He opened the catalog at random. He read what was there, including some marginal notes written in pencil, accompanied by a sketched diagram. He read further, but only a little, before he slowly closed it. He picked up the metal box, the tangled wires dangling down. He examined it more closely, then again consulted the catalog.
He stood where he was. How long he remained without moving, indifferent to the rain, he could not tell. His first move was to open his shirt and shove the pages and the box inside to protect them as much as possible. Quickly he went to the sheltered shed and opened his sack. The catalog and the box were thrust inside, then, with trembling hands, the thong was drawn. Now they were safe from the torrent falling all around.
Declan stumbled his first few steps, then forced himself to walk as steadily as the situation would allow. He paused when he reached the doors to the great hall. He used the key Kitty had given him should he want to avail himself of the “facilities.” He went inside, closed the doors, and leaned against them, then opened the sack and drew forth the retrieved book. He opened it again, then closed it, having read nothing. He had no need. He knew what he held in his hand. It was not only a catalog outlining in detail the methods for detonating explosives, but, scrawled in its margins, it had notes and diagrams showing how to attach the wired metal box to the already planted gunpowder.
Declan looked up at the hundred-candled chandelier of beaten iron where he had seen the hanged bodies. He glanced down at his feet and, with his boot, scraped off to the side the flop in which he had stepped. He stared down at the flagstones, now visible. Again, he slowly knelt and placed his open palms on the gunpowdered flooring. Eyes shut, he blessed the pig.
11
It was a day as fair as any Kitty had ever known. The sky had rid itself of clouds and presided without impediment over a sea content to raise only one unbroken swell after another, feeling no need to indulge itself in the turmoil that was its preferred occupation. The swells, by their nature, advanced inexorably to the cliffs, but on this fine day they seemed merely to lap and lick the rising rock face like a suppliant puppy. No vessel broke the horizon, not even a curragh taking advantage of the sea’s agreeable disposition.
The grass through which she’d waded to come to the cliff’s edge was still fresh with dew, and she’d noted that the purple-headed knapweed and thistle had begun to flourish in the untrod soil. Also, on such a day as this, even the irresistible smell of the sea could not compete with the scent of clover brought to her by the gentlest breeze coming from somewhere to the north. Even the cormorants soaring and plunging out over and into the water had muted their expectant cries, and the sandpipers on the beach below scurried toward, then away, from the surf, managing, as always, not to get their feet wet.
Kitty had to admit that her perceptions might well be influenced by the new knowledge that she was pregnant and had shared the news with Kieran at bedtime the night before. As if to remind her of his unceasing efforts to bring about this pleasant pass, he’d offered up not some tender or solicitous phrases, but the words “And about time if I say so myself”—accompanied by a pleased smirk.
When he had then fallen into Kitty’s arms, she thought at first that he’d fainted, but his recovery was quick enough. He pulled himself away and clamped his huge hands on her shoulders. Speech was impossible. The sounds coming from his mouth, from his throat, and regions farther south were completely animal: growls and roars, high-pitched screeches, then throttled screams that only a renewed plunge between Kitty’s breasts could still. He brought Kitty to such a pitch of joy that she feared she would be assumed heavenward before the great event could even take place, but was calmed somewhat when she felt the heaving of her husband’s body against hers. Her thought then was that he was sobbing, but the good man withdrew himself again and she saw and heard raucous joyful laughter that had been smothered against her flesh, now free to shiver the rafters above and the flooring below. Suddenly the laughter ceased. Kieran was looking almost fearfully into his wife’s eyes, reaching toward the deeper depths he reserved for moments of greatest tenderness. Slowly he enfolded his wife in his arms and rocked the two of them gently from side to side. Then he was crying, and Kitty, too.
Just before dawn, Kitty, still asleep, had moved her arm over toward her husband and was abruptly awakened when she failed to find him there. Her eyes opened immediately, and she raised her head from the pillow. There was Kieran, naked, at the window, his mouth half open, his brow furrowed, staring out into the growing light.
How could she not, even in her somnolent state, appreciate the splendors so readily apparent? Compared to her husband, with his rugged features and tawny beard, other men seemed over-evolved. They had gone too far beyond a previous perfection, leaving Kieran Sweeney as a reminder of what men once were and should be still. His wide-set eyes, a blazing blue, could penetrate stone, to say nothing of her own susceptible heart. His nose, somewhat oversized and leaning slightly to the left, was paired with a mouth extending beyond what lesser beings found sufficient to their needs. The chin, beneath the well-trimmed beard, could jut out farther, but had rejected the arrogance it might suggest. As for his form, it was shaped according to some lost design fashioned by gods more rugged and less fussy than their indulgent successors. The sight of his spine slanting down at an inward angle to give greater emphasis to his rock-hard buttocks was enough to forever undo her, forcing her to concentrate on his feet, which were, in mercy, not particularly interesting beyond being among the largest in the county.
Kitty, no less naked than he, slid her legs noiselessly over the edge of the bed, got up, and went to his side. Saying nothing, she, too, looked out. When he didn’t acknowledge her presence in any way, she reached up and placed her hand on his shoulder blade. She waited. She would stay silent. She would wait forever if necessary.
After a time, Kieran, still not moving, said in a low voice, “And will our child, in its cradle, sleep under the gaze of ghosts?”
Kitty hadn’t thought of that. Under circumstances of lesser importance, her ready response would have been, “We’ll jump off that bridge when we come to it.” But this was a subject far too serious to be diminished by anything snide or silly. Since she was unable to respond, she uncharacteristically said nothing.
After a respectful pause, Kieran spoke again. “She … or he … our dear, dear child, our child … and because it is our child … will see them. Brid. Taddy.” He paused again, then added, “Possibly even the pig. Do we want that?”
Again Kitty could offer nothing but silence.
After a lesser pause, Kieran went on. “What will it do to an infant to discover that the world at times exceeds its limits, that the boundaries of the real have been redrawn, that there are secrets that will make our child unlike any other, that this might force a bewildered girl or a befuddled boy into a solitude where every moment is shadowed, day and night? And we have to tell where all this began, and how and why. Born to a shame that can never be lifted. A child, to be burdened with that? And when should the tale be told? And when will it be explained? What comforts can we offer when we ourselves are descended, the same as the babe, from ancestors complicit in the hanging of Brid, the hanging of Taddy? They are ghosts, and their visitations will be perpetual reminders of an ancient wrong. And our children will be heirs to this remembrance, and their children after them. And do we say ‘Live with this if you can’? ‘Live with this as you must.’ How, Kitty, how?”
Kitty went and sat on the edge of the bed. Without raising her head, without looking over at her husband, she said, “We go to your brother’s soon. For my teaching. It was my plan to return here to the castle so the baby could be born in the place it would inherit in God’s good time. I had thought of little else.”
She waited for Kieran to say something, but he, too, had lowered his head, no longer wanting to look into the distance. Kitty’s breathing was slow and steady. She had found a solution. She had made up her mind. “We will go to your brother’s.
We will never come back—not to the castle.” Kieran said nothing. “This place will pass into other hands. To others unable to see them. To someone free of the curse that’s put upon us.”
“The curse? Or the honor?”
“Both.”
Without allowing much of an interval, Kieran said, “Someone like Lord Shaftoe? And Brid and Taddy left to hang, the harp and the loom untouched? Is that what we’re to do?”
After she’d waited for the inevitable image to pass through her mind, Kitty lifted her head. Kieran was searching the lightening sky. Kitty was tempted to go to him again, but she decided to keep some distance between them for what she had to say. “Then you know as well as I what we have to do. Am I to say the words or will you?”
No answer. Kitty remained quiet until she could wait no longer. “This castle, more my home than the house where I was born and raised, this witness to our great love, this inheritance I’d hoped to leave to our children and their children, it will come down at last. And that will be the end. There’s no other way. We’ll see to it together.”
“We’ll not do it.” Kieran spoke quietly but firmly.
“Then I’m to do it myself?”
“No one will do it. It will never be done.”
“But you yourself have been naming all thereasons—”
“Not reasons. Merely truths that have to be faced. But there are other truths.”
“Oh?”
“And they show us another way.”
“Oh?”
“The child is born. Here. In this castle. In this bed, if you will. And Brid will come to see the baby. And Taddy, too.”
“No!”
“Yes. They will come. And the child will see them; we will see them. The child will see them looking down. The child will see them in the courtyard and on the mountain. The child will see them in the orchard and … oh, Kitty, Kitty, the child will see them at the loom and at the harp—”
“But—”
“No, wait. Wait. Let me finish.”
“But you’re—”
“Please, dear wife, please.”
“Go on, then.”
“When the time comes—and it will let itself be known—we’ll tell who they are. We’ll tell why they are. And the child will hear and the child will know. The whole story, everything. Your ancestor and mine, pledged to set off the gunpowder. The journey to Tralee. And the sweet and innocent hostages taken. The nooses prepared, and their fair bodies—”
“No … Please, no more. We can’t tell a child—”
“We can. And we will.”
“How?”
“With words.”
“And who will say them?”
“I will. You will.”
“I? Never.”
“You will. And I will tell you why.”
“No ‘why’ is possible.”
“Listen. And then say that again if you can.”
“I’ll listen. And then I’ll say what I said all over again.”
Kieran shifted sideways to look directly at his wife. Kitty preferred to concentrate on the opposite wall. With quiet intensity, Kieran began. “Brid and Taddy, who they are and what happened to them, is our story as much as their own. And the story tells of our country and what it suffered and what was done to it. It’s all going, Kitty. It’s going. We are a different Ireland now. The country of Brid and Taddy is gone, and we give thanks for that at last, but it must never be forgotten. Isn’t it possible that they’re here, revealing themselves to us, not because they’ve been robbed of the eternal joy they deserve more than any, but because they want us to see them, to know their story and our story? They have died as you will die and I. We can be forgotten. But not Brid. Not Taddy. They must be remembered for all time to come, for as long as Irish blood flows through the human heart. Our child will know it. Our child will tell it—as we ourselves will have told it. And the castle stones will stand and be their earthly home. Please, Kitty, Brid and Taddy, we can’t send them away. They have a tale to tell and it must be told. It must. And it will be, for as long as I have breath to say again and again what I’ve said to you now.”
Unmoving, Kitty continued to regard the far wall. She let her breaths come and go, one after the other, neither shallow nor deep. Just the ordinary breaths that sustained her ordinary living. She got up and went to her side of the bed. She drew back the sheet and the blankets and plumped first Kieran’s pillow, then her own. She reached out her hand. With a small, sad smile, she said, “Isn’t it our time of morning? Or have you forgotten?”
Contrary to what could be common surmise, Kitty had come to the old familial ground not to wallow in sentimental communion with her forebears about her coming contribution to the future of the family line. Nor had she come to see Declan, who was known to visit the scene where—as Kitty now knew—he could try to either indulge or assuage his grief. If they should meet, she’d say but a few words if any, then do what she’d come to do and leave him to his solitary needs.
She had come to the cliff’s edge, the copy of Mrs. Wharton’s The House of Mirth in hand. When Declan had brought it to her, a remnant of her sunken house tossed onto the shore, she took it as a sign, an omen that it wanted her correction. She had, after all, kept it with that as a possibility, and its peculiar arrival could suggest that she accept the assignment. She had come to realize, however, as Teresa of Avila might once have said, “Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence.” Or, at least, that was Kitty’s chosen interpretation, which now spared her the admission that she was not up to the task. It would be with reluctant resignation, not wrathful vengeance, that as soon as the tide came to the foot of the cliff, she would toss the copy back into the waters from whence it came.
She could, of course, keep the book. It had been part of her lost library. But she feared she would see it, there in the tower landing where she fashioned her wonders, as a rebuke, a reminder that Lily Bart, the novel’s ill-fated heroine, had successfully resisted her efforts at rescue, despite Kitty’s having changed her name to Fenimore Blythe and the title of the book to The House of Fenimore Blythe.
The difficulty was that Lily/Fenimore was not as cooperative as Kitty had expected her to be. Given the woman’s release from the coincidences that had thwarted her landing a man of sufficient wealth and pedigree to guarantee lifelong happiness, she remained, as in Mrs. Wharton’s version, more than a little fussy about whom she would accept as consort.
Also, Kitty realized that the coincidences imposed by Madam Wharton, aka Pussy Jones, while distinctly unlikely, were not exactly impossible. Kitty’s accusation that Lily was destroyed because it suited Mrs. Wharton’s agenda that she should be destroyed still held. But it had to be admitted that the temper of the times in which she, Lily/Fenimore, had lived were equally responsible for her fate.
Kitty had tried making her a Wall Street whiz, a woman taking command of her diminishing stock portfolio and transforming it into a bulging bundle that not only shamed the men of her acquaintance but brought them stampeding to her door, newly aware of her charms. Who except an American or a Frenchman would want to write a novel about a stockbroker, though? Not Kitty McCloud.
Our author then granted Lily/Fenimore the advantage enjoyed by both herself and Mrs. Wharton: She would be artistically gifted. Not a writer, but, acting upon the original author’s choice of a possible profession for her heroine, a milliner—with the difference that now Lily/Fenimore had a near magical propensity for creating hats that caused a sensation, with the women of her set now the ones clamoring at her threshold, pleading not only for her hand in marriage to their dreary sons, but for one of her rather vulgar creations, one suitable for next week at the opera.
Still, Kitty wasn’t satisfied. A small voice was telling her something she had hoped to ignore, but couldn’t: Edith Wharton, had been telling truths that needed to be told; Kitty McCloud was not only obscuring but dismissing those truths. Lily’s fate had been preordained. Also, if Mrs. Wharton had been overgenero
us with her coincidences, Kitty was no less guilty with her own manipulations. She should be ashamed. And she was.
In one last effort to find a truth beyond what her predecessor had uncovered, Kitty could come up with only one inevitable but unacceptable ending. From the beginning she had rightly scorned Edith’s closing scene: Lily’s fantasy, in the last moments before her ambiguously induced death, of cradling a friend’s baby in her arms. The yearning for a child had never been an important issue for Lily, and it was disgustingly sentimental to bring it into play in Lily’s most vulnerable moment.
So what would Kitty do? Kitty came up with only one answer, the one that prompted her to shut down her computer and leave her desk. For her Fenimore there was but one honest ending. Kitty would give her the only job available to a woman in her situation—at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York in the year 1911—then let the absence of workable fire codes do the rest. Like all those other young women at the factory who had failed to find a rich and pedigreed man, she would meet her ordained doom, at first being trapped, then jumping to her death from the tenth floor to escape the flames.
A container ship had appeared and a single cloud had come from the north, bringing with it an even more intensified smell of clover. Gulls had joined the cormorants out over the sea, and behind her Kitty could hear ring plovers distressing the high grass. Below her she saw that the tide was coming in, the water still licking and lapping the foot of the cliff. She’d wait for the waves to rise higher before returning Edith’s book, neither omen nor sign, to the element from which coincidence had sent it. More aggressive waves would be needed for the undertow to bear Lily back to the drowned house and the deeply mourned bones.
She heard a car stop on the road. She turned, assuming it was a longtime acquaintance who had stopped to give her a quick greeting and exchange gossip about the tumbled house. But it was Lolly she saw, cutting off her motor. Lolly glanced over and looked at Kitty looking at her. She immediately switched the ignition back on, ready to drive off. After a light push on the accelerator, she lifted her foot. The motor slowed, then stopped. She turned off the ignition a second time, waited, then got out and came toward her best friend, Kitty.
The Pig Goes to Hog Heaven Page 15
