The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (60 page)

The Eileen O’Reilly said enthusiastically, ‘Indeed I’m after tellin’ the
Capitano
exactly the same thing!’

Saverio said, ‘I deduce from this terrible story that the poor Swiney sisters suspected it too but they were too afraid to denounce the two dangerous men who had held them in thrall all this time.’

‘Indeed,’ said Viaro, rising. ‘My investigations shall continue in this new direction.’

‘I shall accompany you,’ said Saverio, speaking in Venetian, ‘and perhaps I can confirm any matters that are still uncertain in your mind.’

‘I shall be in your debt,’ replied Viaro in a rush of mellifluous dialect.

When the doorbell chimed a few hours later, Pertilly reported from the back window that a tall man with beautiful hair stood at the gate.

‘The hairy man! Come to finish his murders!’ cried Oona. ‘God save us all!’

Pertilly called, ‘No, he is not like that. He has a look of kindness about him. In fact, I cannot say for why, but I very much like the look of him.’

From the rear window, we all – Oona, myself, Berenice, Ida, Eileen, Saverio – looked down on the man. Unaware of our scrutiny, he made his way along the garden path with an easy, rolling step. He was tall, prosperously attired. Most prosperous of all was his hair. His sideburns curled, his auburn head hair curled and his beard curled in dense luxuriance.

He was the man I had seen at Enda’s funeral.

Ida cried, ‘He has legs as fine as Oona’s inside his trousers. Let him come up.’

When Pertilly ushered our gentleman-caller into the dining room, I was the first to take his hand.

‘Phelan Swiney, Mariner?’ I asked.

Chapter 55

‘The same,’ said the man. His accent carried the salt of the docks of Philadelphia and the mist of the fields of Kildare. A grin flowered over his face, a grin of Swiney dimensions, a grin of Ireland, of green fields shimmering with dew under the shadows of the slow crows. There was a musicality to his voice that recalled Oona’s, and a look of Enda in his elegance. I saw Ida in his brow, and Pertilly in the outline of his head. I saw myself in his eyes, green as glit.

‘Will you be giving your father a hug?’ asked Phelan Swiney. ‘Let me see, I know you, surely. Berenice of the brown hair? Oona the fairy? Idolatry, my youngest. Sweet-natured Pertilly? And Manticory, of course you must be Manticory.’

We were all grinning now, the family grin. Phelan Swiney pointed to the Eileen O’Reilly. ‘Who is this? I know the sad fate of Enda, but where is Darcy? This is not Darcy, though she is a lovely girl in herself, I am sure. Where is –?’

Without a moment’s hesitation, all of us, including Eileen, threw ourselves into his arms and there was no more talking, only weeping and laughter.

I buried my head in Phelan Swiney’s waistcoat, and did not want to look up from it.

Our father smelled of fine laundering, of good tobacco, and infinite comfort.

In the light of the seashell lamp, we were finishing a masterpiece of a meal cooked by Pertilly. A great spending of emotion had kindled a fierce famine in our bellies, as well as an unselfconscious desire to break bread together as a family. Pertilly had rushed to the market, her pockets heavy with the money Phelan had forced into them.

Now, when we could eat no more, the conversation turned at last to Millwillis, and to Darcy.

‘You know I was on his trail,’ said Phelan Swiney, ‘frankly wishing to do him a disservice if I could, and indeed make the great weasel of a creature know the meaning of fear. So imagine my surprise when I found someone had already avenged my daughters for me. And more emphatically than I was planning. I cannot say I am sorry for it, either.’

‘I cannot believe anyone is,’ I told him.

‘It is a credit to you, my sweethearts, that not one of you has for a second questioned my innocence in this matter of Millwillis’s death,’ Phelan Swiney said.

‘There is a reason for that,’ remarked Ida. ‘We know you did not do it.’

‘How?’

‘Because Darcy did.’

He swallowed. ‘I had always been afraid that she would turn in that direction. I should not have called her by the name of Darcy. You know it means ‘darkness’? And then there was the truly dark thing that befell the poor girl when she was eight. It cannot but have damaged her mind. Your dear mother always feared – but where is Darcy? Does she hide? Is this why? I did not want to ask—’

‘Yes,’ said Ida. ‘She is hidden. Very much so.’

I interrupted. ‘What happened to Darcy when she was eight?’

‘It is the saddest of sad stories. Your mother gave birth to a little girl in November of that year. A new little daughter would normally have been a matter of joy for me. But I still feared my Fenian shenanigans bringing the law down on my family. So I was away in America then: I made my secret visits back only when I knew I might see my latest sweetheart of a daughter and choose her name for her. However, this little baby decided to arrive three months early and in a tearing hurry. When your mother saw how it was going with herself, she sent the twins away mushrooming, so that they would not hear the screams. She shut the younger ones – I suppose that would be you, Oona, Pertilly and Manticory – in the barn with a blanket and some buttermilk. Ida, of course, was not born yet.

‘Your mother locked Darcy in the room with her, in case she would need help with the little one. She blamed herself for what she imposed on our eldest. You know she ever after denied herself the consolations of Mass by way of a penance, poor creature?’

We nodded.

‘When Annora started screaming with the birthing pains, Darcy hid under the bed. Your mother was delirious, nearly dead from pain and loss of blood, but afterwards she always remembered the curses she screamed. Darcy must have thought they were directed at her, for tucking herself away. But there was nothing to be done anyway. The baby was born dead. It was not her time.

‘In spite of her fever and her pain, your mother’s head was full of the thought that, without me there, she herself was to come up with a name for the dead child. She called her “Phiala”. But of course little Phiala, being stillborn, was in Limbo.

‘The bleeding went on. Annora fainted more times than she could remember. She thought of the little ones shut in the barn, but she was too weak to rise. She told me that all she could do was ask Darcy to take the poor creature in a bucket and to bury her before the twins should return and be terrified by the sight of the corpse and all the blood. Annora had the strength to scratch the initials of the baby’s name and the year on a wooden spoon, which she fashioned into a cross with another spoon tied with rags. She sewed the baby’s name on a pillowcase that she wrapped around the body, to spare Darcy the worst of the looking. And then she fainted again.

‘When she awoke, Darcy was in the room with her, mopping up the blood. The bucket with the baby had vanished. So had the cross. She asked Darcy where she had buried the body, so that she might give the infant a proper burial in time, but the girl refused to answer her. In fact, Darcy would never talk of it again, and pretended that it had never happened. She denied all knowledge of it. And eventually, I suspect, she forgot what had happened, and where the corpse had been laid.’

I pictured Darcy’s fat childish fingers digging with a wooden spoon into the sodden soil. I told him, ‘Darcy never forgot. She buried the baby in the clover field. And she hated anyone to go there. She would punish you, if you did.’

‘From what I heard, Darcy was quite a one for punishing,’ said our father. ‘Your mother said that Phiala’s death changed her. Darcy had been a whole-souled child then. Somewhat inclined to contrariness, but no great harm to her. After that, she grew morbidly interested in all things to do with death. But she also became more angry, with more violence about her too. Your mother worried about how she would beat the rest of you, how she seemed to lack any human sympathies—’

‘The baby was found with a shoe dolly,’ I remembered.

‘That must have been Darcy’s own idea,’ he said. ‘And it must have been her own dolly. Perhaps it was the last time she showed anyone a kindness. I would say that she buried a part of herself with Phiala.’

‘The better part,’ said the Eileen O’Reilly, holding one side of her head against the remembered blows of Darcy’s fists.

‘Your mother tried her hardest to tame Darcy’s blackness. But it only grew the worse. Annora claimed that a devil had jumped out of the hole where Darcy buried Phiala, and had climbed into her breast.

‘She longed to put it right, your poor mother. She wanted to console Darcy, but Darcy would not consent to be consoled for something she could not admit to. Your mother tried to find the grave, hoping she could draw Darcy’s memories back to that day, and correct them. Annora never stopped looking for it. She would call for dead baby Phiala around the place when she could, as if her little soul might hear her in Limbo.’

‘The goose!’ Oona said. ‘That was why she always called a goose “Phiala”. So that she might call the name to her heart’s content, and no one would think her mad.’

‘Darcy always liked to strangle that goose, when she could,’ Ida remembered.

Phelan Swiney nodded. ‘Don’t be thinking that Annora didn’t notice that thing too. And then when you began to talk of going off to Dublin in all your grandness, she told me that she would never leave her lost baby, not until she found the grave. She never did. And now she’s gone too, leaving you motherless, one and all.’

Footsteps rang in the corridor. Saverio’s tall body, Saverio’s kind face were approaching.

‘Who is this fine gentleman?’ asked Phelan Swiney. ‘He has a great look of family about him. Did I inadvertently sire a son?’

Oona looked at me. ‘If you want Saverio,’ she said quietly, ‘and if you promise you can recover if he is not after all what you want, then have at him.’

Ida and Berenice smiled at me. Eileen nodded.

Then Saverio was with us, his eyes on me.

‘Manticory,’ he said, in that voice that always said twice as much as words.

I rose and kissed him on the mouth, long and tenderly, until we both remembered to breathe, at the very last second. Otherwise I believe we would have died happily like that.

When we stopped, I saw that Phelan Swiney, Mariner, was weeping.

‘Your mother used to kiss me that way,’ he told me.

Chapter 56

Each time I had bent my body under Alexander’s, I wondered if he still found in me what he wanted. And I had feared that he would not. But I was sure of Saverio’s esteem. I had never needed to wait for rationed portions of it. It was always there. For months, I had worn it as a garment, like a better, more hopeful version of my own skin. I had accustomed myself to its warmth without even knowing that it was Saverio who was making me feel less cold.

So we did not go at it raw, this business of kissing, Saverio and I. We went at it with the kiss half entered already, and I was free to think only of my senses, because Saverio, with that letter he had given me, had already made sense of love – love not as Alexander practised it, tactically and selfishly, but love as human animals properly make it – untidily, thoroughly, with the feelings spilling over into the thinking and the tasting knitted to the touching.

Saverio had named all the parts of love in that letter of his, in which he had written Irishly as the Harristown rain, scribbling his words all over me, in a sheer profusion that should have drowned my loneliness, if I’d only let it.

I had not listened then. But I was listening now.

‘I’m feeling newborn,’ I told Saverio, in the bedroom of the apartment above his studio.

We had walked there from the
palazzo
, as if deer-stepping over liquid crystal in glass slippers, so beautiful and fragile was the tiny space between us.

His room was large and light, empty of ornament, except the shifting reflections of the canal, Saverio, his bed and his voice. I asked him to lie down with me.

We lay face to face, kissing, breathing, looking, and kissing again. My fingers explored his face, and his traced mine. Our lips followed our fingers.

‘What do you want of me, Saverio?’ I asked him, and I was not afraid of the answer.

‘You have given me such a long time to think about that question that the answer has regretfully become rather long.’

‘What shall you want in the end, I mean?’

‘This is all I want,’ he told me. ‘To have you in my arms, looking at me as if there is nothing else you’d rather see. For the rest, ask me again in two hundred years.’

After a long slow while, I asked, ‘May I borrow your hand, Saverio? It would be the shame of the world if I knew how only your mouth and eyes taste.’

‘The shame would indeed be killing. Yes, you may, if I may borrow yours.’

We tasted the different flavours of each other’s fingertips, concluding that our thumbs were the saltiest, and the little finger of my left hand was the sweetest.

I asked next, ‘Could you turn a little?’

‘I am unwilling to lose the sight of you.’

‘Just for a moment.’

In a moment I had found the musk tucked in the tiny creases of Saverio’s neck. I thrust myself full length against his back and wrapped my arms around the great warmth and firmness of him, nibbling on the little curls at his nape. I could not help my hips pushing against him, withdrawing, and pushing again.