The Maker of Swans

by Paraic O’Donnell

  She is watching the birds when she hears him on the stairs. She fears for them now. It is her rose they have been feeding on, scouring the tender shoots for aphids. Already, those young stems are growing dark and brittle. In the cold, the blooms are greying and growing frail.

  Nazaire fumbles with the lock and almost falls into the room. He is pale and dishevelled, gripping the door frame to steady himself. He is clutching something. She sees a pair of dull metal rings, a loop of chain.

  ‘Little one,’ he says. ‘There is something— I must leave for a time.’

  He takes a step towards her, but lurches immediately to one side. He clutches the edge of the table, almost toppling it, and falls to his knees. He grips the arm of a chair and braces himself against it, unable for now to go any further. He paws at his stomach. It is hugely swollen, straining his grimy shirt. The skin of his hands is blotchy, strangely discoloured.

  When he heaves himself to his feet, he grunts in pain. He looks down at himself, spreading his fingers over his distended shape. His breathing is laboured now, and it is some time before he can speak again. When he does, his voice is weak, distorted by a viscous rattling.

  ‘I will be gone only a day or two,’ he says. He shows her what he is holding. It is a pair of steel cuffs, linked by a chain. ‘You will allow me to make you secure while I am away.’

  Clara folds her arms closely around herself. She edges slowly from her place at the window, keeping herself pressed against the wall. She could run, she thinks. He has not locked the door behind him. If he comes closer, she could get around him. He cannot move as he once did.

  ‘Little one.’ He takes another shuffling step. ‘You know you must. You know I cannot allow—’

  He begins to cough. It is prolonged and violent, worsening the discomfort in his abdomen. He bends at the waist, clutching his gut with one hand and struggling with the other to keep his mouth covered. When the coughing subsides, he lowers his palm to inspect something he has expelled – a quivering slug of crimson tissue. He looks up at her.

  ‘I see you,’ he says. ‘I see you watching, keeping your secrets. You have hidden something from me, but I will find it. I will—’

  The coughing seizes him again, and he sinks to his knees by Clara’s bed, clutching at the quilt for support. He retches, bringing up stained fluid and another bolt of glistening pulp. When he raises his eyes again, he strains to focus on her.

  ‘The body,’ he says. ‘The body keeps its own secrets, though they come out always, in the end. It is like a serpent, little one, a snake in my own guts. Is that what it is? But you cannot tell me, can you? You cannot say.’

  He sways on his knees, his mouth gaping. Blood dribbles over his chin, and his breathing is clogged and syrupy. He bends, clasping his midsection, and vomits. It bursts from him in great surges, drenching the bedclothes and splashing noisily on the floor. It is watery at first, but thickens with darker matter, spongy shreds filmed with mucus.

  Clara paces carefully along the wall, keeping clear of the spreading pool. Her eyes never leave him, but he does not look up again. He slumps forward as the convulsions weaken. He tries to prop himself up, but sprawls on the slick floor and lies still as his ragged breathing fades, facing the void beneath the bed.

  The house surprises Clara with its plainness. The rooms she passes through are as bare and cold as hers was. The windows are curtainless, the white walls unrelieved by ornamentation or colour. Not a single painting or mirror hangs anywhere. In the large but comfortless drawing room, there is no piano or gramophone. There is not even a bookcase.

  For all its austerity, there are signs in the house of increasing disorder. Flies cluster on a plate of untouched food. A broken glass lies in a yellowing puddle of milk. There are fingermarks on walls and tabletops, on banisters and the edges of doors, in glancing smears or clustered darkly like grapes. On a sideboard, she finds one of his monogrammed handkerchiefs, its centre richly bloodstained. On some impulse, she picks it up. Touching only its edges, she folds it away.

  She ransacks the kitchen for provisions, though there is little enough to choose from. She finds half a stale loaf and a wedge of crusted cheese. From the back of a cupboard, she takes a tin of sardines. Nazaire’s own meals must have been no less dismal, in recent days, than those he brought to her. She bundles the food in a tea towel and knots it at the top.

  The kitchen door, when she tries it, is locked. She ought to have expected it. Nazaire was scrupulous about such things. The key is likely to be somewhere on his person; in his pocket, perhaps, or on a chain. To look for it, she would have to go back upstairs. She would have to creep towards his still form, picking her way through that darkening film. She would have to touch him.

  She searches the kitchen, her agitation growing as she upends jars and rummages in drawers. She climbs onto the counter and tries the window, which seems wide enough for her to clamber through. The handle, though, has seized shut.

  She moves with quiet urgency as she makes her way back through the downstairs rooms. When she reaches the tiled hallway, she tiptoes along its length, glancing up the stairs as she passes them. It is absurd, perhaps, but the fear is undiminished. She would feel it, she thinks, even if she had seen him hanged.

  She is looking back even as she tugs at the hall door. It is the air, cold and pristine, that makes her turn. Simply and unaccountably, the door has opened. She stands, in a slow hiatus of disbelief, as the latch slips from her hand, as she blinks in the widening light.

  Outside, in the walled garden, the snow is beginning to melt.

  The day is clear and cold. She opens the garden gate and steps out onto a lane. It is open to the moors and scoured by a harsh breeze. She ought to be wearing a coat. Eustace would want her to wear a coat.

  She walks quickly for warmth, and to feel the cottage recede behind her. She has no idea where she is, or how far away the nearest house might be. She chooses a direction simply because it takes her slightly downhill.

  She has gone only a few hundred yards when the noise of a car makes her start and turn. It has pulled up on the verge a little way off, large and black and slightly shabby. She looks anxiously from one side of the road to the other. For as far as she can see, there is nothing but the sombre barrenness of the thawing moors. There is nowhere she can run. The driver, a man in a dark and tattered raincoat, steps out and takes off his hat.

  ‘Clara,’ he calls. ‘Am I so much changed that you do not know me?’

  She stares at him, gripping her cuffs and shivering.

  ‘It is Elias, Clara. Elias Cromer. I have come to take you home.’

  Twenty-Three

  The boy leaves by the river road.

  He does not look back, once he has turned from the water’s edge, at the still heap that was Swaine’s man, and he finds that there is no hesitation in him. He must take the river road as far as the bridge, and so he steals a good horse from the stable of a coaching inn, laming two others that look quick enough to be used in pursuit. The mist has ceded to rain, and he rides with his clothes soaked to his skin. When his hands grow so cold at last that he can no longer grip the reins, he hitches them instead around his wrists.

  When he chances upon the one he is following, making camp in a copse of ash and hazel, he has no idea how far he has ridden, only that he has come some way along the Dover road. Mr Crowe is in the company of another man, a fellow of shrewd appearance, though he is indifferently groomed. They have set a small fire and are well-enough provisioned to have taken a meal of some kind. They are passing a brandy bottle between them and show every sign of good cheer.

  The boy walks into the clearing and stands facing them across the fire. He lifts the rifle and takes aim. Mr Crowe raises the bottle, gesturing towards him.

  ‘Ah, now there he is, Cromer. That is the young man I mentioned to you as we rode.’

  Cromer regards him mildly, the rain spilling from the rumpled brim of his hat. ‘Indeed?’ he says. ‘I must confess that the pro
mise you spoke of is not immediately apparent to me. It was his name, perhaps, that impressed itself upon you?’

  ‘I regret to say,’ Mr Crowe says, ‘that I neglected to ask it. Will you divulge your name, my young friend, so that we may invite you to join us?’

  ‘I had a name,’ says the boy. ‘I had a name, but it is gone.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear it,’ says Mr Crowe. ‘A boy should not be without a name, no more than should anything in this world. Never leave a void where something may be written.’

  ‘I have no name,’ the boy insists. ‘I won’t need one, where I’m going.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ says Mr Crowe. ‘What do you say, Cromer? Does he look like a Holloway to you? A Morley, perhaps?’

  ‘Neither quite hits the mark, in my estimation. He has a certain quality, this boy.’

  ‘Well, quite. That is just what I tried to convey to you. He is not a Fairfax, exactly, or a de Vere, though I fancy it is something in that region.’

  The boy cocks the rifle. ‘I have no name.’

  ‘Give me a moment,’ says Mr Crowe. ‘It will come to me.’

  He fires, or means to, but the rifle has seized in the incessant rain, or the trigger thwarts his numb fingers. He cannot tell, and never afterwards knows. Mr Crowe looks down, as if in politeness, only raising his eyes again when the boy has lowered the rifle to his side, when he feels his right leg buckle under him and sinks staring to one knee.

  ‘Come,’ Mr Crowe says. ‘Come and warm yourself while we deliberate on what we are to call you. It is not a thing that may be rushed, after all. A name is like a shoe, you know. Nothing is so irksome as one that is ill-fitting. Sit with us, there’s a good fellow. Take a slug of this brandy before you pass entirely from the world. Cromer, where is that cutlet you were eating?’

  ‘I gave it to you, Mr Crowe.’

  ‘Well, cook another one, man. The boy is at death’s door.’

  ‘I thought to keep some portion aside for tomorrow. We have a long road.’

  ‘And what earthly good would that do, if the boy does not live to see it? Sufficient unto the day, Cromer. Sufficient unto the day.’

  The boy sits before the fire and is wrapped in a horsehair blanket. Silently, he eats and drinks what they give him. He keeps the rifle at his side, and neither man moves to take it from him. Indeed, they seem to forget that he has it at all. When he has warmed himself, when his strength returns, he will finish it. He will do the next thing, the last thing, and he will be finished.

  When he wakes, they are readying their horses. The air is cold and damp, scented with woodsmoke and coffee. He throws off his blanket and searches with his flattened palm. The rifle lies where he left it. As he sits up warily, Mr Crowe looks around from his saddlebag.

  ‘Bonjour, mon jeune ami. Tu as bien dormi? Tu as faim?’

  The boy looks away, unwilling to show that he has not understood.

  ‘French, old chap. The language of Flaubert and Baudelaire, and of seduction, as you have no doubt heard. When you speak to a woman in French, it is as if your tongue were applied directly to her most intimate heart. The education of a young gentleman is not complete until he is proficient in conjugation.’

  The boy gets up, keeping the rifle slung at his side. He circles the remains of the campfire, toeing the last of the warmth from its embers.

  ‘We sail at— what time do we sail, Cromer?’

  ‘Four o’clock was what we agreed, though it all rather depends on our associate’s luck in finding a suitable beach.’

  ‘Four o’clock. There you are, my friend. You have until teatime to shoot me. If no opportune moment has presented itself by then, you will have to accompany us to Paris and shoot me there at your leisure.’

  ‘That may be difficult,’ says Cromer. ‘Lavoisier will not have guns aboard, not after the incident at Deauville.’

  Mr Crowe snorts. ‘How particularly tedious he is, even for a Frenchman. No widow could have been more handsomely provided for.’

  The boy stalks off into the trees to relieve himself, stooping afterwards by a stream to wash. On his hands still, minutely seaming his fingertips, is the blood from what he did to Swaine’s man. It has darkened now to umber. They are mocking him, with this levity. They are mocking him, and he ought to silence them. He ought to return to the clearing with his gun raised, to finish what he came to do.

  Instead, he trudges back without a word. He sees to his horse, the one he took from the coaching inn, making his own preparations to leave. Cromer hands him a canteen of water and a buttered roll, and the boy accepts them without a word.

  When they are a mile or so along the Dover road, Mr Crowe turns in the saddle. The boy has fallen in a little way behind them, as if he were travelling the same road alone. ‘Speaking of widows, as we were, I hope you will forgive my raising a delicate matter.’

  The boy replies with a sharp look, but says nothing.

  ‘You have left behind your mother, have you not? I mean no accusation. You would go to her if you could, but the town is no longer safe for you.’

  He stares down at his hands, working the reins into their stained creases.

  ‘It is not safe for you,’ Mr Crowe continues. ‘You would be putting your own neck in the noose. When you killed the man whose rifle that was – and I do not blame you in the slightest for acting as you did – you left behind the life you had. You left those you loved, both the living and the dead.’

  ‘Don’t,’ says the boy. ‘Don’t talk about them.’

  Mr Crowe pulls his horse up and turns to him. ‘There is pain in this for both of us,’ he says. ‘I have no wish, believe me, to revisit what occurred. I mean only to offer you what comforts I can.’

  ‘Comforts?’ the boy says. ‘What comforts?’

  ‘You may not return,’ says Mr Crowe. ‘And nor may I. Our friend Cromer, however, is under no such injunction. He is a man, moreover, who could do your mother’s case much good if he were to apply his arts.’

  ‘What arts? What are you saying?’

  Mr Crowe spurs his horse onwards. ‘The law, young man, that most tenebrous of all arts. Cromer has taken silk, you know, and defers to no man in his juridical guile. He could have the Magna Carta itself struck down if he put his mind to it.’

  Cromer dismisses this with a small gesture. He rides on without looking back, adjusting his misshapen hat and shaking the drizzle from his coat.

  ‘We are still close,’ Mr Crowe says. ‘Cromer could go back and see to it that your mother is protected, that her home remains inviolate and that she herself is not harassed. Provisions could be made for her comfort also. A sum could be put at her disposal that would give some repose to her thoughts. Let us aid her, my friend. I would take it as a kindness. And it would give us time to settle upon a suitable name.’

  Mr Crowe studies him intently as he waits for his reply, but the boy says nothing for a long time. He listens to his own breath, then shakes his head in weariness. ‘I have no name,’ he says.

  ‘Wait!’ Mr Crowe says, bringing his horse up short. ‘I have it.’

  Eustace took the river road, at last.

  It was strange to think that he had not done so until now. He had thought, when he first came back, that it was to see the old places. It was what a man did, surely, when he found he could go no further: he followed his course as far back as he could, sought the vanished things that gleamed still among the reeds. There would be a certain propriety in coming back this way, even if the prospect gave him no comfort. It was no more, surely, than a matter of time.

  Yet the day had not come. He had not woken, one dismal morning in the boarding house, with a quiet certainty of purpose. He had not put his walking shoes on and struck out westwards, his intention unvoiced even to himself. He had kept to the quays and the centre of the town, to places he had seldom been even as a boy. The day had not come, and now he could no longer wait for it.

  He left Abel at breakfast. There was one more visit he must make, he
told him. He would be gone for two hours at the most. Abel was not best pleased. He was anxious to be on the road, and no more inclined than before to be trusting. He insisted at first that they would go together after they had eaten, that he would wait in the car, relenting only when Eustace mentioned his destination.

  ‘Don’t get lost,’ he said. ‘Or I might have to find you a plot of your own.’

  He found the ferry house long gone. A railway bridge had been built a little way downstream from the bank where it had stood, and rubble had been sunk for its footings. Around this, the silt had accreted, narrowing the river’s course. Eustace could tell the character of the water still from its complexion, from the tensions in its rucked and gathered surface. It was faster and deeper now than it had been in any part of the old crossing.

  Further upstream, the reshaping of the bank had allowed a string of cottages to be built, some of them adjoined by places of business: a roughly built workshop with a roof of corrugated iron; a scrapyard where engine blocks were piled alongside the rusting wheelhouse of a boat. The cottages gave way, at a bend in the road, to a more desolate stretch of the bank. A low stone wall enclosed a scrubby and irregular field that was scattered here and there with chunks of old masonry. At its far side stood a low ruin, separated from the river by a margin of reeds and shingle.

  He looked around, taking his bearings as well as he could, but it was difficult to be sure. The surrounding country was as flat and featureless as it had always been, with few landmarks worth the name. The river had so much altered its shape that the place was almost strange to him. Only the distances gave him any guide. It had stood about this far from the ferry house, he thought, and at this remove from the church, whose low steeple he could now see.

  Eustace stepped over the wall, descending the shallow bank beyond to a rough pasture of sedge and rushes. It was grazed by a single dishevelled pony that lurked at its eastern edge, a greasy rope about its neck. The animal considered him balefully for a moment and lowered its head again, as if it had hoped to go unseen.