The Good People (25 page)

‘Why’d you drop it?’ Kate demanded, on her knees. ‘That’s good egg money. I earned it myself. ’Tis honest, not stolen. I earned it with my own hens, and ’tis not his neither. I hide it from him.’

‘I cannot take your money.’

The woman stared, her mouth a torn pocket in a pale face.

‘I’ll not be taking payment in coin. I’d lose the gift.’

Understanding had smoothed the furrows in Kate’s brow. She counted the coins and, satisfied, slipped them into her pocket. ‘You have the gift though.’

‘I have the cure. And the knowledge.’

‘The kind of knowledge that would see a bad man buried?’

Nance nodded at her bruise. ‘Is that his badness I can see there?’

‘You don’t know the half of it.’ Kate had bitten her lip, and then suddenly, before Nance could stop her, undressed, ripping at her outer clothes and lifting her shift to reveal a body pummelled into spoil beneath.

‘Your husband?’

‘I sure didn’t fall.’ She pulled her clothes back down, her face taut with determination. ‘I want to be rid of him. You can do that. I know you can. They’re saying you’re in league with Them that does be in it, and that you have the power.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I want you to curse him.’

‘Even if I wanted to, I don’t know the ways.’

‘I don’t believe you. I know you’re not from the valley, but I might show you a blessed well. Where you might walk against the sun. Where you might turn the stones against him.’

‘An evil curse does no good to the one who lays it.’

‘I would do it myself, but I don’t have the skill. Look.’ The woman had bent down and picked up the hem of her skirt, and with scrabbling fingers drawn out the slender flash of a needle. ‘Every day I set it in my clothes to protect myself from him. Every night I wake and point the eye of it to his damned heart. To give him ill luck.’ She waved the needle in Nance’s face. ‘But it does nothing. You have to help me.’

Nance had put her hands up, guided the needle away from her. ‘Listen to me now. Whist now. Curses come home to roost. You do not want to be laying curses on your man, no matter how he rakes you.’

Kate shook her head. ‘He’s going to kill me. There’s no sin in it if he’s after killing me.’

‘There are other things you might do. You might leave.’

Kate gave a sharp laugh. ‘And bundle all my children on my back and take to the road and feed them on mushrooms and
praiseach
?’

‘Long loneliness is better than bad company.’

‘I want him dead. No, I want him to suffer. I want him to suffer as I have. I want his body to rot, and I want him to sicken, and I want him to wake each morning and spit blood as I have done.’

‘I will give you mallow for the bruises.’

‘You will not set a curse against him?’

‘I will not.’

Kate sank onto the stool. ‘Then you must tell me what
I
may do to curse him. Tell me how I might lay a
piseóg
.’ Her face contorted. ‘I have walked the well. I have turned those cursing stones at twilight. I point my needle at his chest and I pray to God that he be damned. But nothing. Nothing. He thrives. He bounces his fists off me.’

‘I cannot tell you the ways.’

‘But you know them. And there are other ways. I know there are. But no one will tell me.’ Her voice cracked. ‘Tell me how to lay a
piseóg
upon him, or do it yourself. Or I will turn the stones against you.’

CHAPTER

NINE

Selfheal

T
he eve of the new year
returned the snow to the fields in whirling winds, the flakes sticking to the thatch and sweeping against the outer walls, hiding the mud spatter and the damp fingers of mould that stained the limewash.

Nóra kept glancing from her spinning to where Micheál lay sleeping in the settle bed, twitching like a dog.

‘Is it time, do you think, Mary?’

The maid looked up from where she was slowly winding the wool and peered at the slant of light that fell in from the half-door that hung ajar. ‘I think perhaps ’tis not yet twilight. ’Twas twilight she said to come.’

‘I thought perhaps ’twas growing dark.’

‘Not yet. Perhaps we might wait until the chickens return. Hens keep the hours.’

‘Yes, I know that,’ Nóra snapped. She wiped her waxy fingers on her apron. ‘You pulled the herb? Where is it?’

Mary, hands busy, nodded to the bunch of mint lying in the corner of the room, the leaves a little wilted.

‘’Tis straggly. Where did you fetch it?’

‘The well.’

‘Did anyone see you? Were the women there? Éilís? God forbid Kate Lynch saw. She’ll cry devilry.’

‘No one was there.’

‘I don’t see why Nance Roche didn’t cut the mint herself.’

Mary shrugged. ‘Perhaps there is no mint down by the woods. She’s an old woman. ’Tis a long way to go, just for some herbs.’

Nóra pulled a face. ‘Nothing stops that one, old or no.’ She hesitated. ‘Did she say there was a danger in pulling it?’

‘Not if we cut it in the name of the Trinity.’ Mary looked at Micheál as he stirred, his hand lifting in the air and then falling back behind his head. ‘I blessed the mint before I put the blade to it.’

Nóra pursed her lips. ‘I don’t understand it. Mint. Mint is good for fleas and moths. How is mint going to bring a child back from Them?’

‘I always tied it around the wrists of my brothers and sisters,’ Mary said.

‘And why was that?’

‘Keeps away the sickness.’

‘And did it work?’

Mary shook her head, her eyes fixed on the wool before her. ‘Two are with God.’

Nóra’s fierce expression softened, and she looked down at the spinning wheel. ‘I’m sorry for your troubles.’

‘’Twas the will of God, but He took a long time in taking them.’

‘They suffered?’

‘All day and all night they’d cough. They gave up their lives a little cough at a time. But now they are gone to the angels.’

There was a long silence. Nóra glanced at the girl and saw that she was clenching her teeth, her jaw working furiously under her skin.

‘But you have many other brothers and sisters.’

Mary sniffed. ‘I do.’

‘My daughter was the only child I had,’ Nóra said. ‘Her death was a great loss to me. I have lost my parents, and my sister, and my husband, but ’tis Johanna that . . .’ She looked at Mary and, suddenly unable to speak, placed her fist on her chest.

The maid’s face was unreadable. ‘She was your daughter,’ she said plainly.

‘She was.’

‘You loved her.’

‘The first time I saw Johanna . . .’ Nóra’s voice was strangled. She wanted to say that with Johanna’s birth she had felt a love so fierce it terrified. That the world had cleft and her daughter was the kernel at its core. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I loved her.’

‘As I loved my sisters.’

Nóra shook her head. ‘’Tis more than love. You will know it some day. To be a mother is to have your heart cut out and placed in your child.’

The wind groaned outside.

‘Perhaps I will light the candle now. Just in case.’ Nóra got up and closed the half-door, then stoppered the window with straw against the rising draught. The room fell into low light. The fire climbed. Dabbing at her eyes, Nóra lit a candle and set it on the table to guard the house from the coming night and its unseen swift of spirits. The flame whipped on its wick.

‘Did you fetch water when you were at the well, or was it only the mint you took?’

‘The mint,’ Mary replied.

Nóra frowned. ‘And what will you have us drink tomorrow when the new year is upon us?’

Mary looked confused. ‘I will return to the well. As I do every morning.’

‘You will not. I’ll not have anyone sleeping under this roof going to the well to draw water on the first day of the new year. Don’t you guard yourself up there in Annamore?’

‘I fetch the water same as always.’

Nóra pushed the candle to one side and pulled out a small cloth bag filled with flour. ‘I’ll tell you how it is. There’ll be no throwing of the ashes tomorrow. The feet water, you leave that be. From sun-up to sundown, you’ll not be parting with anything of this house. And don’t be sweeping the floor and all the luck from it either.’

Mary rose to her feet. ‘What harm is there in well-going?’

Nóra pulled a face, added milk, water and soda to the flour, roughly mixing it with her hand. ‘There’s no good in drawing first water from a well on new year’s day and that’s all I know. Don’t be questioning the old ways.’ She cast an anxious look to the sleeping boy. ‘Especially not now.’

The two women were silent as the new year bread baked. Nóra moved between the fire and loaf in its pot to the door, remarking on the slow descent of light outside, while Mary woke the boy and rugged him in the blanket for the journey to come. Nóra nipped the bread when it was cooked, breaking a corner to let the Devil out, and they ate it before the fire, Mary sopping the crust with milk and easing wet morsels into the child’s maw with her fingers. He ate ravenously, chewing at her knuckles. His cries for more continued long after the bread was finished.

‘Always hungry, never satisfied,’ Nóra sniffed. ‘Is that not what Nance was saying? The sign of the changeling?’

‘There’s a bonfire on the mountain,’ Mary said, licking her thumb and sponging crumbs off her clothes. ‘I saw some boys piling furze and heather and dead branches up there this morning. Do you think there’ll be dancing?’

Nóra picked her teeth with a nail. ‘You’ve a right to come with me to Nance. I don’t pay you to go dancing.’

Mary glanced at the boy. ‘Are the Good People abroad, do you think?’

‘’Tis as Nance said. Just as day is joined to night, so does the year have its seams.’ She got up and opened the half-door, peering across the valley. ‘And that is when They come. That is when They change their abode. Through the stitching of the year. Which way do you think this wind is blowing?’

The light was fading. Beyond the swathes of fast-falling snow, the glow of a fire could be seen on the hill. A dark plume rose from it, tracing the air with the heady smell of wood smoke.

Mary joined Nóra by the door, Micheál on her hip, his head resting on her shoulder. He was oddly quiet. ‘I think ’tis coming from the west. Are we in for a storm?’

Nóra brushed her shoulders of snowmelt and shut the door fast again, sliding a wooden bolt against the wickerwork. ‘They say there’s portent in the direction of a new year’s wind.’

‘What does a wind from the west bring?’

‘Please God, a better year than last.’

Nance sat in the dark of her cabin and, through her open door, watched the dying year surrender to snow. The night was falling holy, as though the glory of God was in the changing of the light. Sitting in her ragged shawls, she felt the silence ring in her ears as loudly as a monastic bell.

It would begin that night. The cures. The mysterious pleading. The unpicking of old magic.

Nance felt the sly pricking of dread.