Stolen Child

by Laura Elliot

  Stolen Child

  Laura Elliot

  With love to my husband, Sean Considine.

  Thank you for your invaluable support throughout the writing of Stolen Child.

  Come away, O human child!

  To the waters and the wild

  With a faery, hand in hand,

  For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

  From ‘The Stolen Child’ by William Butler Yeats.

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Chapter Eighty

  Chapter Eighty-One

  Reading Group Questions, Laura Elliot:

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  By the same author:

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  Susanne

  Midsummer 1993

  I buried my baby on the shortest night of the year. We were shielded by old walls as I laid her to rest in a shadowy wilderness of lilac and elderberry. She was my almost-child, my shattered dream. Sixteen weeks in my womb before she came away. Born on the longest day of the year, webbed fingers and toes, her veins delicate as skeins of silk. Sweet little monkey face.

  The pain took me by surprise. When it came, I was standing by the gate leading into Dowling’s Meadow, feeding sugar lumps to Augustus. I heard gunshots in the distance. Mitch Moran, clay pigeon shooting again, and, beyond the lane, the pulse of traffic as cars, driven too fast along the narrow road, signalled an end to another working day. Such a twilight, clouds streaking like lava across the sky, the rooks looping and clamouring above the trees. Then I felt it, the familiar cramping in my stomach, the low drag on my spine.

  Sugar crunched like icicles under my feet when I stepped back from the gate. The pain was slight at first and eased quickly, as if teasing me into the belief that I was imagining it. I walked carefully back towards my house, hoping there was still time to save her. But the evening was on fire, a conflagration setting the countryside alight, and the scattering rooks fell through the air like charred scraps of paper. Even the flowers in the hedgerows hurt my eyes, the scarlet pimpernel, the blood-red poppies swaying as I bent over them, cradling my stomach until the pain eased and I could walk again.

  I knelt on the bathroom floor and gripped the edge of the bath. The cramps ebbed and surged, each one becoming more insistent, more cruel. Each one signalling the end of another dream. I thought of ringing David but, even before I uttered the words, he would hear my ragged breathing and know. He was too far away to bring me comfort and I could not bear his disappointment, not yet. I thought of ringing my gynaecologist, an austere man with a masterful knowledge of the female anatomy, but he has never been able to answer my most basic question. Why? He would shake his head and offer false comfort, assurances and condolences. I thought of ringing my mother-in-law. Miriam is practical and kind. She would come immediately and drive me to the hospital, not saying much, because it had all been said before. But I stayed where I was, knowing that what was about to happen would be swift and soon. No waiting around, no false hope, no time for anything other than the fluid separation between life and loss.

  Once again, my body had betrayed me. Once again, it had defied my will and destroyed what David and I, with grim determination, had created.

  Body and mind are one, Miriam always argues, the spirit and the flesh, compatible and whole. Wrong…wrong. The body triumphs every time and I am left holding the husk.

  This little one had no fight. She slid cleanly away, so tiny, yet capable of so much brutal force as she left me. I remember wailing. I needed to keen this loss and I was glad to be alone, not subjected to the constraints of a hospital where the feelings of others must be considered. When I could cry no longer, and such a time will always come, I went through the rituals of separation. Familiar rituals by now and usually carried out by efficient midwives, their expressions sympathetic, their eyes gazing beyond me to the other mothers, the ones with reasons to rejoice.

  I wrapped my daughter in a soft white towel and rocked her in my arms. I rested my back against the wall. It grew dark outside. I felt hot then cold, my thoughts lucid then drifting. Why fight any longer? Someone would find us eventually.

  I ignored the phone when it rang. The caller was insistent. The sound made me quiver but I stayed where I was. The silence, when it stopped, pressed against my ears. I became conscious of other sounds: the creak of old wood, the hiss and gurgle of pipes, the intrusive sighs of a house that has belonged to many generations. The bathroom blind clanged against the window frame and demanded my attention. I wanted to rise and close the window, keep out the scent of the night scented stock I had planted in the spring. It wafted in waves through the stifling atmosphere: sweet and cloying, demanding my attention.

  The phone rang again. I became afraid. If it was Miriam, she would drive over to see why I was not answering. Earlier, I had left her working late in her studio. She was probably still there burning the midnight oil, as she usually did when she had an exhibition coming up. If it was David calling from the oil rig, he would ring his
mother and the result would be the same. She would drive over immediately to check that all was well. The back door was open. She would enter unannounced and then it would be too late.

  I stumbled to my feet and laid my baby, my still and silent little bundle, on the floor. I opened the door of the living room. My hip knocked against the sideboard. Yellow roses drooped in a vase. Some petals had already fallen and more followed, spilling silently onto the polished wood, as if my laden breath had disturbed their fragile link to the stem. How long had I been drifting? Minutes, hours? Somewhere, in my mind, I was still bending over the blood-red poppies and the rooks were swirling.

  My suspicions were correct. Miriam’s anxiety was carefully controlled yet it stretched, taut as a membrane, between us. She asked how I was and I told her I was fine…fine. My voice was steady. That surprised me. Steady and calm while inside I was howling.

  This was the second time she had called, she said, and she waited for an explanation.

  I told her I’d been walking – such a fine, balmy evening. She warned me that the lane could be dangerous, easy to trip on a broken branch, to slip on mulching leaves; she knows every step of the lane, as David does, but I am a city woman, transplanted.

  ‘I’ll drop in and see you on the way home,’ she said. ‘I want to show you the new sketches.’

  I almost blurted out the truth. But I thought about the last time, and the time before, and before…and the well-worn, well-meaning platitudes that stretched thinner and thinner each time she uttered them. Tomorrow, when I was stronger, more able to handle my grief, then I would break the news.

  ‘I’m on my way to bed,’ I said. ‘I’ll look at them tomorrow. Talk to you then.’

  I walked to the front door and folded my arms, pressed them against my breast. Light spilled around me but, beyond the porch, an impenetrable darkness stretched across the Burren. It seemed, as I stood there, that the night was whispering, that even the wind breathed my pain. In the rustle of leaves against the wall I heard the whispers and I heard them rise above a howl that lunged from the darkness. Phyllis Lyons’s dog barking at the moon, the sound silenced as suddenly as it started. But still the whispering continued. I felt myself sinking into the powerful refrain, my lips moving, framing the words, making them audible – No more…no more…no more…

  What does premeditated mean? Is it a conceived plan – or a thought unborn until the moment of delivery? I wrapped my baby in a white blanket and sealed her in a plastic shroud. I carried her gently to the old cottage in the lane. It hulked in the half-light, a crumbling ruin, shouldering briars and ivy, the ground covered in dense banks of nettles. Children once played within these crumbling walls and slept beneath a thatch that hugged them tight. Long gone now, both the children and the thatch. I stumbled through the weeds and the high purple thistles that pushed their heads through the cracks in the stone floor. I laid her down on white bindweed bells and dug her grave outside the walls.

  The garden has long lost its form. A low drystone wall marks its boundaries. In the summer the whitethorn and lilac grows wild, and the ripe fruit drops silently from a longforgotten plum tree during the autumn months. I wanted to name her. Everyone needs a name to stamp their identity on this world, no matter how brief their stay. Joy, I whispered. You would have brought us such joy. My body ached, bled, wept for what I had lost; but when I left that place, my mind was a cold, determined force with no room for grief or doubt.

  In the hallway, I paused before a mirror. The weight I had gained during my brief pregnancy seemed to have fallen from my cheeks. My eyes had steel in the blue, a stranger’s eyes staring back at me through swollen eyelids, defying me to question or condemn. My hair looked dark, the blonde strands lank with sweat and mud. I was unrecognisable from the woman who had earlier walked the lane; yet, it seemed effortless, this casting aside of an old skin and stepping into the new.

  I slept and awakened, slept again. I had no memory of dreams. Dawn was leaching the stars from the sky when I arose and showered dirt from my body, burned my clothes, the towels, the bathroom mat. I washed the floor and walls. I threw out the yellow roses. A bird sang outside the kitchen window, a shrill, repetitive solo, until others took up the song. Their chorus throbbed through the morning.

  I rang Miriam and told her I would work from home for a few days. Too many interruptions in the office and I had spreadsheets to prepare, catch-up phone calls to make. Later, David rang from the rig.

  ‘Our baby moved,’ I told him. ‘Like a butterfly, fluttering wings beneath my heart.’

  The words turned to ash in my mouth but they had been spoken and I heard him sigh, as if he had placed his hands upon my belly and felt his child respond. And all around me, in the cracks and crevices of these walls, in the nooks and crannies of this old house, in the chinks of all that had passed since I moved here, the voices whispered – No more…no more…no more.

  Chapter Two

  Susanne

  September 1993

  Carla Kelly is everywhere. The public face of Anticipation. I see her on billboards and bus shelters, in glossy advertisements. Her white teeth, her full pink lips, her long blonde hair, and that look in her brown eyes, that amber shimmer of contentment; earth mother-to-be, with attitude and glamour.

  These days, she’s the first celebrity to be interviewed in the media whenever the subject of pregnancy is aired. She writes a column in Weekend Flair. ‘My Pregnancy Diary’ she calls it. How to retain one’s sexuality and sense of fashion during those long nine months. Promoting Anticipation all the time. One thing about her, she always was professional.

  The Anticipation maternity collection, Dee Ambrose told me when I called into the Stork Club boutique this afternoon, is the most popular label she’s ever carried. Lorraine Gardner is an excellent designer and she’s touched gold with Anticipation. I was so impressed, I bought a pair of fine wool trousers and a silk twist top.

  Perfect for the final trimester, said Dee, and wrapped them in tissue paper before placing them in a carrier bag. Anticipation was written in gold lettering against a black background. An elegant bag for an elegant collection. On the way out of the boutique, I almost collided with a lifesize cutout of Carla Kelly. Dee laughed, noticing how my mouth opened with an apology in the same instant that I realised it was part of the promotion.

  Only the big campaigns can afford her now. Her career took off after that lingerie promotion. It gave her an edge, a notoriety, all that sleek flesh and red lace flashing from the billboards. Drivers rang talk radio and complained that her image distracted them during rush-hour. Lorraine Gardner wouldn’t have had a chance of running her Anticipation campaign if Carla Kelly hadn’t been her sister-in-law.

  I carried my carrier bag like a banner to the Nutmeg Café where I’d arranged to meet my mother-in-law. The rain fell steadily as I crossed Market Square and I walked carefully on the slippery cobblestones. A wretched day for the Saturday market, what with the wind billowing the awnings and people scurrying past the stalls towards the nearest shelter.

  The Nutmeg was crowded. The smell of damp wool reminded me of crowded buses on muggy school mornings. Women stopped at my table to tell me I was blooming. Even the cashier, a frail, round-shouldered woman, smiled as if she’d known me all her life and said my bump had become enormous since the last time she saw me. I’ve no memory of us ever meeting but she knew that David had returned to the rig and that I’m planning an end-of-season discount sale at Miriam’s Glasshouse. I grew up in the solitude of crowds but here, where the population is sparse, everyone seems to know my business. Miriam arrived at the Nutmeg shortly afterwards and apologised for being late. Something to do with bumping into acquaintances on every corner she turned. She hugged me. Took me quite by surprise. No time to move before I was enveloped in her arms. My motherin-law has a habit of nudging and hugging and tapping me when I least expect it. I’ve never grown used to her effusiveness. I expect it’s to do with my upbringing – nothing touchy-feely about my
parents. I’ve told her about my childhood. The silence and the separation, two people living on either side of a glass wall of indifference, so steeped in their own unhappiness they were incapable of reaching out to me.

  ‘It explains a lot,’ Miriam said, and pitied me for the tenderness I’d never experienced.

  I’m willing to endure her pity but not her touch. ‘Don’t tempt fate,’ I warn her when she asks if my baby is moving. Now she no longer seeks permission to rest her hands on my stomach, but today in the Nutmeg she hugged me so tight I thought my heart would flip over.

  Phyllis Lyons entered and came straight to our table. No asking, just an assumption that, as Miriam’s school friend and my nearest neighbour, she had every right to join us. She picked up my Anticipation carrier bag and placed it on the table.

  ‘Go on, girl,’ she said. ‘Give us a look.’

  I lifted out my new purchases and held them up for inspection. Miriam thought the twist top was a wonderful colour. ‘Sapphire blue, a perfect match for your eyes,’ she said, and ran her hand over the silky fabric. ‘So glamorous,’ she added, ‘yet it looks so comfortable.’

  Phyllis checked the price tag. ‘Mother of God,’ she said. ‘Are you made of money or what? What’s the sense of glamour when you look like a whale? If I were you, I’d just keep letting out the waistband.’

  What does she know? She’s a middle-aged spinster and gone beyond all that now.

  Miriam looked apologetically at me and placed my clothes back in the carrier bag. She finds Phyllis as irritating as I do, but neighbours, she warned me when I first came to live in Maoltrán, have long memories. It’s wise to keep on their good side.

  ‘I feel sorry for her,’ she said, when Phyllis finally left to pick up a prescription for her mother. ‘It’s no joke looking after a creaking door and that mother of hers has been creaking for as long as I can remember.’

  She asked when I was due to see Professor Langley again. ‘Next week, I told her. I’ll take the afternoon off, if that’s okay with you?’

  ‘Of course…absolutely.’ She nodded vigorously. Her anxiety smothers me. The harder she tries not to show it, the more obvious it appears. She’s nervous about the long distances I drive. But I’m her marketing manager. It’s my responsibility to meet with customers. She keeps telling me to start my maternity leave and take it easy for the final months.