Turning the Stones (17 page)

Above, the enormous dark sails graze the sky and its breathtaking spill of stars. I notice a sailor swaying at the top of the mast. He is lashing the heel of the topsail, I think. I admire the feat of sailing this touchy vessel. She is forever yawing and pitching and even a landlubber such as I can tell that it is not easy to keep this unsteady creature under rein.

The sound of splashing draws me forward and I grope along the wet deck, wincing at the clang of my pail on the boards. Something luminous arches out of the water. A porpoise! A school of them of them is frolicking at the bows of the cutter, their silhouettes aglow with a pale blue light. What a wonderful sight! My gaze follows them until they disappear and then it swoops up into the starry canopy. I believe that when we see something beautiful in nature it lends us a moment of feeling completely satisfied, which is a state as rare as it is recuperative to most souls. It uplifts me to think that no matter how poor or dispossessed I am, the beauty of the world is not lost to me – and that, if I give myself over to the genius of these spectacles, I may enter, no matter how briefly, the experience of peace.

As if to make a mockery of my pretty sentiment, my stargazing is terminated most abruptly. A grasping hand seizes with great force my shoulder. Straightaway I strike out at the
darkness with my fist – and I am mortified to find it has collided with Captain McDonagh’s cheek. He releases me at once and we are both of us dismayed. He steps away from me and says with a stiff bow, ‘Forgive me, madam.’ Then he growls, ‘Leaning out like that, you might have gone overboard.’

‘I was only looking at the porpoises.’ There is a tremble in my voice. ‘I am sorry to have struck you, but you startled me.’

‘Will you go below, now, please?’ His voice is tight.

‘The fish were lit up like flares, you know. I have never seen such a sight.’

He says shortly, ‘That is not so unusual. Some creatures have the luminescence in themselves, but like most amazements, it does not last.’

His chilly demeanour provokes me to say with some indignation, ‘It is not necessary for you take responsibility for my safety, Captain McDonagh. I am quite capable of holding on to a rail.’

He bends down to me and says then in a low but heated tone, ‘Safety? For God’s sake, girl, you have no notion of the word. Have you any idea what might have befallen you had your impulsive leap brought you among a less disciplined crew? You may treat my protection lightly, madam, but do not expect me to indulge your foolishness.’

*

In my berth, unable to sleep. Captain McDonagh’s admonition lies heavy on me for I do indeed feel foolish. How could I have wound such a mesh of make-believe around that stranger at Parkgate? He and the captain may be one and the same, but
there never was a luminary walking the strand that day. It was only a smuggler out for his own gain and, watching him, a girl who seems to have made a bad hash of things.

The past is all chopped up and I struggle to put it back together. The only certainty is that my thoughts, tethered to the place like a ball to its cup, keep returning to Sedge Court.

The House of Kitty Conneely, Connemara
April, 1766

Does the child remember at all her people at home? I wonder. The Blacks and the Lees and my sister, Mary Folan, although that sister has turned her back on me. The Molloys and the Maddens. The Naughtons and the McDonaghs. Galore of them gone now, one way or another. It pierces me to be alone, but so I have been for an age, ever since Mike died, God have mercy on his soul. You had Josey and your child. The dear knows you and Josey were a heart match. I saw the way his eyes would meet yours even when company came at your place and there was a conversation running all around in it. You could have blown the house sky high with that look. I was jealous of your happiness, I will admit.

It was to the stones I went today, Nora. I have a great fancy for that place. What a restless world it is up there with all kinds of sharp gusts shredding the clouds and the gulls hurling themselves about. I came to the stones and petted them as is my habit now and reminded them of their commission.

I turn, and turn again

I turn the dark mass

I turn the charm

I turn the spells

I bestow, I bestow a binding

On the woman of the hat and her daughter.

Let me tell you this, my friend: the daughter who belongs to the woman of the hat has been brought away and she is on the path to her doom. It is only right that she should pay the penalty for her mother’s actions and cleanse the ungood. But you know that.

It is a taking and a redeeming.

While I was at the stones the thought of Connla McDonagh came to my mind. Away from us he was for many years but he comes now and then in and out by sea with the wine and the tobacco. You might remember seeing him on the strand when he was a lad, harvesting wrack with his mother, God rest her soul. That was before the great cold came and took his people.

There is silence from you, friend, I have noticed. Ever since I turned the stones. Your voice comes less and less to my mind and I wonder why that is. Don’t you want me to bring our child home?

You never said so, but it occurs to me now that you never liked to share her affection with me as much as I thought. Isn’t that true? My favouring of your daughter: sometimes you were kicking against it, weren’t you?

I think you might have been a little afraid of me, Nora. Lookit, you are right to be so. I did things you never knew, I will confess that now. I made a false charm without a jot of power in it for you when the sickness came on your children and I made a charm against my husband with too much power in it altogether. Filled with fury I was when
he looked with a soft eye on my sister and I asked the stones to turn Mary Folan away from him. From his face, from his eyes, from his mouth, from his belly, from his cock, from his anus, from his entire body. From his heart and his soul.

Perhaps you think I am selfish and that I bring back the girl for myself alone and not for you. But she is in need of a mother’s love, and it would be hard to find a woman more gifted for the treasuring of a child than myself. Seeing as you cannot. She grips my heart, Nora.

It is not easy to influence events at a distance, but I declare to the devil that I will bring her to me and that fellow McDonagh will help me do it. He is bound to abide by my wishes, although he does not know it. In the roar of the sea his boat will hear my summons.

The Orchard and the Stables, Sedge Court
March, 1758

The day after Eliza and I had danced in the library for Barfield I was in a troubled state of mind. It was clear to me that Mrs Waterland had not been gratified by the clumsy manner in which Eliza and I had brought the minuet to its conclusion, but I felt weary of toiling to be agreeable. I might have appeared on the surface to be a meringue, but if anyone had looked into me, he would have found, in place of sugary froth, any amount of unsweetness, of resentment and envy liquefying into bitter waters. I worried that before I grew much older, the effort of attractiveness would defeat me and my choler would be exposed – and what should happen to me then? I knew very well that Mrs Waterland owned numerous treasures that had once commanded her eye but now were shelved in dusty storage or banished altogether.

When I received the order the following morning to work in the summer house, the assignment seemed less a boon than a sign that the mistress wished me to be out of sight. I applied myself for several hours to the shellwork, gluing an endless number of cockles, and no one came near me, not even Abby with bread and cheese for my dinner.

I had no sense of foreboding about the tragic event that was taking place while I was pasting shells to the stone walls
of the summer house. That, on top of everything else, causes me additional anguish and bewilderment. You have heard me speak probably almost incessantly about my alertness to little signifiers in my surroundings. Why did not an alarm ring for me then?

I did feel nervous on my own account, however, as I set off in the early afternoon to return to the house. I remember looking back over my shoulder at the summer house and noticing that its conical roof poked out of the trees like a witch’s hat – but that was not the source of my unease. I had a distinct sensation of being watched as I walked along the path that leads to the kitchen garden. It winds through an old orchard with unkempt pippin and pear trees in a bind of ravelled branches. Behind them taller trees haunted the sky with branches that looked like skeletal arms.

There was a disturbance in the undergrowth that made me pause. It came from a thicket of coppiced ash that encroached on the orchard some thirty yards away. I scanned the trees, but could see nothing. I took a few steps and stopped again at the sound of a sort of snickering. I had the impression of vegetation being pushed aside. Then the insidious rustle sounded again, only closer to hand this time. It was somehow more determined as though a fox or a dog was snuffling about. I walked on, paused again. The sound was louder than a fox and it was no longer rustling …

He was not sneaking. He was barging through the trees, making straight for me. The postilion in his ugly livery. Except that it was not the postilion.

He – Barfield – stepped on to the path in front of me and my heart jumped so hard it knocked the breath out of my
throat. ‘Your servant, lovely,’ he said, with a smirking gesture at his livery, and my flesh crawled. I dropped a queasy curtsy and sought to creep on, but he caught my arm. ‘What, no how-de-do? Where are your manners, wench?’ His humid breath smelled of drink. The pressure of his fingers frightened and angered me and I tried to pull away. He tightened his grip and shoved his hand in the opening of my mantle. I struck at his face. He grabbed my wrist and jerked my arm behind my back with such force I thought the bone would snap. He threw me down then and as soon as I hit the ground he sank on top of me with a crushing weight that made me gasp for air. I realised then that he was serious in his attempt to harm me. At once it was as if all the signs of life in me began to shut down. I felt very cold. Even if I had been able to scream, I do not think I would have done so. I think the thought in my head was to disappear. That if I seemed already to be dead, there would be no point in his prolonging the assault. I also remember thinking that I would do anything as long as it meant that I should survive the attack. I use the word ‘thinking’, but there was nothing cerebral about my responses. They were primitive, instinctive reactions of self-protection. He grunted something into my hair and began to rub himself against me as he fumbled at my petticoat. He pulled my shift above my thighs and … I thought that my ribs would splinter under the mass of him and I would suffocate. Then out of the corner of my eye I saw the movement of a booted foot. The boot wedged against Barfield’s shoulder and I heard Johnny Waterland laugh, and say, ‘Ain’t you a crude beast, man?’

Barfield told him to go hang, but the thrust of Johnny’s
boot forced him to loosen his grip on me. I sought frantically to haul myself out from under his bulk.

‘Leave her, Barfy,’ Johnny ordered in a tone that was almost disinterested. Barfield rolled off me and I wriggled away like an animal into the drift of dead leaves on the path’s verge.

‘It is only I am in the country and I thought myself to plough,’ Barfield giggled.

I groped around for my cap and my mantle and found them lying rumpled further back on the path. They looked humiliated, it seemed to me, and I snatched them up.

‘Tidy yourself,’ Johnny said in his cool way, ‘and be about your work.’ He was looking down on me in a superior manner with his arms folded. Tears insisted on spilling over and sliding hot and stinging down my cheeks.

Barfield, dusting off his breeches, said, ‘I only meant to have some sport with her, Waterland. I could not help myself. Ain’t she a peach—’

‘Shut your mouth, sir.’

‘You see, though, how a fellow might be tempted by her.’

Johnny turned to me and arched an eyebrow as if amused by a jape. ‘Run along now, Em. There is no harm done.’

The stunned expression on my face provoked him to add, ‘Say nothing of this and all shall be well. It would be a sad thing to bring my mother’s displeasure on yourself.’

At the time I wondered if Johnny demanded my silence so that Mrs Waterland’s displeasure would not spill over on to him as well, because it was obvious to anyone that there was a bond of admiration between him and Barfield, but I came to understand that he was immune to censure in that household. As he was keeper of the keys to the family’s future, his
mother was bound to give credence to whatever Johnny said. He had nothing to check his actions.

I threw my mantle around my shoulders and found the strength to run – without a word of thanks to my rescuer. I had no stomach for gratitude. I plunged between the trees, but I could not outpace the shame that nipped, snivelling, at my heels.

I dared not face the house straight away. There was no one there to whom I could express my outrage at Barfield’s offensive, except Miss Broadbent, but I did not wish to burden her. I ran through the wicket gate and pulled up opposite the stable, panting like a coursed hare. My eye fell on a low heap of straw scattered on the cobbles near the door of the stable as Croft emerged with a forkful of staled litter and turned it on to the heap to air. He ducked his ginger head at me and returned to his work. I crept to the doorway and leaned against the jamb with a hanging head. As I slowly recovered my breath, I was overcome by feelings of disgrace and humiliation. Croft was moving around at the rear of the stable under the low-beamed ceiling plying his broom in an empty stall. In the neighbouring stall loomed the hindquarters of our big-shouldered roan mare.

I edged into the stable and lowered myself on to a bench. The wide doors that opened in to the coach house were shut. The light was muted and the air was close. I breathed in the smell of hayseeds and dust and powdery brickwork. A ladder positioned in the middle of the stable led to the hayloft – a place I regarded as a refuge. In the past I had hidden there behind a rampart of hay when I did not feel like bowling a hoop with Eliza or knocking down her skittles.