The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (6 page)

But, as the fairy tales taught, whenever womanly parts draw eyes to them, young women shall also know danger. Our Swiney hair also aligned us with Rapunzel, betrayed, hurt, confined in the frail frame of her own helpless body as much as in the tower from which she so badly needed to be rescued. Our hair knitted us to vanquished Medusa, tongueless mermaids, the stripped and shamed Lady Godiva.

At Mass, my sisters and I would kneel in front of Father Maglinn, our hair aflow, the trembling in his hand communicated via the wafer on our tongues. Then we would rise to see his eyes crooked with a queersome madness and his fingers still aflitter. What I did not realise then was this – it was the Swiney hair that did that to him. At confession in the little shack he’d contrived in the ruins of the chapel, he always asked me to thread a single hair through the grate for him to hold, so he could ‘know the truth’ of my sins. By the end of my confession, he’d invariably futtered it right out of my head. I watched it disappearing through the grate like a very slender baitworm.

And I for one was about to be made to feel the power and peril of my red hair in a most personal and startling way, and me as yet nothing at all but a red-haired schoolgirl of thirteen thin years with calluses rasping on her chilly feet as she ran towards Harristown Bridge with a book of stories slapping in her pocket and no thoughts at all of troll gentlemen with ivory hairbrushes wanting to get going with her in a copse.

If I’d been detained by a pebble between my toes, or had rested on a stile to steal the read of a tale, and I had never crossed paths with him, then I’d never now be asking myself if there’s a market for dried tears in handkerchiefs sold by the square inch to those who prefer their heartbreaks worn and second-hand.

He was waiting for me on the bridge as I pelted home late and solitary from school, a man tall as a standing stone, with the last of the sun pulling a great shadow out behind him.

It is the troll of the bridge
, I thought,
and me with my pockets empty of tribute. Unless it is a book of stories he’s after
.

But this was not one of Miss Finaughty’s fairy tales. It was Harristown, and it was Ireland, and it was my undersized self. A lilting way with words was of no use to me now. I felt the heat of the man’s eyes on my face, my hips and the nakedness of my feet. My scalp hedgehogged; little pinpricks bit the backs of my hands and numbed my tongue.

My feet kept walking, however, for home lay on the other side of the troll and behind me lurked a glooming copse and then a mile of bare autumn field before the next dwelling. My sisters had long since gone ahead of me while I havered over the lending shelf.

My legs faltered a yard in front of him. He was a stranger of middle years, full-bellied and fine-dressed; not some Famined local fellow. In elegant English, he stated politely, but with no expectation of a refusal, that he would give my hair one hundred strokes of the handsome ivory brush he now produced from his pocket.

‘It would give me a sizeable drop of pleasure,’ he said simply, like some sober, regular gentleman. ‘I saw you coming from a way off and I told myself, “This is a girl worth waiting on a bridge for. A girl with hair like that.” ’

‘I’d thank you kindly not to, sir,’ I pleaded.

He took two steps towards me and lifted my plait, grinning like a fox.

‘Now that is something like hair!’ he shouted. ‘Is it four foot long this thing and thicker than my leg, and red as blood, and you still not fully grown underneath its great weight?’

He wrenched my plait high above my head, spinning me around on it.

‘So?’ he demanded, when he stopped.

‘I am thirteen, sir,’ I told him, my eyes dizzied and hot with pain.

‘And is it a woman you are yet?’

‘I do . . . do . . . not think so, your honour.’

He slackened his grip on my hair but he did not release it. ‘Better and far better,’ he gloated, rubbing my plait against his cheek. ‘And look at the eyes on you, girl. Green as glit.’

This last was no great compliment, for glit was what we in those days called the weed that crusted the summer-stale ponds. But the fact that he paid me such attention was what kept me standing in front of him, just as a doe-rabbit may patiently await the ministrations of the fox whose golden eye flatters her with a stare, even if the fox thinks of her not as a fine specimen of an Irish rabbit but as tender meat and his only interest is to part her from her fur and her life.

My knees shook and my wits began to tick. Of course I dared not ask, ‘Who are you at all?’ From his clothes, I was beginning to suppose this man a very great personage of the kind I had never myself met – a landlord. I was as awed as if receiving a Visitation from God.

The man pocketed his ivory brush and caught up the end of my plait with both hands. Now he was unravelling it fast, the white fingers on him furrowing deftly through its redness. He grunted.

That grunt I knew for a sin.

Yet still I stood still, mesmerised.

‘That’s a fierce amount of hair you have there, now I see it all undressed,’ he said. ‘And is it not a shocking hour of the evening for a girl to be walking abroad completely alone in nothing but a smock and such a plain grey calico dress, and poor, patched stuff at that?’

He pinched a piece of it between the fingers of his other hand and then lifted my skirt so the cool of the evening was suddenly sharp around my thighs. ‘And a linsey-woolsey petticoat so thin and so very short.’

I swayed, inebriated by his clear sense of entitlement. Perhaps this was what gentlemen did, I thought. I had never been addressed in any manner of means by a gentleman before. Phelan Swiney, Mariner, our absent father, had not supplied anything by way of knowledge as to how to deal with men. I knew only that I was less than this gentleman and that therefore I should serve him as best I could. I feared to mortify Annora with uncivil behaviour on my part.

Certainly his voice was so sure and steady that I was a tint persuaded by the implication that both the hour and the shortness of the petticoat were grievous offences I myself had foisted upon him. I felt a shameful creature entirely. I blushed, for it was five days since my last confession and the sins must have been piling up in me. And even if they weren’t, the man’s hands were mighty paddles and he had two feet of height on me. He had already shown that he did not scruple to hurt me.

Slowly, he lowered his nose to my hair parting, and took himself a deep relishing sniff and let out another great grunt. ‘There must be something in the rain hereabouts,’ he mused. ‘I have . . .
seen
. . . a ten-year-old prodigy of curls in Ploopluck and a creditable head by Jigginstown House. But
this
,’ – he raised a hank of my hair to his mouth and bit on it – ‘
this
is the best yet.’

Seen
, was it? And was he also so unkind to their hair?

My heart swooped and rolled like a mill wheel so that I was sure he must hear its clattering. Its noise woke up my sleeping senses. I had mistaken myself to trust that a gentleman was always a gentleman. But I had left it too late to object to his landlordly ways. By allowing them, I had fallen in with him on the way to some fearful kind of badness.

I began to raise my trembling, ineffectual fist. He took hold of my arm. ‘Look at this little nub of an elbow out at the sleeve! Shall we retire now to that copse over there?’ he said thickly. ‘And I shall lie down in that pleasant soft grass and you will hang this hair like a tent all over me. And I can put some manners on its great wildness with my brush.’

He wound his other hand around my hair and used it to drag me towards the trees.

My scalp afire with hurting, I whimpered, and flung my eyes around. The rat-grey back of Harristown House hunched in the distance, its blank windows indifferent to me. The lane was deserted in both directions, with nothing but eddies of the dust rising that we in County Kildare deem ‘fairy-blast’. It was, for a rarity, not raining, though the slow crows hung like widows’ laundry on every still-sodden branch. The light was dimming and the lowering sky took on a magical, churning quality, half of silvery gnats and half of my own giddy terror, by which the clumps of moss that beetled the parapet now seemed to commence to crawl and swarm. Below me to the right, the limpid Liffey flowed into the seven maws of the bridge, which mashed its composure into foaming ruin on the other side.

No more could I hold back that man’s desires than the river could resist that bridge. He was back at my parting, sniffing like a dog and moaning like a sick person asleep. His arms snaked round to press me against his thighs, where something thrummed against my unwilling chest as if he swished a fox’s tail before the fatal lunge.

‘I’m going to have you now,’ he told me.

Chapter 6

That troll gentleman and I were halfway into a bush when a horse’s clop struck the road from Brannockstown way. A scorch of a swear roared out of the man. I shook his teeth off my hair, rolled my whole weight upon the elbow whose fist was far up my skirt and sprang to my feet. I stamped hard on the hand that tried to claw at my ankle and kicked the ivory hairbrush deep into the bushes. Then I ran up the path towards home, a madness of tears puddling down my face. Apart from my own breath and pelting feet, everything was suddenly so quiet you could hear the milky grass stems parting the earth and the slow crows crunching the snails’ shells for their flesh. It was too much quietness; it forced into my head an idea for evading trollish attentions for evermore.

‘You’re that late coming home with yourself, and looking like something pulled through a hedge backwards,’ growled Darcy when I erupted through the cottage door. ‘Mooning over the book stack, was it, Manticory? Your potato’s gone cold waiting for you—’

‘But I saved it for you,’ Annora assured me. ‘It’s still got God’s goodness in it.’

Averting my wet face, I lunged straight at the press drawer where Annora kept her mending scissors. I was out of the door in a moment, with Darcy complaining, ‘And now what is ailing the creature?’

Behind the woodshed, I held the iron beak open over my unravelled plait, still slick at the ends with the wetness of the troll gentleman’s mouth.

Poison to kill
, I thought,
those slavers of his on my hair. No amount of washing will see them off
.

In my shaking hands the scissors chattered in the manner of a cat who sees a bird. I rehearsed in my mind the sound of the metal shearing through my hair. I let the beak close an inch, and a single curl whispered to the ground. Then Berenice came bustling round the corner and stopped dead to see me there like that. She screamed.

Berenice could not scare it out of me, the reason for my flirting with the scissors, for I knew there was shame in what had nearly happened by Harristown Bridge and feared the most of it being pinned upon myself. I feared blame and a beating. Berenice ran for Darcy. Then I had the cruelty of her hands on my hair until my sight crumbled at the edges. Only when she placed her knee upon my neck did I mutter an incoherent confession that included my vision of the troll swishing a fox’s tail and the moss seeming to crawl across Harristown Bridge in the giddy twilight. Still Darcy’s hands did not leave the hurting heat around my scalp. Faintly I heard her laughing, ‘Not a troll but a foxy rich gentleman then!’

Soon she was berating me. ‘What have you got the feet for? Sure you could outrun an old man in breeches, and you with divided drawers and skinny legs like a chicken, you miserable bliggard. What is it you are? Now tell me what he looked like, exactly.’

She left me sobbing by the privy midden. As she walked off, she made a swishing motion with her right hand behind her. ‘Like this, was it, the old fox’s tail?’

I sobbed harder.

She turned and swished her left hand in front of her thighs this time. ‘Or was it like
this
instead? Don’t you know the difference between the front and back of a male creature yet, and you brought up in Harristown, you tralloping great cretin!’

She laughed again and went on her way, waving a threatening finger over her shoulder at me. ‘Don’t tell anyone else, do you hear? It’ll be the worse for you if you do.’

I rolled myself into a jointy ball and wept until I fell into a recurring dream in which the parapets of Harristown Bridge rolled open to devour me in a hungry leer. My dream feet kept approaching, for I had nowhere else to go, and each time I was swallowed up and crushed by its stones.

It was fully dark when I was awoken by a rustling near my head. A hand reached out of the long grass and offered me the corner of a smock on which to blow my nose.

The Eileen O’Reilly, the butcher’s runt, squatted down beside me, so close that I smelled the manure of frightened beasts on her shoes.

‘What is it, Manticory Swiney? Is ye took sick on yourself, is it?’

I nodded, whimpering, ‘But shouldn’t you be at home, and the moon high up now?’

‘Sure they’re that busy they never miss me so. Or scuttered with the gin so it’s better to be out of sight.’ Her voice caught on the last words. I gave back the damp handful of smock and she blew her own nose on the other corner. We sat together in the companionable misery of silence punctuated by little tearing sobs.