The Good People (27 page)

CHAPTER

TEN

Hogweed

‘N
óra Leahy sent me
. She says to tell you that the cratur is unchanged and still spitting and screaming and the cretin he was when we came to you.’

Nance looked up from where she sat in her doorway, skinning a hare. Her hands ran bloody. ‘Is that so, Mary Clifford?’

‘’Tis. There was no cure to be had in the leaves. In the herbs.’ The girl hesitated, standing with arms folded and her shawl tightly gathered around her head. ‘But in case you’re thinking ’twas me that sent the charm out of the mint . . . I promise. I pulled it in the name of the Trinity. And the dew was on it. I did all as you said.’

Nance wiped her hands on her skirt and held the hare out to Mary. ‘Take this for me now.’

Mary took it. Nance noticed the girl examine the raw stretch and sinew of the skinned animal.

‘Don’t you have a fear of eating this?’

‘Why is that?’ Nance picked up the swimming bowl of guts beside her.

‘All the magic that does be in it.’

Nance motioned for Mary to follow her inside the cabin and shut the door. ‘I don’t have a fear of eating anything that makes a mouthful. Hares, rabbits, eels.’

Mary pulled a face. ‘My brother says an eel can travel the county in a day. Says it takes its tail in its mouth and rolls like a hoop.’ She shuddered. ‘I don’t like anything as cunning as that.’

‘I like them well enough if I can catch them.’

Mary sat down by the fire and pointed to the hare skin laid out on the floor. ‘Will you be selling that? I’ve seen boys with caps of hare. The ears still on.’

Nance took the skinned hare from Mary and set it in the empty crock. ‘I sell what I can. Dyes mostly, but also skins and besoms. Peck soap.’

‘I like the black there,’ Mary said, pointing to a loose ball of wool in a basket.

‘Alder catkin. Or the roots of spurge. I make them from crottle lichen, bogwater. Sell them. Even heather can wring out a dye. Oh, there’s colour to be had from even the humblest of what grows in God’s soil.’

‘You know a lot.’

‘I’ve lived a long time.’

Mary regarded Nance in the gloomy light. ‘’Tis not the years in a person that gives them knowledge, is it? ’Tis Them that belong to the wilds. They say you speak with Them. You know where the fairies do be, and you speak with Them, and that is how you know these things.’ She lifted her chin to the dried plants hanging from the ceiling. ‘Is that true? That you learnt it from the fairies and that is why you will return the widow’s grandson to her? Because you know Their ways and tricks.’

Nance washed her hands, greasy from handling the hare innards. There was more than youthful curiosity in Mary’s voice. There was suspicion there. A sharp-shouldered wariness.

There was a sudden thump of boots outside and Mary stood up quickly, knocking her head against a bunch of St John’s wort and sending dried flowers scattering to the ground.

‘Here! Here!’ It was a man’s voice. ‘She’s here. There’s smoke, there’s a fire lit. Come on with you, David.’

There was a scuffle outside and three heavy knocks on the cabin wall. Silt fell from the ceiling. ‘Nance Roche!’

‘Open the door for me, Mary.’

The girl got up and pulled the wicker door ajar.

‘May God and Mary and Patrick bless you, Nance Roche, for you must come with me.’ It was Daniel Lynch, his face shiny with sweat, chest falling heavy in laboured breathing. He entered and another man, a stoop-shouldered youth that looked much like him, followed, clearly embarrassed by their intrusion.

‘Daniel. God save you. What’s wrong?’

‘We have need of you. The little woman is in the straw. Brigid. My wife.’

‘What hour did it begin?’ Nance asked.

‘Dawn. Her face is all chalk and the pain is on her. I told her I’d come for you.’

Nance turned to Mary, who was gawking at Daniel, slack-jawed. ‘Mary, run home to Nóra. Tell her to bring women with her to the Lynches’ cabin. Brigid’s cousins, her aunts, if she has any other kin. Ask them to bring what clean cloth they have. Milk, butter. Bless yourself as you set out, and bless them before they step inside the Lynches’ cabin. I will be there, waiting for them.’

The girl nodded furiously, then pelted out of the door, long legs running, shawl slipping off her head. The brothers watched her flee up the path, mud flicking from her bare feet.

Nance asked them to wait outside while she filled her basket with what she might need. She pulled handfuls of dried herbs from the ceiling and wrapped them in rags. Dried ox-eye daisies and watercress. Yarrow. She gathered a hazel stick, black threads, and the pail of forge water she had kept covered with a cloth.

‘I’m ready,’ she said, handing the heavy pail to Daniel. ‘Take me to your wife.’

When Nance walked in the Lynches’ cabin she knew immediately that all was not well. Brigid lay on a heap of broom and heather by the fire, and the blanket she had placed under her was soaked with blood. Nance turned back outside and held up her hands to stop the brothers from following her inside.

‘You did well in fetching me. Now, go on and don’t be hovering about this door like horseflies. I’ll have you told when there is news to tell.’ She spat on the ground. ‘God be with you.’

Brigid’s eyes were screwed shut with pain. At the sound of the door closing she threw her head back. ‘Daniel?’

‘God bless you, child, ’tis Nance. Your man’s gone and fetched me for you.’ She knelt on the floor beside the woman and pushed a folded blanket under her back.

Fear rose off the girl in waves. She is a spooked mare, Nance thought.

‘I’m frightened,’ Brigid choked. ‘Is it supposed to feel like this? It doesn’t feel right.’

‘I’ll see you safe.’ Nance bent over the girl and began to whisper a prayer in her right ear.

Nóra arrived at the Lynches’ cabin with Éilís O’Hare, Kate and Sorcha. She hadn’t wanted to ask the women to come at all, so bitter did she feel towards them and their constant spluttering of gossip, but they were the only women bound to Brigid through her marriage, and if blood could not be fetched to mind her, it was right that a kind of kin be in the room. She had sent Mary to Peg with Micheál.

Nóra opened the door and found the room full of smoke and smell. Brigid was moaning in protest as Nance insisted that her hips face the fire. The heat inside the cabin was insufferable. Brigid’s face rolled with sweat, and the old woman’s hair was damp against her skin.

The women stopped in the doorway, staring as Nance urged Brigid to lay still and not kneel as she was trying. The young woman’s thighs were slippery with blood.

‘Sorcha, come in and help your cousin settle. I need her to face the fire, so.’ With her help, Nance picked up Brigid’s feet and hauled her closer to the hearth, blazing it with dried furze until the darkness peeled back to the corners of the room.

Brigid’s pupils were dark and wide and unseeing. Éilís stood by the wall gripping a jug of water, her jaw set, tense. Kate hovered beside her daughter, taking a long red ribbon from the neck of her crossed shawl and holding it out in her left hand.

‘What are you doing with that ribbon there, Kate?’ Éilís asked. ‘What’s that for?’

Kate didn’t answer, but began to knot and unknot it over Brigid’s heaving form.

‘What are you doing?’

‘To ease the birth,’ Kate muttered. Nance cast her a long look but said nothing.

‘Nance, how are you getting on?’ Nóra asked.

‘There is watercress in that basket. Pound it to a poultice, will you. And you two can make yourselves useful. Take the black thread in there and tie it where I tell you.’

Éilís and Sorcha glanced at each other.

‘Quickly! You need to arrest the flow of blood. Tie that thread there on her wrists.’

The two women heard the urgency in her voice and bent closer.

‘Bite it if you must, and tie it on each ankle, each finger. Each toe. Tightly, mind.’

There was a light tapping on the door, and Mary’s face peered inside, eyes growing wide at the sight of the blood on the ground.

‘Nance.’ Nóra gestured at the girl with the pestle.

‘Send her away. For pig dung. Try the blacksmith’s.’

‘You heard her,’ Nóra said.

Mary disappeared outside and the women continued their slow work on Brigid. She lay still, teeth bared. Nóra passed Nance the poultice and knelt behind Brigid so that she might rest her head on her lap.

Nance’s lips pressed tightly together in concentration as she lifted the girl’s damp dress, exposing the swell of her belly. She smeared the pounded watercress on Brigid’s thighs, skin and pubic hair.

Blood rippled out of her. All the women saw it.

An hour dripped by. Mary returned from the blacksmith’s, her hands dirty with pig dung. Áine was with her, gripping a rosary and woven cross.

Nance looked up at the sound of their entrance. ‘Áine,’ she cried. ‘Bless you, but I can’t be letting you stay.’ She stood, her apron as bloody as a butcher’s, and took Áine by the shoulders.

‘I want to help,’ Áine protested.

Nance whispered an apology and walked Áine outside, shutting the door firmly behind them.

‘Why can’t Áine come in?’ Mary whispered to Nóra. ‘What has she done?’

Nóra clucked her tongue and continued to sponge Brigid’s temples with forge water.

‘She only wanted to pray over her.’

‘Everyone knows Áine’s barren,’ Kate spat. ‘She might cast the evil eye over the child.’

‘She would not! She’s a good woman.’

‘Whether she’s good or not has nothing to do with it. Most of them with the evil eye have no knowledge of when they cast it.’ Kate licked her lips. ‘You could be casting it for all we know. The redheaded girls do be with the evil eye. Unlucky.’

Nóra had just opened her mouth to protest when Nance returned inside with a small clay jug. A stink of ammonia filled the room.

‘What is that?’ Mary gaped.

‘The water of the husband,’ murmured Nóra.

Using a heather besom, Nance began to dash the urine around the room and on Brigid’s face, stomach and lower body, flicking the last of it on the small wicker cradle in the corner.

‘An old and holy blessing,’ Nance muttered.

The women said nothing.

Throughout the day they tended to Brigid under Nance’s direction. They mixed the pig dung with forge water and pasted it over her abdomen with their bare hands. They took turns knotting and untying Kate’s ribbon ceaselessly over her until their arms ached and the ribbon grew stained with the grease of their fingers. They watched Brigid’s toes and fingers seize and swell with trapped blood under their ties of thread, and dribbled ox-eye daisy boiled on new milk into her open mouth.

It was only as the day eased back into darkness that the child came.

It was dead, its lips dark.

Brigid, weak as water, tumbled into unconsciousness.

Daniel was ushered into the cabin and shown the tiny body of his son. The women stood around him, faces grey with exhaustion, too tired to grieve. He looked down at his unconscious wife and brought a hand over his mouth as if afraid of what might come out of it. Mary stepped aside and watched as he walked back out into the cold blue of the evening to fight his grief out with the sky.