on was lying in bed in the damp tangle of her sisters, wide awake and listening to the voices of her parents. Wordless voices like two lines of music, a higher and a lower, twining themselves around each other like stems of briar rose, questioning and answering, turn and turn about, a prayer and a response.
And if there had not been voices, there would have been the wind. There, on the shoreline, the wind was never still. All through each day and every night it whispered, it confided or it howled. It prowled round and round the house, looking for the cracks in windows and the bare patches in the thatch. Its banshee music rose and fell, rose and fell, was so soft sometimes that you could half forget it until it screeched again as a sharp reminder. It never relaxed its vigilance; in kindly mood it stroked the hair back off your face, in cruel it pulled it sharply.
And underneath the wind’s voice was the sea’s. Suck and sigh, or thunder roaring, constant as the beat of blood. Fidelma never listened to the sea, as she never listened to her heart, but once removed inland to the sisters, she listened to its absence, and the silence that replaced it was menacing and cold.
There would be seals on the rocks a few yards from the strand and once in a blue moon they would add their singing voices to the wind’s and to the sea’s. As children, Fidelma and the others had wanted to believe the tales of seals andmermaids, of beautiful young girls who arrived mysteriously, wived fishermen and bore them children, only to disappear as suddenly as they had come. Or seal princes who took human form and stole the hearts of lonely maidens and stole too the babes they fathered on them. In the darkness of winter nights it had been Fidelma’s fearful pleasure to imagine her own mother in the other room, sliding out of bed, casting off her nightgown, slipping naked through the house, white as bone, as moonlight, white as broken shell, lifting the latch of the kitchen door, as quiet as a fish so as not to wake her trusting husband. Running down the silver sand on white feet, into the caressing sea. Finding there, in the kingdom of the drowned, the children she had pined for and forgetting the ones she’d left behind.
When Fidelma’s father upped and went, she was too grown-up to think that he had gone back to the sea. But the old fears seeped into her dreams. One night she woke in terror, darting up to make sure that the youngest, Ronan, was where he should be, in his crib, not appropriated by his father and carried down to the dark depths of the cold salt sea. No trace of him for consolation but a snippet of black hair, a frond of coral and a single gold coin left as nurse’s payment.
Ronan was barely three months old when he lost his father. A beautiful baby he had been, big brown eyes and dark eyelashes; maybe that explained her dreams. Fidelma had not seen her brother these forty years or more; he might as well have drowned for all she knew. And it shall come to pass on a summer’s day, when the sun shines bright on every stane, I’ll come and fetch my little young son, and teach him how to swim the faem.
This new pet of Mary-Margaret’s had shiny dark eyes too. She was hoicking him around with her, dancing flat-footed through the rooms, trying to keep him happy. He needs some toys, she said. But we haven’t any, have we? What can he play with, do you think?
Give him here, Fidelma said. Mary-Margaret dropped the child onto her lap. He sank into its depths and for a second looked as if he were about to cry again but then he settled, softly cushioned in her folds. How strange it was, Fidelma thought, to hold a child again. Hush now, she said to Shamso. There’s a good boy. And she sang.
In the delight of having Barnaby back from Ethiopia, Stella forgot the previous evening and the shame of staying silent. “What would St. Peter say?” she heard the cloister voices ask—the defending of one’s faith was every Christian’s
And if there had not been voices, there would have been the wind. There, on the shoreline, the wind was never still. All through each day and every night it whispered, it confided or it howled. It prowled round and round the house, looking for the cracks in windows and the bare patches in the thatch. Its banshee music rose and fell, rose and fell, was so soft sometimes that you could half forget it until it screeched again as a sharp reminder. It never relaxed its vigilance; in kindly mood it stroked the hair back off your face, in cruel it pulled it sharply.
And underneath the wind’s voice was the sea’s. Suck and sigh, or thunder roaring, constant as the beat of blood. Fidelma never listened to the sea, as she never listened to her heart, but once removed inland to the sisters, she listened to its absence, and the silence that replaced it was menacing and cold.
There would be seals on the rocks a few yards from the strand and once in a blue moon they would add their singing voices to the wind’s and to the sea’s. As children, Fidelma and the others had wanted to believe the tales of seals andmermaids, of beautiful young girls who arrived mysteriously, wived fishermen and bore them children, only to disappear as suddenly as they had come. Or seal princes who took human form and stole the hearts of lonely maidens and stole too the babes they fathered on them. In the darkness of winter nights it had been Fidelma’s fearful pleasure to imagine her own mother in the other room, sliding out of bed, casting off her nightgown, slipping naked through the house, white as bone, as moonlight, white as broken shell, lifting the latch of the kitchen door, as quiet as a fish so as not to wake her trusting husband. Running down the silver sand on white feet, into the caressing sea. Finding there, in the kingdom of the drowned, the children she had pined for and forgetting the ones she’d left behind.
When Fidelma’s father upped and went, she was too grown-up to think that he had gone back to the sea. But the old fears seeped into her dreams. One night she woke in terror, darting up to make sure that the youngest, Ronan, was where he should be, in his crib, not appropriated by his father and carried down to the dark depths of the cold salt sea. No trace of him for consolation but a snippet of black hair, a frond of coral and a single gold coin left as nurse’s payment.
Ronan was barely three months old when he lost his father. A beautiful baby he had been, big brown eyes and dark eyelashes; maybe that explained her dreams. Fidelma had not seen her brother these forty years or more; he might as well have drowned for all she knew. And it shall come to pass on a summer’s day, when the sun shines bright on every stane, I’ll come and fetch my little young son, and teach him how to swim the faem.
This new pet of Mary-Margaret’s had shiny dark eyes too. She was hoicking him around with her, dancing flat-footed through the rooms, trying to keep him happy. He needs some toys, she said. But we haven’t any, have we? What can he play with, do you think?
Give him here, Fidelma said. Mary-Margaret dropped the child onto her lap. He sank into its depths and for a second looked as if he were about to cry again but then he settled, softly cushioned in her folds. How strange it was, Fidelma thought, to hold a child again. Hush now, she said to Shamso. There’s a good boy. And she sang.
In the delight of having Barnaby back from Ethiopia, Stella forgot the previous evening and the shame of staying silent. “What would St. Peter say?” she heard the cloister voices ask—the defending of one’s faith was every Christian’s
Similar Books
