The Ghost of Grania O'Malley (9 page)

‘We've got to keep floating,' Jack cried. ‘Just hang on.' The cold had numbed her legs already and she knew her arms couldn't hold on much longer. And then the mist came over their heads and shrouded them completely. Jack was crying out for help, screaming. She tried herself, but could only manage a whimper. It was hopeless.

From out of the mist came the unreal sound of oars dipping in rhythm, of men's muffled voices calling over the sea. Jack cried out again and the rowing stopped almost at once. They heard the sea slapping the sides of a boat, and then they saw it. It loomed out of the mist, riding the waves, its rearing prow ploughing through the sea towards them. There were arms pointing, heads leaning out, and then an oar to cling to. Rough hands reached for them, hauled them in over the side and they lay on the bottom of the boat gasping like landed fish. The faces that looked down at them were unshaven and weathered. One of them wore a black eyepatch. None of them was smiling.

7
ROCKFLEET

BY THE TIME THE MIST LEFT THEM, THEY WERE out of the swell of the open ocean and in amongst the sheltered islands of Clew Bay. The boat moved faster through the water now, the men rowing more evenly, their strokes longer, deeper. Jessie and Jack sat shivering side by side, covered in a huge cloak of skins. There were fifteen men rowing on each side, and the boat – which was more like a great open galley – must have been longer than the Clare Island ferry, thirty yards or more, with a pointed prow and her raised stern covered in by a canvas roof. There was a tall mast for a sail, but no sail was set. The men at the oars cast hard, searching looks in their direction. They had the least hospitable faces Jessie had ever seen.

‘Who are they?' Jack whispered through chattering teeth. It was the first time either of them had dared talk.

‘I don't know,' Jessie said. She thought for a moment of jumping overboard and escaping, but knew at once that she couldn't do it. She hadn't the strength even to stand up, let alone swim; and besides, she'd had quite enough of swimming for one day. Completely exhausted by now, Jessie drifted into sleep against Jack's shoulder.

She was woken suddenly by a splash and a barked command. She heard an anchor chain running out. They shipped the oars and the galley was gliding silently through still water before grinding to a halt in the shingle. Jessie looked up. Now she knew exactly where she was. Above the prow of the galley, stark against the sky stood a castle, Rockfleet Castle. It rose sheer from the rocks, a tall stone tower with ramparts round the top and slits for windows. She had often been past it in the car on her way to Gran's house on the mainland, and had stopped to look more than once; but the door had always been locked and they could never get in. She remembered her father pointing out the stone drain where the lavatory emptied out into the sea, and her mother saying it must have been a bit draughty, and her father laughing; but that was all she could remember about it.

The men were leaping out over the sides now and splashing ashore through the shallows. They were dressed peculiarly, in long baggy breeches, in rough shirts that were too big for them, and most had some kind of jerkin made out of leather or canvas. All of them carried swords at their sides.

Jessie found herself picked up and dropped unceremoniously overboard into the arms of one of the sailors who grinned down at her toothily out of his gnarled face – the kind of man who slits throats, she thought. Then he was carrying her up the beach, over the rocks and in through the castle door. She was in a small low-ceilinged room. From the shadows all around, grizzled faces stared at them, eyes glowing in the dark. Many were bearded, and most wore woollen caps pulled down to their ears. And then came a voice from somewhere above them and it was a voice both of them recognised at once, the voice of Grania O'Malley. ‘Will you bring them up here to the fire, boys, and fast. They'll die of the cold.'

Jack was ushered on ahead up the narrow, winding stone stairs. Jessie still had to cling tight to her sailor, leaning her head inwards to avoid bumping it against the walls. The stairs brought them out into another room about the same size, but lighter. Here the floor was covered in rushes and there were tables set for eating. But there was no one there. Then they were climbing more winding stairs until at last Jessie was set down on her feet in front of a great crackling fire. Jack was beside her. Her hand crept into his and gripped it. He squeezed back. It was some reassurance, some comfort. Again, there seemed at first to be no one else in the room. Then one of the shadows moved and became Grania O'Malley. The yellow of the flames lit her face as she came towards them. She was dangling something from her little finger, something that glittered and glowed, like gold. It was gold. It was the earring.

‘I think you dropped this on the Big Hill, remember? Here, let me put it on for you, so's you won't forget it again.' Jessie's face was so cold that she could scarcely feel the fingers that touched her. ‘Don't lose it now, will you?'

It was some time before Jessie could find her voice to speak. ‘Are you really her?'

‘If you mean, am I Grania O'Malley?' she said with a smile, ‘then I am, indeed. Granuaille, Grany – they call me all sorts. The English call me Grace, but I'm always O'Malley even to them, and that's the bit that counts, isn't it, Jess? Your mother's an O'Malley, am I right? So, you and me, we're O'Malleys both. So's half the island, and you too, Jack.' She leaned towards them, hands on hips. ‘It was my boys who fished you out of the sea and brought you home. Good boys all of them – well, maybe not good exactly – but fine pirates all the same, the best. We've been keeping an eye on you, so we have. If I couldn't be there myself, then I'd always have the boys looking out for you. Just as well too, wasn't it? Now come over by the fire, why don't you, and dry yourselves out. We'll fetch you some hot soup. You'd like that, wouldn't you?' Jessie hoped Jack wouldn't insist on a peanut butter sandwich and a Coke. He didn't.

What was in the soup neither of them knew nor cared. It was some kind of thick broth and it warmed them from the inside; and there was bread to wipe around the bowl when they had finished, coarse bread that you had to chew, full of grain and grit. But they didn't mind. Grania O'Malley smoked a pipe and studied them from her chair while they ate. Jessie could just about feel her hands again now, but she was still numb from the waist down.

‘Should I rub your legs for you like your mother does?' Grania O'Malley asked. ‘Would you like that?' How does she know about that? Jessie thought. And how does she always seem to know what I'm thinking, what I'm feeling? ‘I told you, Jessie, we've been keeping a watchful eye on you. Call me your guardian pirate, if you will. I've been in school with you, I've met your Mrs Burke, your Miss Jefferson too. I've been in church with you, with Father Gerald. I've been in your room – but I think you know that already, don't you? I was out in the sheep shed when you were shearing the sheep. And I was with you up on the Big Hill, wasn't I? You see, Jess, I've a debt to pay you. Pirate I may be, but I always pay my debts.'

‘I don't understand,' said Jessie.

‘Well, of course you wouldn't. Why should you? But what if I tell you that I was the skull you found? That's right. I am Smiley. You kept me and talked to me, remember? You told me your troubles. I got to know you inside out, Jess. And then, out of the kindness of your heart, you buried me back where I belonged. That was a fine and a good thing you did for me. It made me feel needed again; and whenever Grania O'Malley feels needed, she comes back, and where she goes, her boys go too. So we've come back for a while, not to haunt you, but maybe to help you out a little. That was the idea in the beginning anyway. But as it turns out, I think I'll be needing you as much as you'll be needing me. Now will I rub some life into your legs or won't I?'

She set aside her pipe and held her hands to the fire for a few moments. Then she knelt down beside Jessie, and began kneading, slapping and rubbing, until Jessie's legs began to tingle back to life. Grania O'Malley looked up at Jack and blew into her hands before she began again. ‘See that chest over there, Jack? Have a look, why don't you?' Jack got up and walked across the room. He lifted the lid on the chest under the window. It was heavy and needed both hands.

‘Gold!' he whispered. ‘It's all gold!'

Grania O'Malley frowned. ‘Not that chest. There's my whole life's winnings in there. Get out of it, out of it! I meant the other one, over there by the flag in the corner, the little one. Do you see that flag, Jack?'

Jack held it out to look. A red pig was striding across a black background under a small rearing horse, red too; and the whole thing was decorated with crossbows in each corner, and at the bottom was a ship just like the galley they had come in.

‘I tell you, Jack, in its time that red pig put the fear of God into every sailor that set eyes on it,' said Grania O'Malley. Jack let the flag fall and was fumbling now with the lock on the smaller chest. ‘That's the one,' she said. ‘You'll find in there all the really precious things I ever had,' she said. ‘I have a book of poems by Sir Philip Sidney, signed by the man himself. He turned a lovely phrase, and he was a lovely man too. It wasn't his fault he was an Englishman.' Jack had the chest open by now and was reaching in.

‘Where d'you get this?' he said, and he was holding up in his two hands the shell of a strange prehistoric-looking brown crab with a tail like a sting-ray. ‘That's a horseshoe crab,' Jack went on. ‘We've got them back home, on the beach, thousands of them.'

‘And that's just where I found it,' said Grania O'Malley. ‘Course I couldn't swear it was from the same beach, but not so far from what you call Long Island these days. Oh, I know where you're from, Jack. I've been listening in, remember?'

‘You've been to America?' said Jack.

‘Isn't he the clever one now? And how else would I have such a thing? Of course I have. The boys and me, we all went there together. So we had a bit of luck. When all's said and done, life's nothing but a gamble. You need a bit of luck. We had a map, from a Portuguese privateer that needed teaching some manners. Well, the fellow was sneaking into Galway Harbour, and without so much as a by-your-leave. He should have paid his dues like everyone else. We weren't going to have it, were we? We took everything he had. He didn't have much; but he did have a map of the east coast of the Americas.' She turned to Jessie. ‘Is your legs any better now?'

‘A little,' said Jessie.

‘Got to get you warm,' she said, flexing her fingers. ‘You too, Jack. Come here, closer to the fire.' And she beckoned him over. ‘You're an American, so I suppose you've got a right to know. I'm going to tell you something no one else in the living world knows, not even Mister Barney – and over the years I've told him plenty. Good fellow is Mister Barney, good company. But first we've got to get that chill out of you. Come closer, boy.' And she sat Jack down with his back to the flames. ‘That's better.' And she started on Jessie's legs again, talking as she rubbed.

‘There's not much I like about being a ghost, I can tell you, but at least I don't feel the cold any more like I used to. Five castles I had, and each as cold as the other. Worst of all was that draughty place on Clare down by the quay. Rockfleet was the best, but this too was a bitter cold place to live through the winters. Not like America, where the sun warmed you through to your bones. I tell you, it's a place I'd have stayed, given half a chance. We were there first too, before the Hollanders, and before the infernal English. You don't believe me, do you? Well, no one believed me then, not even my own miserable husband. But I was there, I tell you. I was there.'

She spoke low now, and in earnest. ‘There was trouble at home, there was always trouble, but this time it wasn't something I could fight my way out of, or talk my way out of. The English were hounding me and the Scots were raiding down from the North, and my husband was nothing but trouble. I took the Portuguese map, I took my son and I left. We had one galley, thirty good boys and all the food and water we needed, and we went westwards, towards the setting sun. Three months at sea, hardly a drop of water left and the boys weren't at all happy with me. Then I got lucky. We sighted land. America.'

She pointed to the flag. ‘That was the very same flag I took with me. I planted it at the top of the dunes. The place was a paradise. Fruit, fresh water, game, fish, all you wanted. How we lived! We were going to stay for ever. None of us wanted to come home. But then one morning, it all went wrong. My little boy, called Tibbott he was, went off along the beach looking for his crabs, just like that one. He had dozens of them already, but he had to have just one more, didn't he? He disappeared, vanished into thin air. We looked everywhere. Nothing. The next morning we woke up and there were Indians all around us – hundreds of them and they weren't at all friendly. They shot an arrow at me, missed me by a whisker. Landed in the sand right by my foot. And there was my little Tibbott, taken as hostage. The boys wanted to fight it out, but there's a time to fight and a time to talk. This was a time to talk. It was a simple deal. I could have my son back if we left and didn't come back. We none of us spoke the language of course, but we got the gist of it. They let us take all the food and water we needed, the flag and one crab shell for my son, and the arrow that nearly killed me. Not a lot to show for it. So there y'are. Now you know what no one else knows, that the Irish were first in America.'

She sat back and smiled at them. ‘I owned America. It was mine and I lost it. And then I managed to lose it a second time, didn't I?'

‘How?' Jessie asked, and by now she had quite forgotten that she was talking to a ghost.