by Hannah Kent
‘I do too.’ Her father’s voice was soft.
‘Why does she not know me?’
‘Your mother is away.’
‘She’s there. She’s sleeping.’
‘She is not. Your mammy is away. With the Good People.’ His voice had broken.
‘Will she come back?’
Her father had shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Who is the woman in there?’
‘She is something left. A trick. They have hoped to trick us.’
‘But she looks like Mam.’
The look on his face was one Nance had seen on the faces of other men many times in the years since. The shine of a man in desperation.
‘Yes, she looks like Mam. But she is not her. She has been changed.’
What might have happened had her mother never gone with Them? If Nance had been free to marry the son of a jarvey, had lived amongst the people of her childhood all her life long? If Maggie had never been needed. If Maggie had never come in crisis and marked out the difference in her.
Her mother swept, Nance grown in her absence, and then a tall woman in the house, cheek marred by a long purple mark like the burn of a poker. Even in the streets of Killarney, spilling as they were with pockmarked children and men who hung a life’s hard living off their cheekbones, the woman had seemed hard.
‘This is your aunt, Nance. She brought you into this world.’
The woman had stood still, staring down at her. ‘You’ve grown.’
‘I’m not a child anymore.’
‘Maggie’s come to get your mam back from where she’s been taken.’
Nance had looked over to the dark bundle lying in the corner of the cabin.
‘’Tis not your mam. Not there.’ Maggie’s voice was solemn. Deep.
‘How will you get her back?’
Her aunt had slowly stepped forward and bent to her, until their faces were level. Nance had seen that, up close, the skin of the mark was tight, like scar tissue.
‘You see that mark of mine, do you?’
Nance had nodded.
‘You know about the Good People?’
Yes. Nance knew about the Good People. She had felt Them in the woods, by the lake, where her mother gave herself up to them. Where she, as a child, had curled into a nest of exposed roots and the moonlight made the world seem strange and the air was thick, occupied.
Her aunt smiled, and at once Nance’s fear left her. She looked into the woman’s grey eyes and saw that they were clear and kind, and without thinking she brought a finger up to touch the scar.
Dear, dark Maggie. From that first day when they cut bracken for her bed, Maggie began to show her the way in which the world was webbed; how nothing lived in isolation. God Himself signed the stalks of ferns. The world was in secret sympathy with itself. The flowers of charlock were yellow to signify their cure for jaundice. There was power in the places where the landscape met its own, in the meeting of waterways or the crucible of mountains. There was strength in all that was new: the beestings, the dew of the morning. It was from Maggie that Nance learnt the power in a black-handled knife, in the swarthy, puckering mix of hen dirt and urine, in the plant over the door, the garment worn next to the skin. It was Maggie who – in those years when they fought for her mother’s return – had shown her not only which herbs and plants to cut, but when, and which to pull by hand and which to set a knife to, and which were made stronger by the moist footprints left by saints as they walked the evenings on their holy days, blessing the ground beneath them.
‘There are worlds beyond our own that we must share this earth with,’ Maggie told her. ‘And there are times when they act on one another. Your mam bears no sin for being swept. Don’t you be cross at her for being away.’
‘Will you cure her?’
‘I will do what I can with what I have, but to understand the Good People is to know that they will not be understood.’
The other families were all a little afraid of Maggie. Her father was too. Her aunt carried a presence, a stillness like that which precedes a storm, when the ants pour over the ground and the birds find shelter and stop singing to wait for the rain. No one dared speak out against her for fear she knew how to set curses.
‘She’s a queer one,’ they said. ‘That Mad Maggie. She who does be in it.’
‘I never cursed anyone in my life,’ Maggie told Nance once. ‘But it never does any harm to let folk think you know how.’ Her eyes had sharpened. ‘People will not come to me if they don’t respect me; if they don’t fear me, just a little. Oh, there are curses to lay, you can be sure of it. But ’tis not worth the breath you spend. Piseógs are fires that flare in the face of those who set them. In time, a curse will always return.’
‘Do you know the curses, Maggie? You have no hand in piseógs, do you?’
That glinting look. The slow stroke of the purple mark on her face.
‘I never say either way to them that come.’
And the people did come to her. Despite her strange blemish, despite her pipe-smoking, and her manly hands, and her cold way of looking at you longer than was comfortable, they decided she had the charms and they came. During the long length of the year the door would be opened to faces waiting out in the cold; shawled, hopeful faces nodding at the sight of Maggie’s broad back.
‘Is the one with the knowledge in?’ they’d ask, and it fell to Nance to meet them at the door and ask loud questions of their ailments, so that Maggie, greeting them under lowered brows, a pipe smouldering in her mouth, might know a little of what she was to treat and surprise them with foresight.
Her father did not remain at home when Maggie took her visitors. His wife was absent, and his home overrun. He spent long hours with his boat, and with the other boatmen, coming home to take up the poitín gifted to Maggie for her juniper, her sheep droppings boiled in new milk, her blistering rubbings of crowfoot, her worsted socks filled with hot salt.
‘Mind you don’t let Nance too close to them that come,’ he’d say. ‘Full of sickness as they are.’
‘She’s learning fast,’ Maggie said. ‘She has a hand for it. Isn’t that true, Nance?’
‘What’s the smell in here?’
‘Gladding root. Stinking iris,’ Nance murmured.
Maggie pointed to the bottle. ‘Let you don’t take too much drink. That’s powerful drink, and you on the water.’
‘Aye, I know. I know. “Drink makes you shoot the landlord.”’
‘Worse than that, it makes you miss,’ Maggie chided.
The sacred days past and Nance stayed close to her fire. She did not go to hear Mass, and no one came to see her with the priest’s word so recently upon them. She wondered what he said of her.
Only the wren boys, faces hidden behind tapering masks of straw, ventured out into the dark fields close to her cabin on St Stephen’s Day to beat their bodhráns of cured dog skin. She watched them march the muddy fields, bearing the wet-feathered body of the dead bird on a branch of holly. Their cry travelled on the winter wind: ‘Up with the kettle, down with the pan, give us some money to bury the wren!’
The wren boys did not come near her cabin for alms or coin. They never had. Nance knew that most of the children feared her. She supposed she was now what Maggie had been to the children under Mangerton. A cailleach lurking in her cave of a cabin, able to whistle curses up from spit and hen shit.
In the early days, when Nance knew they believed in her power but did not know its kind, the valley people came to her for the working of badness against others. Piseógs. One hazy morning she had opened her door to a woman with her eye black and tooth loose in her gum, and words spilling out of her in fear. She had brought Nance money.
Kate Lynch. Younger then. Fear-filled. Raging.
‘I want him dead,’ she had said, shaking greasy curls out of her
face and showing Nance the glint in her sweating palm.
‘Will you sit down with me?’ Nance had asked, and when Kate grabbed her hand and tipped the coin into it, she had let the money fall to the ground. ‘Sit down,’ she said, as the woman gave her a look of bewilderment and scrabbled for the rolling silver. ‘Sit down and talk.’
‘Why’d you drop it?’ Kate demanded, on her knees. ‘That’s good egg money. I earned it myself. ’Tis honest, not stolen. I earned it with my own hens, and ’tis not his neither. I hide it from him.’
‘I cannot take your money.’
The woman stared, her mouth a torn pocket in a pale face.
‘I’ll not be taking payment in coin. I’d lose the gift.’
Understanding had smoothed the furrows in Kate’s brow. She counted the coins and, satisfied, slipped them into her pocket. ‘You have the gift though.’
‘I have the cure. And the knowledge.’
‘The kind of knowledge that would see a bad man buried?’
Nance nodded at her bruise. ‘Is that his badness I can see there?’
‘You don’t know the half of it.’ Kate had bitten her lip, and then suddenly, before Nance could stop her, undressed, ripping at her outer clothes and lifting her shift to reveal a body pummelled into spoil beneath.
‘Your husband?’
‘I sure didn’t fall.’ She pulled her clothes back down, her face taut with determination. ‘I want to be rid of him. You can do that. I know you can. They’re saying you’re in league with Them that does be in it, and that you have the power.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I want you to curse him.’
‘Even if I wanted to, I don’t know the ways.’
‘I don’t believe you. I know you’re not from the valley, but I might show you a blessed well. Where you might walk against the sun. Where you might turn the stones against him.’
‘An evil curse does no good to the one who lays it.’
‘I would do it myself, but I don’t have the skill. Look.’ The woman had bent down and picked up the hem of her skirt, and with scrabbling fingers drawn out the slender flash of a needle. ‘Every day I set it in my clothes to protect myself from him. Every night I wake and point the eye of it to his damned heart. To give him ill luck.’ She waved the needle in Nance’s face. ‘But it does nothing. You have to help me.’
Nance had put her hands up, guided the needle away from her. ‘Listen to me now. Whist now. Curses come home to roost. You do not want to be laying curses on your man, no matter how he rakes you.’
Kate shook her head. ‘He’s going to kill me. There’s no sin in it if he’s after killing me.’
‘There are other things you might do. You might leave.’
Kate gave a sharp laugh. ‘And bundle all my children on my back and take to the road and feed them on mushrooms and praiseach?’
‘Long loneliness is better than bad company.’
‘I want him dead. No, I want him to suffer. I want him to suffer as I have. I want his body to rot, and I want him to sicken, and I want him to wake each morning and spit blood as I have done.’
‘I will give you mallow for the bruises.’
‘You will not set a curse against him?’
‘I will not.’
Kate sank onto the stool. ‘Then you must tell me what I may do to curse him. Tell me how I might lay a piseóg.’ Her face contorted. ‘I have walked the well. I have turned those cursing stones at twilight. I point my needle at his chest and I pray to God that he be damned. But nothing. Nothing. He thrives. He bounces his fists off me.’
‘I cannot tell you the ways.’
‘But you know them. And there are other ways. I know there are. But no one will tell me.’ Her voice cracked. ‘Tell me how to lay a piseóg upon him, or do it yourself. Or I will turn the stones against you.’
CHAPTER
NINE
Selfheal
The eve of the new year returned the snow to the fields in whirling winds, the flakes sticking to the thatch and sweeping against the outer walls, hiding the mud spatter and the damp fingers of mould that stained the limewash.
Nóra kept glancing from her spinning to where Micheál lay sleeping in the settle bed, twitching like a dog.
‘Is it time, do you think, Mary?’
The maid looked up from where she was slowly winding the wool and peered at the slant of light that fell in from the half-door that hung ajar. ‘I think perhaps ’tis not yet twilight. ’Twas twilight she said to come.’
‘I thought perhaps ’twas growing dark.’
‘Not yet. Perhaps we might wait until the chickens return. Hens keep the hours.’
‘Yes, I know that,’ Nóra snapped. She wiped her waxy fingers on her apron. ‘You pulled the herb? Where is it?’
Mary, hands busy, nodded to the bunch of mint lying in the corner of the room, the leaves a little wilted.
‘’Tis straggly. Where did you fetch it?’
‘The well.’
‘Did anyone see you? Were the women there? Éilís? God forbid Kate Lynch saw. She’ll cry devilry.’
‘No one was there.’
‘I don’t see why Nance Roche didn’t cut the mint herself.’
Mary shrugged. ‘Perhaps there is no mint down by the woods. She’s an old woman. ’Tis a long way to go, just for some herbs.’
Nóra pulled a face. ‘Nothing stops that one, old or no.’ She hesitated. ‘Did she say there was a danger in pulling it?’
‘Not if we cut it in the name of the Trinity.’ Mary looked at Micheál as he stirred, his hand lifting in the air and then falling back behind his head. ‘I blessed the mint before I put the blade to it.’
Nóra pursed her lips. ‘I don’t understand it. Mint. Mint is good for fleas and moths. How is mint going to bring a child back from Them?’
‘I always tied it around the wrists of my brothers and sisters,’ Mary said.
‘And why was that?’
‘Keeps away the sickness.’
‘And did it work?’
Mary shook her head, her eyes fixed on the wool before her. ‘Two are with God.’
Nóra’s fierce expression softened, and she looked down at the spinning wheel. ‘I’m sorry for your troubles.’
‘’Twas the will of God, but He took a long time in taking them.’
‘They suffered?’
‘All day and all night they’d cough. They gave up their lives a little cough at a time. But now they are gone to the angels.’
There was a long silence. Nóra glanced at the girl and saw that she was clenching her teeth, her jaw working furiously under her skin.
‘But you have many other brothers and sisters.’
Mary sniffed. ‘I do.’
‘My daughter was the only child I had,’ Nóra said. ‘Her death was a great loss to me. I have lost my parents, and my sister, and my husband, but ’tis Johanna that . . .’ She looked at Mary and, suddenly unable to speak, placed her fist on her chest.
The maid’s face was unreadable. ‘She was your daughter,’ she said plainly.
‘She was.’
‘You loved her.’
‘The first time I saw Johanna . . .’ Nóra’s voice was strangled. She wanted to say that with Johanna’s birth she had felt a love so fierce it terrified. That the world had cleft and her daughter was the kernel at its core. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I loved her.’
‘As I loved my sisters.’
Nóra shook her head. ‘’Tis more than love. You will know it some day. To be a mother is to have your heart cut out and placed in your child.’
The wind groaned outside.
‘Perhaps I will light the candle now. Just in case.’ Nóra got up and closed the half-door, then stoppered the window with straw against the rising draught. The room fell into low light. The fire climbed.
Dabbing at her eyes, Nóra lit a candle and set it on the table to guard the house from the coming night and its unseen swift of spirits. The flame whipped on its wick.
‘Did you fetch water when you were at the well, or was it only the mint you took?’
‘The mint,’ Mary replied.
Nóra frowned. ‘And what will you have us drink tomorrow when the new year is upon us?’
Mary looked confused. ‘I will return to the well. As I do every morning.’
‘You will not. I’ll not have anyone sleeping under this roof going to the well to draw water on the first day of the new year. Don’t you guard yourself up there in Annamore?’
‘I fetch the water same as always.’
Nóra pushed the candle to one side and pulled out a small cloth bag filled with flour. ‘I’ll tell you how it is. There’ll be no throwing of the ashes tomorrow. The feet water, you leave that be. From sun-up to sundown, you’ll not be parting with anything of this house. And don’t be sweeping the floor and all the luck from it either.’
Mary rose to her feet. ‘What harm is there in well-going?’
Nóra pulled a face, added milk, water and soda to the flour, roughly mixing it with her hand. ‘There’s no good in drawing first water from a well on new year’s day and that’s all I know. Don’t be questioning the old ways.’ She cast an anxious look to the sleeping boy. ‘Especially not now.’
The two women were silent as the new year bread baked. Nóra moved between the fire and loaf in its pot to the door, remarking on the slow descent of light outside, while Mary woke the boy and rugged him in the blanket for the journey to come. Nóra nipped the bread when it was cooked, breaking a corner to let the Devil out, and they ate it before the fire, Mary sopping the crust with milk and easing wet morsels into the child’s maw with her fingers. He ate ravenously, chewing at her knuckles. His cries for more continued long after the bread was finished.
‘Always hungry, never satisfied,’ Nóra sniffed. ‘Is that not what Nance was saying? The sign of the changeling?’
‘There’s a bonfire on the mountain,’ Mary said, licking her thumb and sponging crumbs off her clothes. ‘I saw some boys piling furze and heather and dead branches up there this morning. Do you think there’ll be dancing?’