Turning the Stones (36 page)

He says suddenly, ‘That business with the
Vindicator
 – I am heartily sorry for it. I used you badly.’

I half expect a throwaway quip to follow this declaration – ‘So hang me for it,’ or some such astringency. Instead he says with an effort, ‘My conduct was dishonourable.’

I can feel my heart beating. He expects a response, but it comes to me with a start that I am reluctant to dispatch the wrong that lies between us. To continue hugging his treachery close to me is very much my wish. The captain is the offender and I am the casualty. That gives me the upper hand and I
feel a base thrill at foiling his apology. I cannot like myself for it, but that does not detract from the exhilaration of thwarting him. You see how the little injured party comes stealthily to lord it over the master and the malefactor?

‘Why do you make your living the way you do?’ I speak in the high tone that destroys the atmosphere of confidence between the captain and me. I cannot say why I must do such a thing. Is it about clutching to my bosom a sense of power? The drive to do so is irresistible. I go on, stupidly, ‘It is quite dangerous, you know, and leads you to hostile situations. You will be caught one day by a revenue man and hanged or transported.’

The captain shifts his position with a creaking of bootleather before replying, in a voice so low it seems that he is speaking to himself, ‘That is the fate that is designed for me, of course. I harbour the hope, though, that I shall continue to step around it.’ He offers himself a grim chuckle. ‘You see? Delusion is a hard habit to break.’

In the silence that follows, the smoke dies away and a chill seeps in through the countless chinks in our shelter.

A Trail to Cashel, Connemara
May, 1766

Captain McDonagh and I left our refuge before dawn and have been slogging along in semi-darkness. We have exchanged very few words this morning. There is a gleam on the horizon now where the sun is being dragged from its bed, and the puddles left by last night’s rain are beginning to reflect the lightening sky. I am weary of the gloom and of my shivering. How consoling it was yesterday afternoon to place my ruined foot into the stirrup of Captain McDonagh’s hands as he assisted me on to the back of the mule. I can still feel the warmth of them as my toes nestled into the cave of his interlinked fingers.

My face feels as though it is on fire all of a sudden, but it is only that the sun has come up at last and suddenly everything is alight. The dew on the bog is glittering and the mountains ahead glow like massive ingots of gold.

It discomforts me that the thought of the captain lingers. I must remind myself that although his touch felt tender in passing yesterday, when I was temporarily lost, it is not illustrative of his character by any means. He is a hard man and a lawless one, and he cares only for his own gain. He said as much last night. His life is difficult and open to danger. As is mine.

You see how quickly the brightness fades here. All at once the appearance of the mountains has altered and they are now crouched on the horizon like humped brown beasts, grazing behind distant veils of rain. I remark anew the paradox of this landscape – so mutable and at the same time fixed. On the one hand openness and the grand range, the huge sky, the unrolling moor; on the other, things closing in on themselves – the tight, tiny stone-walled fields that became smaller and smaller with each passing mile, the sudden withdrawal of light as some housekeeper in the heavens throws a heavy drop-cloth of clouds over our heads. I can see how Captain McDonagh has echoed the spirit of these surroundings in his life at sea. I mean, the tension between the close confines of his sailing vessel and the awesome and unpredictable sweep of the ocean. My own existence by contrast has been a flimsy thing lived under the spell of Sedge Court and the allure of its mistress. But am I capable of inhabiting this aloof heath? I fear I may not have the pluck for it.

At length the trail stutters until it is not much more than a narrow track glimpsed through ropey brambles and soon Captain McDonagh pulls up his pony. He indicates a spot some hundred yards to the east.

There it is, a ruinous dwelling, outlined against the mottled sky, with a wind-whipped tree leaning over the thatch. The cottage is wedged into a shallow slope like a chock tasked with preventing a slippage.

This blasted mule. It will not budge. Captain McDonagh dismounts and without a word takes the mule’s halter and leads me, and his pony, towards Mrs Conneely’s cottage. A goat bleats from behind a stone-walled enclosure next to the
cottage. A guttural wheezing, which comes from the same direction, belongs to a grubby white donkey. All at once a ragged collie shoots from the doorway of the cottage and charges at us, showing its teeth. Captain McDonagh orders it to hush and it does. At a shout from within the cottage, the dog casts a wary glance behind.

A woman has thrust aside the door hanging. The words she cries could be either a warning or a welcome, I cannot tell which, but there is no question that the onset of Mrs Conneely makes me prey to all kinds of excitable feelings as I dismount from the mule.

She is a bony woman like her sister, but her limbs are more crooked. She looks as if she might have been taller once. She leans on a stick, dragging a stiff leg along in a scruffy patch of dirt. Her garments are of such decrepitude they have fallen to strips, but she is yet a formidable figure. Invisible eddies like the swirling updraughts that sometimes manifest on the road during a hot, dry summer seem to spin around her as though she were the eye of a vortex. She is bareheaded and her long wispy plaits fly off to one side. Her apron flaps and her petticoat, its crimson colour drained by aeons of wear, flutters like a collection of pennants.

Throughout her slow advance, Mrs Conneely remains riveted to me as though I were a lodestone. And I, stumbling forward, am drawn towards her outstretched arm. She engulfs me in a musky embrace of surprising force and cries an incomprehensible greeting in a voice that sounds like a rusty door being heaved open after decades of disuse.

She gazes into my face with an unnerving sea-green eye and a tremor passes through her body. She croaks words I
cannot understand as her speckled hand reaches to stroke my hair and she begins to laugh. She radiates glee – or even a kind of rapture – that leaves me in no doubt of the significance my presence holds for her.

‘Hold your horses, Kitty,’ Captain McDonagh says. ‘Miss Smith has only the English.’

‘Miss Smith is it?’ She slaps a thigh as if in the throes of unstoppable merriment. ‘No, it is not, by God. This girl here, the name on her is Molly O’Halloran.’

Molly O’Halloran again. I cannot seem to affix myself to this name. Yet I feel my blood flooding with excitement at the prospect of what I will learn from this old woman, and if she chooses to call me Molly O’Halloran then I shall answer to it.

I offer Mrs Conneely a curtsy and start to explain, ‘I came here—’

She breaks in with, ‘Summonsed, Molly. Summonsed here by me you were, and though you will find it a queer bit of news, it is the truth. Ah, Molleen, do you know how you came to be here? I saw you in all classes of situations that were no good to you at all and I put it on myself to bring you home.’

I do not think that Mrs Conneely can be entirely in her right mind. Surely she cannot think that she has cast a spell on me which has pulled me to this spot.

She says, ‘Things will move along in great style now that you are here. How will you like that?’ Then she remarks to Captain McDonagh, ‘She has something of her father in the shape of her face, but if you ever saw Nora Mulkerrin, it would frighten you to look at the child, for she is the spitting
image of her mother. Those black curls and eyes as blue-green as a heron’s egg and the sleepy eyelids – you would not mix her up with another.’

‘My parents …’ Those are words that snag on my tongue for lack of demand. My voice cracks with emotion. ‘They are dead, I suppose.’

Captain McDonagh says, ‘You see the girl is in a state of anxiousness, Kitty. Did you know her people at all or do you intend to spin a yarn? You’re well known for that, friend.’

Mrs Conneely turns a truculent eye on him. ‘Will you have a bit of sense, Mac. Would I ever mistake the daughter of Josey O’Halloran and Nora Mulkerrin? Hang me high if I would. As for the story, I will satisfy her in the matter, but I will not speak of it outdoors, I won’t so. It is unlucky.’

Standing here being worried by this wind, which throws our hair all around like an irritating prankster, I have the sense of being split in two. I cannot incorporate myself with this unexpected Molly O’Halloran and enter her life – the life that was not lived, the language I do not speak. I can only watch her accompany Mrs Conneely into the cottage and bide my time until something happens that will cause Molly and me to merge or to part definitively. But it is disconcerting, this intense feeling of separation from oneself. It is like walking through a construction that is out of true.

As we enter the cottage, the dog barks at the doorway and a hen squawks in the corner and flaps its wings and settles itself. A rather fetid, intimate smell rises up to meet us, a years-long distillation of Mrs Conneely concentrated in the single dusky chamber. There is something a little discreditable about our intrusion, I think, as though the old woman has
been unwittingly laid bare. Mrs Conneely lets the straw mat hang down in the doorway to keep the wind out and invites us to sit on the low stones near her glowering fire. A cauldron on the boil emits the mealy smell of potatoes.

Mrs Conneely climbs stiffly on to her knees, lights a twist of rushes in a slit stick and rams the stick into a sod of turf. ‘How’s yourself, Connla?’ she asks. ‘Keeping one step ahead of trouble?’

It gives me a jolt to hear the captain’s given name disclosed. Connla. A curious, melodious sound.

‘I’m not too bad, Kitty, all that’s left of me.’

‘Don’t let me delay you now. Sure you must get on about your business. Molly and I can manage without you.’

‘I will do so, Kitty, but let me house a load of turf for you before I go, if that creel can be trusted.’ He is referring to a derelict basket hanging next to a low pyramid of sods.

I am eager to question Mrs Conneely, but despite the extraordinary nature of our meeting, I gather that preliminaries must be paid their due and so I sit quietly listening to the muffled thud outside the cottage of Captain McDonagh at work, while Mrs Conneely kindles a long-shanked pipe. In no hurry to speak, she draws on her pipe with soft popping sounds and squints at me, grinning through the smoke. Something scampers overhead, mice, I suppose, coming and going among the rafters. The cottage throngs with stones, hanks of dried seaweed, a pile of potatoes, some driftwood piled against a soot-furred wall. In the corner a mattress is covered with an exhausted piece of homespun for a blanket.

Mrs Conneely serves tea to me in a scallop shell, but it does little to dissolve the knot of nerves in my stomach. And I am
unsettled too by the way in which this woman feasts her eyes on me. It compels me to break the silence.

‘Captain McDonagh tells me that your husband was a scholar. What an esteemed gentleman he must have been.’

Mrs Conneely cackles. ‘Mike Conneely was that lazy he would not stir to knock a burning ember off his foot, but you could not beat him for brains.’ She is a woman rather mobile in her moods, for her laughter quickly fades and she seems overtaken by melancholy.

Captain McDonagh shoulders his way through the doorway with the laden basket and tips the sods against one of the gable walls. I am glad when he removes himself to a corner, where there is a plank balanced on a couple of flat stones, and seats himself with his long legs stretched out. There is a trace of regret in my mood at the prospect of his departure, but I know he must press on to the bay where Mr Guttery has left a boat for him. He brings a brace of pistols and a powder horn from his bag, and a lead ball, which he rolls in the palm of his hand. He looks up in my direction or at something past my shoulder – the nervous mat, perhaps, that is used for a windbreak. It was slapping itself against the door jamb just now, but it has fallen still. The scratchings and skitterings in the cottage have ceased, too, and the smoke hangs limply above our heads. I have a feeling of breathlessness. It seems as if all the air has rushed outside under the pressure of unsaid things.

Eventually Kitty breaks her silence. ‘I will tell you this about Nora,’ she says. ‘It was an awful ardent temperament that was in her. She thought the world of Josey, you know.’ She frowns up at the wreaths of pipe smoke and bats them away, and says, ‘But that’s no way to begin. I will tell you about those days
from the start. It was a time, Molly, when we were all in it – myself and Nora and Josey, and you, of course. You were always a great girl for the wonders of the world.’

Something shifts in my memory like the insects kicking their way through the dried sedge strewn over Kitty’s floor. It is that mattress of Kitty’s slumped in the shadows. I see myself, I believe, tucked under a blanket on just such a mattress, watching dim figures move about in the shadows. A woman reaches behind her back and unties her apron and a man dips a corner of the apron into a bowl of water and scrubs at his face. Sleepily I embrace a thing that smells grassy and salty, a little effigy with two small hard shells for eyes.

I sit up straight in a rush of recollection. ‘Did I ever have a doll made of straw?’

Kitty’s face splits open in a gappy smile. ‘By Our Lady, you did so! But that morning there, when we came to the long strand, you lost your footing. Your basket went flying and the doll with it. A state of disintegration went on it then. What a to-do you made!’

Seaweed and shells and blades of straw scattering across sand. Is it the wreckage of a plaything? I cannot say precisely that my memory retrieves this image. It could be my imagination that watches shreds of crimson – from the doll’s tiny petticoat? – blow towards the weed sprawled at the water’s edge.

‘And you will remember,’ Kitty says, ‘the necklace of heather I twisted for you that day.’