Bridie's Fire (2 page)

‘What are you doing?' shouted Roisin. ‘You O'Connors, you're both flaming mad!' She ran up the cliff path, with Mickey and Jim chasing behind.

Brandon sat astride the black pony, stroking its neck with long, gentle movements, and all the while whispering sweetly until the animal grew calm again. Then he gave the signal and Bridie carefully guided the pony to an outcrop of rocks so she too could climb on its back. When they were both securely mounted, Brandon leaned forward and coaxed the pony into a walk. It shied into the surf until the waves washed against its flanks. Bridie felt a ripple of alarm.

‘Are you sure she won't take us out to sea?' she whispered.

‘She won't be doing that. I'm thinking she's a runaway from Lord Ventry's stables,' he answered quietly.

The pony broke into a canter and they rode along the water's edge with the wind biting their cheeks, the animal swift and powerful beneath them. The surf roared in their ears as they rounded the point. Bridie wrapped her arms tight around her brother and felt the excitement in his taut body, his heart beating as if it were her own.

They'd only just sent the black pony on its way, and were walking homewards along the beach when Bridie spotted their father's currach riding the crest of the waves, heading towards them. She cupped her hands and shouted, and their dad waved back. He beached the boat and jumped out, clasping three shimmering fish hooked together. Brandon held the catch while Dad and the other men dragged the currach high onto the beach, and then together they set out for home. Dad whistled all the way up the steep cliff path.

Inside the house, Mam was busy scraping hot potatoes from the embers of the fire. Bridie hurried over to help, rescuing her baby brother, Paddy, from the mess he was making in a small pile of cold ash. He laughed at the faces she pulled when he tugged at her dark curls. Shifting the tiny boy onto her hip, she took him into the late summer twilight.

They sat on the bench outside the whitewashed house and Bridie shared her potato with Paddy, feeding him small mouthfuls with her fingertips. Brandon came out and joined them, hungrily scooping out the hot sweet flesh from the skin.

Her mother put her head around the door and smiled at them. ‘Thanks be to the great God who spared you to me, Bridie. The O'Farrells are paying us a visit this evening and I'm hoping you'll be minding the little ones so Kitty and I can have a fine old gossip while we sew.'

‘I can tell them about the great hairy ghost that lives under that lump of stone by the lane.'

‘Don't you go frightening Roisin,' said Mam.

‘It's true,' said Brandon, with his mouth half-full of spud. ‘Bridie's already given her a death of fright this morning.'

‘What's the boy talking about?' asked Mam.

Bridie reached over and cuffed Brandon on the head. ‘Never you mind, Mam. I'll tell some fine old fairy stories that will keep the lot of them out of trouble.'

Half an hour later, Roisin came running up the path to their house, clutching a handful of bright flowers, her long red plaits bouncing as she ran.

‘But sure I'm glad to find you home,' she said. ‘I thought you'd be under the sea by now.'

Behind her were all the O'Farrell family – Kitty O'Farrell with one of her baby twin boys on each hip and a crowd of small red- and golden-haired children milling around their father.

‘Blessing o' God on ye, Seamus O'Connor!' said Mick O'Farrell. His tired face lit up with pleasure as Bridie's father pulled a long-necked bottle of whiskey from the cupboard and set it on the table.

Bridie loved these evenings, when the house was full of people, the warm scent of whiskey and tobacco, and the sound of lively talk and music. When Bridie's mother sang, Bridie thought her voice was the loveliest in all the west of Ireland. The room grew still as she sang the story of a beautiful girl with a broken heart, whose love had gone across the sea to America and was never heard from again.

‘One day I'll be going across the sea to America, like Uncle Liam,' said Brandon, when the song was finished.

‘Now why would you be thinking such a thing?' asked Roisin. ‘No one's ever heard from your Uncle Liam.'

‘To be sure, he's rich and living in a grand house,' said Brandon.

‘But you'll not really be wanting to do that, Brandon,' said Bridie, putting an arm around her little brother. ‘You'll be wanting to come and live with me in my house, not with Uncle Liam. I'll have my own little house, and one half of it will be red gold and the other half, the lower half, it'll be silver; and I'll have me a red door, and the threshold will be copper, I think, and the thatch will be so lovely, like the wings of magic, white-yellow birds, like you've never seen, not even in your dreams. And you and me, we'll live there together for ever.'

Brandon grinned shyly, glancing across at the O'Farrell children with pride in his eyes. There was no other girl that could tell stories like his sister. But Roisin folded her arms across her chest and glared at Bridie.

‘You and your fairies!' she said. ‘First you tell me that if you ride a pooka, it will take you out past the ninth wave, to hell or the otherworld. Then you and Brandon go riding on that beast, and here you are, safe and warm. And then you tell me that fairies are living in the mounds near the beehive huts. I went like you told me, girl, and I waited in the dawn, like you said I should, until the cold crept into my bones, and not one fairy did I see, nor any magical folk.'

Bridie looked from Roisin to Brandon and laughed. Then she put on her most serious expression. ‘But sure I've seen them, my darling girl. With my own eyes, I've seen the fairies weaving
pishoge
over by St Brendan's hut.'

Brandon nodded. ‘I own to God, she speaks the truth.'

Roisin looked suspiciously from sister to brother, and then suddenly she laughed.

‘Devil a lie, Bridie O'Connor,' said Roisin, ‘but I want to believe every word you say.'

The grown-ups grew louder as the whiskey took hold, and their talk became more troubled. They spoke of the crops that were failing again on the other side of the mountain and of the terrible suffering that all Ireland was enduring. The children snuggled down together in front of the hearth, watching the last embers flicker while Bridie whispered stories of all the magic things she'd seen in the hills and fields around their homes. In the glowing turf Bridie could almost see the vision she described: a beautiful faerie queen in a shimmering gown with feather-white pieces of fabric floating about her and dewdrops like tiny pearls on every fold of her dress. Even Roisin was entranced by the description, and when Bridie looked down into their bright faces she could almost believe that every word of the stories she told was true.

She nestled down closer to her brother and began another tale.

2

The hunger

The next morning was bright and clear. Bridie woke with Brandon and Paddy a tangle of limbs and tousled hair on the pallet beside her. The O'Farrell children were gone. Someone must have woken them quietly and then moved Bridie and her brothers to their bed.

The chicken that they kept in the cupboard was scratching and clucking, anxious to be out in the day. Bridie padded across the pressed-earth floor, reached in between the wooden bars of the cage under the cupboard and drew a warm egg from beneath the hen.

The door to the cottage was open, and the fire was smouldering on the hearth. She wondered why Mam and Dad hadn't woken her when they left and why her mother hadn't let the chicken out. Still clutching the warm hen's egg in her hand, she stepped over the threshold. Pale dawn light crept across the morning sky. Bridie walked around the back of the cottage to where the family potato plot lay. Her parents were already at work in the field, but there was something odd about the way they were going about it, a frenzied desperation in their movements. Then Bridie saw that the leaves of the plants looked strange, limp and wilted. The day before they had been a thick tangle of stalks and rich green leaves.

Then, as her father dug his hands into the black soil, he moaned, a horrible low growl like a wounded dog.

‘Da, don't!' she called, frightened.

He looked up, his face white and contorted with despair. ‘It's the blight, girl.'

Bridie caught her breath and pressed her fists against her cheeks. She knew what this could mean. She had seen the gaunt and desperate men and women, turned out of home when their crops failed and they'd been unable to pay their rent. They drifted across the land and wound their way around the peninsula, begging at every door, driven by a hungry wind. All across the country, first in the north, and then rapidly spreading south, the potato harvest had been hit by a terrible cholera, but the O'Connors had been spared – until now.

Bridie slipped the egg into the pocket of her dress and set to work alongside her parents, separating the good potatoes from the bad. Some were no more than black pulp, with a stench that burnt her nostrils. Others showed a row of small spots, like tiny weeping sores.

At the end of the day, a day in which they barely stopped for a moment from the grim work, Dad leaned against the whitewashed wall of their house and looked out across the ravaged field. ‘There's just enough good spuds to half-fill the pit. We'll take care with these, and God save us, there'll be enough to tide us through the winter.'

They filled the store-pit with what they'd salvaged, and laid straw across the top. Mam said a prayer over the pit and Bridie knelt beside her with head bowed, whispering the words with anxious longing.

That evening, Bridie and her father walked down the narrow white path to the O'Farrells' house. Mam and the boys were already in bed, but both Bridie and Seamus O'Connor were restless. It was a sombre gathering at the O'Farrells'. Their crop was blighted as well, and not even the whiskey could break through the chill that settled on the room. Bridie was in no mood to tell fairy stories to the O'Farrell children, so instead she sat beside her father, nestling in against his strong body and listening quietly as he and Mick discussed what had brought the disease to their crop.

As they argued back and forth, Bridie shrank closer to her father, her mind consumed by guilty imaginings. Had she brought this ill luck on Dunquin by riding the black pony? She remembered Roisin's screaming that the pooka would bring the devil to their door. And now it had come true. She frowned and concentrated hard, trying to make sense of what the men were saying.

Mick thought it was the summer storms or the easterly winds or maybe even the moon, but Seamus O'Connor shook his head, adding, ‘Whatever cause brought this upon us, you can be sure the English will make it no easy cross to bear. There'll be no help for the likes of us, Mick O'Farrell. The hunger has the whole of Ireland by the throat. My blood shivers when I think of the poor widows and orphans flung out of their homes, the men working and dying on the public service for a handful of cornmeal while good butter and oats and the best Ireland has to offer is loaded onto boats bound for England.'

‘And here you were telling me only a few years back that our man Dan O'Connell would change it all for us,' said Mick. ‘But to be sure he can't change the will of God, boyo.'

Seamus slammed his hand down hard on the table. ‘Mick O'Farrell, I tell you these troubles and the hunger they will bring are man-made and not the will of God!' Bridie could feel the tide of rage rising in her father's body. He shook his head angrily, pushed a handful of curly black hair away from his face and reached for another mouthful of whiskey. ‘Whatever becomes of us, I'll not have you slack-jawed about the Great Liberator,' said Dad. ‘They've laid him low, and he can't talk for us now, but if he could, he'd put a stop to their mischief!'

The first bite of chill autumn was in the air as they walked back home that night. Bridie felt her whole body aching with grief and guilt. She couldn't put the thought of the black pony from her mind. When Seamus noticed her slackening pace, he hoisted her up onto his broad back and carried her the rest of the way home. The coarse fabric of his coat scratched her cheek but she wrapped her arms tight around him. When he set her down outside the cabin door they stood for a moment, looking up at the swirling stars. Bridie slipped her hand into her father's and he squeezed it firmly.

‘Dad,' she whispered. ‘I did a wicked thing. And I've brought the curse upon us. It's all my fault that the praties turned black.' She wiped a tear away from her cheek with the back of her hand. Dad knelt down and swept her up into his arms, bringing her face close to his.

‘Husha, what's this you're saying?' he said, his warm, whiskey-scented breath against her cheek.

‘I rode the pooka, with Brandon. A wild black pony on the beach near the
cuisheen
. It's an evil sign, isn't it?'

Dad laughed and brushed his hand against Bridie's hair. ‘If it was the pooka you were riding, you'd not be here in my arms, girl. No, it was only a black pony and you can be sure of that. You've no cause to go blaming yourself for anything.'

He sat down on the bench outside the house and settled Bridie in his lap.

‘You're frightened of what lies ahead, aren't you, child?' he said softly. Bridie nodded.

‘Wisha, sweet child, if I could spare you the grief of this world, I would. But I know you're a match for the devil and all his mischief. When you were born, just a fresh babe, and I held you in my arms for the first time, I knew that we had to call you Bridie, after the blessed St Brigid. I knew because the moment I set eyes on you, I saw you had holy fire in you, exactly like our own St Brigid.'

‘But Mam said St Brigid had golden hair, like the flame. Mine's as black as soot,' said Bridie.

Her father laughed and tugged at one of her black curls. ‘But you've got the markings, girl. St Brigid was scarred on her lovely face too. It's a sure sign.'