“You have no bonnet. Don’t the ladies wear them in America?”
This had been a concession to living in the past that Anna had refused. She didn’t like to wear hats, even though she realized that there were perfectly sensible reasons why other women wore them: they wore them to keep their infrequently washed hair clean and to demonstrate their modesty. Covering hair put a visual cap on their sexuality. Glenis had scolded her on several occasions and had even refused to walk along the cobbled streets of Kinsale unless Anna had put a hat on, at least for the day. Now that Anna was traveling with Donal, she was not going to accept fashion mandates from him.
“That’s correct. Women do not wear hats with the same rigor as they do here in Ireland. And do not think that you can advise me otherwise,” she said.
“It’s only that you’ll come to the attention of people, and I don’t want either of us to come to attention. You’ll be the odd bird, the one with the wrong-colored feathers, if you get what I mean. So I’m not making a request of you; it is something that you must do and it goes far beyond your peevish preferences. Now, do you happen to have a bonnet in your satchel?”
Clomp, clomp, tick, tick, the wheels, the wood of the cart creaking, the full brightness of the midday sun making Anna squint. She pictured a neon sign hanging over her with a flopping arrow pointing down at her bare head for all to see her otherness. If she’d been advising a client about how to appear in court, she would have used the same logic as Donal, except she would have said, “Ditch the tongue stud, cover up the tattoos, wear a skirt of a soft pastel shade—a tasteful, kindergarten teacher outfit.”
She grabbed her satchel from the floor of the cart and found a wrinkled cloth hat. She shook it out and ran her hands over the wrinkles, pressing them and staring straight over the haunches of the horse, until she put on the hat. Donal said nothing, but he straightened his shoulders a bit and began to whistle a tune.
Late in the day, they arrived at the exact middle of nowhere, as near as Anna could tell. It was lined with sharp and unyielding gorse plants, which hampered Anna’s efforts at peeing discreetly. There were no houses, and the path they were following placed them perilously close to the edge of the cliffs. Donal guided the cart under a canopy of evergreen trees, well hidden from the coast and from what traffic might chance by. They made a small fire and ate potatoes that Donal had purchased along the way after their supplies had run low. They sat across from each other, with the fire glowing between them.
“I know you like to understand where we’re going. Tomorrow, if all things go in our favor, we’ll stay at a little bit of a cottage where you can sleep in a bed. Near there, we’ll trade our goods with a French ship. Ardgroom is the name of the town.”
“What would happen to Glenis and Tom and all the people who, uh, barter with them if this load is not smuggled out to the French ship?” asked Anna. She wiped her hands on the hem of her skirt, which was already miserably dirty.
Donal stood up and moved to the cart. He took the opportunity to tighten the rolls of bound thatch that had come loose. She spun around on her rock seat and watched him.
“It was four months of work inch by inch, this one and that one bringing what they had to trade by the dark of the moon to Glennie and Tom. Then you came along and slowed down the flow of things. Glennie let it be known that she wouldn’t make the trip until you were clearly well enough from your mishaps and were fully mended. If something goes wrong, they would start over, that’s what. We are born knowing how to start over,” he said.
Donal strapped on a peg of an artificial arm. “Meet my stabber and poker.”
It was a perfectly straight stick. At the end, where a hand should have been, was an imposingly sharp iron point, rather like a large letter opener, attached by screws. “What’s it made of?” asked Anna.
“Bone. The femur bone of a horse in this case. I had one made of wood, but I didn’t like it as much. I rather like another animal attached to me, and I’m fond of horses. Glennie and I have that in common.”
Donal stabbed at the thatch with his horse bone arm, while he used his good arm to tighten the hemp rope around it.
Anna pictured all the artificial limbs that she’d ever seen, the hi-tech versions that could produce movement in perfectly sculpted waxen fingers, the viciously sharp hooks and all the less technologically advanced prosthetics. But Donal’s horse bone arm with an iron point at the end looked effective enough. Once an arm was gone, any replacement wasn’t ever going to look like an arm again; it was another thing entirely. She watched the rhythm of his work. He turned slightly with his left side and jabbed at the thatch, then yanked hard with his powerful right arm, cinching the hemp rope where it had come loose. Stab, cinch, pull out the sharp pointed arm, and start again.
No one had expected this expedition to take longer than three days, and now everything seemed to be fraying, even the thatch. Donal had told her that they were on the outskirts of Ardgroom, but she had no mental picture at all of where they were, as if her sense of directions had been short-circuited. The discomfort of this created a sense of helplessness that she dreaded.
Anna would do anything for Glenis, even help Donal travel to safer access points with the black market goods. Glenis had sworn that if there was help to be had for Anna and Joseph, then Biddy Early was their truest hope. And if Glenis could ride for three days to Limerick, surely Anna could do her part by supplying the labor that Glenis would have provided to Donal. Surely she could do anything for a few days.
“You sound like you know every crevice of the coastline,” said Anna.
“And well I should. Oh, you think it’s the smuggling made me wise. Did not Glenis tell you two wits about me? I’m a cartographer. After my arm was cut off as a lad, my father found a way to send me to France to go to school. I was smuggled myself. I was there for seven years, bundled off like a firkin of butter when I was twelve or so. There’s many Irish in France. Some say all the old Irish royalty left, abandoned the rest of us and left for France. I can’t say if that’s true or not, but I was given safe passage, and good haven while I studied. And here’s the precious thing; I was a mapmaker for the British in Cork, or I was until two years ago.”
Cartographer? Muscles along Anna’s neck relaxed; she hadn’t known that they were pulling her up like a marionette. Donal was the pilot of this aircraft; she didn’t need to keep straining to see where they were going. He did know every inch of the coastline.
“The village that we’re going to, Ardgroom? You won’t see it on a map, not any map that I’ve drawn. I’ve left off places that the British are not deserving of.”
Of course: the cartographer has the ultimate power of knowledge over the occupying forces. And an invading country was always at a disadvantage; no one knew the landscape like the people who’d grown up on it.
“And I suspect that there are other places you’ve left off your maps,” she said. She swatted at the smoke, urging it out of her face.
“Aye. Only with the greatest care. I’ve left off a cove or two, but that’s the best I could do. Anything too glaring and I’d be convicted of treason.”
“Are you married? Do you have a family waiting for this trip to be over? This is so strange that I know almost nothing about you,” said Anna.
“Until now, you didn’t care to know about me. You were only able to see Glenis and think about finding the lad and going home. You are most like a hunting dog, oh, not so much in looks, not at all. But true in the way you stick your nose in the air to catch a scent and you hear nothing else, see less, and only taste your prey.”
“Thanks for the comparison to a four-legged creature with fur and fangs. I notice that you didn’t answer the part about marriage.”
The firelight spun off his dark eyes. Donal pulled a final rope hard and looped the end of the rope around a peg on the side of the cart. He put one foot up on the step of the cart in a resting pose. He rubbed his right hand along the length of the bone arm, and she heard the sizzle of his callu
sed hand caress polished bone. Her eyes followed the line of his thigh, bent at ninety degrees.
“I see Glenis neglected to tell you. One more day on the ride with her and my entire history would have been splayed out. I was married and we had two children. I think of them still as wee ones, but when it was all over, they were not so small. Two years ago, the fever ran through Cork. That’s where I had lived all my life, when I wasn’t a student on the Continent. My wife, Peg, and the boys were blasted hard by the fever. First the boys were struck down, and then when she had nursed them through their deaths, Peg collapsed and the fever dove fiendishly into her. I wished she had not seen her sons die…” Donal’s breath caught, and he exhaled hard in jagged bursts.
Anna felt the uncomfortable sting of tears fill her eyes. His loss slammed into her and pressed hard to be released. She knew that death from disease had been common in the nineteenth century. Glenis had recounted the deaths of scores of children, mothers in childbirth, loved ones deemed too young, taken by diseases that were all but eradicated in the twenty-first century. If she had ever thought that death was tolerated with greater ease because of its prevalence, Donal’s pain disavowed her of this belief. She’d been wrong; she felt the crash of it resound in Donal, echo from side to side within his torso.
Anna stood up. She took a step toward him and stopped. She felt the heat from their small fire lap at her back.
“I’m sorry. There are no words for me to say…”
“Don’t try. It was god-awful, and it still is. But that’s the way of life. We get a swift life here and most of what we are left with is the remembering of times gone by that we can’t relish enough when they’re happening. But I will tell you this. I loved my wife every day and loved my boys so much that I can smell their necks right now if I let myself.”
The skin on her inner arms began to vibrate, as if a tiny flock of butterflies had been struggling right beneath the epidermis, hoping to lift off. There was the unsettling sensation of a breeze on her nipples when there should have been no breeze at all, tucked away as they were beneath two layers of thick cotton, stitched and overstitched to make a firm bodice, and over this a washed wool that kept out all but the most vicious rain. A light mist began to fall on them, nothing that anyone who slept indoors would notice, but for those unfortunate enough to be outside, it was an indicator that their night would be long and cold.
Anna pulled her hood up and tightened her cape around her. “I can’t imagine a father loving his sons. That just didn’t happen in my family. My father acted like he was possessed by demons, wanting to love my brother and loathing him in the same moment. I know that love does happen between fathers and sons, but I only saw the opposite. And then my brother carried on with the same rage even though he had hated every second of it as a boy.”
“What of you? Did your Da treat you the same?”
Anna flinched. She never liked it when the questions focused on her. But there was something different about Donal.
“I was the one who got in between them. I was sure that they’d kill each other, and they very nearly did. I came home one night when I was twelve and there was an ambulance, I mean all the neighbors were there, Patrick was bloodied and hurt, taken out on a stretcher, and my father was gone. I don’t ever remember a time when I wasn’t on alert, trying to do or say something that would stop my father.”
Donal put his foot back on the ground and took one step closer to Anna. “What became of your Da? Did he soften in his old age? Men do that, the hard ones sometimes soften.”
“After he nearly killed my brother, he left. Abandoned us. But that was over twenty years ago.” Anna paused and shifted around in the future and the past. “He never contacted us again. But now he’s sick, or so I hear.” Anna didn’t know how to tell Donal that she had hired a detective agency to find her father when he was in Thailand and that he was now in California, diagnosed with the early onset of Alzheimer’s. She decided not to try.
“And how did your brother fare with his son, the lad that you’re searching for?” Donal was close enough that Anna could see his lips as he spoke, even in the dark.
“That’s the awful part. He can’t seem to do any better. He can’t touch Joseph, can’t wrap an arm around him, can’t laugh with him, can’t eat a meal with him when he’s not glaring at the kid like he’s a criminal. But Patrick is tormented, I know he is. I understand my brother, and I know he wants to love his son more than anything.”
“If Glennie was here I know what she’d say. Have you not told her this pitiful bit?”
“No, not this part.”
“She’d say to look for a curse.”
Anna prepared to catch her breath and she found that her breath could not be caught, that her lungs pumped and labored at the sight of his moist brow, his black hair beneath his knit cap. Her organs jerked around in her torso like break-dancers, her stomach twirling, doing a one-handed push-up ending in a dazzling back flip. She wondered if she could still speak; if she did, would words come, or would they emerge as smoke.
“A curse? Do you mean like, well, a curse? I don’t think I can accept that. I’ve never known anyone who was cursed. I’ve known people who seemed to live beneath a dark cloud…”
“Aye, and no matter what they did, what crop they planted, who they fell in love with, what sweet child they bore, everything turned to maggoty rot. You’ve known them. Only you didn’t know they were cursed, and neither did they,” said Donal.
The rain had just gone from mist to the next stage, something that had more weight to it. Donal looked up, squinting into the sky. He reached behind the seat of the cart.
“But don’t be thinking we are cursed, you and I, by a series of poor accommodations. This will be our last night sleeping under this cart. Come now, help me roll out our canvas.”
As Anna prepared to make her way under the cart once again, she slid her hands into the deep pockets of her skirt to catch a reassuring feel of the twenty-first-century cloth that she kept with her at all times. Gone. The scrap of blue silk was gone. She thought back and realized that she must have left it when she and Glennie had slept out. Or had it been last night with the old woman? No matter, she’d never be able to find it now. She smiled at the thought of whoever might find it.
Anna thought she would never be able to sleep near this man she had met only several days ago. How could she? And she still wondered this as she fell asleep almost instantly, lulled by the rain pattering on the cart, curled against the back wheel. The last thing she heard was the throaty snore of a man.
They had been at the isolated one-room cottage in Ardgroom for two days. The air began to turn cooler, then sharp at night. Donal had left stacks of stones arranged in piles of three on the eastern outskirts of Glengariff, alerting those in the smuggling route that Donal was now at a different location.
“We’ll divide it into three loads with the drink being its own separate box,” said Donal. “The French sailors find some use for our poteen, but they should take care that they don’t go blind from drinking it. If all goes as planned, men should come and take the loads, and then our part is done.”
Poteen was the local white lightning, a home brew that had scorched Anna’s throat when she had tested it in Kinsale.
Together they had unloaded the thatch from the cart and unpacked the goods from within each bundle of thatch. There were tight bolts of linen, beautiful tatted lace, whole firkins of butter, everything that Ireland had been forbidden to export. Except to England; they could always export to England, which would pay the Irish one-tenth of the goods’ worth.
“We’ve been here for two days,” said Anna, picking painful bits of thatch from her fingers. “Why hasn’t anyone come to get these things?” The two of them had grown increasingly edgy, bumping into each other, ricocheting like dancing molecules, saying, “Sorry, oh how clumsy of me.” Anna wanted out. She wanted to be back in Kinsale when Glenis rode in with the news of how to find Joseph, how to go back home.<
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“The rocks that I left as a sign only mean that someone may be at any of a dozen places with goods to smuggle out. Those who take them to the sea must look in each location, each shed, stable, abandoned cottage, until they find us.”
They had stacked the goods in the darkest corners of the cottage, under canvas tarps. Donal’s restlessness, mixed with her own, made her want to scream. He had repacked the grease in the wheels, poked around with horse’s shoes, tethered the horse here or there for grazing, oiled his boots, oiled her boots, and found a sharpening stone to sharpen two knives that appeared from his leather satchel.
On the third day, Donal announced a change in plans.
“The killing in Glengariff has put off the lads. We’ll miss the French ship if we don’t take the crates down to the beach. And we’ll lose their trade if we don’t deliver as we swore to.”
Still groggy from sleep, Anna was just sitting up in bed, amazingly left behind by the former tenants. She tossed off her cape, which had covered her in the night.
“Did you say ‘we,’ as in we will take the crate? You and I?” said Anna.
Donal pulled open the door, and the hinges protested with a deeply metallic whine. “This may be a poorly hatched plan, and if it is, I’ll pay dearly with Glennie. She’ll have my hide if anything happens to you. Not to say that I want anything to befall you….”
Anna leaped from bed. “How hard can this be? Let’s go.”
Chapter 24
She walked in front of Donal, climbing up the path from the bay. They had had to wait all day and into the night for the ship. The moon was new and the sliver of light gave them only the hint of illumination, so Anna was reduced to walking with her hands in front of her, as if she’d been newly blind.
They had met the French sailors in the tiny rowboat, the emissaries from their ship, and the exchange had been swift. Donal had passed two tightly packed boxes of poteen, a major currency of smuggling, which was now traded for what Donal truly wanted: grain and meat, the breath of life that would be parceled out to those who needed it the most. The next trade would be for other items, the finer things. But Donal hid the bounty as soon as the tiny boat was out of sight, saying it needed to be recovered by someone else.
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