by Hannah Kent
‘Aye, and the constable.’
‘She’d steal the eye out of your head,’ Kate hissed.
‘She never did a thing against you, and here you are, heaping mud on her name.’ It was Áine who had spoken. There was an awkward silence.
Hanna nodded to where Áine had risen to her feet, face flushed. ‘She’s right. ’Tis a disgrace. That woman gives out the knowledge, and you have cause to believe it, for didn’t Nance cure my own sister of the fever not a few months back? My own sister, sick and sweating in her bed with a fever I thought would leave her dead and cold. And if it weren’t for the cure that bean feasa gave me, ’twould be nothing for my sister but six feet in a graveyard.’
‘Maybe ’tis that your sister would be well, charm or no.’
‘You’d be a fool to think it. Nance gave me the cure in a bottle, and she told me not to be looking at the fairy ráth on my way home but to go straight back to my sister. Well, I did as she said, but – and God knows I tell no lie – as I walked passed that whitethorn, I felt the cure being pulled from my hands. I gripped it tight, and I kept my eyes to the ground, but the Good People were fighting me for it. ’Tis only that I didn’t see them that I had the power to get home to my sister. I boiled the herb and gave her three drinks from the drawing of it, and she was out of bed and spinning by my side that very night.’
‘You were always one for the stories.’
Hanna bristled. ‘Have you no respect for the old amongst us, Éilís?’
‘We’re only having a laugh, like, Hanna,’ Sorcha muttered.
Éilís’s face twisted. ‘I’m not laughing. The way I see it, Father Healy has a right to be calling her a pagan.’
Hanna sat up straight, indignant. ‘Father O’Reilly credited her with the powers. He went to her himself. A priest. As did you, before you married that schoolmaster of yours. I remember when Patrick’s cow was sickened, and she told him ’twas the blast and found the fairy dart about it too. The ice was dripping off the cow house though ’twas freezing outside. Such was the heat of the cure, so says Patrick.’
‘My man says Father Healy will preach against her every Mass, if that’s what it takes.’
‘He’ll learn to change his tune,’ Hanna said darkly. ‘There’s good reason Father O’Reilly spoke for her. You’d best be listening to me, Éilís. Before Nance Roche lived here, she lived many places. She was no sooner in one place than in another, it used to be said, selling her besoms and dyes on the road, and giving out the cure for the afflictions of those she met.
‘It happened that she passed through this valley, walking the long road to Macroom, and she stopped a while. She was sleeping under the furze, out in the open, poor woman. Bone-tired.
‘Then who should go past her on the road but Father O’Reilly, and without even looking at him she said, “I know that you’ve a swelling in your hand, and I tell you, Father, I can give you the cure.” Well, the priest asked her, “And what cure might that be?” And Nance said, “You walked past the fairy place and you took a stone from there, and ’tis the hand you took it with that has the swelling.” Well, she was right about that, and Father O’Reilly couldn’t say a word, he was so surprised. Nance said, “Now you’ve been shown that I have the knowledge and the healing and no harm in it.” And Father O’Reilly, quick as a whip, said, “I see you’ve the knowledge, but you’ve given me no healing.” And Nance said, “You’re standing in it.” And sure, the priest looked down and ’twas yarrow he was standing in. And he let her cure him with the yarrow, and all of us saw the swollen hand of the priest cured.
‘That is why, until the day he died, Father O’Reilly never had the hard word against Nance, only praised her and gave her as much help as he was able, and assisted her in her living. That is why she has the bothán by the woods. He had it built for her, and she selected the site herself, for ’tis close to the Good People and those who gave her the knowledge. Close to the woods and the herbs that grow in them. Close to the boundary water. Sure, ’tis a place for a wise woman, and ’tis wisdom Nance Roche has.’
There was laughter from Éilís. ‘Will you listen to that? Your tongue collects no rust, Hanna, with all the stories you tell.’
‘That’s the truth of it as it were told to me, and the one who told it was no liar!’
‘I heard nothing about Father O’Reilly picking up a stone from the ráth, though my mam said he had the rheumatism,’ mused Biddy.
‘Sure, ’twas rheumatism and no fairy in it at all,’ said Éilís. ‘Nance is an old woman and she’s soft in the head, and those who believe she has the cure are softer still.’
Hanna pursed her lips in anger.
‘There’s no doubting she’s a strange one, Hanna,’ Sorcha said sheepishly.
‘Have you ever met one with the charms who had not the strangeness? It comes with the gift. You can’t be expecting one who knows the things she does to be taking part in your almighty cackle every morning at the well. If you’re looking for a friend without fault, you’ll be looking for a friend forever.’
‘Ah, but is that gift you speak of God-given, or is it from the Devil?’
‘’Tis nothing to do with the Devil at all, Éilís,’ Hanna scoffed. ‘’Tis from her travelling with the fairies. ’Tis no Devil about it!’
‘Father Healy says the fairies are for the pagans, and what is not for God is for the Devil.’
‘Pssh, the Good People are for themselves alone. They belong to the water and soil and ráth. Devil! They’re in the Piper’s Grave with the whitethorn, not in Hell.’
‘Don’t you let the priest catch you saying that.’
There was silence. Hanna shook her head.
‘Well, this has put you all in each other’s hair combs,’ Áine mused.
‘Do you not see that Nance is after some badness? The priest would have her out. He has the word against her, and sure, she’s living hand to mouth and the promise of a hungry year is upon her. Next thing the profit has been stolen from the milk?’ Kate bit her lip. ‘I saw her creeping about in the fog. God’s truth, there are women who turn themselves into hares to suck milk from the cows at night.’
There were some raised eyebrows. Áine rolled her eyes.
‘Faith, ’tis true with God as my witness. Once, there was a Corkman. He saw a hare drinking from his cow – suckling it, straight from the udder! – and he got his gun and shot it with a bullet made from sixpence. He followed the blood trail and sure, if he didn’t find an old woman sitting by her fire, her leg bleeding.’
‘Shame your Seán has such bad aim,’ Hanna murmured. There was tittering.
‘He sure never misses me!’ Kate cried.
The women glanced at one another, their laughter snuffed.
‘Kate, do you not . . . Yourself and Seán. Do you not agree together?’
Kate flushed red, her eyes fixed on the fire in front of them. She said nothing.
‘Is that the truth of it? Is he after beating you again?’ It was Hanna who spoke.
‘Kate?’
Kate shrugged, her jaw clenched. ‘To the Devil, all of you,’ she muttered.
The smirk left Áine’s face. She stood and gave Kate a pat on the shoulder. ‘The cows will be in butter again. You’ll see.’
‘What’s to be done?’ Kate whispered to herself. She shook off Áine’s hand. ‘What’s to be done?’
‘It can’t stay raining always. As soon as they calve, they will be back in butter.’
The women nestled closer around the fire, exchanging looks. Outside, the hungry wind keened.
The smooth whiteness of the fields melted to mud and dying grass, and the valley felt darker for it. It rained constantly, and the people stayed close to their smoking fires and the inconstant dripping from poor thatch. They muttered, ‘A green Christmas leaves a full graveyard,’ as they lit their candles and asked the Virgi
n to stave off winter sickness.
Nance spent the holy day inside her cabin, passing the quiet, rain-filled hours cutting besoms by the fire and dying the scrags of wool she had removed from thorns and brambles and carded into use. Seeing that change-child, that bony marvel nettle-welted in the cabin of Nóra Leahy, had plated her mind with disquiet. It had stirred embers of memory she had thought long dead. Things she had willed herself to forget.
Nance paused in her work to stretch her fingers and checked the simmering pot of stirabout on the fire. She had woken that morning to find turf and a bag of yellow meal lying in her doorway, protected from the rain by a square of oilcloth. There was no knowing who had left the sacks there, although Nance suspected the quiet generosity of Peter O’Connor and his habit of silent, unannounced kindness. Or the gifts might have been a gesture of gratitude from someone who had lately come to her with the winter lying in their lungs; one of those who continued to bring their complaints to her despite the priest’s warning. The parade of sickness to her door had thinned since Father Healy had preached against her. No doubt her patients’ concern for their souls was now greater than their anxiety over chapped hands or the fevers glittering through their children.
Her days had emptied. It reminded Nance of when she had first fled Killarney and gone to the quiet stretches of rock and moor in her grief. When she had climbed the dry stone walls and walked the fields and slept by the fires of strangers. Those hard years of grinding hunger after the death of her father and the disappearance of her mother and Maggie. Long years of wandering every road between Killorglin and Kenmare, smoking rabbits from their warrens and waiting with fast hands, poisoning rivers with spurge and collecting the rising bodies of dead fish under nightfall. Selling besoms, selling dyes of alder catkin, blackberry and birch. Bog myrtle for yellow. Dark green from briar root. Gathering galls for schoolmasters, some as poor as her, so they might make their ink. Nance of the Herbs, they called her, Nance of the Fairies, and she did as well as she could until her teeth began to fall out of her mouth, and she woke some mornings under hedges, bones aching, not knowing whether she could face another day of walking hungry, walking cold or sunburnt, walking thirsty.
It had been grief and fear that had driven her from Mangerton mountain, but it was hunger that called her back. There was always a living to be scraped off the Killarney tourists if you knew how.
Nance did not remember how she fell into begging, but she remembered the boredom of it. Ten years of crowding the inns, thrusting herself upon the coaches the minute they stopped, blocking shop doors if the shopkeeper was busy and unable to deliver a swift kick and threat.
‘Oh, my lady, look at the poor who can’t look at you. Heaven be your bed and give us something, blessings be with you on the road. Oh, help the poor cratur whose heart is broke in hunger. Charity, for the love of God.’
Nance shuddered. It was a good thing she had left that town again. It was a good thing she had heard the Good People summoning her to the valley and the priest who protected her, who saw the fairy in her skill, and who let her lay her hooked hands on his own troubled flesh.
She hoped never to go back to Killarney.
For all of Father O’Reilly’s welcome, it had taken time before people walked the path to Nance’s door. They had built her the bothán and left her there. Weeks had gone by without visitors, and she had thought she would go mad from the solitude after the noise and crowds of the town. Younger, then, she had scrambled up the bare shoulders of the mountains to find company in the clouds that brooded on the hilltops. There, in the presence of something ancient and immutable, she found her comfort. She could crouch on the wind-whipped grass and dig the stones from the ground and fling them down at the suspicious cottiers and their fear of any woman who was not tethered to man or hearth. There, upon the mountain, her difference – no matter its great weight, its sharp and restless ache upon her heart – was, in the face of such unyielding beauty, a small and passing shadow in a greater story.
Those days on the mountains had prevented her from turning mad with loneliness. She had climbed until her breath beat in her lungs, and she had watched the rain sweep across the valley below in its slow, grey veil, or the sun track its benevolence across the fields, and she had understood, finally, Maggie’s words. Solitude, her difference, would make her free.
But those were younger years, and now Nance felt her age like a millstone around her neck. In the absence of company, without the distraction of boils and rheumatism and heavy coughs or stubborn, bleeding wounds, the past rose up around her like a tide of water, and there was no retreat to higher ground. There was no fleeing the slow flood of remembrance that came. She was an old woman condemned to sit by the fire, bones singing with weather.
Nance carded her stolen wool and her mind filled with her father and his smell of leather and river weed. The timber of his boat creaking, his stories of the Chieftan O’Donoghue rising out of the lakes on May morning. She tried to remember the weight of his hand on her shoulder.
But it was so long ago. And, as always, when she thought of her father, unbidden dark memories of her mother came also.
Nance could almost see that sallow face, looming over her like the moon in the midnight hours.
Mad Mary Roche.
She could almost hear her mother’s voice again.
‘They’re here.’
Teeth bared. Hair uncombed over her face. Her mother waiting by the cabin door while she dressed. Quietly, so as not to disturb her father. Her mother leading her into the night.
Nance struggling to keep up with her mother’s long stride. Walking out of the small yard beside their cabin, out past the potato bed, down the lane where the other cabins of the jarveys and lakemen and strawberry girls stood in slum, absorbed into the nightscape at the foot of Mangerton mountain.
Ten years old and pleading in fear, following her mother’s dark back past the silver, slender trunks of birch and the sprawl of oak branches.
‘Mam, where are we going?’
The water suddenly before them, balancing a fine cloud of mist. The lakes holding their dark mirror to the sky, holding the moon and the stars, until the startled flap of a duck in the reeds disturbed the water and the reflected night rippled. How the lakes had pulled the breath from her in their beauty. Staring at their silvered surface on that first night had felt like stumbling across a rare vision of holiness. It filled her mind with terror.
Her mother stopping. Turning. Face suddenly wide-eyed in fear, like a pig that sees the knife.
‘They’re here.’
‘Who is here?’
‘Can you not see Them?’
‘I can’t see at all.’
‘You won’t see Them there.’ One cold hand against her chest. ‘Here. You’ll see Them here.’
That first night in the woods by the lake. Crying, curling herself into a nook of mossed limestone, watching her mother dart from tree to tree, muttering to herself, scratching patterns into the soil.
Her father, sitting by the fire when they returned at dawn, his head in his hands. Grabbing Nance, squeezing the breath out of her lungs. Stroking her dirty face as he put her to bed.
‘Please, Mary.’ Voices in the tremble of early morning. ‘People will be making a fairy out of you.’
‘I don’t mean to do it.’
‘I know.’
‘I am not myself. I have been away.’
‘You are here now.’
Heavy-lidded, watching him comb leaves out of her mother’s hair with his calloused fingers.
‘Am I? Am I here? Am I my own self?’
‘You are my Mary Roche.’
‘I don’t know. I don’t feel I am myself.’
‘Mary . . .’
‘Don’t let Them take me again.’
‘I won’t. I won’t.’
Was that when it all began? Was
that when Nance first began to learn about the strange hinges of the world, the thresholds between what was known and all that lay beyond? That night, at ten years old, she had understood, finally, why people feared the darkness. It was an open door, and you could step through it and be changed. Be touched and altered.
Before then, Nance had loved the woods. In the daylight hours, waiting for tourists with cans of milk and poitín, the morning rain left the moss vivid underfoot, and the leaves cast their dappled shadow on the clay and stone and leaf. Birds rustled the berried briars. The sight of the forest floor carpeted with the beetled backs of acorns had rushed her with happiness. But afterwards, she understood that the woods changed at twilight; that they grew intolerant of strangers. The birds stopped cheeping and blinkered themselves against the dark, and the fox began to search for blood. The Good People claimed the darkling shadows for their own.
So many years gone and time stretching until she was thin with it all, and still Nance remembered that night in the woods, and the nights that came after. Shaken awake by a mother already half-swept, dragged to the woods where the branches creaked unseen and she choked with fear until piss ran down her leg.
She was older when her father began to fix the door at nights, winding rope about the latch. She had helped him. They thought it might stop her mother from leaving. Might stop her eyes from glinting wild, stop her trespass. But still, her mother was swept – on the wind, with the lights – and the strange woman left locked in their cabin, scratching at the walls and dirt floor until her nails broke and bled, was not Mary Roche. The woman They left in her place was a likeness who threw her food against the wall and would not eat, who did not recognise Nance, and who fought her father when he would see her safe in bed.
‘I miss Mam,’ Nance had whispered once, when the woman who was no longer her mother slept.