The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (57 page)

‘Yes, she got him. Even our mother said that of her,’ declared Ida, ‘that she was a devil. Now may the Devil sweep Hell’s floor with her and burn the broom after.’

Still holding the sticky hammer in her right hand, Ida bent over and closed Darcy’s eyes with her left. Then she wrenched out the six hairpins that held Darcy’s frizzled fringe in place and flung the thing across the hall. She pointed to the horns on Darcy’s naked forehead.

The Eileen O’Reilly reached a trembling hand to assure herself of the reality of those horns. They had grown an inch since I last saw them. I felt them under her fingers, remembering the ragged toenail roughness of them. She pulled her hand back as if burned.

‘Hot like hellfire! You see,’ remarked Ida, ‘a hard-faced, dry-skinned Devil-snake Darcy was all the time, as strong as a python.’ She added, consideringly, ‘Though the skull was surprisingly soft on her.’

She looked straight into the Eileen O’Reilly’s eyes. ‘And you knew it too that she was the Devil, for
you
held her fast while I did what needed to be done.’

She straightened and acknowledged the rest of us, one by one. ‘And you did not stop me, Berenice, nor you, Oona, nor you, Pertilly. Nor even you, Manticory-the-timid-deer. And in your deepest hearts, are any of you sorry now?’

Was I sorry? To see Darcy extinguished brought on a dizzying emptiness in my mind, my bones, my heart. Grief swayed me next, but it was not for Darcy. It was for Enda. If Darcy had died earlier, Enda would still be alive. And, perhaps, so would our secret sister Phiala.

My sisters’ faces showed the same undulations of emotion that I felt. But I did not see the smudge of guilt on any of their features, or the softening of sorryness.

Finally, Berenice said, ‘We must put her in the lime pit.’

Ida insisted, ‘Not till it’s dark, silly. Someone might see. Until then, we clean.’

We acted in strict obedience to Ida’s orders. We were curiously slow and heavy in our movements. It was as if, if we deviated a moment from her direction then we would no longer be safe inside the shelter of our old tribal interiority, which had simply opened for a moment to eject Darcy and to admit the Eileen O’Reilly in her place. It seemed natural that the Eileen O’Reilly should help drag Darcy’s body to our storeroom by the water-gate, scrub the floor, burn her bloodstained clothes in the fire along with ours, take her turn in the bath. She too, I observed, followed Ida’s instructions without comment; she too, I supposed, kept from screaming and weeping only by virtue of a strictly somnambulatory way of going about these things.

Ida brought a day dress for the Eileen O’Reilly from Darcy’s armoire; it fitted neatly, apart from the length, which Pertilly quickly amended.

‘Nothing runtish about her after all,’ said Ida with satisfaction.

I found my eyes dwelling on the Eileen O’Reilly. I hurried to sit next to her when we ate the porridge that was our evening meal, for Pertilly had not left us to go foraging.

I wanted to follow the Eileen O’Reilly when she moved from room to room, touching the gilding, the mirrors, the damask. I wanted to hear her Harristown voice, and I wanted her to talk about the slow crows and sodden fields, which she did, on my requesting it, keeping us spellbound for an hour.

‘Will you stay?’ I asked her, as the moon rose.

You are already a part of this; you cannot denounce us now
, I meant.

‘I will stay,’ she answered.

I said, ‘Would it not be difficult for you to go back, after what happened between you and Millwillis? When they find him, it will all come out, about the room you shared.’

I do not blame you for that
, I thought.
I know what it is to share a room with the wrong man, and to pay for it
.

‘She will sleep in Darcy’s bed,’ said Ida. ‘Tonight. And from now on.’

She rushed to hug the Eileen O’Reilly, who stood quietly in Ida’s arms, while I told her exactly what had happened to Millwillis.

‘Did you love the man?’ I asked finally. ‘He did not seem to be made for loving.’

‘No. I never even thought that I did,’ she said quietly. ‘It was a great curiosity and a bad behaviour of me to do what I did with him.’

‘
This
is where you always wanted to be, isn’t it?’ Ida told her. ‘This is for why you pranced around us so much in Harristown, and followed us, and talked about us, and tried to keep all the other children away from us so you could have us for yourself. This is for why you tried to take our places with the Growant. This is for why you followed Millwillis. Helping him made you
matter
to us. And then it brought you here to us.’

The Eileen O’Reilly wept long trails of tears. Ida kissed them away.

‘Once we were seven and we thought we did not need you,’ she said. ‘Now we are fewer. Well, here you are among us, and here you shall stay.’

The Eileen O’Reilly looked at me, taking deep shuddering breaths.

I handed her my handkerchief, clasping her hand inside my own as I did so. It was small and soft, and it clasped me back.

We waited expectantly for Ida’s next pronouncement. She told us, ‘Now the moon is high and our neighbours are at their tables, not at their windows. We shall put Darcy to bed beneath the lime and above my poor Kitty, and then we shall go to bed ourselves.’

I lay sleepless on my mattress, letting images of the day dilate and shrink back inside my head. When my mind had eaten the colour and shape out of those pictures, I began to think of what had led up to them, and my own part in them, not just in the last days, but in all the years since my childhood. I had allowed Darcy to make money out of the troll who had tried to degrade me on the bridge. Thinking to escape, I fell in with Darcy’s desire to leave Harristown, but I had been more degraded than ever – letting Darcy take money from people who wanted to fondle my hair or own it or steal from innocent people using the image of it. Then I had found love but Darcy killed that too. Yet if she could kill it so easily, then it probably had not been worth having. Had I really loved Alexander? Yes – my pain alone proved it – but was there not a deeper attraction in the prospect of him? Was it not really the case that all I had ever wanted or needed was to
get away from Darcy
? And even now that she was dead, I was still trying to get away from Darcy, but my thoughts continued to settle on her like bats that return to flutter in the dark of their cave. I had watched Darcy kill Millwillis; now my mind’s eye saw her murdering our youngest sister, little Phiala, no bigger than a shoe dolly, and just as breakable. Had she thrown the baby against a tree, as I’d once watched her do with a rabbit?

I must have willed myself unconscious simply to escape the image, because in the early hours of the morning, I was woken by uneven footsteps on the stairs.

My mind, like a tongue to an abscess, flew to Darcy as I’d last seen her, head down, her legs up against the side of the well, the lime heaping over her.

It is Darcy come back
, I thought in terror.
She will never be finished with us. I should have known that Darcy would be stronger than death
.

The steps grew louder and closer, and were accompanied by rasping breath.

The candle in my shaking hands threw canyons of shadow around its faint light. I hurried to the main hall in time and lit its pink-globed gas lamp.

Ghosts hate light
, I told myself.

It was not Darcy but Ida whom the lamp illuminated – Ida stumbling through the
portone
. In her left hand she held the cleaver she had brought back from the asylum. From her right hand dangled a mass of dark bone, clotted blood and white powder.

‘I hope that’s not the poor cat’s bones, Ida.’

‘It’s not at all the cat’s bones,’ she replied. ‘We forgot! Of course we must have a harp of Darcy’s breastbone. I shall curve the spine over just so, and tie it to this thigh bone once I have cleaned the meat and washed off the lime. Oona will give me some hair for strings.’

She took a step towards me. ‘Manticory, there was something wrong with
The Cruel Sister
! I mean the operetta you wrote,
The Cruel Sister
. It was wrong that the good sister died and that the cruel sister won. We have made it right.’

The Eileen O’Reilly appeared, ghostly in Darcy’s nightdress. Quite a creditable cascade of light-red curls fell down her back. I wondered if they had started growing faster in the night as she lay in Darcy’s bed, breathing the air of Darcy’s pillow.

She pointed her candle towards the stairs where splashes of blood descended down to the
androne
.

‘Will ye be showin’ me where the scullery is? And the buckets and rags?’ she asked. In her other hand she held up Darcy’s frizzled fringe.

‘And a spade for buryin’ this in the garden? To do the business complete.’

I was uneasy with Eileen O’Reilly in the
palazzo
, yet absurdly happy with her company too.

My sisters clustered around her, seeking her conversation, especially about Harristown and all the other places of our childhood. I was afraid of claiming too much of her time, but her eyes always followed me over the tops of their heads.

Ida had insisted on cleaning the bones and stringing the harp with Oona’s hair. The articulations of Darcy’s spine curved just as Ida wished. The thigh bone stood straight, white, virginal. Of course it made no music. Oona’s hair was silent under Ida’s fingers, but she hummed nasally, impersonating the harp’s voice. Finally, she had been persuaded to put the gaunt instrument away in a cupboard. From there I quietly extracted it and hid it under a fringed armchair.

It thundered all through the next day and night, with the wind hurling the shutters against the walls. The Eileen O’Reilly stood at our window, transfixed by the drama on the canal, following the creaming tip of each wave with her blue eyes.

‘The Divil wouldn’t send out his dog on such a day as this,’ she whispered.

That night, when I closed my eyes, I imagined Darcy’s hollowed corpse struck by a long dry shaft of lightning all the way down in the lime pit. I saw her sitting bolt upright all white and powdery with the lime, and climbing up the stone shaft, while the moon shone through the gap in her upper torso where her breastbone had been. I saw her walking across the garden and then passing through our great oak door – as all doors are permeable to the dead – and mounting our lion-studded stairwell with dragging steps to arrive in my own chinoiseried bedroom. She stood over my bed. Her skull, the house of her bad brain, was broken. Its horns were fused to its bone.

At last, lying rigid with terror in my bed, I took responsibility for the words that I had written: I felt that I deserved Darcy’s retribution thick and threefold, more than any other Swiney, far more than Ida who had simply applied herself with pure literality to the story I had set up with my conniving, heartless words in the name of entertainment, to make money, to sell lies.

The Cruel Sister
, I thought,
she is me
.

The next day passed in a sick swoon.

Deserving my punishment, that night I turned myself out of doors; I turned myself into bait to draw. Every sliver of innocent noise was the scrape of a blood-dripping shoe; every creak, the crack-knuckles of Darcy, the accomplished ghostly hammerer and filleter of Irish Goose Girls who pretended to be writers. Every gurgle of every wave was a mocking thing, the giggle of a murderous dead sister happy in her work of hunting down her real killer. Every knock was the dropped knot of Darcy’s handkerchief garrotte, every breeze the final breath I might draw before Darcy took me at last. I felt the rush of her hammer and knife at my neck.

But when I looked behind me, the only person I saw was the Eileen O’Reilly, finding me in the dark, just as she found me by the privy midden all those years ago. And just like that, she said again, ‘What is it, Manticory Swiney? Is ye took sick on yerself, is it?’

She was carrying a shawl for me and an umbrella. She wrapped the shawl around my shoulders.

‘Don’t be infuriatin’ on me for following ye on your private walk, Manticory. All day ye’ve looked haunted out of your seven senses and I was afearin’ for ye. I know ye do not sleep. How could ye? Ye’re so tired and kilt ye can hardly think, can ye? Let us be goin’ home. I wouldn’t be sorry for a cup of steamin’ tea in my hand, nor a toasted bun neither.’

‘No more would I,’ I agreed.

We linked arms and walked silently. Her side aligned against mine was warm; her hand on my wrist was firm. She did not press me for explanations.

She said, ‘Manticory, I have me own hauntin’ to keep me awake – I jest remembered I must go and fetch Millwillis’s ghastly manuscript, or desthroy it.’

‘How could we have forgotten that?’

‘I will go in the early part of the evening. I made a friend of the maid who turns down the sheets. She’ll let me in on the quiet.’

‘How will we live through the day?’

‘As we have done till now,’ she said. ‘In agony. As if in a dream.’