The Parentations

by Kate Mayfield

  We’re going to avenge these appalling acts of mtró, mordre, morðor, murdrum, myrdrian, murder.

  LONDON

  PRESENT DAY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  The skeletons of London are rising. The magnificent city is fitful as machinery peels back the pavements. Layers of soil thirty feet high are crammed rich with the dead. Centuries of forgotten graveyards and emergency burial grounds, representing the whole spectrum of society when death spread like a conflagration, are being disturbed in their overgrown, crowded loneliness. There are digs that are more haunting than others. An axe is found in a woman’s skull, and a two-thousand-year old cooking pot with the lid still intact is filled to the top with remains.

  Despite the attack on concrete, no archaeological site in London is as big and visible as the Thames foreshore when the tide is out. The relentless action of the tides has for thousands of years proven that sometimes, a thing lost might be found.

  Autumn has pushed aside summer this year, with early gusts and an overcast sky that threatens winter storms ahead. Yawning nature, weary from bloom and bursts of growth, prepares for the last note of its nocturne.

  It is past lunchtime when Constance stands in Narrow Street. The renaming of the street amuses her; it was much narrower when it was Fore Street. How small the houses seem; the rooms felt enormous when they were children. Constance’s spirits lift to see the terrace exquisitely restored. Fast and furious memories flood her and she turns away before she is completely overtaken on what may well be her last visit to this street.

  As the afternoon loses its warmth she makes for the tranquil cobblestoned streets of Wapping. Her cape flaps with each breeze as she strides past a mammoth tourist coach. Its long, wide body looks like a threatening alien on the slim, ancient street. Tourists queue at the door of a heavily visited riverside pub. While they pile in, eager for their authentic experience, Constance descends a set of algae-covered wooden steps to the foreshore. The river, swift and grey in the dying afternoon, laps and roars.

  Ominous bits of jagged glass, crockery and rusty iron lie at her feet. The spoils are never the same twice; the next time the river retreats it will deposit different offerings. Constance is here to visit the river, not its swag. It may be the last time she ever sees it, too.

  The sisters were given long life and now they must make an offering, perhaps a sacrifice. If they fail, and are unable to return, Constance wishes for something of herself to remain. What better recipient of her memento mori than the river that has defined their lives. She removes a red-velvet pouch from her bag from which she withdraws a gold locket. An eighteenth-birthday gift from Verity, it contains two locks of hair, one from each of them. It is no use offering a gift that does not strike deep chords. She steps closer to the water’s edge and tosses it in.

  Navigating the flotsam and jetsam, just as she turns her back to the river towards the stairs, her gaze falls on a tarnished, golden object. Is it the locket I just cast? she asks herself, disorientated. Has Father Thames spat it back at me? Her fingers join the grit and pebbles, animal bones and wrappers, to rescue the locket. Only when she wipes it clean does she see the shamrock engraved on the casing. Fascinated, she stops to prise it open. She reads it once, shakes her head, reads it thrice.

  Grá buan

  Averil & Francis

  Love forever

  Constance drops to her knees on the foreshore’s unkind surface. Her first thought is of Verity who will think this treasure is God’s miracle. Constance would disagree. The miracle is time.

  ‘Passports.’

  ‘Check, such as they are.’

  ‘Empty plastic travel bottles.’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘Pouches.’

  ‘Pouches?’

  ‘For the phials and bottles.’

  ‘I forgot.’

  ‘Oh, Verity.’

  ‘I’m nervous. I can’t think.’

  ‘Run to the market and buy those Chinese-silk pouches. Purchase several, we’ll place other things in them as well so that it seems like we’re women with travel phobias.’

  ‘Honestly, I don’t know what you’re talking about, travel phobias.’

  ‘Oh, just do it please.’

  It’s been a week of sleepless nights since Constance found their mother’s locket. An urgent and most distressing request from Benedikt arrived in their safety letterbox two weeks ago. There has been some relief from the crisis that has hovered over them for two years. The supply of the phials’ liquid is available once again, though limited. Of course it is good news, which they celebrated until they read on. The new problem is the logistics of the next delivery. There is no one available to travel. The letter maps out instructions for the sisters’ journey from London Heathrow to Keflavík International. Further details followed.

  Constance and Verity accepted without hesitation. They are willing to flirt with danger if it means helping Rafe, for they assume that wherever he is, he too needs the phials. And perhaps, just perhaps, this sacrifice will take them one step closer to him.

  Camden Market is at its mid-September phase. Schools are in session and people are gearing up for the heavy work period before the Christmas break. After she makes her purchases, Verity is captured within a flux of Japanese tourists in the warrens of the food stalls. Escaping to the outer food courtyard, she considers what she’ll take home for dinner when she hears the incredulity in a young woman’s voice.

  ‘Mrs Fitzgerald?’

  Verity freezes at the stranger’s call.

  ‘Mrs Fitzgerald, is that you?’

  Sometimes Verity will search faces on the streets of London and think that she recognizes them; over the years she must have seen the same faces many times. But this girl staring at her now with her mouth agape, she does not immediately recognize. What an odd girl she is, too. With a cone of chips in one hand, the other waves at her in a wild, frantic sweep. People inadvertently stand in her way as the young woman circumvents them towards Verity.

  Slowly backing away from the young woman, Verity turns a corner and wends through the stalls and out of sight. She hurries along Parkway until she’s sure she’s not been followed, and then it hits her.

  Rushing through the gate and into the house, she tosses her coat on the floor.

  ‘Constance!’

  She climbs the steps and finds her sister packing a carry-on.

  ‘You won’t believe it. You won’t believe who I just saw at the market. I couldn’t place her at first. I can’t believe it.’

  ‘Slow down.’

  ‘Oh, what’s her name … Clovis Fowler’s girl. What’s her name, Constance?’

  ‘Willa? You saw Willa? Are you sure?’

  ‘Oh yes. I am now. She called out to me. And she looked like she’d seen a ghost. I wish I’d recognized her. She must know about Rafe.’

  ‘Yes, she must. Was she on her own?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Should I go back?’

  ‘There’s no time. When we return we’ll comb the market. Did she look the same?’

  ‘In age, yes, but not in any other way. I remembered her as frightened, cowering, a nervous girl. There’s a remarkable difference. It’s probably why I didn’t recognize her right away.’

  ‘We must find her, sister.’

  ICELAND

  PRESENT DAY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  Benedikt arrives just before nightfall. The cottage rests on a quiet, peaceful plot of land that sits in The Golden Circle, near a national park in the geothermally active valley of Haukadalur. Tourists have been visiting this area of Iceland since the eighteenth century, and now holiday cottages sparsely dot the landscape, from which a constant flow of twenty-first century tourists marvel at the erupting geysers, giant waterfalls, hot springs, mud pots and steaming fumaroles. They will get themselves in all kinds of trouble. Tough men cry like babies when they watch their tents explode in the wind and learn the meaning of inhospitable. The elements wage an unforgiving perp
etual war. Calamity is a commonplace certainty. Tourist hikers have been known to have mental breakdowns. When a blizzard comes on fast and unexpectedly, they give up, lie down and prepare to die in this magical, devastatingly beautiful and savage land.

  Benedikt places his bag down in a cottage that gleams with glass and polished wood – strikingly different from the turf walls and dried sheep’s bladder windows of his childhood. He peers into the powerful telescope that faces the expanse of the surrounding vicinity, checking for intruders, or at best, lost travellers who may interrupt him. Satisfied, he promptly closes the blinds and the curtains. The Aurora Borealis will soon beckon tourists in rented cottages to their terraces, or bid them to sit indoors by their fires to gaze in wonder at the green and blue lights billowing across the sky. It’s a clear night in the season; the chances are good. Benedikt cannot risk their glancing his way.

  He builds and lights a fire and then makes his way into the bedroom where he locks the door. Benedikt’s hair, long-ish on his forehead, falls into his eyes as he removes his knitted cap. He needs a haircut.

  He begins to undress slowly, methodically. First he slips out of his jacket, then a wool jumper, a shirt, and a cotton vest. Then he unwraps the binding around his torso to reveal breasts that have been sheathed for months at a time over a period of one hundred and eighty-five years. Elísabet looks into the mirror. Her arms are slender, yet incredibly muscular and strong. Her breasts are still firm, her face is unlined, and yet her eyes, wise with age stare back at her.

  A long scar runs from her right shoulder, midway down her arm, a reminder of the knife fight between the first two would-be abductors. The first men she had killed. There were others – men and women who came too close to the truth, all of whom threatened to harm her son, to harm them all.

  Elísabet and Stefán had entered the most elaborate and painstakingly devised plan. She trained her body and her mind the first six months of her baby’s life, almost to destruction. Forever adjusting, living through the years like a streak of quiet lightning, constantly responding to legions of alerts, and training, always more training to remain a step ahead, to be stronger and rise to the impossible demand to occupy several places at once. The physical pain she could endure. The emotional pain nearly broke her. The only semblance of peace she possessed during her long saga of protection was the nine years Rafe lived with the sisters Fitzgerald. And even those years, when her son was cradled in love and devotion, the Copenhagen enemies nearly snatched him away. Everything turned black after Clovis reclaimed Rafe from Constance and Verity Fitzgerald.

  When she received the sisters Fitzgerald’s letter that confirmed her suspicion of the cruelty her young son suffered, she became a machine. She no longer knew herself and was determined to end the whole charade. Stefán talked her out if it, reminding her that if the Falk family ever captured Rafe he would suffer far worse.

  Then the intricate system of retrieving and delivering the pool’s resources almost collapsed. Ever since the 2010 eruptions of the volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, and the subsequent ash clouds that disrupted air space across western and northern Europe; its effect on the pool that holds the life-giving water has been devastating. It has been nearly dry for six years. Though Stefán and the others had prepared for such circumstances, the supplies grew low as their population increased. A few more innocents have stumbled upon the pool in much the same way Elísabet and Jon had. Stefán now regrets the extra phials he’d released to appease and occupy Clovis. He was never in any fear that the liquid or Rafe’s sweat could be replicated, but he agonizes that he has been wasteful.

  It is long after midnight. The sky-watchers have grown weary from waiting for a multi-coloured sky that never appears. A four-wheel-drive jeep pulls up to the cottage. Elísabet hears Stefán’s keys in the locks.

  ‘Elísabet!’

  ‘In here.’

  Stefán embraces her.

  ‘I don’t like putting the Fitzgeralds in danger, so many things could go wrong, but I think it’s the right decision. I can’t safely make the journey back to London if my long sleep is on schedule.’

  Stefán does not respond, and Elísabet pulls back from him.

  ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ she asks him.

  ‘Ask me what’s right. Ask me what has finally happened to make things right.’

  ‘I love you, but I’m tired, and in no mood for riddles.’

  Stefán embraces her again. He’s warm, slightly fevered.

  ‘I’m just back from Copenhagen.’ He holds her firmly at arm’s length, as if he expects her to collapse. ‘Elísabet, there are no more Falks.’

  ‘No more Falks …’ she repeats, as if in a trance.

  ‘They have completely died out.’

  Now it registers and her knees buckle.

  ‘Here, sit down, Elísabet.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  He laughs. ‘How do I know? I’ve only been tracking them for almost two hundred years.’

  ‘I can’t believe it. We knew they were slowly dying out, but I thought … aren’t there two young cousins? Do you know what happened to them?’ She reasons breathlessly.

  ‘Iceland drowned them. There were four cousins, the photos … they were hunting in the east. Reindeer.’

  ‘Trophy hunting? You’re kidding.’

  ‘I’m not. And apparently, according to ICE-SAR, either one or two of them fell into a pool at the bottom of a deep ravine. SAR thinks that the other two died trying to rescue them. All four corpses were recovered and identified.’

  ‘And you’re positive they were the last of the line? What about any who’ve gone completely underground? There are no women?’

  ‘It’s possible, but no, none that we’ve discovered.’ He brushes her hair from her eyes. ‘We’ll need to remain vigilant for a while longer, and of course I’ll continue to search.’

  ‘Does this mean …’ She begins to pace. ‘Can I allow myself to think that …’

  ‘Yes, darling Elísabet. Yes. But first, we must deal with Clovis.’

  There is no time for lovemaking tonight. Elísabet and Stefán begin making calls to the others in their group. Now it is time to unravel past deeds, time to shift whatever goodness is left in the world to those who deserve it.

  LONDON & ICELAND

  PRESENT DAY

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  Ava Fitzgerald eases out of the small driveway at Lawless House.

  ‘You really don’t need to come with us,’ Constance says. ‘It will ruin you if we’re caught travelling with fake passports.’

  ‘I will not allow my favourite aunts to go on such a mission alone. And anyway, yours are fake, not mine.’

  ‘Don’t you trust us?’

  ‘I trust you, but not the circumstances. Let’s go over the questions. What is our reason for visiting?’

  ‘We’re on holiday,’ the sisters answer, simultaneously.

  ‘Right. And how long are we staying?’

  ‘Ava. Everything is in hand. It will be all right.’ Constance puts on a show of confidence.

  As the Audi hums down the M4, the sisters can’t quite believe they and their niece are leaving the country. Though they know the inevitable outcome, the sisters have formed a deep attachment to the long line of Fitzgeralds who have looked after them. With each of their deaths has come the brutal reminder that a natural lifespan is breathtakingly short. They are observers with a prison-like view, from where they repeatedly witness the life cycle of those they love, with all its promise, its countless choices and decisions, until one day, half a life is gone. There is something special about Ava. In the succession of male Fitzgeralds who had cared for them through the years no one had ever asked them what it was like to live for so long. Perhaps they were frightened, or even secretly repelled by the sisters’ reality. Not Ava. They had the distinct feeling that Ava would leap at the chance and embrace the condition if given a choice. They cannot bear to think of her impermanence. The sisters often speak of it in
midnight whispers.

  At check-in, the ticket agent asks Verity to remove her sunglasses, which rattles her a bit, but after she complies the first hurdle is completed without a hitch and the three women relax somewhat.

  After they board, the sisters are quiet, disorientated by their first experience of air travel. The roar of the engines that will transport them to another country in merely hours flusters them. They hold hands like two children, noses to the window, drawn to the blanket of clouds and their first view of the earth from above.

  Just over three hours later they arrive at passport control at Keflavík International Airport. They wheel their carry-on luggage to the Kaffitár coffee kiosk, where they are due to meet their contact. No sooner have they parked themselves near the kiosk when an attractive middle-aged woman walks towards them in an unassuming manner. With a pointed and friendly smile, she offers her hand.

  ‘My name is Margrét. Welcome to Iceland.’

  As they walk to the car park, Margrét asks, ‘Any problems travelling? Any at all?’

  ‘No. None. Thank goodness,’ Ava answers.

  ‘You were not followed at any time?’

  ‘Not that we’re aware.’

  Less than a five-minute drive later they arrive at one of the airport hotels.

  Margrét leads them to a large suite in which she has already checked in.

  ‘Please. Make yourselves comfortable. I’ll order coffee and something to eat. You must be famished now that the first leg of your journey is complete.’

  While they revive with strong coffee, a selection of smoked fish and bread and butter, Margrét explains that the package will be delivered to the room soon. It is the first mention of it.

  Constance will go on to remember clearly the moment she heard the hotel room door’s lock click open.

  A man and a woman enter the room. The woman removes her knitted cap.