Turning the Stones (42 page)

The captain mistakes my feelings for trepidation, for he says, ‘Don’t worry, Molly. Harm is unlikely to visit you here. But shall I leave you a pistol and a charge? You may have it for show in any case to frighten off any soul you do not like the look of. Will that put you at your ease?’

Captain McDonagh hands me the pistol and begins to tell me how the mechanism works. The piece feels heavy in my hands. The captain shows me where the ramrod is stored underneath the barrel. My gaze lingers on his hands with their dirt under the fingernails. He indicates the hammer and the trigger.

I suddenly find that I am standing in a moment of amazing clarity. It is as though my eyes have been unsealed and I am looking on an entirely new universe. I see that I am in love with Captain McDonagh.

‘A pistol, is it?’ Kitty breaks her long silence. ‘Sure, there is no use in that article at all.’ She begins to cackle as though nothing in the world has ever amused her so.

‘Thank you, Captain, but I believe you need your weapons more than I do.’ My voice is so soft he must bow his head to hear my words.

‘As you please,’ he says, but he seems in no hurry to take the pistol from my hand.

I do not dare to look at him. I hardly let myself breathe for fear that I might startle this fledgling love into darting away. The captain removes the pistol from me, his fingers almost brushing mine, and tucks it into the pocket of his coat. I long to linger in this moment, but I know that I must put my feelings away. I am in love with Captain McDonagh and it grieves my soul to be torn from him, but torn I must be. Duty and compassion oblige me to stay with Mrs Conneely. I gave her my word. I do so in memory of Nora Mulkerrin and Josey O’Halloran. Surrounding them is a much more ancient grief, and to take up a life in the place where they birthed me is the only proper monument I can erect. I want them to know that. I want them to know how my story ends.

For a few minutes I feel that everything around has receded and that I am left in a tight circle of consciousness that encompasses only Captain McDonagh and me. What a haven it is, a safe harbour. But then, I register a faint sound beneath or beyond the wind. I do not recognise exactly what it is, but misgiving turns my innards to water.

Suddenly Captain McDonagh cocks an ear and asks, more of himself than of me, ‘Is that a child lost on the bog?’ Clearly audible now is a shrill kind of whimpering. It almost resembles a curlew’s call, but I cannot persuade myself that it belongs to a bird. I look to Kitty and she lifts her hands in a slow gesture that seems to signify acceptance of the inevitable.

A figure has appeared, pushing through a scrappy stand of undersized alder or birch – I do not know which, all of the vegetation here is stunted and altered. The flaring mist makes it difficult to make out the encroacher at first, but I can guess her identity and somehow I am not even surprised. The air seems to have congealed in order to resist her approach, but what can the air do, what can any of us do, to keep at bay an event that is inexorable? Kitty is laughing away. Even the captain must blanch at the sight of the convulsed creature stumbling towards us in a bedraggled riding habit. She has the appearance of a pitiful child, hopelessly out of her element, and there is something calamitous, fateful, about her, too.

‘Captain,’ my voice quavers, ‘that is Eliza Waterland. It is she whom Kitty means to harm.’

‘Good God,’ he says quietly. ‘I do not like this.’

Eliza has caught sight of us. Her eyes widen and she stands immobilised with mouth agape and arms dangling.

She has not recognised me. I let go the mule’s halter, push the mantle from my head and run to her.

‘Em?’ She cannot believe her eyes. She begins to wail.

‘It’s me, Eliza. You are safe now.’ I do not know if that is exactly true. To come across her in this place fills me with foreboding as much as amazement and I am afraid that Kitty’s design may come to pass.

Eliza sags against me, racked by spasms of shivering.

Barfield springs into my mind. Eliza was travelling with him. If she is here, so is he. The thought makes me giddy with fear.

‘Eliza.’ I look into her face. ‘Where is Barfield?’

She stares at me as if she does not comprehend. I shake her a little to bring her out of her abstraction. ‘Surely you are not on the moor all alone?’

Eliza stiffens in my arms. She has seen something over my shoulder that she does not like. I turn and follow her gaze. It lights on Kitty, sitting still on her donkey, with a remote air as if she is reposed in some faraway place, inside one of those pools or bubbles where she sees things. The way she is bent over, with her black mantle drawn low over her forehead, makes her look like a large crow.

Now Captain McDonagh steps forward. His orderly, practical demeanour steadies me. Surely Barfield cannot get at me while I have Kitty’s powers and the captain’s pistols to hand. He says to me, ‘What do you want to do with this lady? Keep her with you or send her with me?’

Eliza gulps back her tears and stammers, ‘Who is this?’

‘Captain McDonagh. He will help you.’

‘But where is Johnny? What have you done with him?’

‘Johnny? What do you mean?’

She pushes at me and frees herself from my arms. She has no strength in her, but I can feel the force of her anger. ‘Where is he?’

In the tone he uses to command his crew, Captain McDonagh advises Eliza to calm herself. He says, ‘If your companions have gone astray, we will ask men in the locality to search for them.’

Eliza cries at me, ‘You and your scheming! You tricked my brother into coming away with you. You ever wished to thwart us, I see that now.’

Captain McDonagh says, ‘You and Kitty may go on, Molly, and I will carry her to the cove. I will find someone to return her to Galway, where she may find passage to her home.’

Eliza pays no attention to the captain’s offer. She whimpers, ’I do not like that creature.’ She means Kitty. ‘Tell her to go away.’

‘Eliza, hush.’ I pull the mantle from my head and settle it around her shoulders, but she hardly seems aware of me.

She cries, ‘Such dreadful things have happened! Mr Barfield has disappeared, too!’

‘If Barfield is close by,’ I gasp, ‘then I am in danger.’

The captain says, ‘Who are you talking about?’

But seeing the agonised expression on my face, he does not wait for an answer. He says to Eliza. ‘Where did you last see this person?’

‘I do not know! He said he was going to judge the lie of the land. We were in a bog. I waited all night for his return. There was no shelter and nothing to eat or drink and it was so dark and I was
terrified
!’

‘Kitty –’ the captain is brisk – ‘the stones must wait. I will not leave you and Molly alone while she is under threat.’

‘Do as you please, man,’ Kitty rasps. ‘I am not in it now at all, for it will end as it is meant to.’

Eliza sobs, ‘I fear that he fell into a sinkhole and was swallowed.’

And
I
fear that Barfield is indestructible.

Each time that Johnny knocked him down with a scornful remark or a humiliating prank, Barfield rose up again as enduring as a cockroach. Johnny made a show of being the more dominant of the two, but I never saw Barfield cowed by Johnny’s superciliousness – there is too much violence in him for that. If Johnny acted the master, it was only because Barfield allowed him to. I imagine that nothing would arouse Barfield’s perverse humour more than to watch Johnny Waterland strut about so very mistaken about the degree of authority at his disposal.

Eliza will not let me comfort her. She shouts once more, ‘Where is Johnny?!’

I ask her in bewilderment, ‘How could Johnny be here?’

‘You bewitched him,’ Eliza hisses. ‘You took him away from me.’ She appeals to the captain. ‘Barfield told me. She made Johnny run away with her and now she has ditched him.’

Captain McDonagh is looking at me with an air of enquiry and I worry that he has begun to doubt me. If only I could tell him the events that led to my escape, but I cannot bring them to light. Why can I not do so? Is it because I am a dissembler and my forgetting is only a ruse to board up the truth in its guilty chamber?

‘It is not true,’ I cry. ‘I was never in agreement with Johnny Waterland.’

Eliza pushes at me a bitter face that has broken out into sweat. ‘You liar. People in Bristol told Mr Barfield you were with a gentleman who matched Johnny’s appearance. He told me so.’

‘Why should you believe what Barfield says?’

‘Why shouldn’t I?’

Because … because I am waking up in a noisome bedchamber that reeks of piss and brandy … and if I can say what happened there, Barfield will be exposed for the rakehell that he is.

All at once some spark seems to go out of Eliza and she falls to the ground in a faint. The captain props her up and revives her with a pinch of snuff to her nose. He says to me, ‘We must go on now. We have wasted enough time.’

Kitty begins to cackle again. She croaks, ‘Too late, Molly, my jewel. Too late to take the curse back from the stones.’

*

The hill of Cashel looks down on us as we descend in a column towards a cove. Captain McDonagh holds the drooping Eliza upright on his pony. We are on a track bordered by a long chocolate-coloured turf wall, its sods piled on one another at an oblique angle. The wall looks in danger of collapse, but I dare say it intends to endure, held up by the mutual binding of its components. On either side of the track lie endless iterations of gorse and granite boulders. The cove below is sheltered by a tongue of grey-green land and crumpled rocks that are heaped about with yellow seaweed. The tide is full and a boat with distinctive curved lines bobs at anchor close inshore. I assume it is a tender that Captain McDonagh has arranged to take himself, and now Eliza as well, to the French
ship that is anchored in the bay. I watch his tall back as I follow him on my mule. I am overcome with sorrow at the loss of him.

He has not looked my way since we set off from the misty clearing where we encountered Eliza. I sense that some warm feeling that he came to have for me is already fading. Perhaps he believes Eliza’s accusation – that I eloped with her brother and have now abandoned him.

I glance over my shoulder at Kitty, plodding along behind me. She looks very frail. I know she loves me. It is my duty to stay with her even if her end of the bargain has not held up. There is no time now to go with her to the place where she would lift the curse she placed on the Waterlands – as though that would have made any difference to Eliza. Her state of harm is to do with Barfield rather than any hocuspocus dreamed up by an old hermit woman half deranged by loneliness.

At that instant there is a bang. Kitty grunts softly, and tries to say something. She tugs at her mantle as if to hold herself together.

‘Captain!’ I cry, pulling up my mule. A dark rosette is forming on Kitty’s washed-out shirt. ‘Captain! Hurry!’

I have reached Kitty – she has pressed an inadequate hand to her breast, but blood spills between her fingers. Captain McDonagh has pulled Eliza from the pony – she is collapsed in a heap against the wall – and he rushes towards Kitty and me with his pistol in his hand. I understand that Kitty has been shot by mistake. Barfield is close by and means to kill me. The donkey brays as the weight shifts on its back and Kitty topples to one side. All of this happens terribly slowly.
I catch Kitty in my arms, staggering under the impact of her fall, and drag her to the ground. There is a hole in her chest where the shot has torn up her flesh and her breath makes a rattling sound as though her throat were filled with gravel.

Bent low under the cover of the wall, Captain McDonagh commands me to sit Kitty up against the turf. He snatches the mule’s rope halter before the animal can abscond. The donkey is out of reach, backing away along the track. Kitty’s eyes flutter shut, her crimson hands are folded in her crimson lap. Her face is waxy and she seems already to belong to a place far away. The captain whispers in her ear and makes the sign of the cross on her forehead. She groans faintly and her head droops as life pours out of her on its river of red.

I press my lips to her cool cheek and ask God to commend her soul. She utters a shallow sigh and then she is gone. The captain bends to me with a hoarse whisper. ‘Come away!’ He seizes my wrist.

There is no time to contemplate the passing of Kitty Conneely – for we are in danger. Barfield will kill me if he can. Because he is a man of violence. Is it the blood pooling around Kitty that speaks to my understanding?

I do, I understand.

The door of Barfield’s bedchamber swings open and I see the figures within: Barfield, Johnny, me. But I cannot examine the scene in this present mayhem. We are scuttling at a crouch, Captain McDonagh and I, with the mule for a shield. The animal reaches Eliza. The pony stands patiently at her side, its nose snuffling in the weeds at the foot of the wall.

A second shot thwacks into the turf.

The captain glances at his sleeve, which has been torn by
the shot’s trajectory. Scarlet spurts at the ripped cloth. ‘It is nothing,’ he growls, and pulls the pony away from its grazing. ‘Keep your heads down,’ he says. ‘We have a minute while he loads another charge.’

He urges us forward, screened by the animals. Eliza stumbles along, dazed, in a state of shock. At the point where the turf runs out, a short, grassy slope gives way to rocks and the waves. Beyond, the captain’s boat sways on the tide. Between the terminus of the wall and the sea, three or four tallish, squarish boulders lying roughly in a row provide some small cover.

The captain says, ‘Tie my neck-cloth around my arm, will you, to staunch the blood. Don’t be frightened – the wound is superficial.’

As I lean close to wind the strip of cloth around his upper arm I can see a pulse jumping in his throat. It is the only sign of his tension.

‘What are you doing?’ I ask. He is pulling off his boots.

‘Preparing for a dunking. I will draw him out, while you and Miss Waterland reach the shore using the mounts for protection. I will cover you, while you bring the girl through the waves to the boat.’