The Good People (4 page)

John O’Donoghue rose, his blacksmith’s bulk suddenly filling the room. ‘And you, Nance Roche. God save you.’ He moved forward to lead her to the fire, and the other men immediately made room by the hearth. Peter, pipe in mouth, fetched a creepie stool and placed it firmly down by the coals, and Áine brought water for her dirty feet. Daniel offered Nance a small nip of
poitín
, and when she shook her head, the young man mumbled, ‘’Tis not a drop big enough to fit a wren’s bill,’ and pressed it into her hand.

Those who had fallen silent resumed their talk once they saw Nance was welcome. Only Seán and Kate Lynch retreated to the shadows where they slouched, watching.

Nance extended her bare toes to the embers, sipping her spirits. Nóra sat beside her, dread unspooling in her stomach as she watched the steam rise from the old woman’s shoulders. How had she known Martin had died?

The old woman took a deep breath and raised a hand towards the bedroom. ‘He’s in there?’

‘He is,’ Nóra answered, heart fluttering.

Nance cradled her cup. ‘When was his hour?’

‘John and Peter brought him to me when it was still light. Before evening.’ Nóra looked at the ground. The close air of the cabin after the clean night outdoors was making her feel sick. There was too much pipe smoke. Too much noise. She wished she could go outside and lie on the soft slick of mud, breathe in the smell of rain and be alone. Let the lightning strike her.

Nóra felt Nance’s hands close around her fingers. The tenderness in her touch was alarming. She fought the urge to push the woman away.

‘Nóra Leahy. You listen to me,’ Nance whispered. ‘For all the death in the world, each woman’s grief is her own. It takes a different shape with all of us. But the sad truth is that people will not want your grief a year after you bury your husband. ’Tis the way of it. They’ll go back to thinking of themselves. They’ll go back to their own lives. So let us mourn Martin now, while they will listen. While they have the patience for it.’

Nóra nodded. She felt like she would throw up.

‘And, Nóra, tell me. What’s all this muttering about him passing at the crossroads? Is that true?’

‘’Tis.’ It was Brigid who had spoken. She was cutting tobacco at the table behind them. ‘Peter O’Connor found him there. A dreadful sorrow.’

Nance turned her head, squinting. ‘And who are you?’

‘Brigid Lynch.’

‘My nephew Daniel’s wife,’ Nóra explained.

Nance frowned. ‘You are carrying. Young Brigid, you ought not to be in a corpse house.’

Brigid stopped cutting the plugs of tobacco and stared.

‘You have a right to leave. Before you breathe the death in and infect your child with it.’

‘Is that true?’ Brigid dropped the knife on the table. ‘I knew to stay out of the churchyard, but . . .’

‘Churchyard, corpse house, grave mound.’ Nance spat on the fire.

Brigid turned to Nóra. ‘I don’t want to leave Daniel,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t like to go out when ’tis dark. And ’tis storming. I don’t want to go alone.’

‘No.’ Nance shook her head. ‘Don’t you go alone. ’Tis an uneasy night.’

Brigid pressed both hands against the round of her stomach.

Nance waved at Áine, who was handing out filled pipes to the men. ‘Áine O’Donoghue, will you take this girl to a neighbour’s? Take her husband too, so he might come back with you. ’Tis no night for a soul to be alone on the road.’

‘Take her to Peg O’Shea’s,’ Nóra muttered. ‘She’s closest.’

Áine looked between the women. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

‘’Tis for the good of the young one’s child.’ Nance reached out and placed her wrinkled hand on Brigid’s belly. ‘Make haste, girl. Put some salt in your pocket and leave. This storm is brewing.’

By midnight Nóra’s cabin was oppressive with the smell of wet wool and the sourness of too many people in a crowded room. The eyelids of Martin Leahy were bright with two pennies, placed there by a neighbour, and there was a crusted saucer of salt balanced on his chest. A plate of tobacco and coltsfoot sat on the dead man’s stomach. The air was unbearably close, smoke-rich, as the men nudged their lips with clay pipes, borrowing Nóra’s knitting needles to tap out the ashes and wiping them on their trousers.

At the approach of midnight John O’Donoghue recited a rosary for the dead, and the company knelt and mumbled their responses. Then the men retreated to the walls of the cabin and watched the women keen the body by the poor light of the rush tapers, stinking of fat and burning too quickly from their brass pinch.

Nance Roche led the wailing against the muted cracking of thunder. Her forehead was grey with ashes, her hands blackened from where she had smeared cold cinders on the foreheads of the other women. Nóra Leahy felt each powdered cheek split with the hot, wet path of her tears. She knelt on the ground and looked up at the circle of familiar faces, furrowed in solemnity.

This is a nightmare, she thought.

Nance closed her eyes, let her mouth slip open, and began a low lament that vanquished the small conversation of the men like an airless room snuffs a flame. She crouched on the clay floor and rocked back and forth, her hair loosened and thin over her shoulders. She cried without pause, without words. Her keen was hollow, fear-filled. It reminded Nóra of the
bean sidhe
, of the silent, scrabbling death-yawns of drowning men

As Nance keened, the other women muttered prayers for the dead, asking God to accept Martin Leahy’s departed soul. Nóra noticed Kate Lynch, brown hair dull in the gloom, next to her kneeling daughter, Sorcha, dimpled and whispering, and Éilís O’Hare, the schoolmaster’s wife, crossing herself in a latticework of prayer, one eye open to Nance as she clawed the firelight. Her neighbours and their daughters. The glut of valley women, all wringing their hands. Nóra shut her eyes. None of them knew how she felt. None of them.

It was frightening, to be unbridled from language and led into anguish by the
bean feasa
. Nóra opened her mouth and did not recognise her own voice. She moaned and the sound of her grief scared her.

Many in the room were moved to tears by the
caoineadh
of the women. They bent their damp heads and praised Martin Leahy with tongues loosened by
poitín
, naming the qualities that recommended him to God and man. The fine father of a daughter, gone to God only months before. A decent husband. A man who had the gift for bone-setting, and whose wide hands could always calm horses in a hackle of panic.

Nance’s moan dropped to a low ragged breathing. Sweeping up a sudden fistful of ash, she threw her body towards the yard door of the cabin, flinging the cinders towards it. Ashes to banish Those that would restrain a soul’s flight into the other world. Ashes to sanctify the grieving of kith and kin and mark it as holy.

Amidst the prayers, Nance slowly dropped her head to her knees, wiped the ash from her face with her skirts, and rose from the floor. The keening had finished. She waited until the words and cries of those in the room subsided into respectful silence, and then, nodding at Nóra, retired to a dark corner. She knotted her white hair at the nape of her neck and accepted a clay pipe, and spent the rest of the night smoking thoughtfully, watching the womenfolk and mourners circle Nóra like birds above a new-shorn field.

The night ground down the hours. Many of the people, dulled and comforted by the heady fumes of burning coltsfoot, lay down to sleep on the floor, plumping beds out of heather and rushes and slurring prayers. Rain escaped down the chimney and fell hissing on the fire. A few kept their eyes open with stories and gossip, taking turns to bless the body and finding omens in the thunderstorm that thrashed the valley outside. Only Nóra saw the old woman rise from her corner, slip her hood back over her head and retreat into the darkness and the howling world.

CHAPTER

TWO

Furze

N
ance Roche woke
in the early morning, before the fog had eased off the mountains. She had slept in the clothes she had returned home in and their damp had spread to her bones. Pushing herself up from her bed of heather, Nance allowed her eyes to adjust to the low light and rubbed at the cold in her limbs. Her fire was out – only the faintest suggestion of warmth met her outstretched hand. She must have fallen asleep in front of its heat before she could preserve the embers.

Taking her shawl off a hook in the wall, she wrapped herself in the rough wool and familiar smell of hearth smoke, and stepped outside, snatching a water can as she left.

The storm had thrashed the valley with rain all night and the woods behind her stunted cabin dripped with water. The fog was thick, but from her place at the far end of the valley, where the fields and bouldered slopes met the uncleared woodland, she could hear the roar of the river Flesk’s swollen waters. A short distance away from her cabin was the Piper’s Grave, where the fairies dwelt. She nodded respectfully towards the crooked whitethorn, standing ghostlike in the mist in its circle of stone, briars and overgrown grass.

Nance tightened the shawl around her, joints creaking as she walked to the sodden ditch left by a collapsed badger set. Squatting unsteadily over the edge, she pissed with her eyes shut, her fingers holding on to bracken stalks for balance. Her whole body ached. It often did after a night of keening. As soon as Nance left any corpse house, a great, pulsing headache would swell in her skull.

’Tis the borrowed grief, thought Nance. To stand in the doorway between life and death racks the body and bleeds the brain.

The slope down to the river was slippery with mud and Nance stepped carefully, wet autumn leaves slicked to the bare soles of her feet as she made her way through the brushwood. It would not do to fall. Only last winter she had slipped and hurt her back. It had been a painful week in front of the fire then, but the worst of it was that, injured, she had felt herself crease with isolation. She had thought she had grown used to a life alone, that the skittering presence of birds sufficed for company. But without visitors, without anything to do but rest in the darkness of the cabin, she had felt so violently lonely she had cried.

‘If there is one thing that will sink sickness deeper into the body, ’tis loneliness.’

Mad Maggie had told her that. In the early days, when Nance was young. When her father was still alive.

‘Mark my words, Nance. That man who came by just now? No wife. Few friends. No brothers or sisters. The only thing keeping him company is his gout, and ’tis the loneliness of him keeping it there.’

Maggie sitting in their cabin, pipe in mouth, plucking a chicken. Feathers in the air. The rain pelting outside. Feathers resting in her wild hair.

That fall was a warning, Nance thought. You are old. You have only yourself to rely upon. Since then she had minded her body with tenderness. Steady steps on grass slippery with weather. No more reckless journeys to cut heather on the mountains when the wind growled. An eye to the fire and its crush of embers. A careful hand with the knife.

The roar from the Flesk grew louder as Nance drew closer, until she could see the white foam of the current teeming at the top of the riverbank through the surrounding trunks of oak, alder and ash. The storm had stripped the trees of their remaining leaves, and the wood was black and tannic with moisture. Only the birch trees, moon-pale, shone in the wet.

Nance picked her way around the broken branches that littered the ground and the tangles of ivy and withered bracken sprawling over the bank. Folk did not often frequent this end of the valley. The women did not come for their water or washing this far upriver because of the Piper’s Grave, the lurking fairy fort, and there was a feel of neglect and wildness from their absence. The stones had not been scuffed clean of their moss and the briars had not been cut back for fear of them snagging on laundry. Only Nance came to the water’s edge here. Only Nance did not mind living so close to the woods that claimed this part of the river.

The storm had infuriated the current and Nance saw that the stones she usually trusted to take her weight had been dislodged by the high water. The bank crumbled underfoot. The river was not especially wide or deep here, but when in flood the current was strong, and Nance had seen it fatten with swollen-stomached foxes washed out of their holes by fast and violent rains. She did not want to drown.