whisper and when he heard it he wanted to hear more.
“You will be killed. You know that?”
He said nothing. His eyes studied her.
“They will take you out in the fields somewhere and…” She stopped. Something in her wavered as though in a sudden warp of heat.
Teige reached and kissed her mouth and laid his palm against the side of her neck. They stopped and she looked at him and then kissed again and were one twisting shape among the shadows and the soft ghosts and silent dust that assembled there.
5
In the dawn when Clancy came to him, Teige was lying awake in the straw of the stable. Neither man spoke but went at once as if by mute accord and brought out the horse and stood her briefly in the yard. The day was thickly clouded as if there were no heavens. The air smelled cool and damp and flies were not yet abuzz. The horse’s eyes studied with long, slow circumspection the horsecart in which she was to be loaded. She had never yet travelled so, but it was the squire’s belief and shared with others of his kind that the exertion of the ride over to the east to the stallion would weaken the possibility of a strong issue. So Clancy said. She must be loaded and brought. In the thin light then Teige and Clancy set about it. A line was run from the horse’s halter on up the gangway and into the cart with high creels. Clancy took this and led it through the top bar and waited for Teige to begin to coax her on. But the moment the horse felt the tension on the line she pulled back with her head and took two steps backward and Clancy tugged at the rope harder and called out a curse. The cobbles of the yard rang out with the sharp clopping of hooves. The fellow Pyle appeared with tousled hair and looked at Teige with crooked grin. Clancy shouted to him to get behind her and urge her forward, which business he set about in a manner wild and mad. But Teige already knew that it was hopeless. As if it travelled along the very rope, fear reached every sinew of the horse. She backed and shook and twisted her head about, thrashing the rope line sideways, for all the world as if she were some fabulous marine creature hooked on a fishing line descended from above in the realm of the gods.
“Stop, leave off,” Teige said. And the tension on the rope slackened and he undid it and let it fall to the ground. “Get off, go away from there,” he told Pyle, and the youth scowled and scratched at his freckles and did not move back.
“Do it!” Clancy shouted.
“But I’m coming to—”
“Go away!” Clancy roared.
Pyle stepped back then and his eyes narrowed and then were lost beneath the falling fringe of his hair.
Teige turned the horse about then so she was headed in the direction opposite to the gangway. He stroked her neck and spoke to her and felt the heat in her body. Then
he ran his hand firmly down the length of her long face and stopped and with one hand held there across her nose and the other flat against her flank, he coaxed her backward. She stepped a step and then another. When her hoof reached the wooden planks she hesitated only for a moment, then clattered up backward with Teige holding her so. She was loaded. Clancy came about and swung up and closed the cart. He did not say anything to Teige.
“Am I not coming?” Pyle asked.
“You are not,” Clancy told him. “Do you think I want her maddened? You will clean out the stalls.” The fellow’s face crumpled into a sour twist.
Clancy climbed up and sat beside Teige and they drove the cart away down the avenue.
In slow, rocking motion, the cart pulled by two black horses and labouring on all hills almost to the pace of walking, they passed out through the town of Kilrush and eastward along the road to Ennis. They travelled past wild brown boglands and small roadside cottages with doors open and dark, dim interiors whence the face of a man or woman peered like an animal frightened. Blackbirds flew up and landed. Smaller birds there were none. Long tracts of the road were empty of all living. There were many cottages ruined, thatch torn down or tumbled inward and standing now with roofs gaping, strange and sad in the aftermath of famine. At a place where green fields opened to the south, Clancy passed Teige the reins and rummaged in a bag and brought out hunks of bread and a stoppered jug of milk. They did not stop as they ate. The morning came up over them, the sky grey and sunless. At the town of Ennis a shower of rain fell and stopped and then came again and continued falling. They passed on, as if veiled within it. The backs of the horses shone. The road, softening beneath them, tuned the pitch of their clopping a semitone lower.
At that town they drew the attention of many. Some who were stopped in doorways studied them like a show. Small children, boys and girls alike, ran along in the rain and shouted and tried to hit with sticks the sides of the creels. Clancy swung a short whip backhanded toward them in warning and Teige stood up and turned back and tried to soothe the horse. But soon the children slowed of their own accord and stood in the rain and faded off, mucked and white-faced and melancholic as some dwindling image whose meaning was potent but hard to fathom. The rain thickened. The road east took them out of the town and soon they were again without company on the long brown ribbon bordered by green. The land was still and the cattle within it stood in the falling rain. Berry bushes dripped in the hedgerows. The flowers of the fuchsia hung and fell red and purple on the roadside.
They passed on. In the pallid light of that afternoon they came to the place where the stallion was at stud. When they passed through the gateway the mare lifted her head and neighed and moved about in the narrow confines of the cart.
“Stop here,” Teige said. They were the first words he had spoken in some hours. Clancy did as he was told. The cart stopped and Teige got down and walked along by the side of it and spoke up to the mare. Then he went on ahead into the yard and across to the stable, where already the stallion was turning and making long, ratcheted sounds to be released. There was a man there with eyes he opened wide every second, as if a reverse of blinking. Teige looked in at the stallion.
“You’ll take him out? And be able to hold him?” he asked the man.
The fellow widened his eyes. “I will.”
“Wait until I say. I’ll close over the gate.”
Teige went then and brought out the mare on a line and told Clancy to shut the gate between her and the stallion. And when this was done he called up to the other and told him to bring out the stallion, and soon both horses were frisking on lines either side of the shut gate. He backed the mare then to the gate and held her there and let the stallion approach and take the smell of her and raise his head as if savouring it and twist it about thrice in the heavy rain air. He came to her and his nostrils widened and his sex rose and he pressed and angered at the gate impatiently, and still the man held him. The mare did not kick back as was her won’t.
“Let her through to him now!” the man called. “I won’t be able to hold him.”
“No, hold him, wait. Wait.”
Teige took the mare then and turned her away and walked her in a small muddy circle there where she could see the stallion. He held her back when she would have stepped forward. The rain ran on his face.
“Now, now open the gate,” he called, and Clancy stepped across and did so and the stallion came forward, pulling the man with the wide eyes like some minor nuisance. Then the two horses passed alongside each other and the mare tried to bite and her teeth showed in the air and each neighed aloud and Teige called out for the ropes to be loosened. Then, with the men standing muted about them in the pouring rain, and holding the long lines limp, the stallion mounted the mare and became briefly a thing colossal, high and muscled and shuddering as if with the charged currency of the earth itself.
In moments it was over. The men came to and sharply reined the horses apart and with swift economy of movement brought each back to the places of their confinement. The mare was backed up the platform and it was raised with a clatter and shut. The stallion, subdued and dull-eyed, was led inside the stable and the door bolted. Clancy went off to the house with the other man and performed what matters of business were required. Teige waited. He looked at the mare, tranquil now, her coat damply matted, and the coupling already passed like some figment into the deeps of her memory. If there was such, Teige thought. If it’s not just of then, done, and then gone. The rain fell. He waited. No sound came from either horse.
When at last Clancy came out he had the flushed cheeks of strong whiskey and his eyes were brightened like glass polished. He climbed up on the cart and told Teige he was good, by God, he was good, and they would stop and get a drink to celebrate. They would, so they would. He clucked at the horses and they wheeled about and out of there. A short time later they came to the town of Killaloe on the banks of the river. The rain stopped then and the place hung in sorry wet aftermath like a child half-drowned. Clancy looked along the street for a place suitable to their needs. No sooner had he found one than there appeared a small boy ready to hold the horses and keep all safe while the men went inside. Teige and Clancy got down, and Clancy gave the boy something. Already there was a little cluster of some too proud to be called beggars who assembled to beg there. They stood in the men’s way with no menace, but urgent persistence. Their begrimed hands opened, palm upward like rough petals. Their clothes steamed a strong sour odour that was the perfume of rain and sweat and poverty. They offered prayers and blessings and intercession with saints of all name and manner and appeals to the Virgin herself for the cause of the good travellers. As if wading in murk, Clancy raised his arms above them and tried to move forward. He saw the doorway where he was headed and pushed toward it, parting the beggars and telling them he had nothing for them. He did not look back at Teige behind him. He did not see how they gathered about the younger man, and how Teige stopped there.
Teige stopped and his mouth opened and he felt himself weaken as though a surfeit of air had arrived in his lungs or he were suddenly out of his element. His hand outstretched was taken by one of the hands offered to him. Others joined this and took him gently. He near staggered but did not and yet seemed almost asway as he came forward. His expression was of one caught and transported in revelation even there on the grey wet street of that town. The look of his eyes must have bespoken something or resembled a beam, for the little crowd followed the gaze and turned and saw at whom he was staring.
It was a woman, one amongst them, who hung back and waited on the side of the street. She was wrapped in a shawl and stood with patience and a faraway look. She did not turn her face to see Teige coming to her. She did not lift her eyes from the scene infinite in distance upon which her mind gazed. He came to her and the little crowd of the others came with him. Some held his sleeve, others the hem of his jacket, but none said anything now. Dreamlike, as if the moment did not exist but must be lived anyway,
Teige reached the woman and stood before her, and a cry escaped from deep in his throat and seemed to buckle him. For he fell down onto his knees and then reached up and touched the face of the blind woman who was his mother.
6
And some time then in the darkness of the night many miles away, Finbar Foley woke and felt the left side of his body was dead. Beneath the covers he reached across himself and with his right arm made short, tapping motions as if to gently awaken the part that was numb. When this failed his actions grew more urgent, and Cait woke in the bed beside him to find him beating at his left breast with his fist.
“God almighty, what are you doing?” she said.
“Half of me is dead,” Finbar told her, and no sooner had he uttered the words than their reality struck him and he let out a sharp cry and stopped still.
The Fall of Light Page 28