All the Murmuring Bones

by A. G. Slatter

  ‘Miss, shall I put out more of the salmon?’ One of the borrowed maids appears at my elbow.

  I shake my head. ‘No, it will only encourage them to stay.’

  The girl bobs her head, gives a curtsey and moves off.

  Soon they’ll all be gone, these family members here to see what they can see, not to give comfort in a time of need, merely to celebrate that it’s not us who’ve gone beneath.

  I remember Óisín as I sat by him in the days before the reaper came. There was no pale wailing woman at the window, nor did a storm blow up when he died – that only happens when the women go; no one knows why or if they do, no one’s saying. I remember my grandfather becoming a scared child, shrunk into himself on the vast mattress where our matriarchs and patriarchs have bred and slept and died. I remember him weeping that no one would lament his passing, a sudden wish, a need for affection when he’d never given much himself. And I wondered at that, that he’d be yearning not for absolution for his sins, which surely must be numbered in a very large book, but for love.

  Yes, soon they’ll all be gone and it’ll just be Aoife and me, rattling about at Hob’s Hallow as it decays around us, Maura and Malachi teetering along the lip of the grave. Yet I cannot see beyond the moment when the door closes behind them all; cannot truly imagine what shape my life might take in the weeks and months to come. It’s like enduring a storm, I suppose, though a strangely quiet one: Just hang on, Óisín used to say and I hear his voice now, hang on to whatever’s solid. A seaman’s mantra. What he’d tell me whenever Aoife took me swimming in the sea.

  And abruptly I’m aware of the hole in my middle: the old man will be missed. I clench my fists, press them against my stomach, and blink hard to keep the tears away as I take the steps, twenty, thirty, to get to the expanse of windows at the other end of the ballroom. If I know anything for certain it’s that neither love nor hate is ever simple.

  Some cousins try to speak to me, but I move past as if I’ve not heard and they fall away. At last, I’m standing in front of the bank of diamond-shaped panes, staring out.

  The overgrown lawn is the brightest of greens, rolling gently away to the cliffs. Both sky and sea are grey; the optical illusion of it makes it seem as if they’ve been stitched together, a patchwork quilt with only the subtlest of seams showing. It looks like the horizon is missing; what might happen if that line were gone? That line to which we all head, knowing we’ll never catch it, but driven toward it like a seabird following a migration path year after year, life after life.

  I imagine the sound of the waves because I can’t hear it in here over the murmur of voices, the clink of fine china tea cups, the chewing, the tap of boots across marble floors. But I know it thuds and retreats with the constancy of a heartbeat, the shush and crash as it hits the shingle down below. Just the thought of it helps to calm me, which is funny because when I was very small I was so terribly scared of the noise. All the waters in the world are joined, Miren, Aoife used to say – what use being afraid of them?

  That was neither help nor comfort, of course, when she was teaching me to swim by throwing me into the icy sea. That’s how I learned, unwillingly; she kept heaving me in no matter the weather or how I wailed. She would toss me off the rocks that erupted from the water (not so far from the collapsed cave) and I would sink. The first few times she rescued me; then she let me go. Let me plummet for so long that I thought I’d drown and I realised the only way to survive was to save myself with the long strokes and powerful kicks Aoife herself used. I’ve wondered for years if she’d have let me perish in the end… or if I’d waited just a moment more would she have dived in after me again, pulled her hopes and future from the waves in the form of a sputtering, coughing, terrified three-year old.

  Just hang on to whatever’s solid, Óisín would say, but it took me a long time to realise he meant I had to rely on myself: I was the only solid thing in that angry sea.

  How long I stare is a mystery but I’m pulled from my reverie when I see two figures striding across the grass. From their direction they’ve come out from under the postern gate and are heading towards the spot where the church once stood, however briefly. One is in a long black mourning gown, the wind plucking at her veil, which she flings back with irritation so it trails behind her like a wing.

  ‘What’re they talking about, do you think?’

  I didn’t notice Brigid come up beside me. She’s short and dumpy, blonde curls, pale grey eyes, but her voice is lovely and she sings when asked. No one asked her for Óisín’s sending-off, but then no one sang him away at all.

  I glance sideways at my cousin. The colour in her cheeks is high as if she’s annoyed or embarrassed or she had to work up the courage to speak to me or she’s afraid I won’t reply. We’re not friends. Not anymore. Once we were. When Óisín still ran the office in Breakwater – before he sold it to Aidan – I would get to visit with Brigid. She would come out to Hob’s Hallow too, and we would play. It didn’t matter, then, that she wasn’t a “proper” O’Malley; I didn’t listen to Aoife’s contempt for the lesser branches. It went on for years and I thought she was my best friend, but when you’re fed crumbs of resentment and pride, when you lose trust in someone…

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. Then add, because there’s no shame it in, at least not for me, ‘Perhaps a loan.’

  ‘This house will fall, you know.’ Yet she says it with no trace of spite, just a kind of sadness, like she’s speaking of an old pet soon to die.

  ‘I know.’ And then we watch the two figures outside in silence.

  Aoife’s almost as tall as Aidan; she’s talking avidly, hands waving. I can see her expression: sly, wary, hungry and smart. And Aidan, listening intently, looks a little like her. When he opens his mouth, the features rearrange into a different creature, the son of a thinned blood, and then both their faces are lost to me as their direction changes and they walk toward the camouflaged horizon, into a wind that carries the breath of a storm.

  3

  The library has a high ceiling, once painted with scenes of our maritime glory, but largely the art is obscured by cobwebs and smoke grime and has been for as long as I can remember. A face peeks through here and there, a limb, a roiling cloud, a ship’s sail, a sea monster’s tail, but mostly what’s there is up to the imagination. When I was small, I wouldn’t look lest I conjure a nightmare of those elements. Back then I thought there couldn’t be worse things than bad dreams. Three of the walls are covered by overflowing bookshelves, and the fourth is mostly window, swathed with red curtains, thick with dust, to keep the night and the worst of the cold at bay.

  Aoife’s in an embroidered housecoat of the deepest maroon, hair piled high, silken silver, no trace of the darkness of her youth; there’s a glass of winter-lemon whiskey by her elbow and she’s seated in one of the threadbare wingback chairs, staring into the flames of the hearth. Not long ago she gave a deep sigh that I recognised as a letting go, a signal that from here we move forward. But to where?

  I’m still in my mourning gown; I spent the afternoon farewelling guests, then helping Maura clean up the mess because Aidan took his borrowed maids home with him. Afterwards we packed three baskets with as many leftovers as possible, and I walked to the three tenanted cottages to deliver them. There’s more food than we can get through and someone at least should benefit somehow from Óisín’s passing. The Kellys and the Byrnes were grateful; the Widow O’Meara accepted what I brought but gave me the same look she always does, and I hurried away just as I always do.

  I go to one of the shelves and take a book down from its place nestled between family histories, and tomes of maritime law that my grandfather loved more than anything of flesh and blood. There are many volumes with the golden “M” on their spine that denotes “Murcianus” – Murcianus’ Little-known Lore, Murcianus’ Mythical Creatures, Murcianus’ Strange Places, Murcianus’ Songs of the Night, Murcianus’ Book of Fables. There is even a Murcianus’ Magica, but it is an incom
plete version, the true one having been lost centuries ago in the sack of the Citadel at Cwen’s Reach or so it’s said.

  But the one I take down is different, heavy in my arms and I hold it almost like a shield as I approach Aoife. My fingers trace the embossing on the cover, no longer easily visible. In the front, I know, there are missing pages, nothing left but the tiny jagged shreds of paper like the edges of butterfly wings. It’s always been that way and Aoife claims not to know what was there; that the story, the very first story, was missing when even she was a girl and no memory of it had been kept.

  ‘Will you read to me?’ I ask without much hope, for I’m eighteen and Grandmother’s not read to me for the longest time. Maura, to whom I’d run for comfort as a child, never read me anything, but used to tell fairy tales. Maura’s singsong recountings were of children taken away to hidden places; of women turned into birds and bugs; of soul clocks and dark magic; of boys who sometimes went on two legs, sometimes on four; of girls who changed their faces, grew horns, and danced away from their old lives; of brides stolen by robbers and heroes laid low by a woman’s curse. And she told me, too, of places other than here: Lodellan and Bitterwood, Tintern and Bellsholm, and stranger places like Calder in the Dark Lands where the Leech Lords reigned.

  Aoife, when she was in the mood, would read from the book wherein generations of our kind have written tales that might be lies, might be true. Scribbled in different hands, some harder to decipher than others, but all ones that, as a child, I took as gospel.

  Perhaps, too, I remember my own mother reading to me from the black-covered volume, the pages yellowed, discoloured with ink and age, with the fingerprints of the dead and tiny drawings to enliven or mar the margins. Perhaps I remember a voice sweeter than Aoife’s, gentler, more like to laugh than not, whose tellings were less frightening, so I did not wake from nightmares, but rather slept cradled in the arms of my ancestral memories. But perhaps I imagine it. Perhaps Isolde is merely a thought I once had and will never be anything else. But perhaps, just perhaps, my mother’s voice left a trace in my dreams. There’s not even a hint of a memory of my father, Liam; all Aoife’s ever said about him was that he unsuitable and a few other words besides, none of them complimentary.

  Other families might have stories of curses, cold lads and white ladies, but we have old gods, merfolk and monsters. I never doubted, when I was little, that these stories were true. Now, less a child, I’m not so sure.

  But this night, for whatever reason, I need to hear such tales again and, for whatever reason, Grandmother is feeling generous and she nods. I place the book in her lap; the soaring points of her chair look like a throne with the wings of a bat. I curl on the green velvet chaise longue across from her, prop my head on a cushion, feel the warmth of the fire spread through me, knowing it will be too warm by the time the night is done, but not caring. I don’t ask for a particular recounting. It’s the telling that matters.

  For the moment, there is peace.

  And Aoife begins, in a voice that sounds only a little like an old woman’s, to read something I’ve not heard for many a year.

  Three children there were in the house: the firstborn, a girl to inherit; the middle a boy for the Church; and the last another girl, and a grief it would be to her mother if she fulfilled her purpose. The family had argued it back and forth, but the order must be respected; they did not get to pick and choose, the children’s great-grandfather reminded.

  There was nothing to be done about it: the tithe had to be paid whether they wished it or no.

  And so the children’s mother lowered her eyes and bowed her head. She sat in the nursery day and night, held the baby with her red-gold hair as if to take all the moments with her she could. When the rest of the family stopped watching her with suspicion – for who amongst them would go against the patriarch? When women ruled the O’Malleys there was more give and take, a greater flexibility with rules and boundaries; but the great-grandfather’s tenure had seen a tightening of the reins that held his women in check. Now, it seemed he’d never die, and those of his own blood found themselves hoping for his demise. And his granddaughter, the mother of the babe in question, was tired, tired of her bent back and bent knee, of giving way in all matters large and small and, without ever really knowing it when it happened, rebellion flared in her.

  And so the day before she was to say goodbye to her littlest, she sent the oldest and middle children to the sea. Take the path, she said, down to the shingle. Be careful not to slip. There’s a cave at the far side of the cove, you’ll love to see it, love to play there, perhaps find treasure, my sweets! She wrapped them up warmly, for the day was grey and cold.

  The eldest, Aislin, knew better than to question her mother, yet her excitement was tempered by some instinct. The boy, Connor, was more enthusiastic than his sister, not so wary, and the girl said nothing to dampen his spirits. She knew this excursion was important from the tension in her mother’s body, from the way her eyes were so dark and hard, the way her lips pressed so into whiteness. Aislin nodded and took her brother’s hand.

  ‘But don’t,’ their mother said as she adjusted the silver bell necklace around her oldest child’s throat, ‘let anyone see you. Let’s make it a game. How clever can you be? How quiet and sly, my little mice?’

  So Gráinne sent those children, she did, down to the pebbled beach. She sent them by the secret ways that all the youngsters of the house knew, but adults tended to forget: the long dark corridors where no one but the servants went and only then rarely. They scampered through galleries inhabited by nothing but gilings, for their home had always been made bigger than it needed to be, extensions created for prestige and to excite envy rather than to house any more bodies. They passed by family portraits whose storm-black eyes watched them go, eyebrows seemingly on the verge of lifting. Past weapons that had gathered dust and rust, not taken from walls in anger for years and years; past silver vases and busts on pedestals, past tapestries heavy and rich depicting scenes of the family’s history, with sights of the sea, always the sea, and ships upon it, the very things that helped make the O’Malley fortunes.

  They sneaked past the library door, past the chair where their great-grandfather spent his days dozing when he wasn’t making pronouncements about fates; past the office in which their father and his brothers spent their days counting and recounting the gold and silver brought in by the O’Malleys’ mercantile empire, planning and plotting and strategising to make more; past the solar where the great-grandmother, grandmother, and aunts spent their days in embroidery and schemes as women will when forced to sit idly by.

  It was only when they moved through the great subterranean kitchens that the children’s stealth came adrift. A single scullion caught sight of them, a girl thin and curious, and she followed. At a distance, she followed, but follow she did. Through the potager, then the gardens proper, trees and shrubs, flowerbeds, past wells ornamental and true, past the folly built only last year to look like a small ship because the great-grandfather had an obsession with such things. She was cold, for she’d not thought to put on a coat, but she still followed, lips taking on a blueish tinge, fingers turning numb so she had to rub them against each other and bury them in her armpits to keep them from cramping entirely. She followed them as they came to the cliff edge, to the spot where the switchback path began.

  O’Malley children had no fear of rain or grey skies, and no fear of the sea either for they learned to swim almost before they could walk. But they were careful on land, found it somehow treacherous the way it sometimes gave way without warning, when it promised such solidity. So the children were wary as they took the path down to the pebble-strewn cove.

  But when they reached the beach, their steps were sure once again: closer to the water, they were more certain. Behind them, the maid struggled, trying hard not to trip, to make any sound that might alert her quarry, but by that time they were nearer to their objective and focused utterly on that.

 
They came at last, did the children, to the sea cave, cut deep into dark layers of basalt. The tide was out for Gráinne had paid attention to the hour when she sent her children away, but the entrance was still so small, hardly more than a gap in the rock, as if a mighty hand had pulled the stone up in a curve as easily as a drape of fabric. Aislin got down on her knees and, after the smallest hesitation – it wasn’t fear, no, you couldn’t call it fear, more a considered caution – crawled inside, followed swiftly by her brother who suffered no such qualms.

  And the maid waited, not daring to pursue, and feeling that somehow she’d made an ill choice in giving in to her curiosity.

  It was dark, the space they squirmed through, damp and close and smelling of dead things the sea had claimed and wouldn’t let go. Just when it seemed they’d crawl forever, when Aislin was sure the darkness would suffocate them, a weak gleam showed up ahead and a voice trickled through to them. A voice so sweet that it drew them on, made Aislin forget she’d ever thought about trying to turn back. Surely, there was treasure here, just as their mother had promised.

  When Aislin and Connor could stand once again, they found themselves in a cave most assuredly, although they couldn’t say how far they’d gone; Aislin had a sense that the path had begun to slope down at some point. The area into which they stepped was large, large as the formal dining room at the manor twice over, two-thirds filled with black water, the other third a sandy bottom so soft their boots sank. The only source of light was the algae growing on the walls, which glowed a blue-green, made their faces look sickly, and showed the creature that still sang as it lay in the shallows, part-in and part-out of the liquid obsidian.

  The woman’s bottom half couldn’t be seen, but Aislin sensed movement in the water, a shift of the fluid caused by the press of something powerful, teasingly silver just like a hint or a taste of truth. The creature – woman, surely, for it was broad-shouldered, heavy-breasted, with long ropes of sable hair with pearls braided into them. But Aislin couldn’t quell the suspicion that the woman – thing – was much bigger than any person she’d ever seen, even amongst her tall family. The mouth was wide and filled with sharp teeth, the nose a little flat, the nostrils a little high, the eyes big and black with no white at all, but she clearly saw the children, for she smiled with that wide mouth and beckoned them closer. It – she – stopped singing and the sweet echoes dropped from a ceiling so high it was lost in shadows, dropped and dripped and trickled down to make ripples in the surface of the pond.