The Fall of Light (21 page)

He had gone back to Limerick that day long ago. He had ridden in along the banks of the Shannon River with his head low on
the horse and his eyes watchful for bailiff and agent and constable. He had considered the situation. He knew that she was
waiting for him. He knew too the life that she was living and that her waiting was secret and silent and existed only in the
thin, insubstantial way of hope or prayer. Still he remembered a look in her eyes. He told Teige this. He said it looking
into the starless sky when she was sleeping. There was a look in her eyes when he had told her that he loved her, he said,
and that was all he saw that day riding back into the town of Limerick. He had no plan.

“No,” his father said, as though this were an inevitability of his birth.

Tomas had arrived back in the town in the evening. Rain was pouring down and the streets were mucked and the sewers ran like
dark streams. Rats traversed the streets and carried leftovers from the stalls
of the market. Apple cores, plumstones, flecks of potato skin, passed into the shadows. Tomas tethered his horse in the narrow
alley behind the building where he knew Blath was. The rain fell. In his wet shirt his chest hammered. He said he tried to
swallow hard, for it seemed he had bitten a huge apple and the piece of it was wedged in his throat. But there was no apple,
he said. He went around the alley. When he approached the front door, he saw it was locked. He wanted to bang on it. But for
once he knew he shouldn’t and crossed the street and waited. The curtains of the rooms upstairs were drawn poorly and frayed
amber light showed. The rain threaded across it. There was the traffic of late gentlemen in their coaches passing up the street,
there were dragoons in uniform cursing and laughing and kicking a bottle they had emptied. There were dogs that meandered
night-eyed and low-snouted. So many dogs, he told them, dogs and rats and figures scurrying in the dark.

He waited a long time and none came out or in. He waited longer still. He struggled with doubt and dark imaginings, and when
he could wait there no more he stepped into the rain and walked across the street up to the front door and banged on it like
a hopeless emissary of love. He banged again. Then he heard the noise of calling from within and footsteps coming on the stairs.
He was asked his name through the door, and he said, “I am Tomas Foley, I am here for Blath.” And the door opened and there
was a man there of small stature with bald pate and whiskers and the smell of tobacco.

“She’s not here,” he said. His eyes were screwed near shut. He rocked on the balls of his feet as though a long time used
to the sea.

“Where is she?”

“There’s another Blath,” he told Tomas, “there’s as many Blaths as you want, eh?”

Tomas hit him then and the man fell back against the banister and his eyes opened wide for the first time and he rolled himself
quickly to one side and stood with the swaying motion of a boxer, though Tomas was nearly twice his size. He fisted at the
air and made short jabs of no import as Tomas advanced upon him.

“Where is she?” he asked again.

The man did not say, and Tomas reached across his fists and lifted him and flung him against the wall. He followed him across
the hallway
and pulled him like a sack upward until the man’s eyes were somewhere below his chin. He held him there and asked him again
where she was. The man shook his head in quick motion as though his head were preparing to spin off. Then Tomas broke his
arm. The man’s screams brought an old woman to the top of the stairs. She held a candle and peered down at them. Her eyes
were painted. Her hair was loose and those strands she possessed at the sides of her head were brushed outward by intent or
accident and lent to her the weird air of one grotesquely masked. She shouted for them to get out in the street. Tomas asked
the man again as he held him against the wall, and this time he heard that she was gone, that all the girls were gone to the
house of Lucius Stafford, cousin of the baronet. He heard the news but did not comprehend it. He stood a moment staring into
the face of the man. The man, fearing for his other arm, said the name again and told him where the place was.

When Tomas left there it was the middle of the night. The rain was still falling. He found his horse and rode out into the
darkness to the south. His progress was slow. The rain blew in his face and the moonlight was lost to him. He had been told
where the house was and so went there with the single purpose of getting Blath back. He was not thinking of the other girls
or who they might be or in what engaged. He was gifted the naive vision of the lovelorn and experienced such a simplified
view whereby the only significant measure in the world was the straight line between lover and loved. He rode on, an absurd
servant of forgotten chivalry or one bearing lit candelabra through the falling rain. He arrived at the house before dawn
and saw its candlelit windows as he came upon the curve of the avenue. It was a tall house. Its chimneys smoked the scent
of oak wood. Next to it, a smaller lodge nestled in the trees. Tomas tied off the horse and crept up across the lawns in the
rain. When he reached the house, he knelt and looked in the window and thought he had arrived by some magic inside a painting.

“I could not believe it at first,” he told them. “I could not understand it.” For there inside the long room were naked statues
of women. There were a dozen or so of them. They were as like real as could be imagined. Yet they did not move. They were
set about on alabaster podia through the room in a series of poses, some bearing fruits, some
holding a hand out in frozen invitation, some covering modestly with draped arm or fingers their bosom or sex. It was not
until he saw Blath there with flowers in her arms in the pose of Persephone that Tomas knew for sure that they were not statues.
Then he saw Lucius Stafford in the gown of a Roman emperor with a garland of leaves about his head and three others similarly
attired. They moved among the goddesses. Lucius led a pair of fawn bullish dogs like mastiffs on a rope of red velvet. They
passed down along the figures there. They laughed and made comments on each and restrained themselves to resume their performance
and seem imperial. The goddess Diana holding a wooden bow wavered in her place, and one of the men whipped at her with a tasselled
cord.

“I saw no more,” Tomas said. “I went down and broke the lock of the small lodge there. And I made a brand of a handle and
cloth wrapped about it and I laid it in the ashes until it was alight. Then I came up the lawn to the big house and crashed
in the glass and stepped in with the fire.”

Screams and glass shattering and the barking of the dogs and the astonished cry of Lucius Stafford announced him. The emperor
raised his hand as though to call forth bolts of lightning. His companions held up theirs as if to hold firm the beautiful
reality of the women in their power, but the goddesses had leapt down and were running naked in all directions. Tomas waved
the firebrand in zigzag and briefly marked the air as he walked forward. The Romans backed away. They called out for him to
stop. He struck the face of one of them with the burning wand and he fell writhing to the ground. Then he saw across the room
that Blath had seen and recognized him and was standing there with her arms across herself, unsure of whether to stay or run.
And the room was suddenly full of people and the firebrand was wrestled from him and fell on the carpet and spread flame.
There were two men on his chest. There was another struck him in the ribs with a wooden baton. Smoke was thick. Flames ate
up the curtains. Tomas could no longer see Blath or any of the women. He cried out her name. He kicked aside one who came
at him low and saw the man’s head twist sharply back as though the neck were broken. Then from behind he was hit with
the blow of a poker and the room spun sideways and he fell senseless to the floor.

“When I awoke I was in Limerick gaol,” he said.

He said it in a whisper to his father in the small hours when the others were sleeping and the sea sighed in rhythm as though
rocking the world.

“They had me there as a robber.” He felt his wrists when he told it, and Francis Foley saw the marks of irons on them. “I
was I don’t know how long in a place dark and wet no bigger than half the cart. It was a place of nothing. No bench, no bed,
nothing. I stood in my own shit. I cold not see my hand. I was in a place like under the world. Once in the day they slid
back the hatch and threw in what I was to eat and it landed in the dirt many times until I learned to listen for it coming.
There was a silvery kind of light for a moment then. Then it was gone. That was how I knew it was another day passed. I counted
them then. When I had counted a hundred I thought it was forever. I thought they would release me. They would come any minute.
But they did not. I began to count again. I tried to count each minute of each day and fell asleep standing and fell down
along the wall and woke with my face in muck and counted again.”

Tomas stopped. They gazed dimly at the night sky awhile.

“There were four hundred and thirty-seven days like that in that darkness and dirt,” he said when he started again.

“Oh God,” the old man said. “Oh God.” Teige awoke then and listened without stirring.

“I thought,” Tomas said, “they had forgotten me, and I hammered on the door until my fists were numb. I beat my head against
it. Still none came. I think they took days away and did not come at all, for sometimes I counted the day longer than it could
have been. Or it was that my mind was wandering. I thought of Teige and the twins then with the gypsies. I thought of the
white pony racing on the sands and how Teige would surely win. I thought of Blath and where she could be and did she know
if I was living or dead. I tried sometimes to see the patterns of the stars in the blackness, but my mind failed me. I could
tell rough seasons by the cold in the floor or how the smells
thickened and rose. But the darkness, the darkness,” he said, “that is…”

His head bowed then and his shoulders curved. His father placed a hand upon his back. The sea sighed. They said no more that
night. Teige closed his eyes tight and drifted uneasily to sleep.

What he told them the next evening was how one day without warning the footsteps approached and the hatch was not opened,
the door was. Two men reached in and lifted him out of the cell.

“I did not seem myself to myself,” he said, “so weak was I. I could not walk. I was a flake of Tomas. I was bone with flesh
fallen off it. They dragged me from under my armpits. My feet scraped and bled on the stones. They bore a lantern that burned
my eyes and I hung my head and saw the nakedness and dirt of myself passing down that place that was like a sewer beneath
the gaol. I tried but could not talk. My mouth was sores, my tongue like that in a leather boot. When I reached the stairs
I felt the light on the crown of my head hurting. When I got to the top I discovered I was near blind in this eye,” he said,
pointing his finger to it.

“As they took me down along the corridor, another in chains passed me going toward my cell below. He flinched when he saw
me. I heard his irons shake and the sounds of struggle as they beat him forward. I was thrust on, dragged by my gaolers and
brought at last to a large hall with barred gates and iron bars from floor to roof. Inside were maybe three hundred men and
women. They clamoured toward the gate when the gaolers approached and were threatened back with lashings and the beating of
batons on the bars. I was thrown in there then. The gates were locked and the gaolers went away.

“I lay on the ground. There were high, barred windows. The daylight hurt me. I curled there and did not know if I was to live
or die. Then the people came about me. They were beggars and thieves and rebel men and ones caught without means. The women
were to be in separate quarters, but all these were filled and so they were brought here to that large gaol instead and were
to wait until such space became open to them. Some were there without trial or judgement other than the wishes and say-so
of their landlords or some other one. They saw how I was and clothed me with abandoned rags. They carried me back toward the
wall where the ground was driest, for the light passed
there each day. The women sat me then on cloths they had made themselves of their own rags. One touched water on my lips.
I thought I fell in dreams then. I thought I lost the world and slipped into imagining, for before me then I saw Blath.

“I thought one eye was blind and the other saw dreams. But she was small and bent down and was near to me and I smelled her
and her fingers touched on the place on my forehead that was bruised and bloodied from beating on the door. And it was her.”

They were seated again by the low fire beside the cart on the west coast of Clare. When he said her name Tomas looked to where
Blath was now sleeping. He had thought that if they did not move for some days, her health might recover, but as she lay her
breaths came in broken parcels and her body still shivered beneath their blankets and coats.

“It was her,” Tomas said.

“She had been brought there after the fire in Stafford’s house. Some had told against her and said that I had come to kill
him because of her, and so she was brought in without trial in the night and thrown in the gaol and forgotten there. For one
year she did not know if I was living. She hungered, she grew ill, and her feet swelled. They had called for the surgeon of
that place for her. Farley, his name was, a man big in the stomach. He came there sometimes and ate with the captain. I saw
him. He passed the gates of our gaol with a cloth over his mouth. The guards took Blath to him. They laid her on a table there
and he looked at her feet and he cut them then.”

The wind came up from the sea and was bitter at their eyes and lips.

“He bled her to release the swelling. They told me he swayed with the wine of his dinner. He cut too forcefully and severed
the backs of her heels.”