by Hannah Kent
‘Oh, you’re a wonderful great man, taking our money and counting out sins in exchange, and not letting an honest woman have her bit in return for all the good she does.’
‘I’ve tried to do right by you, Nance Roche. I came here to lead you to the better path. But if ’tis stubborn you are, I would see you leave this place.’
‘The people would not let you drive me out. They need me. You will see that they need me.’
‘Well, now. I don’t think it will go well with you, Nance Roche, despite what you think.’ The priest ducked his head under the cabin door and strode to his donkey, which was grazing beside the woods. Nance followed, watching as he mounted and gave it a hearty kick with his heels. He looked back at her as he rode towards the lane. ‘Go on, Nance. Stop it with the keening and the fairy talk. You want a long spoon when supping with the Devil.’
PART TWO
A Mouth of Ivy, A Heart of Holly
Beul eidhin a's croidhe cuilinn
1825–1826
CHAPTER
SIX
Nettle
December arrived and bled the days of sunlight, while the nights grew bitter, wind-rattled. The water that pooled outside beneath the doorstep was tight with ice by morning and starlings lit upon the thatched roofs of the valley, circling the smoking chimney holes for warmth.
Micheál became restless in the cold. When the heat of the fire died away at night and the chill crawled into the room, he woke Mary with whimpers, arms jerking, fingernails sharp in her back like a kitten fighting a sack and a swift-flowing river.
Anxious to warm him, Mary wrapped him in their blanket, pressed his pointed chin to her shoulder and, sitting up, lumbered his shivering bones against her chest until he surrendered to fatigue. Sometimes she traced his eyebrows and the delicate skin of his eyelids with a gentle fingertip to encourage him to close his eyes, or opened the front of her clothes to place his cheek on the bare skin of her neck and reassure him with her warmth. She fell asleep with him upon her chest, slumped against the wooden corner of the settle, and would wake in the grey of morning with a stiff neck and her legs dead and unfeeling.
She had never felt so tired. Mary had thought that the winter days, with their lull in labour and their quiet, unfriendly weather, would be easeful after her term of working through harvest. Those days had been unceasing. She had fetched and flailed and stooped until she felt she would die, until she was spangled with chaff and her hands bled from handling flax. But the child exhausted her in a different way. He tortured her with constant, shrill needfulness. Sometimes it seemed that he screamed his throat raw and no amount of soothing would quiet him. She fed him and he ate like the starved, swallowing thick mouthfuls of potato mixed with milk, and yet he was as thin as winter air. He would not let her sleep the night through. Mary woke every morning with her body aching to rest, her limbs cramping from long hours of holding the boy close to her, her eyes as raw as if someone had tried to pluck them from their sockets. She would stumble in the half-light to uncover the embers from their blanket of ash and set water to boil, before lurching into the shocking blue of the yard, the air so cold it seized her lungs.
Her one moment of peace each morning was in the cramped, shit-stained byre, when she was able to lean her forehead against the dusty comfort of the cow and milk her, singing old songs to calm herself and the animal. Sometimes she cried from weariness, without caring. She pressed her face into the cow’s belly and felt her eyes grow hot with tears, and as her fingers encouraged the teats, she let her song give way to sobs. The milk hardly came, no matter the sound from her.
Ever since the visit from the widow’s son-in-law, Nóra had withdrawn into herself. Mary knew she had spoken out of turn, had let the fear of being cornered by the women at the well have the run of her mouth. As soon as she had spoken in the doorway she had flinched at her own accusation. She had thought she would be sent back to Annamore with empty pockets. But Nóra had simply looked at her with the preoccupied, inward stare of someone who is told there is a ghost in the room. The man, Tadgh, had reacted even more strangely. He had gazed at Mary with curiosity, then reached out and touched her hair, stroking the cropped ends between his fingers as though she was an angel and he could not decide whether to kiss or fight her. Then, just as quickly, he had recoiled. ‘May the Good Lord protect you,’ he had said to her before stepping out into the pale afternoon and stumbling down the lane, a hand over his mouth. He had not looked back and they had not seen him since.
Nóra, Mary noticed, had watched this without feeling. After Tadgh left, she had sat still and breathed deeply and steadily, as if asleep. Then she had beckoned Mary to the fire. ‘Sit down.’ When Mary had hesitated, Nóra’s voice became edged with impatience. ‘Sit down.’
As Mary sat on the creaking straw-seat, Nóra had fossicked in the nook of the hearth. Mary heard the squeak of a cork being pulled from a bottle, and when Nóra brought her forearm to the wall to hide her face, Mary had guessed she was drinking.
‘People are calling Micheál a changeling, are they?’ She turned and her eyes were bleary.
‘They were speaking of him as changeling at the well.’
Nóra had begun to laugh in a wild panic, like a woman who finds a lost child and is split by anger and relief. Mary watched as Nóra bent over, shaking, tears spilling from her eyes. Micheál, attracted by the noise, had squealed, mouth wide. His shrieks brought her flesh out in goosebumps.
It was all too strange. The sight of Nóra laughing when there was nothing but dread, heavy and rolling in her stomach, made Mary’s heart thud. She had been brought into a home where everything was on the point of collapse, where ill fortune and sorrow had eaten into the timber of this woman and she was breaking down in front of her. Unsettled, Mary had wrapped her shawl about her head and had gone out to sit in the byre.
Mary had stayed beside the comforting warmth of the cow until the day faltered and she could hear the wind whistling through the stone wall. She wished that she could leave the widow to her mad laughter, and walk the rocky road back to Annamore that night. Were it not for the thought of her empty-bellied brothers and sisters, and the weariness pulling at the corners of her mother’s mouth, she would have walked the whole night long to return home.
When she went back inside, Nóra had acted as though nothing had happened. She asked Mary to begin preparing their dinner and had sat with her knitting, fingers plying the needles furiously. Only once did she raise her head and address Mary, her face inscrutable. ‘Briseann an dúchas trí chrúba an chait. The true nature of the cat shows in the way it uses its claws.’
‘Yes, missus,’ Mary had replied. She had not known what the woman meant by the proverb, but it seemed ominous and had not comforted her.
Since then, neither of them had spoken of Tadgh’s visit, nor the gossip at the well, nor what had happened after, although Mary thought that Nóra was not as attentive to Micheál as before. More and more it fell to her to bathe and feed him and to rise in the night to console him from the unseen terrors plaguing his soft, mysterious mind. Mary became used to the shadows that emerged in the ill-lit witching hours. She woke and tended the child like a mourner over a corpse.
One night, rasping awake at Micheál’s scraping cry, Mary wriggled away from his grasping arms and buried her head under the rag-pillow, too tired to sit and warm him or rub the soles of his feet. She fell back into the blissful arm of sleep, until the smell of sour piss roused her and she woke to soaked hay, the boy wet-backed and freezing beside her, screaming like the murdered.
It had become cold in Nance’s bothán. In the late autumn days she had spent many hours gathering what fuel for her fire she could find, cutting the prickled gorse from the mountain slopes and wild land with a black-handled knife and taking what dung had not already been gathered from the fields by the children. Some of the valley folk had brought her small baskets of turf in exchange for
her cures, but she knew those few, precious scraws would not be enough to last her the winter. The cold would stalk her, threaten her, if she did not find some way to keep her fire alive through the months of biting wind. Always, the need to find ways to survive. No lingering children to take care of her. No parent living to help. Every year, this battle to keep on. Every year the fight to remain. It wearied her.
When did I become so old? Nance wondered as she huddled over her fire. My bones are becoming as fluted and hollow as the skeletons of birds.
How slippery time had become. When she was younger the days had seemed unceasing. The world had felt infinitely full of wonder.
Yet the more she aged, the more the mountains shrank against the sky. Even the river seemed colder than when she first arrived in the valley, those twenty years ago. Seasons came and went with staggering swiftness.
Nance remembered the woods of Mangerton when she was small. Walking through them with her cans of goat milk and poitín for the tourists, and the hard, clinking purse she brought back to the grateful hand of her father, she had felt that she was a child of the trees. The moss on the forest floor comforted her bare feet, and she had felt protected by the canopy of leaves, had felt the wind to be a voice that rushed through her hair for no other purpose than to speak to her alone. How well she had known God, then. How unknotted her soul. How easy to be.
Nance remembered walking the mountain, plucking snagged wool from the thorns of briars and gorse, waiting for ponies carrying tourists on their way to the Devil’s Punch Bowl, only to be overwhelmed by the beauty of the sun lighting on the water of the lakes. Lough Leane golden, and the surrounding mountains bearing down in holy indigo. The shifting, unfurling clouds passing the sun like pilgrims past a saint. Nance remembered walking, only to be winded by the grace of the world.
‘Why are you crying?’ her father had asked her once, caulking his boat on the shore of the lough.
How old had she been? The summer before Maggie came with her herbs and visitors and mysterious ways of being. A child still. A bud unblossomed. A lifetime ago.
‘Nance? Why are you crying?’
‘Because everything is too beautiful.’
Her father had understood the profundity of her love. ‘Nature is at her best in the morning and the evening. Sure, ’tis no bad thing to cry over. Most people go through their days without ever acknowledging her.’
Perhaps it was then that he began to teach her the language of the sky with his boatman’s eye for weather. Before the slow disappearing of her mother, before Maggie came, when they were all together and they were whole and well.
‘The world isn’t ours,’ he said once. ‘It belongs to itself, and that is why it is beautiful.’
It was her father who had showed her the high mackerel clouds that brought rain and fish, and the deceitful emptiness of summer days which hid the sign of storms at night. The sky, he taught her, could be an ally, a messenger of warning. When it brought them the wheeling screams of seagulls, they knew not to stray too far from shore or cabin.
Sometimes, before the gentle-blooded tourists flocked to spend their money on the strawberry girls like Nance and boatmen like her father, and jarveys to the crumbling Muckross Abbey with its towering heart of yew, or when her mother had suffered through another terrible night, her father took her out onto the lakes and bid her look up.
‘Can you see the clouds there, Nance?’
Nance remembered lifting her face to the sky, squinting against early sun.
‘What do you make of them? Are they not like a goat’s beard? A combed goat’s beard?’
Even now, she could almost smell the clay and water.
‘Do you see where the beard turns black, there?’ He would haul an oar into the boat and raise his arm. ‘That’s where the wind’ll be coming from today. Faith, a strong wind. And that black tip of his beard is full of rain. What do you think we’re after doing with a beard such as that in the sky?’
‘I think we should be going home.’
‘That goat will bring us no good. No gentlemen and their ladies today. Let’s get back to your mam.’
He had loved the lakes, her father. And the sea. Raised near Corca Dhuibhne, he had spoken of the ocean as some men speak of their mothers – with reverence and a great, choking love. ‘When good weather is on its way, the sea will make a sweet and quiet sound. The sea will be settled and calm and you may trust in her. But gannets in the harbour in early morning and you know she’s warning you to leave her alone. The cormorant on his rock shows you the wind and, depending on where he is facing to, where it is likely to come from.
‘Most people don’t see the world. But you’ve got the eye, I think, Nance. You’ve got the eye.’
There was a cough at the door and Nance started. The fire had gone out and there was a man standing on her threshold. She had not heard him approach.
‘Who’s there?’ Nance croaked, bringing her palms to her cheeks. They were wet. Had she been crying?
‘’Tis Daniel Lynch, Nance.’ He sounded nervous. ‘I’ve come to see you about my wife, Brigid.’
Nance peered in the low light and saw the young man who had been smoking at the wake of Martin Leahy.
‘Brought you a hen,’ he said, nodding to the struggling chicken he held pinned under his arm. ‘She’s stopped laying, but I thought it might be good for your pot. I didn’t know . . .’
‘That’s kind.’ Nance beckoned him in with a trembling finger. ‘Come in, son, come in and God welcome.’
Daniel ducked his head under the door and Nance noticed him take in the small cabin with its tethered goat, the drain of waste and the dead fire in front of her. He pulled the chicken out from under his arm and offered it to Nance, holding it by its legs. The bird flapped, sending the bunches of herbs swaying on their strings.
‘Set her on the floor, there, good man. She can stretch her legs. Grand so.’ Nance prodded at the fire and blew on the embers. ‘Would you pass me some of that dried furze? Ah, I thank you. So, you’ve come about your young wife, your Brigid. The one with child. Is she in good health?’ Nance nudged a stool towards Daniel and he sat down.
‘She is. Only . . .’ He let out a short laugh, embarrassed. ‘I don’t really know why I’m here. ’Tis nothing, only the little woman’s taken to walking at night. In her sleep.’ He watched the hen jump the drain and begin to scratch in the hay.
‘Walking at night, is she? Not a thing for a woman in her state to be doing. Will you have a drink?’ Nance reached for an empty piggin and poured out a liquid, tinctured yellow, from a pot near the fire.
Daniel regarded the cup with a frown. ‘What’s this, then?’
‘’Tis a cold tea. ’Twill calm you.’
‘Oh, I don’t have a need for calming,’ Daniel said, but he took a tentative sip. ‘It tastes like weeds.’
‘Go on, Daniel. Tell me about your Brigid.’
‘I don’t like to make a fuss, only, begod, ’tis a strange thing she’s doing and I have no wish for people to talk of it.’
‘You say she’s walking in her sleep.’
He nodded. ‘A few evenings back I woke in the night and she wasn’t to be seen. Her side of the bed was cold empty. My brother sleeps by the fire and we have the wee room to ourselves. Well, I woke up and thought to myself, “She’s maybe after getting a sip of water,” and so I waited. But a good time crept past and there was no sign of her. I went out and there’s my brother, sound asleep, except the door is wide open and there’s a fierce cold coming in. I look for Brigid’s cloak and ’tis there, where she normally sets it on the rafter, but her shawl is missing. Well, I was frightened for her then. I didn’t know if someone had taken her, or what. You hear stories . . .’ His voice broke off and he took another sip of tea. ‘I woke my brother and asked him had he seen her and he hadn’t. So we set out to look for her and thank God for the
bright moon! After a time we find her shawl lying on the ground and perhaps we walk on for another mile, and I see a flash of white, and . . .’ Daniel frowned, pulling at his lip. ‘Well, ’twas her. Lying down, asleep.’
‘She was safe, then.’
‘That’s why I thought to come see you, Nance. She wasn’t just lying any place. She was asleep in the cillín. Near the fairy ráth. Hardly a stone’s throw from where we’re sitting now.’
Nance felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. The cillín was a small triangle of land next to the fairies’ whitethorn. The grass grew long there, around a standing stone guarded by a ragged copse of holly trees. The thin slab of rock stood perpendicular to the soil like a tombstone, the vestige of an etched cross upon its surface. Surrounding it, like stars without pattern, were white stones marking where clusters of limbo-bones lay in the soil. Sometimes the people of the valley buried unwed mothers there, and sometimes those who had died in sin. But mostly the cillín was for children. Stillborns. It was not a place people visited unless they had an unchristened baby to bury.
‘The cillín?’
Daniel rubbed at the stubble on his chin. ‘You see now why I’ve come? She was lying there amongst the stones. Amongst all the poor dead, buried babies. I thought she was dead herself until I shook her awake. I’ve heard of folk that do be wandering in their sleep. But to a cillín?’
‘Who knows of this?’
‘Not a soul besides my brother, David, and myself. And I made him swear to keep it quiet. ’Tis the kind of thing to get tongues moving faster than a middleman to tithe day. Especially with all the goings-on in this place.’
‘Tell me. What goings-on?’
Daniel grimaced. ‘I don’t know, Nance. There’s just an uneasy feeling about the place. Cows are not giving the milk they once did.’ He pointed at the chicken fussing in the straw. ‘Hens have stopped laying. Folk are still talking of the way Martin Leahy died. A fit man in the full of his health, dying at a crossroads? People are saying ’tis unnatural. Some are getting on with nonsense about the evil eye. Saying he was blinked, like. Others keep talking about a changeling child. A changeling, like! We all know Nóra Leahy has a boy in with her. When her daughter died, the son-in-law came with a child in a basket. We saw him in the fields. But when no one saw the boy afterwards, we thought perhaps he was sick. Ailing, like. But Brigid has seen him. And she told me that there’s something woeful wrong with him. Woeful wrong.’