3 Great Historical Novels

by Fay Weldon

  Cailleach. Death.

  It was only a fire trick; air warped by heat. Rhia had outgrown dragons and enchantresses and vaporous creatures, and all but the most persistent ghosts. She closed her eyes; opened them. Just flames.

  She looked around for a means of escape. There was none, so she bit the garda’s hand. He tasted as bad as he looked. He bellowed and drew back his other hand, but seemed to think better of hitting her. She might be Connor Mahoney’s daughter after all. He twisted her wrist a little tighter instead, making her wince.

  ‘Why has your mam not come?’ The garda was watching her closely. Did he really think her a tinker, and if he did, then why not let her go? She just might be Connor Mahoney’s daughter.

  ‘She’s not in town.’ The rents were due and more weavers were in trouble. Brigit Mahoney’s swift, charitable hands at the loom might not save them, but, in spite of her husband’s disapproval, she wouldn’t stand by and watch another eviction. The mechanised loom might be the pride of Belfast, but it was enemy to the Greystones pieceworkers.

  Rhia suddenly remembered Tom. He could explain who she was to her captor. She scanned the crowd hopefully, but her heart sank when she saw him. Tom had joined a nearby group of spectators who were passing around a flask. The fire had drawn a sizeable crowd from the rookeries as well as from the opposite shore. It was an amusement.

  ‘Cheaper than the penny gaff,’ said the garda, following her gaze.

  The stink of charred cloth filled the air. Rhia remembered Mamo telling her that they’d used linen rags as tinder, because it burnt well. The smoke was in her eyes and lungs. She felt hollowed out. Along with the great timbers of the storehouse, she was dragon’s prey. It suddenly struck her that the assurance society’s men were not here. She elbowed the garda, who narrowed his eyes. ‘Where are the firefighters?’ she demanded.

  ‘They went home.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Building’s not insured.’

  ‘The building is insured!’

  He shrugged. His look said that biting him again was not advisable.

  It was impossible; Connor Mahoney was unerringly conscientious; fastidious, even. He would not forget to keep up the assurance payments. Rhia shook her head, disbelieving.

  Eventually, the garda eased his vice a little so his dirty nails did not bite into her flesh. Again Rhia tried to snatch her arm away; his grip tightened in response. She did not try again. The fire lessened but continued to burn through the night.

  She watched and waited as though her father’s life depended on her not taking her eyes from the flames. This time she was certain she saw Cailleach. The hag’s hair was a mantle of blazing flax, and her fiery gown trailed the ruin like the tail of the dragon. She was terrible and beautiful; her face as white as ash, her lips as red as embers.

  Was she here to take Connor Mahoney?

  ‘Bring him out or …’ What? What bargaining power could she possibly have with Death? Threaten to marry a Catholic? She almost had.

  The garda was looking at her. Had she spoken aloud? The figure vanished into the flames, leaving Rhia blinking away hot tears.

  The heat diminished and the flames settled. Darkness lifted just as suddenly, or so it seemed, and the smoking ruin was exposed. The storehouse, yesterday unyielding and constant on the waterfront, was a carcass. Bricks, timbers and thousands of pounds’ worth of new linen all reduced to a fine white dust, waiting to be carried away by the smallest breeze.

  Brigit Mahoney arrived as dawn exposed the ashen rubble. Most of the crowd had drifted away. Only vagabonds, a few sailors and the gardaí remained. Brigit embraced Rhia, but could not speak. Her face, normally so carefully composed, was creased with fear. She was almost in her fiftieth year but her features might have been carved from well-preserved wood. She seemed smaller today, her shoulders rigid.

  Brigit was looking at Rhia’s feet and Rhia followed her gaze. They looked like marble in the half-light. She had barely noticed the aching chill of them until now.

  ‘I didn’t feel the cold,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Then perhaps they are frozen. My calfskin slippers are in the carriage. There is a flask of tea.’

  Rhia returned from the carriage shod and carrying the stoneware flask. Her mother was talking quietly to the garda who had detained her. He glanced up at Rhia wearing an expression that said he believed her, now. They shared the steaming brew with the remaining men. None spoke Connor Mahoney’s name.

  They waited. No one wanted to be the first to lose hope, but there was no sign of life from the ruin, and barely a flame. ‘The lawn at the cottage is like a Persian carpet,’ Brigit whispered. ‘The pink and scarlet rose petals are scattered everywhere.’ She was trying to evoke something beautiful; to soothe them both. ‘And the leaves from the maple and the copper beech. I thought you might come with your paintbox …’ She trailed off with a choking sound, her fingers flying to her lips. Rhia followed her gaze. The body of Connor Mahoney was being carried from the skeleton of the storehouse on a makeshift bier by two gardaí. He was black as a sweep and as still as death.

  Her mother gripped her hand so hard it felt as if the bones would crack. They walked towards the bier, which was being lowered gently to the ground. Those gathered stepped back to let them pass. Connor Mahoney’s left leg was twisted so badly that it looked as though his trousers were stuffed with rags. His face was a dark mask.

  The moment was an eternity.

  Brigit sank down beside her husband and kissed his blackened lips as though they were alone together. ‘Leannán,’ she whispered, my love. Her little shoulders finally collapsed. Rhia knelt beside her.

  ‘He is alive,’ said the young garda, black from head to foot. ‘He is alive.’

  Rhia laughed and her mother wept. The garda beamed and thumped the young hero on the back, handing him the flask. The boy told them how they had passed the night. The fire started at the bottom of the building, he said, when Mr Mahoney fell down the stairs, dropping a tallow into a basket of oiled linen. In the fall he’d broken his leg, and by the time his rescuer arrived the cellar was their only hope. It was, providentially, connected to a tunnel that led deep into an old vault close by the river. A tiny vent; perhaps a rat’s entrance, had allowed them to breathe plain air when the room filled with smoke.

  The boy waved off their thanks and praise and looked uncomfortable. He did not seem to think it remarkable that he had saved a man’s life. He was merely disappointed that the flask contained tea and not whiskey.

  Someone was despatched for the infirmary coach.

  Rhia watched her mother take the coarse blanket that was offered and place it gently over her husband. She brushed his hair from his eyes, lightly, and dusted ash from his shoulders.

  The garda who had detained Rhia smiled before he walked away. She smiled back. Cailleach be damned. Tonight, after all, there had been grace.

  Flannel

  Morning sloped into the ramshackle docks. Rhia walked away from the quay as if she could leave the night behind, but its smell lingered, threaded through her hair and the wool of her hood. The infirmary coach was drawn away by four drays, carrying Brigit, pale and weary, clasping her husband’s hand. Rhia sent Tom back to St Stephen’s Green. He didn’t look well on his night of thrills and cheap potato whiskey, but she couldn’t summon the energy to reprimand him.

  The water trade started to gain momentum along the docks and she felt soothed by the commotion. She pulled her hood forwards, for invisibility, but a young fisherman still tipped his cap and grinned foolishly, following her with his eyes until she’d passed. It was hard to be invisible in a red cloak.

  She sifted through the ruins of the night. What if the garda had not found the cellar hatch? What if it had been Connor Mahoney’s time to die?

  She stopped still.

  It was Samhain. How could she have forgotten? This was the night when the dead awoke whilst the living slept. When the Others were abroad. If Cailleach had not come for her fathe
r, then for whom? She pulled her cloak closer and kept walking, faster now.

  The smell of burnt cloth seemed to be all around her. She tried not to think about all that linen turned to cinder. It was a disaster. But there was clearly some confusion about the assurance society – her father never forgot to pay his accounts.

  Their quarrel would continue to trouble her until they had made peace. They were too alike; both pig-headed. He’d usually bring home a lace fichu or a length of silk after a dispute and say that he regretted his words. Rhia would then apologise for whatever heated remarks she had made and that would be that.

  She had never wanted to marry William O’Donahue. She had sensed what kind of man he was beneath his manicured respectability; his oiled whiskers and London tailoring. But she had not sabotaged the engagement. Perhaps she should not have confided the events of that cold January night, seven years on and still so sharp in her memory and her heart; she had carried the couple’s babe to Mamo’s cottage, in awe of its wee hands. The weaver’s landlord was, like Connor Mahoney, a member of the United Irishmen; an alliance of Protestant and Catholic traders against the English stranglehold on Irish produce. She had made the man look heartless. (Never mind that he was.) She had made herself seem unattractively active. There was a difference, her father said, between being rebellious and being a rebel. Mamo had been proud of her.

  William had found the affair highly distasteful, and made it clear that his sympathy rested with the landlord, rather than the tenants. After all, they had not paid their rent for three months. In turn, Rhia made it clear that she considered him as pitiless as any man who built his fortune on the ruins of honest labour. He had looked startled to hear her disagree with him. The memory of his expression cheered her.

  The eye-watering stink of the port area made her nostalgic. As a child, she would often beg to accompany her father when he was supervising a linen shipment, and thrill to inhale the reek of wet canvas, and to get close enough to a sailor to smell the tar on his breeches and the tobacco on his breath. She loved to hear the creak of leather straps on wicker, as basket upon basket of Mahoney Linen was hoisted onto the deck of a sleek tea clipper, bound for London. The sound always sent a shiver through her; it signalled the beginning of a journey to a place so exotic and mysterious that it might as well have been the Otherworld: London. But one had to cross the Irish Sea to get there.

  The sea.

  Whenever Ryan visited Dublin, Rhia begged him for tales of the capital. London had cultivated her uncle, who had always been elegant but was now worldly and sophisticated. He made the capital sound like the most intoxicating city in the western world. Ryan would not be receiving their shipment of linen at China Wharf this season, nor finding buyers for Mahoney’s sheerest cambric or heavy damask. Irish linen was not Ryan Mahoney’s only enterprise, of course. He also imported wool from the continent, cotton from India and silk from China.

  Along the port market, Rhia took refuge in the familiar, nodding her greeting to the barrow-keepers who recognised her; guilefully dodging the vendors you could smell from a distance, their pails filled with cockles, jellied eels and herring. The everyday muddle of wastrel beggars, canny merchants and bleary-eyed passengers calmed her.

  Beyond the fishermen bartering with prostitutes, Rhia saw something that made her woes seem trifling. A line of female convicts, a queue of sagging brown flannel, shackled and surrounded by gardaí. Their pale faces stared vacantly, as though they had already departed their land and kin. Their utter hopelessness. For a moment, Rhia was one with them. The sensation was so strong that she clutched an upturned drum to steady herself. Such feelings only ever got her into trouble. She could do nothing for these women. She turned away, thinking of Michael Kelly, whose wife and son had not seen him for nearly seven years.

  She arrived at the last market stall. Nell the fryer was up to her elbows in fish scales. Her flesh wobbled from her chins to her buttocks every time she slammed a fat trout or glittering salmon down on her block. On her fire was a griddle pan and in it was a fillet of something that had, a few hours before, spent its last night swimming up the Liffey. When she noticed Rhia, Nell gave her a sparse-toothed grin and wiped her poxed hands on her apron.

  ‘Rhia, me lovely! You look half dead. Set them skinny haunches down and take a draught.’

  Rhia did as she was told, and a dish of fried whiting was slapped down in front of her. Nell cocked her large head and squinted. ‘Well, what the devil is Rhiannon Mahoney doing in the port market at sparrow’s fart?’

  Rhia burst into tears. She had been perfectly all right until she saw the women. She was quickly enfolded in Nell’s mighty bosom, which radiated fish oil and love. ‘There there, blossom. There there. Is it a blackguard? Or is it your da again?’

  Rhia took a deep draught of warm porter, and then, amidst sobs, told Nell her troubles. Nell always knew how to make things right. She was astonishingly well-informed about the world for a woman who had never left Dublin. She had survived the last epidemic of the pox, which invaded the rookeries around the port like the Norsemen, taking all of her family from her. The world came to Nell; she heard of its farthest reaches from sailors and traders, whores and thieves. Nell the fryer’s fish was legendary.

  ‘I believe the business was in need of a prosperous son-in-law,’ Rhia concluded. ‘We have less custom with each new season because we charge more than the factories. People don’t care that hand-woven linen is of better quality, they want what’s cheapest.’ This made Rhia weep all over again. She would not make such a spectacle of herself in the presence of just anyone. Better to be thought brazen than hysterical.

  Nell cocked her head the opposite way, tutted and sighed. ‘These machines will be the finish of honest labour. Take heart, blossom, bricks and cloth are easily made, but boldness is not. A lady is as limp as a dead trout without it. A lady such as yourself, with knowledge of a trade, can earn her living – husband or no – though I doubt your da would have it. Now take yourself home before your mam finds you missing. The woman has cares enough without you giving her more. But first, you finish that fish!’

  Rhia did as she was told, then she hugged Nell and left the port market.

  She took the shortest route home, behind the rookeries. A band of ragged urchins followed her until she stopped and told them that she thought them brave to be abroad so early after the night of the witches. ‘I’m on my way home from a witch’s gathering,’ she added, ‘and if you don’t leave me alone I’ll turn you all into beetles.’ They ran off laughing and squealing.

  Beyond the rookeries was the dyers’ quarter, where bolts of cloth were hung out to dry all along the alleyways: saffron, scarlet, indigo and emerald. Rhia the child had thought the dyers’ streets an enchanted forest. No one looked twice at her red cloak here. It was here that she had once imagined days as pieces in a quilt made of all colours and cloths; some days were bright and delicate, others discoloured and ruined.

  Today was dove grey, and silk. A melancholy cloth that whispered and rustled and liked to be mysterious. Who could say what it foretold.

  Yarn

  Michael Kelly pulled the brim of his hat down against the sun. Even at the end of a November day, the broad corridor of George Street was sunlit and lively. Most of the shopfronts were now shuttered, but striped awnings were hoisted at all hours here, all the days of the year. In Sydney, no draper, confectioner nor bookseller left goods displayed in their windows. Cloth faded, vendibles turned rancid and paper crisped.

  Michael had an uneasy alliance with this remote shore, his home and his prison. A man would be a fool not to hold some regard for the unseen in Australia; for ancestral heroes and sacred places. Disrespect for the wildness of the land had cost many a convict his worthless life.

  When Jarrah told him about the Altjeringa – the ‘religion’ of the original Australians – Michael was not surprised. He had felt it. The place was overrun with spirits, some freshly slaughtered and others which had apparently been
around since the world’s dawn. In this alone, Australia was like Ireland; the gods were inseparable from the land. It had taken Michael years of scrutinising Jarrah, the only Original he knew, to even begin to see it.

  The craving for home used to spoil his gut when he caught sight of the watery horizon. But now the silvery shale of Greystones and the wistful mauve of the Wicklow Hills were so remote that he barely believed they existed. Here, the beaches were met by tow-headed cliffs and laid with pale sand, and the mountains to the west looked dangerous. The sky was of a blue so striking that it seemed unreasonable such a colour should occur in nature.

  Michael couldn’t say that he’d miss Sydney, but the colony had an unexpected anarchism that he approved of. He supposed this was the natural condition of a place whose population was cobbled together from the lawless outcasts of other societies. Shackled together, he thought wryly. The place was damned beautiful, too, for a prison.

  There was a carelessness about the George Street shopgirls who jostled past him on their way to the cocoa rooms at Circular Quay. Their bare arms were linked, their hair loose and their gait typically defiant. Sweethearts were more daring here, children louder and men more violent. The public behaviour of the colonists was unique. Sydney was unlike any place Michael had known, and he’d known plenty.

  He had a lot of time, lately, for the past. It seemed to press against him with more force the closer he got to leaving. As a young, wayfaring sailor, he’d taken whatever commission he could to avoid the stationary industry of weaving. He’d seen the ports of Europe and Africa and had got as far as Bombay with sherry and tobacco from Bristol. The cargo was not for sale. Rather, it was destined for the cellars and pipes of the gentleman of the East India Company. His father called him home before he was near ready, because of a contractual arrangement with the Dublin Mahoneys. Then he met Annie. After that, Michael only went to sea in his dreams, or spinning salty tales for Thomas and young Rhia Mahoney, who begged to hear them again and again. Over the years his stories grew bigger and more embellished, but their scoundrels were usually the same – the Merchant Venturers who controlled the Bristol docks.