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“Say thank you, George,” said the beauty with brown hair, wiping her muddy hands on her white dress.

“If it wasn’t for us you would have floated out to sea, you would have drowned,” said Janie matter-of-factly, “so you’d better say thank you.”

“Thank you Hester,” said George.

And the girl who was beautiful, although he didn’t know the word yet, giggled.

“Don’t thank Hester, thank me.”

“Are you not Hester?” George asked.

“No,” she said, “and I’m not Emily either. I’m Nina.”

“Thank you Nina,” said George.

“You’re welcome. Now let’s get you cleaned.”

George saw her stand and walk towards the house. Janie immediately followed. So George followed too. They had crossed the river, in fact as well as in spirit, and he was dimly aware that different rules now applied. To George, a mass of brown mud from head to toe, to Janie, with her wet dress clinging to her. Perhaps even to the immaculate Nina, clutching her doll, who alone knew the way.

“I’ve got just the job for you, George,” she said, “just the job for you.”

The phrase was Dan Turnbull’s, which seemed apt enough for the business at hand. Apt enough too was Dan Turnbull’s hose, threading its way through the limp tomato plants that seemed to exhale in rows in the greenhouse. Nina dragged out the hose, turned on the spigot and watched the India-rubber respond as if an invisible snake was coursing through it.

“Stand to attention, George,” she ordered. “Like a soldier,” she added when she saw his mudcaked face puzzled by the concept of attention.

So George stood upright, his right hand frozen to his eyebrow the way he’d seen the soldiers do it in South Quay Barracks. And Nina circled round him with her cleansing spray which became a punishing jet when she pressed her finger to the nozzle. Which transferred the river’s mud from George to the cracked panes of the glasshouse behind him.

“Do you know what Hester thinks,” said Nina dreamily, watching George’s hair part under pressure from the hosepipe.

“Hester the Pester,” said George, his mouth hardly moving, military style.

“What does Hester think?” asked Janie, who was lying face down with the doll by Nina’s feet.

“Hester thinks we might be friends . . .”

Dan Turnbull thought they must be friends. So after he had lifted Nina into the cart he had hitched on to Garibaldi, the grey mare, he lifted Janie and George too. He neglected to lift Hester, who Nina had left beside the India-rubber hose and the mud-splattered glasshouse. George surmised that she belonged to the house, the river and the chestnut tree and so couldn’t come along for the ride. It was not, he decided, that she wasn’t wanted on this journey through the fuchsia and honeysuckle hedges, with the low hum of bees drowned by the rattle of the cart’s metal wheels,
it
was just that she wasn’t thought of. There were indeed other things to think of, like the dark soft hair of the girl beside him, darker than the shadows of the brown cows standing in the fields, melting in the heat of the midday sun. Like the appeals of the children that ran from every cottage, begging to clamber on for the ride. But Dan wouldn’t take them, would he. All Dan would carry was Nina, George and Janie, because he was collecting seaweed for the flowerbeds in Baltray House and hadn’t room for more than three. “So get off that trailer, Buttsy Flanagan, and crying won’t help you, will it, Nina?” And Nina said no, crying wouldn’t help one bit.

But the truth was Nina didn’t take Hester because for once, on that Saturday morning, she had no need of Hester. She would have exchanged the company of Hester, Emily and whatever incorporeal friend she could ever imagine for the company of those two beside her on Dan Turnbull’s cart.

Dan guided the mare towards the estuary mouth, where the large granite boulders broke away into scraps of fossilised stone, where the Lady’s Finger pointed towards an invisible spot in the hot sky above, at the apex of the triangle of river and sea. Across the warm, lazy river was the random straggle of huts around Nina’s father’s fish factory.

Dan forked the seaweed that clung to the rocks by the water’s edge, wet clumps of brine-smelling tendrils the colour of dried blood.

“That’s hair,” said Nina.

“What’s hair?” asked Janie.

“A woman’s hair,” said Nina.

“Hester’s hair,” said Georgie.

And Nina told them what her father had told her, the story of the spring and the foaming water and the girl who ran from it until she was caught by the waters here, at the mouth of what would become the Boyne river. And if the limestone tower was her finger, the seaweed must surely be her hair.

“Her hair,” said George, sitting on a rock at the water’s edge.

“Yes,” said Nina, “her hair.”

“No, her hair,” said George again, pointing down.

And Dan Turnbull thrust his pitchfork in the water below George and found it entangled in what indeed was hair, the hair of Miss Isobel Shawcross, governess, of the Kildare Shawcrosses, who floated to the surface like a flounder caught by a gaffhook.

~

The sun rises to more hoar-frost on the morning of the seventeenth of January. The fields are pure expanses of white and the sycamore by the gates is a palm of silver fingers appealing to the sky. A veil of mist lies inches above the frosted surfaces, curling round the sycamore and the black Ford car parked by the gates in which a lone policeman sleeps. A second car comes to relieve him as the mist disperses; men in uniform step out of it, stamp their feet, bang on the frosted window until the one who sat vigil awakes. They pour him tea from a flask and as the steam from their mugs drifts into the dispersing mists a third car joins them. Dr. Hannon now emerges, leading George gently by the hand. Then behind comes Janie. The girl who was so thin and freckled has gained something of a stoop. She has a hat pinned to her greying hair, is wearing a black coat with a black fur collar, thinking the colour, perhaps, is appropriate to the agony of the occasion.

“Come on, George,” she says to her brother, “tell the men now.”

But George has little to tell. His feet are sore from wandering, the laces in his shoes are missing and the leather edges have rubbed his sockless ankles raw.

He complains about his heels as Janie moves him through the gates and the policemen follow at a distance, thinking any speech, perhaps, is better than none. They move up the driveway, at George’s shambling, uncertain pace, round the courtyard at the back, through the arches round the outhouses. And George stops, in mid-stride, outside the orchard wall. He stares at the bare apple trees, as if remembering them bowed down with fruit. There is a slight, sad smile around the corners of his mouth, and his eyes are wistful. The group of policemen shuffle awkwardly behind him.

“Is it inside there,” Janie asks gently, “somewhere in the orchard?”

“The orchard,” George echoes.

“Not the orchard, Janie,” Buttsy Flanagan says, “we’ve checked the orchard.”

And George, as if in agreement, starts to walk again. Past the glasshouse to his right. Down the path of scuffed grass towards the river. And the procession follows.

George’s eyes are pale blue, the colour of cigarette-smoke, and Janie’s are brown. Time has not been kind to her eyes, to the lids above them, the circles beneath them, but there is still tomboy tartness to her face, an arresting slash of purple lipstick on the wide mouth, beneath the hungry hollow cheeks. In fact time itself has only served to enhance that waif-like, lost abandon. Even now, as she holds George’s elbow, allows him to lead her towards the river, Sergeant Buttsy Flanagan is eyeing not the moving ripples in the river, but the pendulum of Janie’s hips.

The grass beneath her impractical high-heeled shoes is scuffed from years of children’s feet into something like a path. And where the chestnut arches over the river, the branch above it still with the ringlet of scar on its bark, the ground below it still empty of grass as if from the memory of thrusting feet, there George stops. His blue eyes mist up. He pulls a crushed packet of Sweet Afton from his top pocket and fumbles for a light.

“You want a light, Georgie?” Janie asks. The policeman next to her proffers it.

The match flares, the smoke curls up and the mist in his eyes turns to tears. He could be remembering his sister’s small, half-naked body that used to swing like a knotted branch over that water, fall and float away as deftly as wood. The policeman, of course, presumes something else. He pictures George lowering an adult body into that water, with all the solicitude of deranged affection. He pictures the high tide carrying the body past the ruined shellfish plant, past the old breakwater, past the Lady’s Finger, out to sea.

10

D
AN TURNED THE
body over with his pitchfork once, then twice, and said to Nina in his lazy way, “Nina, lead the mare over to that bank so she can eat some clover.”

“Clover,” Nina said. She was staring at a picture she had seen before but she couldn’t remember where.

“Grass or clover, all the same to her, she’s hungry. Georgie, Janie, give her a hand.”

He had the body turned by now, in a tangle of floating seaweed. He was hoping they wouldn’t understand what they had seen.

“Will she eat shamrock?” Nina asked. She had the loose reins of the mare in her hand and was leading her away from the image she wanted to forget.

“She’d eat anything,” Dan said.

“Clover,” said Georgie.

Nina drew the mare’s head down towards the grass and saw her lips curl back, baring long yellow teeth. She listened to the crunch of seagrass and shivered even though the sun was hot enough to make her cheeks burn. She remembered wishing her governess gone and wished now that she hadn’t wished that. Because if all of her fleeting desires came true, she didn’t want to think of what would happen.

“That was Miss Shawcross, wasn’t it?” she said quietly to Dan, who jammed his pitchfork in whatever seaweed he had so far collected, and took the reins from her hand.

“Don’t you bother your head about it.”

Dan lifted her first, then Janie and last of all George on to the cart.

“Is she drowned?”

“Drowneded,” echoed Georgie.

“We’re taking you home now Nina,” said Dan softly, “and I don’t want you to bother with what you’ve seen. Leave that to the peelers.”

“She’s still hungry,” said Nina, as Dan jerked the mare’s head upright, and whipped her into a smart trot down the sandy road.

“She is,” said Dan, “and I know a fine field of clover she can chew to her heart’s content.”

“Where’s that?” asked Janie

“Below the RIC barracks.”

She lulled herself into a dream as the horse trotted back, a dream scented with honeysuckle and clover and the smell of wet seaweed. In her dream the face turned over and over, the hair spreading out in the water like a scallop-shell. In her waking the river threaded its way above the hedges, a hot ribbon of silver.

The sound of humming bees droned towards her from the hedges and away to the dunes and made common cause with both her dream and her waking. Whatever made this happen wasn’t her, she sensed, but some part of her had seen it before it happened, so some part of her could at the very least have stopped it from happening. To know what was to come would be a burden, a terrible burden, even worse than knowing what was not to come. She would return, she knew, to the house, to father and mother and Mary Dagge, to her doll Hester and to a world without Miss Isobel Shawcross.

She tried to picture Dan’s arrival at the peelers’ station, sunlit swathes of green below the redbricked barracks, two peelers running towards them from the door, buttoning their tunics, serious, serious, all business. Dark glances towards her, the girl in the back, you, you of all people knew. But to her immense relief it wasn’t like that at all. An officer in shirtsleeves was lazily clipping the lawns, Dan pulled the mare to a halt, handed the reins to Nina, said, “One minute now,” left them on the seaweed-smelling cart while he walked forwards, shook his hand and whispered.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” said Janie.

“You think so?” asked Nina.

“Well, I don’t think she was swimming.”

“Maybe she can’t,” said Nina.

“Can’t what?”

“Swim.”

The mare cropped at the grass by the roadside.

“Clover,” said Georgie.

“Stop saying clover,” said Nina.

“Grass,” said Georgie.

“That’s better. Grass.”

Louder voices on the lawn then, two peelers walking fast down towards them. Buttoning their tunics, just the way she’d pictured, to her shock and disappointment, but not really her surprise.

“Make room there,” said Dan, and they clambered up, large laced boots and shining buttons. Dan thwacked the reins and drew the mare in a half-circle. She moved off unwillingly with the extra load.

“So where is she?” asked the first, fixing the last buttons on his greatcoat.

Dan shot the officer a disapproving glance.

“Across from the Lady’s Finger. I’ll drop off the childer first and take you there.”

“A bad business.”

“Maybe.”

So he left them by the gates to make their way up the avenue on their own.

“Don’t be bothering your little heads, now,” he said. “Nina will take you to Mary Dagge for your tea.”

The three of them walked over the crunching pale gravel, the death now unmentioned between them. To her two new friends, if friends they were, the sight of this gaunt facade was like another entrance, another house. They had seen its jumble from behind, the crumbling wall of an orchard, the long triangle of glass and rusted metal, the stone arch leading to the stables, but this looming thing, this dark rectangle with the sun now right behind its bunched chimneys, this was neither house nor home, church nor castle, this was some unimagined, unimaginable fact they would have to find new words for.

The large front door was ajar and Nina pushed it open with her shoulder. The sound of a piano, soft and measured, came from the living room. She held the door open for Janie and George and looked down at George’s bare feet as he tested the tuft of the carpet, his splayed toes pressing it as if he expected it to ooze between them like mud. Then she walked towards the sound of the piano. George and Janie followed, stepping in her brief footprints in the carpet, fearful that the area outside them would indeed turn to mud, the kind of mud that sank for ever, that they would vanish beneath that red and purple leaf-shaped pattern, hardly leaving a ripple.