“They’ll catch us,” Finbar said.
“Feck, they won’t,” Tomas told them. His face was twisted in a mask of fury and guilt and remorse.
They stopped in indecision.
Then Teige said, “I’m not afraid of the river.”
They tied the horses loosely to each other, and Teige spoke to them and told them they must fly like their horse ancestors into the darkness and lose the ones who were chasing them. Then he blew his scent into their quivering nostrils and smacked them free.
The brothers stepped into the Shannon. Teige floated on one side of the swan and Tomas on the other. Then, with the twins flanking them and holding on tight, they moved out into the river and at once were borne away on the current.
7
And we can leave them there a moment. The part of the story that is the courtship and marriage of Francis and Emer Foley is told on winter nights when stars flock into the sky. It is told by the old to the young in cautionary tones. Sometimes the courtship alone is told and seems a story out of arcadia. She was the daughter of a hedge-school master. His name was Marcus O’Suilleabhain. He was from the County Galway and had come eastward with his family when Emer was still a child. They lived in a place not far from Carlow. Sometimes there he taught her Latin and Greek and spoke in those languages with an ease and eloquence that made him seem a figure out of times antique. He was blue-eyed and wore a grey beard. His fingers were long and thin, as his daughter would tell, and by yellow candlelight he would sit in the evenings and dip ink and write words and say these out loud as he did so. He told his daughter stories in Irish and Latin both and made in this way obscure connection between times long distant and those of their living. He loved the fair-haired girl his only daughter for the semblance she was of her mother and for the high-spirited way she had and how she held her head back when she walked in the street as the daughter of the master. When she was not yet twelve years old, he first told her the legends of the stars. He sat with her and told her these, though her mother thought she should be at bread baking or other such things. Marcus O’Suilleabhain did not care. He had no sons. He had this beauty of a daughter. He sat by her bed and talked her into sleep. And just so, between her waking and her dreams there walked on the mud floors of their two-room cottage Apollo and Artemis, and Pallas Athene, Hermes, Dionysus, such figures. She had been born in Virgo, and when in the spring and summer her stars could be seen, Marcus recounted to her the legends of the winged virgin. She was the queen of the stars, he said, the goddess of the corn. She loved one who was cut down in his prime, and she had to travel through winter to the Underworld to bring him back. But she did. For, see, the winter ends and she returns with him every spring. The master told her there were many names for her, the lovers were Venus and Adonis, or Isis and Osiris, but whichever there was always the grief and the journey and the promised return.
Like Virgo, then, the independent and free, Emer grew more beautiful and fiery still. She sat at the classes her father held in an open cabin whose thatch leaked drowsily, and sometimes she taught the very youngest ones. Then her father died. The school like a figment or a thing of air vanished overnight, its students gone. Emer lived on with her mother and then for her living took work washing in the house of a landlord, Taylor. Her childhood and girlhood were like linen, taken up and folded away.
She was a young woman beautiful and proud and silent unless provoked. Then her anger would flash out in fierce indignation. Her mother caught fever in the wet autumn of Emer’s twentieth year and died before Christmas. She was alone. For the natural elegance of her bearing she was moved into the position of dining maid and given a small room in the attic. She lived there some years and attended the table of those genteel who ate lavish feasts served from silver tureens and platters and drank from goblets of crystal. There was a sorrow in her manner that beguiled the gentlemen. They spoke of her when she left the room. Some tried to draw her with remarks and soft flatteries, but always she turned them away.
In the April of a year, Francis Foley saw her in the market of Carlow town. She was standing at a stall. Her hair blew about her in the breeze. He did not speak to her. He studied her until she turned and took her purchases and went back through the town and out along the road to the big house. Briskly he was behind her. He left his horse and went on foot and was a short distance back, as if it were she leading him, like a tame pony, leading him out of one life into another.
As a young man Francis Foley had been outlaw and rebel for his country. His father had been hung for participating in plots treasonous and bloody. He had grown up hiding in woods, taking instruction from white-faced thin fellows who arranged attacks on magistrates and agents and spies. He had lived seemingly without life of his own, yet he was strong and powerful. He assisted at the assassination of plump men scented with cologne. In his youth, he had walked in the footsteps of his father, grandfather, and more great-grandfathers than he knew. He rode with his brother, Aengus, taking vengeance to be justice and thinking they were righting what was wrong in the history of the country. Then, on a failed raid on a barracks in Tipperary, Aengus was shot and died afterwards beneath a hedge in a field wet with rain. Francis Foley lost his spirit then. He grew silent and went off by himself and did not again meet with those who promised freedom was near. He took work for short term in season of harvest or spring. Anger still rose and bloomed within him sometimes. Sometimes he saw inequity and injustice and had to keep his chin set and knuckles deep in his pockets. Such times when he thought he should return to the life of a rebel, he thought of Aengus in the field, and the anger did not so much pass as turn into grief. So his life was, working itinerant and travelling between farms and estates, until the noon he saw Emer O’Suilleabhain at the market.
He followed her.
“Ailinn,” he called after her when she turned in at the gates of the house. Beauty.
She stopped in the road. She had known he was following her. She had already weighed the possibilities of the moment like pebbles in her palm and, with the intuition gifted her by a grandmother who spoke with fairies, knew that her life would roll from her fingers into those of this stranger.
“Is it me?” she said in Irish, turning her face into the fall of her fair hair.
When he came to her, Francis Foley fell into the first reverence of his adult life. He lost at once the hoop of words he had expected to throw over her. He said nothing. Emer smiled. The soft April noontime touched them both, then she said: “I suppose I shall see you tomorrow on this road.”
There was no reply, though the air between them was already eloquent. Emer walked on. Francis lay himself in against the weeds in the ditch. The following day he awaited her there. When she arrived a thin rain was drizzling and a scarlet headscarf covered her hair. Without slowing her walk, she passed along by where he stood and then felt the presence of him in her stride. It was as if she had collected him, and he her, and they were in each other’s air already. So, without words, they walked off the road to the town and into the damp new grass coming in the meadows.
From the first, Francis Foley gave her his dreams. The dreams he had once dreamed for his country now became the condensed but powerful dream of a perfect place for this woman to live and bear their children. He imagined it fiercely. He told Emer the home he would make for her. He described it as if it were its own republic, as if he hoped now to step outside the reality of history and find a place only theirs. Emer raised her eyebrows at him yet loved the way he made her feel again a queen. When she went out with him in the nighttimes after the dining was done and the ware washed, he made her forget the disappointments of her life.
She lay back on his coat in a field under the night sky.
“Do you know the stars?” she asked him.
“Some of them I know.”
“My father told me their names and stories,” she said, and then told him something of the old master and of the stars’ names in Latin.
He listened and loved
her more still and the following days went and inquired of a schoolmaster thereabouts names of further constellations, and these he brought to Emer like the gifts of that courtship.
“I want a place for us,” he said to her.
“There are many places. Where will we go?”
“We’ll have a house of our own.”
“Yes,” she said. “A fine house. A house with a yard and garden and hens.”
“I will make it for you. I will make the finest house any man ever made.”
“You won’t be able to.”
“I will.”
She angled herself on her elbow and looked into his face, pale in the night.
“You are a man who thinks he can change the world.”
“Of course I can,” he told her, and took her in his arms.
They married in May. Emer ran to him at the end of the avenue when the sky was releasing its stars and the night sweetening with scent of almond from the furze. The May night was warm syrup. The tenderness of the air, the hushed green of the world that was luscious, sensual, primordial, the soft low light, the sighing breaths of beasts in the fields, all these entered their memories that night as if such things were themselves the guests at the wedding. They met the priest at the roofless ruined chapel of Saint Martin’s and were married with a twist of Latin over their heads like a cheap, invisible corona. When the priest had slipped batlike into the shadows, Francis Foley and Emer clung to each other. It was long moments before they moved. Then they ran down the road and across the nighttime fields to a stone cabin for cattle, empty now, and which was the first house of all those that fell short of Francis Foley’s vision of paradise.
They began a home there. She left her work. He would not have her going there, and she herself was glad to walk in with her head high and say she would not be back. Then there was a brief blue summer of three weeks before the weather turned around and came at them from the east. The wind burned the hay. Seeds did not come to proper fruition, trees lost their leaves in August, and by September a fierce winter had already arrived. Emer carried their unborn son like a promise of new spring and watched the dark days for signs of light. Her husband, who had dreamed so extravagantly, had to hire himself at fairs. He disappeared before dawn and did not return until the physical exhaustion of his body was brought about by those who paid him less than the cost of feeding their horses. Slowly, so slowly, a sour disappointment seeped into the cottage. Tomas was born in January, when the snow was lying thick on the fields and there was no work even at the fairs. They ate small birds and berries. In the deep silence of the one dim room their marriage staggered under the impossible weight of dreams. Words were a reminder of other words and went unsaid, but the vision of the place that had been conjured remained. It lingered like a shadow in the corner, and soon Francis Foley could not look at the leaking thatch, or a place where the mud floor puddled, without hearing the reproach and mockery of his own words. Years slipped past them. The twins were born. Francis lay in the low bed at night and listened to the scouring wind and then for the first time in his adult life said a prayer to God for guidance.
He was too rash and independent a man to wait long for reply, and the following morning when none had come, he loaded his wife and family on their small cart and moved them northeastward into the wind. Emer did not want to go.
“This is madness,” she said.
“Nothing is gained by sitting still,” he told her as the gale bit off his ears. “This is not our home.”
“It could be.”
“No, it couldn’t. Look at it. We are going. This is not what I promised you.”
“What if I said I didn’t care?”
“You’d be lying.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“This is not our home.”
They wandered like biblical travellers looking for a sign, and were met with blizzards. Gulls were blown out of the sky. To keep his family alive, Francis stole sheep and killed them with his hands. They slept under hedges of whitethorn, the father lying himself down and letting the others rest wrapped upon him as the cold rose into his bones and by the dawn made of his face a white, bloodless mask.
When at last they found a place to live, it was no better than the one they had left behind. They stayed a year and two months, then moved again.
And so on it went, that life of struggle and hardship that followed the innocent days of love so swiftly that soon they themselves were almost forgotten and survived only as the thinnest faded memories of a once upon a time sweetness. They did not find a home. They lived on for times in various cabins and ruined cottages, deeply mired in the disappointment of their dreams. They stayed awhile and then moved, each time at the insistence of Francis over the increasing resistance of his wife. At last, when Teige was born Francis found work as one of an army of gardeners on an estate. They had a small cottage. The country itself was lost too in disillusionment. Spies and betrayals were everyday, the air of towns was opaque with mistrust and the yellow scent of greed. Those who owned the land did not live on it, and those like Francis who worked it imagined they were little more than the beasts in the field. It was a long, hard kind of living. And though he heard the whispered news of rebels, the perennial plots and hot dreams of those who promised a new country of their own, Francis Foley resisted joining them. He bowed his head and stayed working, clucking the horse and leading the mower down the long lawns of the estate, trimming the hedges and tending the perfect gardens of Lord Edward James Fitzroy of the county of Essex.
Emer was by then almost contented. She was the mother of four boys. She tried to teach them classes in the Latin and Greek her father had taught her, but Tomas was impatient to be with his father and the twins rolled and knocked each other about and showed little interest. Only Teige sat and listened. His hair was first blond and then fair brown, and he had a way of sitting in close attention that was serene and knowing. His mother told him he would be a master. She ruffled his hair and touched his face with floury fingers.
But trouble was already gathering. Francis had no garden of his own and tended another man’s instead, clipping the laurel bushes that the lord himself never saw, grooming them into globes of green in case the lord should visit this year, and bringing home the clippings to add to the stew of their dinner. He planted potatoes, dug carrots and turnips and parsnips that were marshalled in such straight lines that they mocked the crooked stonewalled boundaries of the fields outside the garden. His hands grew black with earth. When the old angers rose in his chest, he reached down and tore at the weeds with fury. And shortly he was noticed by the head gardener, Harrington, for none rooted at the ground like him or pulled up the stumps of dead trees or turned over the soil with the same fury.
The garden was a kind of paradise. It was made to defy the typical view of that country in the drawing rooms of London. From there, the neighboring island was a place unruly and wild where everything rioted in nature and a straight line was not to be seen. But in that garden was a proof of empire, a living evidence that in the hands of the educated and well-bred even the most inauspicious place, the damp, dreary ground of that estate, could become transformed into an elegant country residence that would not offend a visiting lord. It would both reflect and inspire. It would show the natives the advantages of dominion, of what could be done, mirroring in its majesty the glory of its owner while subduing them to it at the same time.
Within it, Francis worked silently from grey dawn until the gloaming. The years ran into his hands and lined his skin like the knots in trees. The lord never came. The house was prepared several times, fires lit, woodsmoke hanging in the trees, and every plant and bush in the garden balanced on the instant of its best display. Rain was prayed away. Maids ran about in black dresses with white aprons and caps and polished the dishes that had never been used. The world waited and was disappointed once more.
It was the evening after one of those false visits, when all day eyes had watched the avenue for His Lordship�
�s arrival and the gardeners had looked at their garden as though it were the painting of a garden, a masterpiece in which every detail had been painted just so, that Francis Foley came home angrily to Emer. He sat at the table and placed upon it his hands brown with mud.
“What are we doing?” he said to her.
“We are living our life. Get yourself cleaned,” she told him.
“We have nothing.”
“Stop. Don’t. I know what you are going to say and I don’t want to hear it, Francis,” she said, and went to get the food for the dinner. The boys stood about and watched silently to see calamity coming. But that evening it did not.
Later that night Francis left the cottage in the falling darkness and broke into the big house. He felt he had been scorned by the lord and that this was only the latest of all those assaults life had made on his dreams. He opened a window and stepped inside that mute and perfect world. He walked through its ordered elegance, down the polished oak floors that reflected the stars, and into rooms that offered themselves like nervous debutantes, hoping for approval. He stood in the bay window and saw in the stellar light the long view down the garden. He saw it the way it was meant to be seen, and in those moments, hearing his own breath sighing in the empty house, he was struck with a cruel knowing of how completely he had surrendered his soul. Bulbs of anger exploded inside him. He was in the middle of his life and realized how much of it was lost. He touched the smooth painted sill with his fingertips, then he crossed the dark room and looked out at the western view of the rosebed, the eastern view of the boxwood. He moved from room to room to see out through each of the windows, and as he did, his rude boots making creaking noises on the floors, he felt a tightening in his heart. The whole country is a jail, he thought. They have us prettying it up for their visits, and they never even come. He was in the library looking outward, and when he turned away from the garden view in anger, he saw behind him the great brass-and-wooden contraption that was the telescope.
The Fall of Light Page 4
