Three Bags Full (21 page)

At this very special moment, Zora retreated to her rocky ledge to meditate, while Heather leaped in the air. “We’re going to Europe,” sang the lambs, and anyone grazing close enough to Ritchfield could hear him quietly humming along. But most of the sheep rejoiced in silence as they grazed, and only at second glance could you see the gleam in their eyes.

Othello was the happiest of all. Now he would be able to put into practice all the things that George had taught him behind the shepherd’s caravan in the evenings: how to lead a flock, how to keep your nerve while on the move, how to lead the others forcefully but cautiously past obstacles—or over them. “I’ve been waiting just for you,” George had always told him when, yet again, he had done everything just right. “With you, Europe will be child’s play.” And now they were going. Not with George, unfortunately, but Rebecca wasn’t to be sneezed at either.

“Justice!” bleated Othello contentedly. “Justice!” Then he fell silent. Europe would be wonderful, but all the same, all the same…Suddenly the black ram raised his head.

“It never got out,” he snorted.

The sheep stopped in the middle of their rejoicings and looked at Othello. He was right. The will had been full of splendid things, but they still didn’t know who had murdered George.

“It doesn’t matter,” bleated Heather happily. “We’re going to Europe and the murderer will have to stay here. He isn’t dangerous anymore.”

“It ought to get out, all the same,” said Mopple bravely.

Cordelia nodded. “He read aloud to us. He made the will so that we could go to Europe.
He
ought really to have been coming with us.”

“We mustn’t take it lying down,” said Zora. “He was our shepherd. No one can just kill our shepherd like that and get away with it. We ought to find out
before
we go to Europe. Justice!”

The sheep proudly raised their heads. “Justice!” they bleated in chorus. “Justice!”

Miss Maple stood in the midst of them, and her inquisitive eyes were sparkling.

Toward evening Rebecca came up from the village. George’s daughter: their new shepherdess. She came on foot, carrying a small suitcase. Her face was paler than the whitewashed side of the shepherd’s caravan. She put her suitcase down on the grass and climbed the steps to the caravan door.

“I’m going to live here now. Until we go to Europe,” she explained to the sheep. “I’m certainly not staying in that village any longer.”

She shook the door for a long time, tried levering the windows open, even fiddled around in the keyhole with a hairpin. Then she sat down on the top step of the caravan and put her head in her hands. George sometimes used to sit there just like that, motionless and solitary as an old tree. It seemed to the sheep almost uncanny. They realized Rebecca was sad. Melmoth began humming into the wind.

Rebecca raised her head as if she had heard him, and started whistling a tune. It fluttered through the air defiantly, reeling about like a butterfly on its first flight.

She didn’t notice the black figure that had appeared at the side of the meadow. The sheep twitched their ears nervously. Then the wind turned, and told them it was only Beth, coming into their meadow. Beth, looking for good works to do. She glided toward Rebecca, silent as a ghost. Rebecca sat there whistling and didn’t even turn her head.

“I’m sorry,” said Beth. “Those heathens!”

Rebecca whistled.

“You won’t have any luck with that door,” said Beth. “Eddie says it’s a safety lock. You’ll never open it.”

Rebecca was still whistling as if Beth wasn’t there at all.

“Come back with me,” said Beth. “You can sleep at my place.”

“I’m never going into that village again,” said Rebecca in a calm voice.

They said nothing for a while. Then Rebecca asked, “Who was Wesley McCarthy?”

“What?” Beth came out of her thoughts with a start.

“Wesley McCarthy. I’ve been through the newspaper files, you see. Of seven years ago. When you were in Africa. Wesley McCarthy was found murdered in the stone quarry. An anonymous caller phoned the police to report it. No suspects, no arrest, nothing. It went out of the headlines at once. I think that’s what you were looking for.”

“Wesley McCarthy!” Beth clutched the glittering pendant that hung round her neck. “
Weasel
McCarthy, that’s what they called him.”

Rebecca raised her eyebrows.

“There was a lot of talk at the time. No one knew where he came from or what he was doing in Glennkill. But he had money. He bought Whitepark and did it up. He lived there quietly for some time, so we thought. He was popular back then. Later, of course, everyone claimed to have had a funny feeling about him from the first.”

“So then?”

“Well, it seemed all right to start with,” said Beth. “All the drinkers in the Mad Boar hung on his every word when he told them how he came by the money. Apparently he began as a small farmer and then…” She laughed derisively. “People began pressing their money on him for investment abroad. And the first few even saw some of it back.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Well, you can guess the rest.”

Rebecca nodded.

“But that was only the start,” said Beth. “He bought up land, bit by bit. Right here next to the meadow, and then almost everything all the way to the village. It all belonged to him back then. He paid well, and people really didn’t have any choice, because they had no money left. No one asked what he was going to do with the land, not at first, anyway. And then it was too late.”

“Too late for what?”

“There was to be a slaughterhouse here. The biggest abattoir in Ireland. When I set off for Africa they were frantically discussing ways to stop it—citizens’ action groups, petitions…And when I came back: nothing. Whitepark was empty, and I never heard that he was murdered until today.”

“What’s so bad about a slaughterhouse?” asked Rebecca.

Beth smiled sadly. “Did you ever see one? The stink! The animal transports! It would have ruined all of them. The tourist trade would have been done for, all the bed-and-breakfast places, the Mad Boar—but the farmers wouldn’t have had a market for their meat either. That’s how people are around here, you see. Complain as they might about McCarthy barging his way in, they’d have gone to buy meat where it was cheapest.”

“So that was it,” said Rebecca. “I don’t think I want to hear the details. Not now.”

She looked up at Beth’s black scarecrow figure. “I came here because I wanted to know everything about him. Particularly why he was murdered only just before…” She broke off and rubbed the bridge of her nose with her forefinger. It was a gesture the sheep knew well from George.

“He wrote me a letter,” she added, “and I took my time answering it. Let him stew, I thought.” She swallowed. “I’m sure we’d have been reconciled.”

“I think so too,” said Beth.

“Really?” asked Rebecca.

“Really,” said Beth.

“And now I know a little about the life he lived, outside that…that village. This is the first time I’ve admired him.”

As if they had heard a sound, they both turned their heads to the beautiful sunset sky above the sea. For safety’s sake, the sheep looked the same way, but they couldn’t see anything special.

“What will you do now?” asked Beth after a while.

Rebecca shrugged. “Count sheep. What about you?”

“Pray,” said Beth. “I’ll pray for you here and now.”

But then she didn’t do anything after all, just stood with her eyes closed, casting a long, straight shadow in the evening twilight. Crickets chirped. A white cat stalked along the stone wall by the gate with its tail in the air. The first night birds began to sing while the sheep grazed the soft evening grass. Melmoth went on humming until a magpie flew down from the crows’ tree and perched on his back.

It didn’t stay there long, but flew on again, up to the roof of the shepherd’s caravan. It had something in its beak that shone like fire in the sunset light. This something dropped from the magpie’s beak and landed, clinking, on the top step of the caravan.

Rebecca quickly rose to her feet. The door of the shepherd’s caravan creaked, and Beth opened her eyes. Rebecca was laughing, almost in high spirits.

“Wow,” she said. “If only I’d known it works as well as
that
! You must bring me a few of your tracts sometime.”

Beth clutched the glittering little pendant on her breast. Her knuckles were white.

“Come in,” said Rebecca, from inside the shepherd’s caravan.

But Beth moved away from the door, shaking her head vigorously. The sheep were nervous too. Was something going to get out now? But nothing came out of the shepherd’s caravan, any more than it had come out of the will.

“I ought to go back,” said Beth. “If I may offer you a piece of advice: don’t put a light on this evening. I’ll say you’ve gone away.”

She turned abruptly and marched back to the village, thin and upright, as she had done so many times before.

Rebecca and her case disappeared into the shepherd’s caravan. The sheep heard her turn the key in the lock. They put their heads together.

“Do you think she’s gone to sleep?” asked Cordelia.

“She smelled tired,” said Maude.

“She can’t go to sleep,” said Heather, a little stubbornly. “It says so in the will. She has to read aloud to us. She’s a bad shepherdess.”

“Read aloud, read aloud!” bleated the sheep.

Then they fell silent. Melmoth had come up to them, shaggy and mysterious as ever.

“Nonsense,” he said. “Don’t you understand? The story is here. The story is us. The child needs the key.”

“But she already has the key,” said Heather.

Melmoth shook his head. “George’s red lamb needs
all
the keys,” he insisted.

“You mean the key for the box under the dolmen?” asked Cloud.

“Yes, under the dolmen,” Melmoth agreed. “Who has the key?”

“I do,” said Zora proudly.

“Ah, the sheep of the abyss.” There was a note of respect in Melmoth’s voice. “Who else?”

No one answered.

Melmoth nodded. “Carried away into the air with mischievous pleasure, brilliantly hidden until the human cat came. We must hurry.”

“You want me to
give it up
?” Zora looked indignantly at Melmoth.

“To the shepherdess. As you did to George the shepherd.”

“I never gave it to George just like that,” said Zora. “He used to wait for it on the edge of the abyss.”

“George knew. Rebecca is a lamb. She doesn’t know anything. We have to guide her to the milk,” said Melmoth.

Zora made a sulky face.

A little later Rebecca came out of the caravan. A lamb was crying outside, and the sound went to her heart. When she put her foot on the steps of the caravan, she saw something glittering there. It was not like fire—the sun was too low for that now—but more like spilled blood. She bent down. A key on a string. Shrugging, she put it in the pocket of her skirt. Today was not a day to wonder about anything.

The lamb was still crying, and she followed the sound under the dolmen.

The sheep watched expectantly as Rebecca came upon the hidden box. Othello had scraped the earth up first, to make it easier for her to find. Rebecca laughed and took the key out of her pocket to open it. As she knelt to remove a small packet from the box, a good smell rose from the nape of her neck.

She bit through a piece of string with her teeth. There was a crackle of plastic. Something dry crumbled in her fingers.

She sniffed it. The sheep sniffed too. It smelled…strange. Appetizing. Mopple knew at once that you could eat it.

“Grass!” said Rebecca out loud. “Any amount of grass!”

The sheep looked at each other. So
that
was the mysterious grass the humans were so keen on. Each of the sheep had carried a small packet like that, tied under their bellies and buried deep in their fleece, when George drove them to the other pasture for a few weeks. “We’re off over there again,” George had announced every time. “Operation Polyphemus.” If only they’d known then that those little packets, tied with string and smelling of nothing, contained grass…

Now it was up to Rebecca. Would she give them any of it? Apparently not. Rebecca held her skirt out like a kind of red bag and shoveled everything she could find under the dolmen into it. Many, many small packets came to light, and a larger, squarish package. And a file of papers.

Rebecca carefully carried it all back to the shepherd’s caravan in her heavily laden, bunched-up skirt. She remained out of sight for a while. Then she was suddenly out on the steps again, with a glowing point of light in front of her lips.

Sweet, heavy smoke wafted over the meadow. It made the sheep sleepy. But suddenly Rebecca was very talkative.

“So I’m supposed to read aloud to you, sheep,” she said. “I’ll read aloud to you as no one ever read to you before. And I know what I’ll read, too. Let’s see if you like it…”

Her footsteps unsteady now, she climbed back into the caravan and came out again with a book in her hand. She opened it somewhere in the middle. The sheep knew the book had to be opened at the front first, and only as it was read aloud did the sheets of paper slowly move from one side of the cover to the other. Some of the sheep bleated in protest, but most of them were too tired to get upset about this small deviation from the rules. They were being read aloud to again at last, anyway. Their young shepherdess couldn’t be expected to get everything right straight off.