by John Pipkin
The shouts and footfalls echo against the walls, and James climbs the stone steps and stands on the ramparts to have a look. Peering into the dark city, he sees only the gray hulks of churches and tenements in moonlit shadows, but he hears a whistle again and the rustle of clothing, the slap of bare feet on wet bricks, and then a trickle of water that strengthens and continues. Along the walls torches flicker and smoke every few feet. He follows the sound, squints, and can just make out the shape of a man lit by torchlight, hands at hips, pissing on the Castle. James turns to descend the wall and return to his rooms when he glimpses the horrid shapes above the gates, and he curses himself for not averting his eyes. It is a sight too common in Dublin: the severed heads of traitors impaled and displayed as a warning to others. He did not witness the executions that morning, but he heard the cheers that filled the yard each time the ax fell. Now he will dream of these vile things tonight, instead of imagining himself in the arms of suntanned women dancing on white Tahitian beaches.
“You there! Hold!”
James detects the shake of the trembling hands at the bayonet’s end before he notices the sharp point in his back. And now you appear, he thinks, wondering how long he would have remained unconscious and undiscovered on the cobbles behind the powder tower. Without being told, he lifts his arms, looks over his shoulder, and feels the press of the blade.
“I said hold, croppie! Or I’ll not stay my hand.”
“You are in error.” James works his jaw, still stiff from resting on the cold cobbles.
“Coming to collect your friends above the gate?” A second guard asks the question, then steps in front of James and points at the impaled heads.
“I am a man of the viceroy’s own staff,” James says slowly. “James Edward Samuels.”
The second guard lifts the brim of James’s crumpled hat, and leans close until their noses nearly touch.
“Mr. Samuels? So it is!”
James lowers his arms and realizes that his hands are shaking as badly as the first guard’s.
“Beg pardon, sir,” the second guard says, “but you smell of fish.”
“It is the night air,” James says. “I thought to take a walk before retiring.”
“Unwise to be out after dark.”
“So I have discovered.”
“We made you for a croppie,” the guard with the bayonet says. “Thought you were bent on taking the heads.”
“We’ve caught them before, running off with the heads under their coats.”
“But we’ll see to it that these boys stay up there until the flies have their fill.”
“I am relieved to hear it.” James’s stomach lurches at the thought of having to witness daily the slow dropping of the flesh from the skulls.
He nods to the guards, hurries down the steps and across the yard to his rooms, careful not to look up as he passes. The signs of what the century’s end will bring are all around. In recent days he has read reports of campfires in the Wicklow Mountains to the south, but no one dares auger the meaning of it. From hour to hour, rebellion seems imminent. The south counties have been under martial law since March, Queen’s County even longer, and still the reports of atrocities and ambushes continue. Week after week, James has copied out letters from Lord Camden begging Whitehall to send more troops, each request insisting that the soldiers of the Irish Army are too few and untrustworthy. And James might just as well write the replies himself, for they, too, are always the same: England can spare no soldiers … the British Army must prepare for French invasion … The French had tried to invade Ireland the previous year, to bring aid to the insurgents. Their ships had foundered on the northern coast, dashed by the so-called Protestant winds, but they will surely come again, for Napoleon needs a perch from which to fall upon England.
It should not be so difficult to discover what men will do. The Castle has spies in every corner—Lord Camden has assembled the largest web of informants the world has ever seen—but most are little better than paid liars. Only the Royal Mail can be trusted to bring reliable reports from the officers afield. Throughout the island, towns large and small set their timepieces by the regular arrival of the mail coaches from Dublin. That is one thing, at least, that Lord Camden has accomplished; he has made sure that the mail coaches run on time, bringing order to the clocks across the country.
James enters his apartment and removes his battered hat, pulls the crow’s feather from his pocket and places it on his desk next to the rolled map of the Pacific Ocean. In inks of various colors he has traced the imaginary voyages of Captain James Samuels, dotted lines looping up and down distant coasts. He hears the crack of a gunshot somewhere out in the night and it surprises him that he does not jump at the sound, so common has it become. There is nothing to be done to prevent what will come, but James has decided that he will at least take pains to avoid being stranded among the unready in Dublin when the world turns itself upside down.
PART FIVE
1798
Aphelion the point at which an orbiting body is farthest from the sun
Chapter 28
THE EMPTY FORGE
Finnegan O’Siodha grunts as he works the bellows with one hand and steadies the heavy tongs with the other, never once turning his eyes from the glowing steel in the fire. He expects the men to come again tonight, as they have every week since his return to Inistioge. They will appear like spirits emerging from the trees, and he will give them what he has promised. It is the spring of 1798 and the men arrive a little later each time, for the days are growing longer. Even here, far from Dublin, they must be watchful. The clank of a pike head in the silence of night can bring a lashing at the triangles, or worse.
Across Finn’s palms, fresh blisters rise alongside hard calluses. It is still a wonder to him, how heat and pressure and time awaken the most commonplace things to their own changeableness. He takes a deep breath, heaves the hot metal to the anvil, and almost loses his grip. In recent years he has grown accustomed to tinkering over small flames with soft metals, fragile wires and springs, screws and clasps and toothed gears no bigger than a kernel of barley. His movements with the heavy tools are awkward, his mistakes those of a novice. But daily he discovers that his fingers have retained their own memories of how these things are done.
The light at the window has faded, and the hour is long past when Owen O’Siodha would have set down his tools. Finn remembers Owen shouting to his boys over the rush of the fire, his commands landing with the certainty of granite, his laughter an empty barrel rolling downhill, and he recalls Moira’s songs and her voice like soft wind in the grass, and he thinks, too, of the small, impatient sounds that filled the cottage as they waited all together for sleep to come. At the moment the forge is silent, save for the lapping of the flames. When he lifts the hammer, he hears its piercing ring before he even begins, and he knows the sound will carry far into the night, but he no longer worries that the noise and the glow at this dark hour will invite suspicion. Most men have already put themselves to bed, unless they are at work in the draining of a bottle, and the number of plows and scythes and shovels in need of mending provide ample excuse for him to keep the oven burning until midnight.
The farmers who appear at his door each day know better than to pester him with questions about his sudden return. Summoned by the smoke and the clanging of the hammer, they hand him their broken tools, then remove their hats and show him their empty hands and say they have nothing to barter but old promises and the memories of past friendships. It baffles him, that the tenants in this corner of Kilkenny have done without a blacksmith for so long, but Finn knows too well how a man will persuade himself to forgo the necessities of living and regard the deprivation as a virtue. Tending to the infirm in Mary King’s Close, Finn had learned enough about the plaiting of flesh and mind to reckon people’s thoughts from the way they stood before him, and the farmers who come to see him now are hardly different. He can see the humbling mix of desperation and gratitude. No one a
sks why he has come back, or what he does late at night. They do not ask about the copper wires he has strung through the trees to draw the electrical fire from the air, and they do not question the strange shape hidden beneath the oilcloth on the table. They want only to have their simple needs met.
When he was in Edinburgh it was easy to imagine how he would find Siobhan alone at New Park, aiming her telescope at the cold heavens, for Colum McPherson had promised that he would leave her be if Owen and Moira left as they did. But when Finn returned, there was no one who could tell him where she had gone, and now there is nothing for him to do but wait, like a phantom of himself, haunting his old home in witness to the lives that passed through it. From the corner of the forge, twitchy fire-thrown shadows point and wave behind the carved wooden hands propped upright near the wall. Before fleeing Edinburgh, he threw what he could carry into a small trunk—a fat leather purse, a pair of wood and screw articulations, and the complicated brace that had occupied so many of his laboring hours—and he heaved it to his shoulders and staggered over the slick cobbles in the dark.
At first, he worried that the trunk would draw attention when he arrived in Ireland, but at the docks in Kingstown he encountered a mad confusion of travelers with all manner of trunks and bags. On the massive stone pier that stretched a mile into the harbor, drivers shouted destinations to the dizzied passengers spilling from the ships, and Finn attracted little notice as he squeezed into one of the waiting carriages. On the long ride to Inistioge, he stared out the coach windows and watched the fields pass where men and women crouched and crawled, trailed by children, some too small to help with planting but most working quietly in the dirt. It made his back ache to see them stooped over freshly dug furrows, pushing halved potatoes and turnips and handfuls of corn into the dirt, some moving more slowly than others, and each body a fragile, wondrous complication, shoved and tugged through life, put to onerous labors and asked to mend itself and serve again day upon day, a machine enslaved to thought. And Finn knew that these men and women were already worrying about winter, still half a year away, but coming, always coming. He imagined how they must be figuring sums as they dug, counting seeds and roots, numbering on split fingertips the stalks that would rise, the ones that would not, subtracting what would be paid in rent and surrendered for debts and lost to insects and rodents and the spotted rot. He saw a woman with an infant swaddled on her back, and farther on another child dragging a basket of halved potatoes between tilled humps of earth, and poking out from the basket a tiny pink hand, fingers spread like fat tubers clutching at the sky and he thought of the blood and the wailing in the falling-down barn where Caroline—still Siobhan then—squirmed in the hay, and he wondered what he would find if he dug into the earth at the footprint of the barn. How deep would he need to burrow to uncover the silt of forgotten grief?
When he arrived in Inistioge, he stopped first at the Green Merman and found Duggan Clare pulling drafts and cursing the pains that plagued his knees and caused him to limp when the days turned cold. Duggan stared at Finn, and then nodded, as if hardly a week had passed since he had last seen him. He led Finn through the back door to a narrow patch of dirt between a hog pen and a cage of roosting hens, and he leaned against the cage and said that he had always known that Finn would return. Duggan asked after Owen and Moira and clucked his tongue at Finn’s answer, and then he said the forge was just as they left it, vacant as the day they walked off. Finn thought of his purse, fat with the mingled weight of farthings and shillings and groats from the Edinburgh doctors, and he imagined throwing the coins in the middleman’s face. And Duggan seemed to read his thoughts, for next he told him that the previous year, Mr. McPherson himself was found in the road, stiff as a plank where he had fallen from his wagon, though there were some who said that the lump on his head had nothing to do with a fall. And Duggan spoke of other changes, too, how the house and lands of Arthur Ainsworth now belonged to a distant relation from England, a William Moore whom few in town had seen, for the new landlord had arrived with his wife and then soon left again. It was his wife, Duggan said, who refused to stay.
“It’s the stories scared them off, what the papers call the atrocities, but it’s only what needs to be done. The boys have been after houghing the cattle again at night.” Duggan reached around to tap the stringy backs of his own ankles. “Once the cords are cut, it’s only meat they’re good for. It sends a clear message to any man who would stand against them.” Finn recalled the mournful cries of a cow struggling to rise along the road from Kingstown, but he had thought the sorry beast only needed milking.
“So what are you to do now, Finnegan?” Duggan glanced at the hens and the hogs before continuing. “Are you come to aid the cause?”
Finn gave him no answer. He planned to remain only long enough to convince Siobhan to leave with him, and he wanted nothing to do with the rest of it. Duggan told him about the men of the United Irish Brotherhood who gathered at night to plan how things ought to be, and he explained that a blacksmith could be a great help to the cause.
“The pike is a fearsome weapon.” Duggan drew a line in the dirt with his cane and made a cross at the top. “Done right, even a horseman cannot stand against it. A seven-foot shaft is what you want.”
Duggan traced a box around his sketch. “Of course, I know why you’ve really come.” He held Finn in his gaze and smiled slyly. “But she’s not here. Miss Ainsworth left soon after yourself.”
Duggan told Finn how Mr. McPherson had made it impossible for her to stay. “Fantastic stories he told, about her being the girl you found in the barn, and how that infant had not died, that it was Owen himself had traded her for a chance to own the forge. And to be sure, none of us believed it. But then to prove his point, that devil McPherson dug up Mr. Ainsworth’s wife, disturbed the poor woman’s rest with his own hands, and they found her still clutching both of her children right there in the ground.” Duggan said that he had not witnessed the uncovering himself, but he saw the fresh dirt mounded on the grave afterward. “There’s none of us suspected it.”
Finn kept silent, as if he were still bound to secrecy.
Duggan nodded slowly, “But I don’t expect you knew anything of it, as you were just a boy yourself.”
Finn dragged his foot over the drawing of the pike in the dirt.
“Still, it’s a terrible thing,” Duggan said, “digging up children like that. I suppose it’s no surprise the middleman wound up dead in the road. There’s poetry in that.”
Finn felt a cold fist at the pit of his stomach. All this time, he had thought that Siobhan was still at New Park, and somehow he had convinced himself that she was waiting for him and that when he returned he would find everything about her unchanged. “Do you have any idea where she went?” Finn asked.
“Miss Ainsworth?” Duggan shrugged. “Dublin. Cardiff. London. Who knows?” He drew another line in the dirt. “Some were saying that she’d gone to look for you, in France, or America. But now you’re here and she isn’t.” The man pulled a green kerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow, though Finn saw no need for it, other than to show him the kerchief itself. “They say she left all those curious devices, including what you and Owen made. All of that work for nothing.” Duggan paused and balled the kerchief in his fist. “So as I was saying, Finnegan O’Siodha, what will you do now?”
When Finn first caught sight of the old forge, he understood why it had remained vacant. How needful would a man have to be, he wondered, to look upon the dilapidation and think it a betterment of his condition? And contrary to what Duggan Clare had said, the forge was not at all as he had left it. The door had been torn from its hinges. The roof sagged where the thatch had been pulled free for bedding and kindling. And there was other evidence of temporary dwellers: a torn shirt filthy beyond salvation, a chewed strap of leather, reeking stains along the walls.
He found the hearth lumped knee-high with ash from the procession of wanderers who had burned what they could t
o keep warm for a night. He raked through the mottled gray ash and uncovered things that showed him his childhood was no fiction: a bent and tarnished spoon, a cracked plate that had taken the print of Moira’s slender thumb when the clay was still soft, a metal button, the black stump of a chair’s leg that must have once supported Owen as he worked. Other things had no memories attached. A spent fist of coal, greasy cakes of animal fat commingled with soot, the fat spine of a book with all but the stubble of pages charred away. Deeper, he uncovered bones in the ashes, the small dismemberments of pigeons and rats and squirrels, knuckled gray lengths scraped clean of tendon and gristle. And, inexplicably, his siftings revealed a man’s large toenail, big as a marker for a game of draughts, thick and yellowed and striated from root to tip. He held it in his palm, examined the ridges of its once living geography, then carried it to the door and flicked it into the grass. At the bottom of the hearth he uncovered a charred wooden crosspiece with slices of red and yellow glass still affixed. Finnegan shook his head as he imagined a solitary figure trudging through the Nore Valley with a window strapped to his back. There was no accounting for the things people carried.
Of all their tools, only the anvil remained—too heavy to be carried away without enormous effort—and it sat on its stone block as if waiting for him. For the length of the first night, Finn sat awake in front of the cold hearth, trying to think of a way to find Siobhan, or a way to bring her back to Inistioge. He had never imagined her anywhere else, and now it seemed he would have to look for her everywhere at once. Finn thought of what Duggan Clare had said about the devices that still remained in the observatory, and how the men preparing to fight were in need of pikes, and so the next day he went back to the Green Merman and asked if the men of the Brotherhood were well placed.
