Turning the Stones (40 page)

Kitty offered to give her a hand to tow it and she too stripped to her shift. The two women picked their way off the rocks and stepped into the churning shallows.

Kitty said, ‘Be careful, won’t you? Good luck.’

‘We will be back in a flash. Good luck to you!’

They slogged through the sea’s floating gardens until the sandy bottom fell away and then they were able to kick free of the weeds. Nora propelled herself forward, pushing the
water away with powerful sweeps of her arms. The timber was at a greater distance than she had calculated and she was panting by the time she approached the nearest log. It skidded from her reach, but she threw herself at it with determination and managed to drape an arm over it in an awkward embrace. She had not realised that the log was so long. It was the trimmed trunk of a tall tree about twenty feet in length and more than a foot in diameter. How long it had been at sea who could say – it might have floated loose from the cargo of a foundered ship hundreds of miles away, but it was in good condition with none of the tiny pin marks that indicate borer. The tree must have been a handsome sight when it was rooted in its home.

Treading water, she looked around and saw that Kitty was heading for another log that was bobbing two or three yards behind the first. There were others congregating in the distance, but the current was already hustling them out of reach. Josey would be over the moon if they could land even one of these beauties.

Kitty grasped her log and cried, ‘Both of them we can bring in, I am sure! Or will I come and help you to manage the one?’

Nora shook her head. ‘Don’t worry, friend. You know I am able for swimming.’

Kitty shouted, ‘The tide will ebb soon, Noreen. We must not tarry.’

Nora wished she had a decent length of rope by her, but the waist-cord would have to do. She tugged it from her head, passed the working end around the log and secured it with a bowline knot. She could see that Kitty was doing the same.
Nora tightened the knot against the log. Would she have the strength to tow the thing? The log was awfully extensive – but that meant there was a deal of wood in it. She imagined the elation that would fill Josey when she brought this prize ashore. A boat might be made from it by the time the November starlings arrived. The image of a curvaceous vessel filled to the gunwales with glistening heaps of cod and haddock glided into Nora’s mind.

With the end of the cord in one hand, she turned and struck out for the shore. At once the log bunted her between the shoulder blades. Nora spluttered out a mouthful of water and pushed her hair from her eyes. She tried to shove forward, but the log yawed inconveniently. Mother of God, this thing was a devil, wasn’t it? She wondered if it might be easier to paddle the log to shore. Of course, the beast did not want to let her on at first. It rolled and spun and insisted on much wearisome effort before she could haul herself astride. The wood dipped into the sea under her weight, but when the following swell lofted her up, Nora was able to pinpoint Kitty, some distance behind, joggling along like a determined retriever with her catch.

Nora’s thighs gripped the log as though she were riding an irascible donkey, and making an oar of her hands she drove it onward. It was a tiring business, though, on top of the day’s kelping. She altered her position, flopping on to her belly, with splayed legs providing a grip, one hand hanging on, the other sweeping strongly in the sea. She swivelled her head and warm water trickled from her left ear. The throb of the sea sounded very loud. Or was that the beating of her blood? She drew up her arms, resting her left cheek on them.

It was a relief to float for a moment without striving, feeling the sun’s heat on her back, and watching her indolent hair trailing on the surface of the sea. She could see almost to the sandy floor below. Shafts of sunlight cut through the clear water like a loy through turf, picking out a haze of restless, translucent infant lobsters and schools of tiny silver fish twitching among the dancing fronds of weed. She rose and fell on the swell, pacified by the lazy rhythm of the waves, and began to drowse …

What was that?

That sound – wasn’t it the clunk of oars turning in their rowlocks and the creak of timbers?

Nora pushed herself up to sitting and saw a rowboat not far away that did not belong to these parts. It had not the shape of a
púcán
bringing seaweed from one of the islands or a load of potatoes. Where are those people all going? Nora asked herself.

There were three people in the boat, the oarsman and a couple of the gentry, by the look of their headgear. The man sported an authoritative three-cornered hat, while the lady was repressing the brim of a sizeable bonnet whose ribbons snapped in the breeze. They had not noticed Nora.

She cast about for Kitty and was disquieted to find that her friend’s course was going one way while hers went another, so that a separation had come between them. Nora stifled a warning cry for fear that it would draw the strangers’ attention. Who knew what manner of people they were. They might inform the militia that women of the island had been seen purloining wreck-wood that belonged by rights to the landlord – he was an awful tyrant for staking his claim to
the sea’s bounty. Galore of people had been marched away in manacles to Galway for less. If she could only get this brute of a log ashore, then it would be no hard matter for Josey and her to carry it home in the dead of night.

Nora slipped from the log and quietly entered the sea. She was lying off the point of the spur that divided the inlet from the strand. With a turn of her head she could discern the crimson blob of her tent-petticoat on the shore. The thought of Molly folded up inside like the nub of a flower lifted her spirits. She hauled on the cord that was attached to the log and, with her legs scissoring under the water to provide momentum, she paddled and hauled, paddled and hauled. But the shore would not come closer. She detected some opposition in the sea, a reluctance to let her go forward.

She realised then that she no longer had the tide in her favour. The blasted thing had begun to ebb. No matter how vigorously she laboured, she could not advance. She felt the undertow tugging at her legs, and a stiff offshore breeze was making the sea lumpy and obstructive. Nora found herself drifting away.

She looked again towards the strand and was rattled to find that the strangers’ boat had pulled up on the shingle and the people had disembarked. How had that happened so quickly? The woman was strolling along with her mantle and flashing white skirts billowing like sails. Her neck was bent and her head obscured by the hat. Was she searching for something to eat in the sand – scallops or gapers or razor shells? However, the men with her were agitated, Nora sensed that.

Nora’s heart flopped over cold and heavy as the interlopers registered the red tent. The woman looked up and drew closer
to the man in the masterful hat as though she were afraid. Yes, Nora urged, fear the wild natives. Go away, go away, back, back from whence you came! The other man pointed at the pile of oarweed that the tide had washed up near the bank. The tension in Nora wound tighter as he approached the heap and kicked at it and pulled some of the fronds away. Josey would not have him meddling with the wrack, not when he was responsible for it. Nora felt a sinking sensation in her stomach like a stone at the end of a long, long line dropping into one of the ocean’s terrifying chasms.

She began to swim with desperate, thrashing strokes towards the shore, not caring now how much commotion she made, intending, in fact, to distract the intruders so that the events that were about to occur would stall and fail to go forward and life would go on as it was and not be changed violently and for ever – for Nora knew with horror-stricken certainty that death was walking on the strand and nothing would satisfy him more than to spring his trap.

The House of Kitty Conneely, Connemara
May, 1766

As the boat beached on the strand, Kitty’s first thought was that the people had lost their way. The man of the hat and his oarsman hung back at first near the water’s edge and she sensed their trepidation. But the fancy woman was bold at the outset. The instant she stepped ashore, she took a great interest in whatever it was at her feet, for she set off with her nose down, fossicking.

With that detail, memory strikes me like a thunderbolt.

I recognise the fossicking woman, of course. She is Mrs Waterland – with her great hat and her wilful sense of entitlement and her unsatisfactory little daughter at home.

I recognise, too, with ghastly foreboding, that her stroll along the strand will devastate Nora and Josey O’Halloran, and I marvel at the relentless sequence of events that has driven me to this place. Kitty Conneely insists that she summonsed me here, which is an impossible and absurd thing to say, yet here I am with the truth rushing at me. It bursts into the room like some long-delayed messenger gasping out the news of a terrible rout. There was no foundling hospital or penitent poacher in the cells at Chester. Nor was there a merciful rescue or a lucky escape.

I was stolen.

I might have been a specimen of lichen or a curious shell that happened to catch Mrs Waterland’s eye. She simply wrenched me away and left behind havoc in my place.

My eyes fix on Kitty in heavy silence. My world has broken free of its axle and gone reeling off the path.

Far away on the moor the wind is moaning. The outcome of this tale sits between the three of us in the cottage like some huge, unmanageable bale that has split open from its fastenings. Kitty coughs and sniffs and leans forward with sweeping gestures of her arms as if she intends to gather up the invisible mess at her feet.

‘The woman of the hat picked you up,’ she says at length. Her face darkens and a sigh catches in her throat. ‘Nora left off the wreck-wood, I saw then, and she started to swim for the shore. At the same time up jumped Josey from behind the kiln and he sprang on to the strand to protect his child. I will admit it is frightening that he looked with the ash pole brandished high, but it was only Josey running to his daughter, and there was no need for the oarsman to shoot. And yet shoot he did. A flash came out of the hand of that man, may a red devil take him and use him.’

A sound it was like stone falling on stone. My blood runs cold and somewhere inside me a child’s voice begins to wail in panic.

For a few seconds Josey stood on his feet with the people on the strand gawking at him …

I should like to quit this cottage and this story at this instant, leaving my father yet alive. If I do not hear what comes next, he will live still! But then Kitty speaks and Josey O’Halloran falls down on the white sand. My hands are already pressed
to my mouth to stifle a cry and yet it seems to me that a scream sounds in the hush of the cottage. I think it must have travelled a great distance from the past because it arrives at my ear with a sound as thin as a wire.

It is Nora’s scream of anguish.

Mrs Waterland was unmoved by the screams, if she heard them at all above the sound of the wind and the waves. I doubt she noticed the desperate soul struggling in the sea. She would have been preoccupied, carrying away to the boat the little girl. Mrs Waterland held the child fast on her lap, Kitty tells us, and the men cast off and they hurried away on the convenient tide.

All of this happened on the spur of the moment. There was no planned design.

Kitty cannot fathom the impulse behind Mrs Waterland’s heartless theft. ‘Why would she do so?’ she cries, her eyes sparking with anger. ‘The cruelty of it, on top of the wicked shooting.’

‘For God’s sake, you know the answer to that.’ Captain McDonagh, his shoulders bunched under his coat, presses his hands on his knees as though he must physically restrain himself. ‘Such people never think that they are cruel. They are blinded and deafened by the privilege of themselves. They tell themselves that others do not feel pain and loss to the same degree that they do. That is how they think, and they must hold fast to their views to avoid despising themselves.’

‘Had our men been at home,’ Kitty says, ‘they would have launched the boats and been after the child in a flash. But there was no one to help, and the ebbing tide and the freshening wind were against us. They helped the devils get away.’

Another long, terrible silence. Then she says thickly, ‘Ah, Molleen, Nora swam the life out of herself to try to bring you back.’

My heart collapses, felled by grief at the thought of my parents. I believe in them now, absolutely, I do, and their loss a second time over is unbearable. Hot, salty tears slide down my cheeks. A soundless torrent of them drips from my chin.

Captain McDonagh passes to me from his pocket a handkerchief and I bury my face in it to muffle my sobs. He murmurs, ‘Has Kitty got it right? Do you remember it all?’

The scene is vividly excruciating to me: my father bleeding on the strand, my mother beating through the sea in the everwidening distance between us. I covered it over with a haze of crimson and the cry of gulls, which sounded as an echo in my head until this day.

I turn to the captain. I straighten myself as much as I am able and tell him, ‘You may address me as Molly O’Halloran, if you please. It is my name and I will use it.’

He acknowledges me with a grave bow.

Afterwards it was said that it was not people who had come but that brigade from the other side, Kitty tells us, and that I had been taken by a
bán sí
, a faeriewoman, for a hostage. The wife of Liam Black said that when she and her husband went to their boat that morning they saw a puff of dust moving along the path and they recognised it as a sign that a band of faeries was travelling on the way to the long strand. They said that Josey or Nora must have done something to offend the other crowd. Martin Lee let it be known that he had warned Josey and Nora not to stay behind. Had the O’Hallorans only sailed to the holy well on the saint’s island, the dreadful
fatalities never would have occurred. It was fate, by God, and that is the way the incident was left.