Kitty knew she must turn around and go back down as silently as possible. She must return to her computer. She must deny what she had seen, what she was seeing. Or she must review the workings of her psyche and determine whether she was sane or insane. In self-protection, to reach for some accounting of what was happening, she tried to tell herself it was not all that unusual. All her life—with the exception of her time spent in America—things would disappear and reappear in and out of the mists: a tree a few feet away, the islands in the bay, the high ridge of the hills and every sheep and cow in sight, all seen, then unseen, with the sky the least reliable presence of all. Her own house would vanish after she’d taken but three steps from the door. Long had she been prepared for this present phenomenon. And her acceptance of it was not as reticent as it might have been had she been born anywhere but at this farthest reach of the Western world, where the eternal mists offered hints of the proximity of the seen and the unseen. To see ghosts could be a gift given by her Kerry birth. Refusal of the gift was impossible. The sole act of choice was what she would do about it, about these visitations. That had yet to be decided—especially since she had not the least idea why she had been singled out but, it would seem, no one else, not the squatters or anyone in the countryside around. If someone had, it would have been not only mentioned but proclaimed. Most significant, not even her husband had reported any “sightings.”
Her next thought was that she could no longer dismiss these appearances as aberrations peculiar to County Kerry and its ever-shifting shadows, to the rise and fall of the mists that could, without warning, nullify the distinctions between the real and the unreal. This was Brid; this was Taddy, as named by the local Hag. There on their necks were the marks of the rasping rope. On their faces showed the loss to which they seemed reconciled, a grief whose source had been taken into their hearts, cherished and protected, until a rite could be found that would reunite them to themselves and give them peace or, perhaps, a respite from the wanderings to which they now seemed consigned.
Kitty decided to continue on her way to the upper air. With land and sea in view she could test her mind; she could think it through, this assault on her lifelong insistence—mist or no mist—that there were no such beings as ghosts, just as there were no Little People, no leprechauns, no netherworld of kingdoms and castles, of stolen children and predators ready to pounce and to snatch, to abduct and to imprison. She would see how Brid and Taddy, if there was a Brid and Taddy, would react to her passage through their private domain. Would they vanish, as seemed their habit? Would they ignore her? Would they, perhaps, seize her, take her to the parapet above, and fling her down for having invaded this world of their betrayal? There was only one way to find out.
Reverting to the pace of her approach—and fueled by her exasperation with Maggie Tulliver and the misguided Mary Ann Evans—Kitty passed through the room as though nothing out of the ordinary was taking place. Brid, and Taddy too went about their business. At the second step, just before the turn that led to the top of the turret, Kitty stole a quick backward glance to see if they were still there. They were, Brid at her loom, Taddy with his harp, each unmindful of her presence.
The trapdoor at the top of the narrow stair was stuck, as usual. Kitty stepped high enough so that her bent head was pressing against the door, the palms of her hands flush against the wood. With a strength summoned by her need to escape she pushed upward, head and hands, spine and legs all commandeered for the task. The trapdoor had no choice but to spring open.
Kitty ascended to the parapet. It was the sea off to the southwest she chose to watch during her ruminations. But Maggie Tulliver and Mary Ann had been superceded by Brid and Taddy. By what she’d just seen. Not only a fleeting glimpse, a quick, almost teasing, appearance, but a prolonged and uninterrupted display, assured and without the least apprehension on their part. Their existence was their own.
And Kitty their only witness. The Hag hadn’t seen them, even though she’d known who they were from Kitty’s descriptions. They were the young hostages chosen at random for hanging when the gunpowder plot was revealed. That there might have been no plot was accepted by some and dismissed by others. A search, somewhere between compulsive and rabid, had continued for months. Although the castle was practically dismantled, fields and pastures uprooted, border walls demolished and rock boulders overturned, no gunpowder had been discovered. By the time the ruthlessness had come to an end, the hangings had already taken place, the need for evidence having been dispensed with so that justice could be served without impediment. And so some portion of their spirits had been told—or allowed—to stay. But to what purpose? To haunt, to frighten, to turn white the hair and to addle the mind? As far as Kitty could tell, they wreaked no vengeance. Nothing had been destroyed. They were highly selective, to say the least, about when to make their presence known. Kitty McCloud seemed to have exclusive claim to the honor—or to the curse.
The curse. Did it consist only of these bewildered spirits? If so, let the entire land, the whole wide world, be cursed, so fair were they, so fine their presence. More a blessing, surely, than a scourge. But what had they to do with Kitty, and what had Kitty to do with them? That she had been chosen she already knew. But why? She had no powers. She wasn’t all that certain she believed in what her eyes had seen. And yet, she had seen.
Off in the distance the sea was wild. Again and again the crested waves flung themselves at the shore. Kitty was indifferent to the whole shebang. She had troubles enough without taking on the idiosyncrasies of the deep. And, she realized, she would have to simply accept what she could not understand. Mystery, by its nature, was not subject to explication.
Of course, as a writer, it was her impulse to search for understanding, to expose a motive, to tame the chaos of the human adventure. She was a skilled manipulator, devoted by her calling to trace the movements of the unseen hand, to reassure her readers that events fulfilled themselves and, in the process, revealed truths otherwise unrealized. She was supposed to solve mysteries. To accept them was inimical to her calling. To admit the limits of her gift would be to admit defeat.
But she had no choice. A refusal to live with the reality of these unrealities would make a demand she was not yet prepared to make: to leave the castle. To abandon the curse. To dismiss these bewildered youths and forget their fate, a fate beyond their hangings, a destiny still to be fulfilled. How could she do that? How could she forsake those who had been forsaken by all the world?
Kitty stood at the parapet and watched the waves bash themselves against the headlands. She had been wrong to consider herself threatened by this presence of mystery. She had been brought beyond the common boundaries. Either she possessed or had been given a special grace. She had been honored, and to refuse it or rebel against it by going mad or abandoning the castle was inconsistent with her nature. She would go back to the landing below, to the loom and the harp; she would, if possible, communicate to Brid and Taddy that she accepted their invitation into their mystery. She would neither ignore nor deny their presence. They were welcome in her castle. She would make no attempt to exorcise them from her home or forbid them what comforts they might find at her hearth. And if there were any particular demands they had come to make, she would do what she could to fulfill them.
Down the stone stair she went, leaving the sea to insanities of its own. When she made the turn onto the landing, she stopped. Brid, who had been busy with her loom, also stopped, as did Taddy with his harp. No one moved. But when the moment had passed, Brid took up her task again, and Taddy—as if there had been only a marked pause in the score of the music he was playing—resumed his silent strumming.
Rather than continue through to the steps on the other side of the room, Kitty waited and watched. Brid continued to be caught up in the rhythms of her weaving, Taddy intent on rhythms of his own, the work-worn fingers delicate in their plucking and strumming. Even the sea seemed to have become silent. For Kitty there was only the throb o
f her own blood to reassure her that she too had not been taken into the realm of the dead. She wondered if she could—or if she should—speak to them. After pondering this for no more than three seconds, she crossed the landing, looking at neither of them, and continued on down the narrow winding stair to the no-less-mystifying world awaiting at her computer. Before she could confront Maggie Tulliver, however, she would confront her husband.
But what if he said they must leave, that the castle had obviously overheated her brain, already fevered even in its moments of serenity. She reveled in the castle. She drew sustenance from its stones. The rough-hewn rafters raised her spirits. The view of the sea from the turret battlements made possible this remove inland from the cliffs upon which her family home had been built, the cliffs that had betrayed her by letting her house tumble into the sea, taking with it her first forays into the corrections of The Mill on the Floss, a loss she could barely sustain.
Here in the castle she had found her talents awaiting her. Her turret room now held captive the characters she’d sought, the imaginings needed to supplant the misguided author’s insufficiencies, the proper plot lines the muses had withheld from George Eliot but revealed to Kitty McCloud, if only she could discern them. Also, for her, the castle pastures were indeed greener, the mire muckier, the fields more fertile. The great hall expanded her spirit—even if it had been given over to the cows and to the pig. The dank cellars inspired in her enough gloom to satisfy the most morbid of her Irish sensibilities. Within these precincts she felt she was in possession at last of this emerald isle, this teeming womb of holy saints, this splendor thrust up by the all-creating sea, this seat of royal Maeve, this mystery, this Ireland.
If Kieran insisted they leave, she would, of course, refuse. That was a given well beyond dispute. Even the very thought would not be entertained or considered, much less discussed. It was this realization that resolved the issue: the potential for disagreement. Immediately she relished the idea. A whole new area of contention. What more could she want?
She found him on the plot east of the castle where he’d been preparing the earth for a planting. He was humming a tune and dropping seeds along a furrow he’d dug in the harsh soil.
“Is it cabbage?”
“Cabbage.” He continued to let the seeds sift from his hand.
“Will they grow, do you think?” she asked.
“We’ll find out.”
“Yes, we’ll find out.”
Kieran stood up straight and dusted the last of the seeds from his hand, letting them fall where they might.
Still reluctant to proceed with her mission, Kitty searched her brain for an acceptable subject that might occupy at least a few more moments before she’d lead her husband into a territory from which there might be no return. Without much difficulty, she found it. “I was going to do the planting, you the digging.”
“I’m competent in both.” He brushed his hands against his thighs.
“I never questioned that—nor will I ever. It was an observation only.”
“Of course.” With the toe of his boot Kieran slid some earth from one side of the furrow to cover the seed, then some from the other side. “More trouble with your Tullivers?”
“That, always.”
“And I’m no help.”
“As it has to be.”
“But you’ll let me know.” He looked at her and cocked his head to one side. “But there’s something else I can help with? Is that it?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Look at you and ask it again. You, shuffling your shoes like a woman not knowing where she wants to go. Will you tell me now, or should there be more talk of cabbages?” Direct as his question was, there was no trace of accusation or impatience in his voice. There seemed even a note of amusement.
Kitty herself shoved a bit of earth over one of the furrows, but without tamping it down. The time had come. She raised her head and shook it lightly from side to side to make sure her hair fell reasonably straight onto her shoulders. That much she could do to bring order into the world. Kieran, his gaze unchanged, waited for her to speak. What she would say would be pure and unadulterated truth. But first she would take him up to the turret, to confess to what she’d seen and to tell about Brid at the loom and Taddy at the harp. Then let him judge if she was mad.
“Can you come with me? Something I want to show you. Something to tell you.” Kieran waited, then nodded.
It was when they were crossing the gallery that led to the stair that they heard from somewhere high above them the sound of a harp. They stopped. Each turned toward the other. Kitty raised her right hand level with her ear as if she were going to cover it. Kieran took in a slow breath and exhaled even more slowly. Neither of them moved. How many moments passed was beyond telling. The harp continued, a plucked melody so plangent it seemed to plead for stillness even as it filled the entire hall with its sorrows. Rising, falling, the harp bespoke a yearning that reached out into the great world in search of some fulfillment of its longing, of the return of something lost and never to be found again.
At that moment, the harp seemed to have summoned the lowering sun from behind a cloud. The hall was flooded with rose-colored gold, making amber the dark stones, burnishing the dull iron of the many-candled chandelier, and transfiguring both Kitty and Kieran, allowing each to see the other made radiant, suggesting that each was being given for just this moment a vision of the other’s true self, the world’s first glory, a gift no mortal could hope to deserve. The music rose higher, the yearning now an ache beyond bearing but instilled with the promise that it would never cease to be, that its sorrows would be nobly borne beyond the farthest reaches of time, even past the silence where all things die.
Unable to sustain this vision of each other, both Kieran and Kitty turned and looked out over the courtyard. As if in mercy, the song stopped, midchord. And the sun, having done its mischief, retreated. Some remaining rays thrust themselves out above and below, striking the hills, sending one last shaft into the courtyard beneath them.
And there, staring up at them, was the pig, complete with the brass ring passed through its snout to make uprootings impossible now that the garden was being planted.
“The pig,” said Kieran.
“Yes,” said Kitty. “The pig.”
At their words, the animal turned its hams to them and bounded away to its trough. Sounds permitted only to a gorging pig came up to them. “We’ll go ahead then,” said Kitty.
Up the winding stones they went onto the first landing, continuing past Kitty’s desk. She considered giving a preliminary lecture before making the final ascent, giving Kieran some clue as to what he was about to be told, hinting, perhaps, that he must withhold judgments as to her ability to live in a castle and not have her imagination overwhelmed by ancient lore and thrice-told tales. She decided to wait.
He must already have some premonition. The sound of the harp had been too soulful for any returned squatters and too human to suggest the intrusion of angels.
Maybe Brid and Taddy would be there. Maybe Kieran would see them. Were she and he not one? The implications of this thought were too complex and far too troublesome for Kitty to give it further consideration. Just the fleeting suggestion unnerved her. To be of one heart was acceptable. But it surely had to stop there. To be of one mind with anyone but herself was not permissible.
Kieran would either see Brid and Taddy or not. That was hardly for her to decide. But if he did see them, would she be jealous? Would this make her not the unique person she believed herself to be? Would she welcome this rival for Brid’s and Taddy’s manifestations? To avoid further turmoil—a turmoil given about two seconds of conscious awareness—Kitty continued with even more determination up the stairs, Kieran following behind.
The loom was there, the harp set down on the stool. Brid and Taddy must be off somewhere—if they were anywhere at all—doing who knows what. Again Kitty refused to entertain further speculation. She did not
consider it part of the arrangement that she know what ghosts did when they were not in view. That was their business, and she had no intention of sticking her nose into matters that would tax even more her already overburdened imagination.
Kieran picked up the harp. “This could hardly be the one we heard. No strings.”
“It was the harp we heard,” said Kitty. “It needs no strings.” She paused, swallowed, then said, “It was a ghost played it.” She paused again, then went on. “And we both heard it. I not the only one. Her name is Brid. His name is Taddy. They were at our wedding feast. And before you think anything, whether I might be making sport—or gone daft—I’m telling you the truth. Brid and Taddy. I’ve been seeing them. Like here, in this room. Brid there at the loom. Taddy playing the harp. Brid with no thread, Taddy with no strings to his playing. You don’t have to believe me. But you have to believe I haven’t gone away with my head.”
More mournful than fearful, Kieran asked, “Can this be?”
“Who are we to say what can and cannot be?”
“We’re rational. We’re sane. Or we were until we came to this—this place.”
“We”—Kitty squirmed a little as if trying to test the fit of her dress—“we have a few adjustments to make.”
“The squatters—”
“Ghosts, Kieran. Ghosts. The ghost of Brid. The ghost of Taddy.”
Without taking his eyes off Kitty, Kieran lowered himself down onto the stool, still holding the harp. “Ghosts,” he said.
“Yes. Ghosts.” Kitty’s voice was quiet. “They appear. And they disappear. They’re here, and then they’re not here. You can believe me or not, according to your way. But it’s God’s truth—and if it isn’t His, then it’s mine.”
Kieran stared toward the window high on the wall. “Then I’ve seen them, too,” he said quietly. “Even when my own eyes watched them be here, then here no more. Brid in the great hall one evening when the cows first came. Taddy alongside the pig on the slope goes down to the stream. But I couldn’t admit who they were, what they are. If I did I’d have to tell you. And how could I do that? Mad, you’d say I was. And— my worst fear of all—you could be right. How could I say anything would make you think you’re married to a madman?”
The Pig Comes to Dinner Page 5
