Turning the Stones (34 page)

‘I do not wish to go to Galway. What would I do there?’ Not for the first time during an exchange with Captain McDonagh, I have to restrain myself from stamping my foot. This man has an unerring knack for bringing out in me the vexed child. ‘I will find Mrs Conneely with or without your help.’

He shrugs. ‘I cannot stand here disputing with you. There is a French ship at anchor in the bay waiting to receive our cargo.’ He frowns at the sky and then consults an improbably
glamorous pocket watch, which he brings out from his rough coat. ‘Very well,’ he says with a sigh of irritation, as if I have forced him to a position, ‘since you are determined to turn your back on Galway, I dare say we can manage to take you to France. But you must come now. I have a task to be getting on with and it will stay with me until it is finished. We rendezvous with our ship at midnight.’

I am completely taken by surprise. Is the captain capable of compassion after all? I sense the abrupt stalling of my mission in the face of this tempting offer. In the cold light of this mercantile little village it seems preposterous that I should continue stumbling through bogland that will swallow me if I put a foot wrong on the off-chance that a barbarous hermit woman, who by all accounts of her is hopelessly touched, and to whom I have been directed in the first instance by a peasant who mistook me for a ghost, should be able to tell me anything at all about my long-disappeared people. Face the truth of it, Em: despite all your longing and projecting and the intense mental effort you have expended in order to make her your familiar, your mother, child, does not exist. The wrongheadedness of my storytelling hardly differs, except in its degree of elaboration, to those hollow tales Eliza used to tell when we were young of her adventures with Johnny. And weren’t they a bleakly inadvertent demonstration of what was not? Only a fool would continue this wild goose chase instead of sailing to asylum in France. Certainly the captain has assumed that the matter is settled. He is in discussion now with one of his men. Good heavens, didn’t I throw myself at the
Seal
for exactly this – to be rescued and carried away? To choose a wraith over a place
where safety may give me leave to breathe easy again … there is no sense at all in clutching at phantoms.

‘Captain.’ He half turns from his conversation and glances at me with a you-still-here? expression. ‘Captain, I think … I think, on reflection, I must refuse your kind offer. I am bound to find Mrs Conneely.’

Dear God, what have I said? How the course of one’s life hinges upon such moments. But against all reason I cannot ignore the powerfully insinuating nature of this coast and the insistent feeling that it has significance for me. I find that I cannot walk away from any possibility of you.

Captain McDonagh regards me at length, weighing my reply. Perhaps he sees that sorrow fuels my lunacy, because he says with almost a trace of kindness, ‘You have a drop of brave blood in you, Miss Smith.’

At that a foolish flush comes to my cheek.

*

My mule is a shaggy brown beast with a white nose, my guide a youth who goes by the name of Tag, who has dusty ropes of black hair hanging down his back and a habit of cracking his knuckles. When Captain McDonagh asked him to take me to the house of Kitty Conneely, Tag said with eagerness that he would do so; but he has developed a dull-eyed look since our meeting the hour previous and I wonder if he has been pouring strong-waters down his throat, for there is a torrent of them in the village. Or perhaps his rolling gait comes naturally to him.

North of the settlement, the landscape turns out to be, against all probability, even starker and we travel on a trail that becomes, in short order, imperceptible. My braying mule refuses to go on and I must dismount and pull at its halter to
persuade the beast forward. Then I discover that Tag has disappeared. I find him nearby in a dip in the ground, snoring on a bed of tussock, and no amount of shaking his shoulder or shouting his name will rouse him. Since the mule is a native of this place, I decide to trust its knowledge. It must have a little inkling of the way to a cabbage dinner, surely. I urge the animal on and indeed it plods patiently for a while, but eventually it dwindles to a very slow walk and then stops as though its mechanism has wound down completely. Must I get down and carry this animal across country myself? And is it even worth mentioning that it has begun to rain again?

We have reached a spot that is irredeemably cryptic. All around, hillocks of granite merge with the wet sky and I cannot figure how to get out nor even how I got here. I am surrounded by a great deal of stubborn silence. The silence has a quality of misgiving, too, as though a lull between an event and a consequence. I have had the whole day ahead of me for hours, but now I am in danger of darkness.

I have the feeling that I am being followed or watched. It is because of this overwrought landscape, I tell myself – it ripples with import. One can come to believe anything out here, I am sure. I resolve to press on, one footstep at a time, but the wretched mule is of an alternative mind and digs in with a desperate hee-hawing. Yet I ought not to say anything against it because if it had not been for its racket, Captain McDonagh might never have unearthed me. Tag, it transpired, made a dazed reappearance in the settlement that alerted the captain to the lad’s dereliction of duty and he came to find me. He regarded me with an air of weary inevitability, then without a word he bent over and made a stirrup of his hands.
I raised a filthy foot and placed it in his palm and with one hand against his shoulder to steady myself, I let him hoist me on to the back of the mule.

*

The rain had become a relentless downpour now, making our passage thoroughly miserable. Captain McDonagh shouts over his shoulder, ‘It will not hurt to shelter until the weather passes,’ then veers away and urges his horse over a slight rise. Where the land beyond falls away into shadow, I can make out the shape of a tired-looking cabin hunched against the elements. Captain McDonagh leads his pony directly through the empty doorway and I follow suit with the mule. The place is derelict, its single chamber damp and dark with a floor that inclines slightly downhill towards the remains of a byre. The captain settles our mounts there before a drinking trough that is supplied with rainwater, and then glances at me with a frown and says, ‘Will you make yourself comfortable or will you stand like a post?’ He indicates a rotting mattress in the corner. ‘Hell’s bells, girl, sit before you fall down.’ At my collapse on to the flaccid mattress, a displaced mouse scurries into the squally outdoors. I ask the captain if his rendezvous is in jeopardy, but he says that the bad weather has led to a change of plans and the French ship will not leave until noon the following day. He does not repeat his offer to bring me with him.

Captain McDonagh travels well supplied with victuals and a fire-making bag. He moves to and fro establishing order: feed for the animals, a fire kindled on the sooty hearthstone, potatoes quartered with his knife and put to roast and water to boil in a makeshift kettle. Gusts batter the walls of the cabin.
Raindrops go astray in the fire with a hiss. The water gurgles in the kettle … a picture of Mrs Waterland comes to mind. She is unlocking her tea caddy, while glinting crystals watch secretively from behind the glass doors of their mirrored palace on the chimney piece. Her image is awfully distant as though painted as a miniature.

The pony twitches as a gust of wind enters at a lurch and sets about worrying the fire. Captain McDonagh crosses to the byre and mutters something to the animal. He glances in my direction and says, ‘I will admit I am curious to know what has set you on your course and what Kitty has to do with it.’

He returns with the saddlebags and brings out from one of them a twist of tea. He cocks an eyebrow at me as if to say, ‘Well then?’

I ask him if he has ever heard of a woman from these parts by the name of Nora Mulkerrin or O’Halloran.

‘I have not, although Mulkerrin is a common name here. What do you want of her?’

I hesitate to explain why she is important to me. An imaginary mother is not a subject that I wish to expose to Captain McDonagh’s scorn. I ask instead, ‘What kind of person is Mrs Conneely? Her own sister seems daunted by her.’

‘Kitty is a woman of unpredictable humours and many people prefer to avoid her. She was a wise-woman in the old days, but after the year of the slaughter she stopped doing cures, I have heard.’

‘Who was it came to slaughter?’

The captain’s gaze ebbs inwards like a man searching for a way to summarise a long and branching story. At length he says, ‘A great frost, it was. It fell on us with a cold so bad it
would snap your arm off. Afterwards many of our settled people were forced by their losses to disperse. My father’s home could not provide for me and I was sent to the French army like plenty of our lads.’

A soft nicker from the drowsing pony causes Captain McDonagh to rise abruptly. He glances at the animals – the mule is asleep on its feet with a drooping lip – and then strides to the doorway and stands with his hands on his hips regarding the fall of darkness. It is only when he says, ‘We will go abroad at first light,’ that I realise I am to stay here with him overnight.

As though to forestall a thing that I cannot name, I say in a strangled voice, ‘I shall be awake all night. It is too uncomfortable to sleep.’

‘If you require a feather bed before you can rest, you will never refresh yourself at all.’

‘You have a cutting style of speech, Captain McDonagh. It makes a person feel very mown down.’

He looks taken aback, which is not a view of him that I have had before. In silence he pours tea from the kettle into the single tin cup at our disposal. Did he make the tea by sleight of hand? Somehow it was concocted without drawing attention to the undertaking. He passes the cup to me, then sits down with his back against the scaly wall, his legs bent, his arms loosely folded, and gives me a plain sort of look.

‘It was never my intention to disparage you, Miss Smith. I am sometimes inclined to bitter, bad manners as you can tell from the poor apology that I am squeezing out, but I hope it will do to reconcile us.’

‘It will do.’ There is that pouty tone at work again, which
I suppose I employ to mask the delight that floods through me at hearing the captain’s apology. I do not want him to know how much I esteem him for it.

Captain McDonagh says, ‘We can be a hard people, those of us who come from these parts. There is nothing much to soften the terrain, or those who live in it, but a scattering of heather and furze. They say it wasn’t always so. There was a time long ago when the forest in these parts was so thick you could walk on the top of the trees from Letterfrack all the way to Galway town.’

‘I can hardly imagine such a thing.’ I sound as if I have been running. It is the effort of trying to stifle a recollection that insists on intruding.

The captain says, ‘I suppose there is a memory of Eden even in the most unlikely of places. Give any old boy a couple of jars and he will start telling you how in the old days all our geese were swans. How the lads could shoulder a load of weed the size of Cashel Hill and snare gigantic fish on a hand line alone. Not to mention the galore of cattle that belonged to us. Your unicorns could not pass them by without stabbing themselves out of jealousy.’ He leans forward, his elbows resting on his knees, and says in a level voice, ‘You may tell me what brought you here and I will listen to it.’

My mouth opens and closes. I do not register my tears until I feel their heat on my cheeks.

Captain McDonagh regards me with calm attention.

Carlisle House, Soho Square, London
April, 1766

Throughout the day following my revelation about Hill & Vessey, Eliza hardly spoke to me, but early in the evening she announced that we were to dress for an outing to a pleasure garden. A little later, around eight o’clock, Johnny arrived at Poland Street and I found that we were to go abroad with him and Mr Paine. The journey was rather uncomfortable, squashed as we all were on seats in Mr Paine’s carriage that had lost their spring, while listening to Mr Paine lecture on the subject of medical electricity. He posited a machine that would allow people to administer electric shocks to themselves in order to cure aches and pains. It was strange, I thought, that he spent his time in close observations of the natural world and yet he could not see Johnny’s insincerity.

‘What do you think of Cousin Arthur’s notions?’ Johnny addressed the question to me, then grinned at Mr Paine. ‘She may be only a waiting woman, but she is quite fascinated by all sorts of things above her station.’

I knew then that Eliza must have reported to him the allegations I had made about the bank. I said nothing in reply, only staring at the pale blob of my face reflected in the black window. The carriage had picked up speed and the horses’ hoofs rang on the cobbles. One of the lamps flickered and
went out. I could sense Johnny eyeing me and could feel Eliza stiff and subdued at my side.

Eventually Mr Paine’s driver dropped us at a sentry box at the gate of a grand avenue bordered by trees. Johnny paid an entrance fee and we passed into the avenue. Immediately a young woman in a feathered hat accosted Mr Paine and without ceremony offered him her arm. Mr Paine started, and Johnny laughed. ‘Everyone is equal here, Arthur. You see?’ And he took my arm.

Although he flashed a smile at me, I thought there was some malice in the firmness with which he gripped me. My great fear as always was that Barfield awaited us. If that turned out to be the case, I meant to take to my heels and run as fast as I could into the night. And then what? I felt the constriction of my lack of choices.

Mr Paine shook off his accoster and took Eliza as his escort. I caught a glimpse of Eliza’s face, intent and watchful as Johnny led us into an elaborate garden gleaming by moonlight. There was the sound of plashing water and faint music in the air and the murmur of conversation. We crossed a shimmering canal by means of a Chinese bridge and passed through a bottleneck of people in an arcade. I glanced over my shoulder at Eliza. How uncharacteristic of her not to make a single remark. In fact had Eliza been unlike herself ever since we left Sedge Court for London?