by Hannah Kent
Nance asked them to wait outside while she filled her basket with what she might need. She pulled handfuls of dried herbs from the ceiling and wrapped them in rags. Dried ox-eye daisies and watercress. Yarrow. She gathered a hazel stick, black threads, and the pail of forge water she had kept covered with a cloth.
‘I’m ready,’ she said, handing the heavy pail to Daniel. ‘Take me to your wife.’
When Nance walked in the Lynches’ cabin she knew immediately that all was not well. Brigid lay on a heap of broom and heather by the fire, and the blanket she had placed under her was soaked with blood. Nance turned back outside and held up her hands to stop the brothers from following her inside.
‘You did well in fetching me. Now, go on and don’t be hovering about this door like horseflies. I’ll have you told when there is news to tell.’ She spat on the ground. ‘God be with you.’
Brigid’s eyes were screwed shut with pain. At the sound of the door closing she threw her head back. ‘Daniel?’
‘God bless you, child, ’tis Nance. Your man’s gone and fetched me for you.’ She knelt on the floor beside the woman and pushed a folded blanket under her back.
Fear rose off the girl in waves. She is a spooked mare, Nance thought.
‘I’m frightened,’ Brigid choked. ‘Is it supposed to feel like this? It doesn’t feel right.’
‘I’ll see you safe.’ Nance bent over the girl and began to whisper a prayer in her right ear.
Nóra arrived at the Lynches’ cabin with Éilís O’Hare, Kate and Sorcha. She hadn’t wanted to ask the women to come at all, so bitter did she feel towards them and their constant spluttering of gossip, but they were the only women bound to Brigid through her marriage, and if blood could not be fetched to mind her, it was right that a kind of kin be in the room. She had sent Mary to Peg with Micheál.
Nóra opened the door and found the room full of smoke and smell. Brigid was moaning in protest as Nance insisted that her hips face the fire. The heat inside the cabin was insufferable. Brigid’s face rolled with sweat, and the old woman’s hair was damp against her skin.
The women stopped in the doorway, staring as Nance urged Brigid to lay still and not kneel as she was trying. The young woman’s thighs were slippery with blood.
‘Sorcha, come in and help your cousin settle. I need her to face the fire, so.’ With her help, Nance picked up Brigid’s feet and hauled her closer to the hearth, blazing it with dried furze until the darkness peeled back to the corners of the room.
Brigid’s pupils were dark and wide and unseeing. Éilís stood by the wall gripping a jug of water, her jaw set, tense. Kate hovered beside her daughter, taking a long red ribbon from the neck of her crossed shawl and holding it out in her left hand.
‘What are you doing with that ribbon there, Kate?’ Éilís asked. ‘What’s that for?’
Kate didn’t answer, but began to knot and unknot it over Brigid’s heaving form.
‘What are you doing?’
‘To ease the birth,’ Kate muttered. Nance cast her a long look but said nothing.
‘Nance, how are you getting on?’ Nóra asked.
‘There is watercress in that basket. Pound it to a poultice, will you. And you two can make yourselves useful. Take the black thread in there and tie it where I tell you.’
Éilís and Sorcha glanced at each other.
‘Quickly! You need to arrest the flow of blood. Tie that thread there on her wrists.’
The two women heard the urgency in her voice and bent closer.
‘Bite it if you must, and tie it on each ankle, each finger. Each toe. Tightly, mind.’
There was a light tapping on the door, and Mary’s face peered inside, eyes growing wide at the sight of the blood on the ground.
‘Nance.’ Nóra gestured at the girl with the pestle.
‘Send her away. For pig dung. Try the blacksmith’s.’
‘You heard her,’ Nóra said.
Mary disappeared outside and the women continued their slow work on Brigid. She lay still, teeth bared. Nóra passed Nance the poultice and knelt behind Brigid so that she might rest her head on her lap.
Nance’s lips pressed tightly together in concentration as she lifted the girl’s damp dress, exposing the swell of her belly. She smeared the pounded watercress on Brigid’s thighs, skin and pubic hair.
Blood rippled out of her. All the women saw it.
An hour dripped by. Mary returned from the blacksmith’s, her hands dirty with pig dung. Áine was with her, gripping a rosary and woven cross.
Nance looked up at the sound of their entrance. ‘Áine,’ she cried. ‘Bless you, but I can’t be letting you stay.’ She stood, her apron as bloody as a butcher’s, and took Áine by the shoulders.
‘I want to help,’ Áine protested.
Nance whispered an apology and walked Áine outside, shutting the door firmly behind them.
‘Why can’t Áine come in?’ Mary whispered to Nóra. ‘What has she done?’
Nóra clucked her tongue and continued to sponge Brigid’s temples with forge water.
‘She only wanted to pray over her.’
‘Everyone knows Áine’s barren,’ Kate spat. ‘She might cast the evil eye over the child.’
‘She would not! She’s a good woman.’
‘Whether she’s good or not has nothing to do with it. Most of them with the evil eye have no knowledge of when they cast it.’ Kate licked her lips. ‘You could be casting it for all we know. The redheaded girls do be with the evil eye. Unlucky.’
Nóra had just opened her mouth to protest when Nance returned inside with a small clay jug. A stink of ammonia filled the room.
‘What is that?’ Mary gaped.
‘The water of the husband,’ murmured Nóra.
Using a heather besom, Nance began to dash the urine around the room and on Brigid’s face, stomach and lower body, flicking the last of it on the small wicker cradle in the corner.
‘An old and holy blessing,’ Nance muttered.
The women said nothing.
Throughout the day they tended to Brigid under Nance’s direction. They mixed the pig dung with forge water and pasted it over her abdomen with their bare hands. They took turns knotting and untying Kate’s ribbon ceaselessly over her until their arms ached and the ribbon grew stained with the grease of their fingers. They watched Brigid’s toes and fingers seize and swell with trapped blood under their ties of thread, and dribbled ox-eye daisy boiled on new milk into her open mouth.
It was only as the day eased back into darkness that the child came.
It was dead, its lips dark.
Brigid, weak as water, tumbled into unconsciousness.
Daniel was ushered into the cabin and shown the tiny body of his son. The women stood around him, faces grey with exhaustion, too tired to grieve. He looked down at his unconscious wife and brought a hand over his mouth as if afraid of what might come out of it. Mary stepped aside and watched as he walked back out into the cold blue of the evening to fight his grief out with the sky.
Nance told Sorcha to wrap the baby and cover its face.
‘Is Brigid dead?’ Kate asked.
‘Not yet.’ Nance took a small piece of paper from her basket, unfolded it and shook something into an earthenware bowl. ‘Fetch a light,’ she muttered.
Mary raked over the smoking fire to uncover the belly of embers and carefully pincered a live coal with the tongs.
‘Set it here.’ Nance held out the bowl, and Mary saw it was full of hogweed seed and dried horse dung. She placed the ember in the bowl and smoke uncurled from the mix. ‘Let her breathe of it,’ Nance said.
Mary crouched beside Brigid and placed the smoking hogweed beneath her nose.
‘Does she stir?’
‘I can’t be sure she’s breathing.’ Smoke covered t
he woman’s face like a veil.
‘Pull her chin down for me, girl.’ Taking the bowl from Mary, Nance blew the smoke into Brigid’s open mouth.
Nothing happened.
‘Shall we say a prayer?’ Mary asked.
Brigid’s nostrils flared and she began to cough.
‘Praise be,’ Nance said, wiping her hand across her forehead. It left a trail of blood. ‘She’s life in her yet.’
The evening was a strange, silent one. Brigid woke and wailed for her child and for her husband, and clamped her mouth against Nance’s insistent hand offering her berries of bittersweet. She fell asleep only when exhaustion overtook her. Then the women rolled her body to remove the bloody heather and replace it with fresh straw. Nance shoved the afterbirth on the fire, where it hissed and gave off a meaty smell.
‘Where is her man?’
‘Outside,’ Mary said. She peered out the door. ‘He’s on his knees in the field.’
Nance was sitting on a stool, her head in her hands. ‘He must be fetched.’
Nóra’s face was white. ‘Let him grieve, Nance. Let him sit in the soil.’
‘No. The young have weak spirits. They are hard put to defend themselves against the devils that hover all places.’
‘Give him a moment alone.’
‘Mary Clifford,’ Nance said. ‘Go and bring Daniel back in. He has a right to protect the soul of that child.’
Sorcha looked down at the little bundle in her lap. ‘I . . . I blessed him. I crossed his forehead with the forge water. Is that not a christening? Is that not enough to get him to Heaven?’
Kate sniffed. ‘’Twas dead afore it came out.’
‘Still,’ Sorcha protested. ‘A blessing is a blessing.’
‘Go get Daniel, Mary,’ Nance repeated. She pushed herself to her feet and staggered over to the chicken roost against the wall of the Lynches’ cabin. Peering at the line of blinking hens, Nance reached in and grabbed one, pinning it underneath her elbow to prevent the bird from flapping. It struggled against her grip. ‘Fetch Daniel,’ she said.
Mary ran out into the field, her ankle jarring on the uneven ground. Mud splashed up her dress.
Brigid’s husband was kneeling amongst the lazy beds, his head on his knees. Áine, Peter, Seán, John and his brother, David, stood around him, keeping him company in silence. Above them the clouds had vanished and the sky was bright with emerging stars.
‘Leave him be, girl,’ Seán said.
‘Nance says she needs him.’
‘He’s done all he can.’
‘She’s worried about the devils.’
Áine’s brow creased. ‘What now?’
Mary bit at her nails. They tasted of dung.
Peter nodded. ‘Nance is right. That child is not gone to God. Brigid is ill protected. There is evil that would seek to enter your house, Daniel.’
Seán spat on the ground. ‘Peter. Don’t be talking of this now.’
Daniel looked up and Mary flinched at the sight of his red-rimmed eyes, the raw look of his mouth. ‘She wants me?’
Mary nodded. ‘She’s taken one of your chickens and asked me to fetch you.’
Seán groaned and placed a hand on Daniel’s shoulder. ‘She’s done enough, nephew, don’t you think?’
Daniel shrugged him off angrily.
‘Go on, Daniel,’ Peter urged. He turned to Seán. ‘Let the man do something for his child.’
Nance met Mary and Daniel by the open door and passed the hen over the threshold. ‘You know what I need from you,’ she said, placing a knife in his hand. ‘I’m sorry for your trouble. Kill it.’
Daniel didn’t look at her, but accepted the chicken and, in one swift movement, cut its head off. He gave it to Nance and she threw it on the fire, where it smouldered. The women inside brought their hands to their faces as the smell of burning feathers filled the air.
Nance took the dead bird, which jerked wildly in death throes. Holding it firmly by the feet, she turned the hen upside down and dripped its blood on the floor of the cabin by the entrance. She returned it to Daniel, wiping her hands on her skirt. ‘Circle the cabin with blood. Protect your wife.’
Mary stepped inside and sat next to Nóra, who was watching over Brigid, her eyes swimming. ‘Missus. What was that for?’
‘For the wee babby’s soul,’ Sorcha answered, crossing herself. ‘Protection.’
Éilís stood up suddenly. ‘If spilt blood can waylay the Devil, then sure this place is holy, for Brigid’s blood is burning with the straw on the fire and the air is full of it!’ She spat on the ground and stormed out the open door without looking back.
Mary noticed that one of the Lynches’ farm dogs had appeared outside. It stood on the threshold of the cabin, crouched close to the ground, sniffing the chicken blood.
Before Mary could say anything, Nóra rose and kicked it from the door.
Nance returned home from the birth reeking of blood and shaking with exhaustion. No food had passed her lips since that morning and, walking the narrow path home in the starred night, she felt overcome with dizziness. The night was cold but clear, and the full moon cast pure over mist that lingered on the ground, unmoved by any wind. The air seemed impossibly damp and sweet after the heat and smoke of the cabin.
Suddenly Nance stumbled sideways to the stone wall that bordered the lane, falling against thorny briars and dropping her basket of soiled linen and the remains of her herbs.
How she wished the child had been born alive.
She had delivered a generation of children in the valley, it seemed. She saw them every day: small, shrill children who buried their snotty faces into their mothers’ skirts, scraped their knees on the walls, and grew strong scarpering along the fields. But amongst the children she delivered who stuck to life like burrs were others who came too still, too small, knotted with cord. There were those who did not catch to the fabric of the world. It happened. She knew it happened.
So why did the death of Brigid Lynch’s child fill her with such dread? She had done all that was needed. She had done all that Maggie had taught her to do.
The besom of broom and the piss of the husband.
The heat of the fire set to the slope of the hips.
The thread, when the blood came, and the pig muck on the abdomen, and the forge water and watercress, and even Kate’s relentless unknotting of the blessed ribbon.
Nance remembered then. She had not brought her cloth. The white swaddling cloth that she had dragged through the dew of every St Brigid’s morning to be blessed by the saint, to be wrapped around the mother if the labour was long.
Would that have saved the child?
Nance slowly picked up her basket and pushed herself from the wall. The brambles snagged her clothes. It no longer mattered. She had done everything in her power, but the child was not meant for the world.
The woods and her small cabin before them looked cold and empty in the deep blue of the night. Her goat, a ghost in the distance, stood looking at her, waiting to be led indoors.
She reached the cabin and threw her arms around the animal, comforted by the round heat and smell of her.
‘Truth, you are a patient girl,’ she murmured, nuzzling her face into Mora’s wiry coat. She led her indoors and tethered her to the hook in the wall, then lit the fire. She drank some milk, scattered groundsel and a little yellow meal to her chickens, some already roosting, and lay down wearily on her bed.
But sleep did not come. Nance lay on the heather, cradled by her own exhaustion, her mind uneasy. Again, she had the sense that something terrible was happening. That in some irreparable way the world was changing, that it spun away from her, and that in the whirl of change she was being flung to some forsaken corner.
The fire cracked as the turf sods slowly disintegrated into ash.
What would
her father say to her now, if he were alive? He who understood the strange winds that blew, who understood the anatomy of storms.
‘The cod swims in deeper waters,’ she remembered him murmuring, pulling her head to his shoulder. ‘There’s a mighty peace in the deep, and that is all the cod is after. The untroubled deep. But a storm will toss the water about like a devil. Fish, weed, sand, stones, even the old bones and bits of wrecked ships, ’tis all tossed feathers when the storm hits. Fish that like the deep are thrown into the shallows, and fish that have a need of the shallows are pushed into the deep.’
His hands stroking her hair. The smell of boiling potatoes as they waited for their dinner.
‘Begod, I tell no lie. But what does the cod do when he senses a storm in the water? He swallows stones. Faith, ’tis true or I’m not your da. Your cod will fill himself with stones to stay out of the mighty swell of the sea. He will sink himself. All fish are afraid of thunder, but only some know how to keep themselves out of the way of it.’
Nance closed her eyes and her heart clenched in pining for her father.
The dead are close, she thought. The dead are close.
Sometime before dawn Nance heard a noise outside. Rising to her feet, she took a dead ember from the fire for protection against the fairies and peered into the uncertain night. The sound came from the Piper’s Grave. Nance set out in the direction of the ráth.
The moon had listed to the horizon, but its light still cast a varnish over the valley and Nance could see a man standing next to the great slab of stone in the cillín, his hand resting on its slender edge. He was praying, it seemed. His head was lowered.
Daniel.
Nance stole closer and watched him from beyond the low wall that marked the sacred space from the surrounding fields. A small box lay by his feet.
Nance wondered whether Daniel had made the coffin himself, nailing together what poor, unhallowed wood he could cobble from his home, or whether a neighbour had, in generosity, made one to accommodate the unbaptised child.
She watched as Daniel wandered the cillín, his eyes to the ground, then having decided on a place and retrieved a spade, began to dig a grave. The soil was cold and hard, and for many long minutes all Nance could hear was the rasp of the spade’s iron edge against the untended ground. Nance watched as Daniel fetched the tiny coffin and placed it gently into the earth on his knees. He stayed there for some time before wearily rising to his feet and filling the grave in with clay.