The Mersey Girls (14 page)

One reason that Finn had not mixed much with the Duveen young was that they were very different from the Tuam tribe, who were horse dealers, donkey barterers and lace-makers. In fact, the Tuams worked for their living in every possible way. Children cut hazel-wands and the women wove them into baskets which the men sold to the villagers and townsfolk. Old men cut rushes and mended chair seats. Others searched for the lucky white heather and wheedled pennies out of superstitious housewives. They lived, by their own standards, fairly enough. The Duveens, however, lived not on the country, but on the people. They preyed on villagers and townsfolk alike. They were thieves for a living and stole hens, eggs and farm stock without compunction. They took the flowers from the graves, the butter from the churn, the milk from cows in the meadows, and seemed to believe they had a God-given right to do so. They would pull down an isolated cattle shelter and burn it on their fires, or untie the dog from his kennel and demand a ransom for his return, or steal the washing from the line or the bicycle from the shed. They were able-bodied but idle and feckless in the extreme, with a streak of real viciousness if things did not seem to be going their way.

So Finn’s feelings upon seeing Brónach were not exactly of unalloyed joy but were laced with considerable caution. She was a year older than he and a naughty girl, even his stepmam said so. However, one could not be rude, particularly to a member of the opposite sex, his real mother had taught him that.

So after cautious greetings had been exchanged he had sat down next to her and, after a quick glance at him, she had pushed her skirt back so that her long, slender brown legs could enjoy the warmth of a rare day’s sunshine. Finn had looked at the legs – he swallowed now at the recollection – and then at Brón, looked at her properly for the first time. She had a small face, almond-shaped dark eyes and ripe red lips, the lower one bee-stung, fat and tempting, reminding him of some exotic fruit. And when she laughed she showed teeth which were small and perfectly white, and the tip of a scarlet-strawberry tongue.

He had never felt the urge to touch a girl before but suddenly it was upon him, hot and strong and irresistible. He glanced sideways at her and she was laughing at him, eyeing him coquettishly through the long, curly lashes which fringed her big brown eyes. Though a year younger, he was both taller and broader than she, and suddenly the surge of desire in him peaked, could no longer be denied. He took hold of her shoulders and pushed her back onto the sweet spring grass.

‘Brónach, you’re a beautiful crathur.’

She smiled sleepily up at him and her tongue flickered out and ran across her lower lip. ‘Sure, sure,’ she murmured. ‘And what are you goin’ to do about it, Finn Delaney?’

He smiled, too, suddenly sure of himself, suddenly seeing where the conversation was heading – if you could call it a conversation, that was. He had been born in a tinker’s tent and bred in the sod huts they built to over-winter, and in the wooden caravans which were the palaces of his tribe. No child could be brought up in such circumstances ignorant of the facts of life. Many a night when he was very small he had lain awake wondering what made his mother cry out softly and his father groan with pleasure, and as he grew so did his understanding of such nightly activities. So now, in the quiet graveyard with the water lapping at the little strip of golden sand which would presently be covered as the tide rose, he put his hands on beautiful Brónach’s beautiful body and gently pulled the dress down over her rounded shoulders and began to stroke her smooth skin and make much of her. And in a little while he had made love to her and laughed at her when she screamed like a vixen in spring and clung to him and vowed she would love him for ever.

By then he had heard it all before, knew it was the way of a tinker’s woman to scream when she was aroused, though his mother had been a gentle soul who took her pleasures gently, too. But Eilis was uninhibited in bed and he had lived in the same small wooden caravan as she and his father for six months.

Parting company with his father had happened easily in the end, almost painlessly. Finn had been eating his share of a pan of sausages when his father had come up to him, cleared his throat and delivered what was, in effect, an ultimatum.

‘We’re goin’ across the water, Finn me boyo, to feed on the fat lands of the English,’ Paddy Delaney had said. ‘The Tuams didn’t like me beautiful Eilis and to be frank, boy, the Duveens are trouble. So we’re gettin’ right away from the both of ’em. Are you with us?’

Finn had looked at his father and had read in the older man’s face enough to realise that it would be a mistake to accompany them. His father loved him, but his loyalty, now, lay with Eilis and his new marriage, the babe which would come to Eilis when autumn coloured the trees. Finn had been fifteen, near enough a man in his own right, so he shook his head and tried not to be hurt by the relief in his father’s dark eyes.

‘No, I’m for stayin’,’ he had said simply. ‘I’ll move out from here and I’ll work for meself, so I will.’

He had meant to do so, meant to search out the Tuams and move back in with the tribe. Finn would have been happy with them and might have gone back indeed, but he stayed partly from laziness, partly because of Brónach. He took his shabby little tent and parked it near Granny Mogg’s old wooden van and told anyone who would listen that he would be gone by winter. And though he had held aloof from the stealing and general wickedness of the other lads his age, he had not got himself a job but had idled the summer away, meaning to move away but doing nothing about it. And he had thought himself a man, pleasuring Brónach and being pleasured by her whenever they could sneak away from the others, and had swaggered around the camp like the man he so nearly was, looking down on the lads who stole and boasted because they didn’t know how good it was, to lie in the heather with a beautiful woman and make love to her.

Granny Mogg wasn’t a true Duveen, though, and looked down on those who were. She was Vorth’s motherin-law, the mother of his first wife, who had been older than he and very beautiful, and she told Finn she would never have moved back in with the Duveens except that she was too old, any longer, to keep herself, and the tribe to which she had belonged were all old too.

‘An old ’oman waren’t good for nothin’, an’ Vorth’s the nearest t’ing I’ve got to kin,’ she told Finn. ‘But he’s a bad’un, so don’t you take him as a sample of how to live. Work for what ye want, me laddo, because tinkers don’t have to steal, there’s good work on the land for the likes of us. I’d not have brought my old nag and my old shack over to the Duveens if I’d known how low they’d fallen since my darter died.’

But then she had got ill and one night Vorth had come quietly past Finn’s sacking tent and stolen into the creaking wooden caravan. Finn thought he was just looking in to see the old lady but next day he guessed, when he found the caravan empty, that Vorth had picked her up like the bag of dry old sticks which she so closely resembled and carried her off for reasons of his own. Not good reasons, he was sure of that. If someone died in a van no self-respecting tinker would live there for fear of the ghost of the departed; instead they would set fire to the caravan or tent or sod hut, turning it into a funeral pyre, and Finn knew that Vorth wanted the old wooden van for his sullen, mean-eyed eldest daughter and her new husband. Vorth was sick of sharing space with newly weds who made sheep’s eyes at each other and never helped with the cooking, he’d been saying so for a month. Granny Mogg’s caravan was clean and relatively spacious, and fully furnished with all that was necessary for life on the road – what more could a daughter ask?

So Vorth had gone off in the dead of night and next day, when Finn asked where the old lady was, he told the tribe that Granny Mogg had known she was going to die and had begged him to take her some distance away for her final moments so that he might take over her caravan when her soul had departed this life. He said he had put her in a curragh and set fire to it, pushing it out to sea so that her bones might rest in the deep, as she had requested. Whether the tribe believed or not Finn did not know, he just knew they accepted it. Easier, they would think, than questioning their leader who, in a rage, could kill a man with a single blow – not only could, but had done.

So Finn had pretended to believe, too, and had left the camp as soon as he could and tracked Vorth’s passage of the previous night with all the skill and persistence which had been born in him. He had followed Vorth’s footsteps across the wet field, through the mud at the gate where the cattle had poached the ground, along the lane, through a copse. And his eyes on the ground had seen every step, noted the deeper marks of the heels because of the burden the man carried, seen where he paused, how he laid the old woman down to open a gate, saw in his head a picture of Vorth’s doings of the previous night as clear as though he was seeing it all in a crystal ball.

He had guessed what he would find in the ditch before he reached it, because the footsteps going out were deep still but here they crossed with footsteps coming away which were shallower and with the gaps between them longer, too. An unburdened man had made those prints. Finn ran, then, suddenly afraid. If she was in truth dead why leave her in the ditch, why not build her a funeral pyre from dry branches, or turves, and send her body cleanly on its way? Vorth had told everyone she’d wanted her mortal remains to be carried out to sea in a curragh and there burnt, but the footsteps stopped by the ditch . . . if her body lay there still, then Vorth was the liar and the murderer Finn had always thought him.

He dived into the ditch and there she was – his heart jumped when he bent over her though; her breathing was stertorous, her face blotched white and purple. She was alive still despite Vorth’s treatment; he must have hesitated to deliver the
coup de grâce,
believing she would die anyway if abandoned in the ditch. Finn said her name softly, then picked her gently up in his arms. The blanket in which she was wrapped was soaking wet and as he held her he realised she was shuddering and shaking as though with an ague. But she was still alive and would remain so if he moved swiftly. Granny Mogg, who had been kind to him when his father had left him with the Duveens, was in his charge now, and needing him. And Finn Delaney, Finn told himself as he walked steadily away from the ditch, was not the man to let her down.

He carried her, still wrapped in the stinking wet blanket, to the only dry spot he could find – a haystack. He buried her deep in the heart of it and stayed with her, feeding her water from a cracked old cup when she stirred and cried out for a drink, stealing eggs from the birds’ nests and feeding her with them, too. For three days she had not known him, had burned with fever, had cried out and cackled, putting him in mortal fear that she would bring the Duveen tribe, or at least Vorth, down upon them. But she was a strong and wiry old bird, and she had recovered. Her mind was not as sharp and quick as it had been, but her body was healthy once more and she remembered Vorth and what he had tried to do to her.

She had woken that night to find him bending over her, a look of such evil on his fat, dirty face that she had thought her last moment had come. So when Finn told her that they must lie low for a while she had nodded anxiously, understanding the necessity, and had followed him trustingly to the castle, which he had found when she had been so ill that she had not known whether he was with her or away.

For a whole year they had lived there, hiding away. He had found the curragh washed ashore with a hole in its outer canvas and made it his own. He had fashioned the oar, patched and tarred the little craft to make it watertight, and then he had gone into Cahersiveen and bartered for a net so that he might catch fish in quantity. He dared not work on any of the nearby farms, however, for fear a Duveen might come there and guess what he had done, might let it be known that the old ‘un lived and that he, Finn, was taking care of her. So he left the old ‘un for as much as a month at a time in the summer and tramped until he found work on a distant farm. He went out with the fishing boats further along the lough in winter and earned money to see them through . . . and sometimes, he fretted a little for the feel of a strong, supple girl like Brónach in his arms, and the soft whicker of a horse as he tacked it up before riding it along the country lanes. But mostly he enjoyed his freedom, Granny Mogg’s strangely restful company, and the sensation of being entirely his own master.

Until now. Until a fair-haired, blue-eyed scrap of a girl had looked him in the eye and he had felt his stomach clench, not with any sort of sexual desire but with a sort of
knowingness,
as though he and Lucy Murphy meant something to each other, as though their fates were, in some way, entwined.

And he wanted to see her again, wanted to see her so much that he could not resist making a rendezvous, even though it wasn’t wise to mix with buffers, not if you were a tinker born and bred.

But perhaps it was different for him, because his mam had not been a tinker, she had been a respectable girl from a respectable farm just outside Roscrea, and she had fallen in love with the dark-eyed, curly-haired tinker who came to the farm to visit her father, wheeling and dealing, promising his fine grey mare, with a foal at heel, for the farmer’s broken-down old plough horse – new lamps for old, his mam had said with a small, secret smile.

So the respectable girl had run away with the handsome tinker, only to find the travelling life was no very wonderful thing – but she had stuck with Paddy Delaney through hell and high water, and she had loved her son and taught him to read and write and given him a love of books and stories, though it was few enough of the first that came his way.

But . . . Lucy Murphy, thrown in his path by chance, too young for him, too innocent, too indifferent, even. She had laughed at him when he fell off the stairs, it was her friend who had slanted looks at him through her lashes, looks which told him that one of the little birds was on the threshold of womanhood – but it wasn’t the one he wanted.