The Good People (24 page)

Nance carded her stolen wool and her mind filled with her father and his smell of leather and river weed. The timber of his boat creaking, his stories of the Chieftan O’Donoghue rising out of the lakes on May morning. She tried to remember the weight of his hand on her shoulder.

But it was so long ago. And, as always, when she thought of her father, unbidden dark memories of her mother came also.

Nance could almost see that sallow face, looming over her like the moon in the midnight hours.

Mad Mary Roche.

She could almost hear her mother’s voice again.

‘They’re here.’

Teeth bared. Hair uncombed over her face. Her mother waiting by the cabin door while she dressed. Quietly, so as not to disturb her father. Her mother leading her into the night.

Nance struggling to keep up with her mother’s long stride. Walking out of the small yard beside their cabin, out past the potato bed, down the lane where the other cabins of the jarveys and lakemen and strawberry girls stood in slum, absorbed into the nightscape at the foot of Mangerton mountain.

Ten years old and pleading in fear, following her mother’s dark back past the silver, slender trunks of birch and the sprawl of oak branches.

‘Mam, where are we going?’

The water suddenly before them, balancing a fine cloud of mist. The lakes holding their dark mirror to the sky, holding the moon and the stars, until the startled flap of a duck in the reeds disturbed the water and the reflected night rippled. How the lakes had pulled the breath from her in their beauty. Staring at their silvered surface on that first night had felt like stumbling across a rare vision of holiness. It filled her mind with terror.

Her mother stopping. Turning. Face suddenly wide-eyed in fear, like a pig that sees the knife.

‘They’re here.’

‘Who is here?’

‘Can you not see Them?’

‘I can’t see at all.’

‘You won’t see Them there.’ One cold hand against her chest. ‘Here. You’ll see Them here.’

That first night in the woods by the lake. Crying, curling herself into a nook of mossed limestone, watching her mother dart from tree to tree, muttering to herself, scratching patterns into the soil.

Her father, sitting by the fire when they returned at dawn, his head in his hands. Grabbing Nance, squeezing the breath out of her lungs. Stroking her dirty face as he put her to bed.

‘Please, Mary.’ Voices in the tremble of early morning. ‘People will be making a fairy out of you.’

‘I don’t mean to do it.’

‘I know.’

‘I am not myself. I have been away.’

‘You are here now.’

Heavy-lidded, watching him comb leaves out of her mother’s hair with his calloused fingers.

‘Am I? Am I here? Am I my own self?’

‘You are my Mary Roche.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t feel I am myself.’

‘Mary . . .’

‘Don’t let Them take me again.’

‘I won’t. I won’t.’

Was that when it all began? Was that when Nance first began to learn about the strange hinges of the world, the thresholds between what was known and all that lay beyond? That night, at ten years old, she had understood, finally, why people feared the darkness. It was an open door, and you could step through it and be changed. Be touched and altered.

Before then, Nance had loved the woods. In the daylight hours, waiting for tourists with cans of milk and
poitín
, the morning rain left the moss vivid underfoot, and the leaves cast their dappled shadow on the clay and stone and leaf. Birds rustled the berried briars. The sight of the forest floor carpeted with the beetled backs of acorns had rushed her with happiness. But afterwards, she understood that the woods changed at twilight; that they grew intolerant of strangers. The birds stopped cheeping and blinkered themselves against the dark, and the fox began to search for blood. The Good People claimed the darkling shadows for their own.

So many years gone and time stretching until she was thin with it all, and still Nance remembered that night in the woods, and the nights that came after. Shaken awake by a mother already half-swept, dragged to the woods where the branches creaked unseen and she choked with fear until piss ran down her leg.

She was older when her father began to fix the door at nights, winding rope about the latch. She had helped him. They thought it might stop her mother from leaving. Might stop her eyes from glinting wild, stop her trespass. But still, her mother was swept – on the wind, with the lights – and the strange woman left locked in their cabin, scratching at the walls and dirt floor until her nails broke and bled, was not Mary Roche. The woman They left in her place was a likeness who threw her food against the wall and would not eat, who did not recognise Nance, and who fought her father when he would see her safe in bed.

‘I miss Mam,’ Nance had whispered once, when the woman who was no longer her mother slept.

‘I do too.’ Her father’s voice was soft.

‘Why does she not know me?’

‘Your mother is away.’

‘She’s there. She’s sleeping.’

‘She is not. Your mammy is away. With the Good People.’ His voice had broken.

‘Will she come back?’

Her father had shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Who is the woman in there?’

‘She is something left. A trick. They have hoped to trick us.’

‘But she looks like Mam.’

The look on his face was one Nance had seen on the faces of other men many times in the years since. The shine of a man in desperation.

‘Yes, she looks like Mam. But she is not her. She has been changed.’

What might have happened had her mother never gone with Them? If Nance had been free to marry the son of a jarvey, had lived amongst the people of her childhood all her life long? If Maggie had never been needed. If Maggie had never come in crisis and marked out the difference in her.

Her mother swept, Nance grown in her absence, and then a tall woman in the house, cheek marred by a long purple mark like the burn of a poker. Even in the streets of Killarney, spilling as they were with pockmarked children and men who hung a life’s hard living off their cheekbones, the woman had seemed hard.

‘This is your aunt, Nance. She brought you into this world.’

The woman had stood still, staring down at her. ‘You’ve grown.’

‘I’m not a child anymore.’

‘Maggie’s come to get your mam back from where she’s been taken.’

Nance had looked over to the dark bundle lying in the corner of the cabin.

‘’Tis not your mam. Not there.’ Maggie’s voice was solemn. Deep.

‘How will you get her back?’

Her aunt had slowly stepped forward and bent to her, until their faces were level. Nance had seen that, up close, the skin of the mark was tight, like scar tissue.

‘You see that mark of mine, do you?’

Nance had nodded.

‘You know about the Good People?’

Yes. Nance knew about the Good People. She had felt Them in the woods, by the lake, where her mother gave herself up to them. Where she, as a child, had curled into a nest of exposed roots and the moonlight made the world seem strange and the air was thick, occupied.

Her aunt smiled, and at once Nance’s fear left her. She looked into the woman’s grey eyes and saw that they were clear and kind, and without thinking she brought a finger up to touch the scar.

Dear, dark Maggie. From that first day when they cut bracken for her bed, Maggie began to show her the way in which the world was webbed; how nothing lived in isolation. God Himself signed the stalks of ferns. The world was in secret sympathy with itself. The flowers of charlock were yellow to signify their cure for jaundice. There was power in the places where the landscape met its own, in the meeting of waterways or the crucible of mountains. There was strength in all that was new: the beestings, the dew of the morning. It was from Maggie that Nance learnt the power in a black-handled knife, in the swarthy, puckering mix of hen dirt and urine, in the plant over the door, the garment worn next to the skin. It was Maggie who – in those years when they fought for her mother’s return – had shown her not only which herbs and plants to cut, but when, and which to pull by hand and which to set a knife to, and which were made stronger by the moist footprints left by saints as they walked the evenings on their holy days, blessing the ground beneath them.

‘There are worlds beyond our own that we must share this earth with,’ Maggie told her. ‘And there are times when they act on one another. Your mam bears no sin for being swept. Don’t you be cross at her for being away.’

‘Will you cure her?’

‘I will do what I can with what I have, but to understand the Good People is to know that they will not be understood.’

The other families were all a little afraid of Maggie. Her father was too. Her aunt carried a presence, a stillness like that which precedes a storm, when the ants pour over the ground and the birds find shelter and stop singing to wait for the rain. No one dared speak out against her for fear she knew how to set curses.

‘She’s a queer one,’ they said. ‘That Mad Maggie. She who does be in it.’

‘I never cursed anyone in my life,’ Maggie told Nance once. ‘But it never does any harm to let folk think you know how.’ Her eyes had sharpened. ‘People will not come to me if they don’t respect me; if they don’t fear me, just a little. Oh, there are curses to lay, you can be sure of it. But ’tis not worth the breath you spend.
Piseógs
are fires that flare in the face of those who set them. In time, a curse will always return.’

‘Do you know the curses, Maggie? You have no hand in
piseógs
, do you?’

That glinting look. The slow stroke of the purple mark on her face.

‘I never say either way to them that come.’

And the people did come to her. Despite her strange blemish, despite her pipe-smoking, and her manly hands, and her cold way of looking at you longer than was comfortable, they decided she had the charms and they came. During the long length of the year the door would be opened to faces waiting out in the cold; shawled, hopeful faces nodding at the sight of Maggie’s broad back.

‘Is the one with the knowledge in?’ they’d ask, and it fell to Nance to meet them at the door and ask loud questions of their ailments, so that Maggie, greeting them under lowered brows, a pipe smouldering in her mouth, might know a little of what she was to treat and surprise them with foresight.

Her father did not remain at home when Maggie took her visitors. His wife was absent, and his home overrun. He spent long hours with his boat, and with the other boatmen, coming home to take up the
poitín
gifted to Maggie for her juniper, her sheep droppings boiled in new milk, her blistering rubbings of crowfoot, her worsted socks filled with hot salt.

‘Mind you don’t let Nance too close to them that come,’ he’d say. ‘Full of sickness as they are.’

‘She’s learning fast,’ Maggie said. ‘She has a hand for it. Isn’t that true, Nance?’

‘What’s the smell in here?’

‘Gladding root. Stinking iris,’ Nance murmured.

Maggie pointed to the bottle. ‘Let you don’t take too much drink. That’s powerful drink, and you on the water.’

‘Aye, I know. I know. “Drink makes you shoot the landlord.”’

‘Worse than that, it makes you miss,’ Maggie chided.

The sacred days past and Nance stayed close to her fire. She did not go to hear Mass, and no one came to see her with the priest’s word so recently upon them. She wondered what he said of her.

Only the wren boys, faces hidden behind tapering masks of straw, ventured out into the dark fields close to her cabin on St Stephen’s Day to beat their
bodhráns
of cured dog skin. She watched them march the muddy fields, bearing the wet-feathered body of the dead bird on a branch of holly. Their cry travelled on the winter wind: ‘Up with the kettle, down with the pan, give us some money to bury the wren!’

The wren boys did not come near her cabin for alms or coin. They never had. Nance knew that most of the children feared her. She supposed she was now what Maggie had been to the children under Mangerton. A
cailleach
lurking in her cave of a cabin, able to whistle curses up from spit and hen shit.

In the early days, when Nance knew they believed in her power but did not know its kind, the valley people came to her for the working of badness against others.
Piseógs
. One hazy morning she had opened her door to a woman with her eye black and tooth loose in her gum, and words spilling out of her in fear. She had brought Nance money.

Kate Lynch. Younger then. Fear-filled. Raging.

‘I want him dead,’ she had said, shaking greasy curls out of her face and showing Nance the glint in her sweating palm.

‘Will you sit down with me?’ Nance had asked, and when Kate grabbed her hand and tipped the coin into it, she had let the money fall to the ground. ‘Sit down,’ she said, as the woman gave her a look of bewilderment and scrabbled for the rolling silver. ‘Sit down and talk.’