The Ground She Walks Upon

by Meagan Mckinney

  A soft white haze blew in from Carlingford Lough. Suddenly it struck Griffen how strange the townland looked. The four fields of Lir became liquid with the rolling fog, and the weathered gray ogham stones, the druid standing stones that separated the four fields, seemed to take shape in the fog, making serpents and elves in his imagination where before there were only rocks.

  He knew what was to come. All his life he had waited for this moment. His father had told him about it, like a family rite of passage into manhood, but though his mind had always held out the possibility of it actually happening, never had he thought it would come like this. That it would come with the land. That Ireland herself would tell him. By the eerie way the sun glowed through the mist; the way the Sorra Hills seemed to burn in the background. He had worked the fields all his seventy years, and never could he recall seeing them as he did now with the boy running through them. They were haunting, unnatural, perhaps tainted with magic.

  Behind the boy, where the mist rolled in, O’Rooney could still make out the sea, churning and spewing graphite-colored waves against the rocky coast. It would storm tonight. It would happen in a storm.

  He looked down at his hands, aged and gnarled from pulling weeds and digging graves. A gold ring so small he had to wear it on his last finger seemed to fire with the light of the fading sun. He’d worn it nearly all his life, and it seemed like an old friend. It was the middle ring of a gimmal, incised with the shape of a heart. His father had bestowed on him the ancient ring when he had told him about his destiny. The groom wore one ring of the set, his father had explained, and the bride would wear another; a trinity of rings so old they were thought to predate Christianity in Ireland.

  Griffen turned back to where the small speck of a boy pounded on the priest’s door. Lir’s fields were indeed strange this evening. Too peaceful by half, now that the sea whispered violence. Even the air was different. The smell of the ocean came in with the saturated fog. The salty, mineral scent hinted of times and places held within unreachable memory. He fought the urge to cross himself.

  “The faeries are out tonight, aren’t they?” Michael whispered to him as he too marveled at the ever-changing landscape.

  Griffen had almost forgotten O’Shea’s presence. Too preoccupied now, he didn’t answer. Mutely, he watched the boy enter the priest’s cottage. The door shut and Griffen looked up. The fog had unaccountably dispersed and the landscape looked as he remembered it, its forty shades of green grayed by an impending storm that still brewed in the Irish Sea.

  With the excitement passed, O’Shea apparently put all notions of faeries out of his mind like the good Catholic he was and went back to his cottage. Reluctantly, Griffen went back to his work, pulling weeds around the grave of a woman he used to know. Still, he gave several furtive glances at the landscape around him, as if at any moment he expected to see the strange alliance of light and shadow again. Still, his mind was on the boy and the message the lad was clearly sent to bring.

  The council would meet tonight.

  Father Patrick Nolan sat in an old tattered armchair, the note from Drummond in his hand. Moira, his housekeeper, stirred a cabbage and mutton stew in an iron pot suspended on an arm over the fire. The woman’s interest seemed to be in the stew, but he suspected by the furrow in her middle-aged brow that she was as concerned as everyone else by the arrival of the letter from the Church of Ireland rectory.

  The priest read the letter again, his lined pink lips moving as he read. His aged features, plain, moonfaced, and Irish, filled with the character of six decades of suffering and joy, seemed to grow older as he read. Older and paler. At last, he carefully folded the paper and placed it in a pocket hidden in his cassock.

  Frowning, Moira Fennerty set a place at the father’s board. She took the cracked Staffordshire plate and set it down next to the single place setting of silver flatware as she had done every evening for the father for almost twenty years. But tonight was different. He could tell she was near to bursting with the desire to ask questions. The furrow was still there.

  “’Tis a right nice stew tonight,” she said, clearly hoping to open up conversation. “I’ve some bread from Mrs. McGrath. She got some white flour on her trip from Waterford. Would you be wanting some, Father?”

  “Are you speaking to me, Moira?” he asked sternly in Gaelic.

  Moira visibly flinched. “I—I—would you like some bread with your meal, Father?” she repeated, this time in Gaelic, stumbling over her native tongue that, after centuries under the British crown, was now more foreign to her than English.

  Father Nolan shook his head and returned to staring pensively into the fire.

  “What’s in the letter, Father?” Moira blurted out, unable to hide her panic.

  “This is not what you think,” he comforted her in the language she knew best. “The vicar and I have business to attend to and it is nothing that the gossips of the county need hear about.”

  “I’ll not breathe a word to anyone. I promise.”

  The priest softened. “Moira Fennerty, I know you’re not a gossip. Now don’t be as cross as a bag of cats, but I cannot be telling you about it. I gave my word long ago, you understand?” She clearly didn’t. He looked around the cozy keeping room as if searching for the words to explain. “Perhaps you should just think of the meeting I must attend with Reverend Drummond tonight a social visit and nothing more.”

  Moira dropped the stew spoon and looked at the priest as if he were telling her she needed an exorcism. “You cannot mean to pay a social call on that … that man?”

  “That man was once a boyhood friend. Only politics separated us at manhood, and politics must be put aside for tonight.”

  “Politics! Why ’tis you who insist we all speak in Gaelic. ’Tis what them like you all over Ireland who long ago set up the hedge school so that our young could be taught to spell and write and understand our Irish ways. You’re the one to remind us of the English oppression. And now you tell me you must pay a social call on the vicar? The man whose church has no congregation and the taxes from all Ireland?”

  The priest gave a mighty sigh. “Reverend Drummond didn’t exactly stand by while the English stole our four fields. I remind you, James Drummond was born in Lir. Our Ascendency came here from England before Cromwell. Some before Protestantism. Besides … remember, even Lord Trevallyan’s mother was Irish. ’Tis hard always to tell the difference.…” He waved in the air as if his talk were confusing even himself. “Oh, I know this is difficult to understand, even I don’t understand it all the time, but think of it perhaps as our myths of Fenians and the knights of the Red Branch. Some things withstand all of time and politics. And tonight, this meeting, is one of them. You must listen and understand. I have no choice about this meeting with the vicar. We must do what we must do. I promise you, ’twill be the last meeting we have in this lifetime.”

  “But what are you to talk about? What are you to do?”

  The priest had a faraway look in his eyes. “’Tis a serious task. My own father told me that the future of our fruitful county depends on it.”

  “And for this we must shove aside our beliefs?”

  “Not our beliefs, just our politics.”

  Moira looked at him, then patted her gray hair as if to assure herself she was still all there in the midst of the unreality of their conversation. For some unworldly reason, Father Nolan was advocating that the lamb lie down with the lion. She would have been less surprised if ancient Sorra Mountain had erupted like Vesuvius. “I don’t understand a word of this, Father, but if you must go out tonight and meet with the vicar, I’ll speak not a word to anyone. I promise on the everlasting soul of Mother Mary.”

  Outside, a sudden clap of thunder echoed through the glen. The light, pelting sound of rain muffled on the thatch grew stronger as a storm moved inland.

  “’Tis going to be a foul night. Are you sure you must go out tonight?”

  The priest smiled. Moira didn’t want to say h
e was no young colt, but it would be rough going to the vicarage with no more than his pony cart to take him there.

  “A long time ago my father told me of my duty. I am part of a council, you see, that meets but rarely. This is the first in my lifetime.”

  “If the vicar weren’t calling you, Father, I’d believe you were trying to resurrect the White Boys.”

  He looked sternly at her. “I want Home Rule as any Irishman does, but I’m not willing to maim and steal to get it!” He softened. “Now put all your speculations away. I’ll go to my meeting and that’s an end of it.”

  He turned to look at the fire, but his attention was drawn downward, to his right hand draped languidly across the worn upholstered arm of the chair. A gold ring that barely fitted on his pinky finger flashed in the firelight. It was an unusual ring, with Celtic tracery forming the shape of a serpent. The bride’s ring. He would be giving it away, perhaps even tonight. As soon as they knew who she would be. His father had handed down the ring to him long ago. He’d said, You are the guardian of this ring, my son, and upon your shoulders the burden of it falls.

  The burden of it falls.

  Another boom of thunder shook the windowless cotter cottage. Moira looked up at the shabby thatched roof as if she expected it to come tumbling down upon her head. “’Tis a terrible night to go out,” she scolded, stirring the stew and clucking her disapproval like a hen. “You shouldn’t be going, and I’ll never agree that you should.”

  He opened his mouth to protest, but she raised her hand. “None of your arguing will change my mind, Father.”

  “Do as you must, Moira Fennerty,” he said, his stiff old bones rising from the armchair. He looked at his hot dinner and gave a longing sigh at the warm hearth. “Because tonight I must do the same.”

  Chapter 3

  FATHER NOLAN’S pony cart climbed the high road through driving rain to Trevallyan Castle. The castle had stood since times of old, its very foundation rumored to be built upon Celtic ruins. Irish royalty had once eaten in the great hall, but the English confiscated it in the fourteenth century. The Trevallyans had built the elegant granite towers three hundred years hence, when they were deeded the land by Henry VIII. The Trevallyans were, in the most literal sense, Ascendency, landed Irish peers whose ancestors had come from England. There were some in Lir whose bitter hatred of the Ascendency could not be quelled by centuries of intermarriage and mixed Irish-Anglo blood; these folk kept alive the burning memory of their ancestors’ lands—and, therefore, wealth—that had been brutally seized so long ago. But in most, a hatred can go on only so long. After three hundred years of intermarriage to the townfolk of Lir, even Father Nolan considered the wealthy Trevallyans one of their own. Indisputably Irish.

  “Good evening, Father!” shouted the Trevallyan coachman, Seamus, as he ran to greet him in the bailey. Seamus held the harness and assisted the aged priest from the vehicle. “’Tis terrible weather for a visit, Father. What brings you out this evening? I hope it ain’t that boy o’ mine. The rapscallion! Always in trouble with the girls!”

  The frail priest trembled from the cold and rain, yet his voice was as strong as in his youth. “No bad news about the lad tonight, Seamus McConnell, but I’ve important business with your master. I presume Greeves will show me to a warm fire?”

  “Sartinly, Father.” Seamus whistled for a stable boy. One appeared and took the pony cart while Seamus helped the priest to the castle’s ornate English oak doors. The Trevallyan butler, Greeves, met them at the front door. In seconds Father Nolan was seated before the library fire, sipping a brew of hot whiskey and cream.

  “What brings you out on such a night, Father?”

  The commanding voice made Father Nolan turn toward the doorway. Shadowed in the archway of aged, heavily waxed library doors, the master of Trevallyan stood. Though but nineteen, Niall Trevallyan seemed much older. The youth had the face of a poet, Celtic fair yet etched with tragedy, and he had the presence of a king, perhaps because, after three hundred years of English-Irish marriages, his blood ran as much Gael as Anglo. The priest had the eerie notion, especially now with the firelight casting the young man’s fine, handsome features into sinister shadow, that Brian Boru, the legendary Celtic ruler, must have looked just so before he became High King of all Ireland.

  “My lord Trevallyan, how good it is to see you again, my son.” Father Nolan tried to stand, but Trevallyan waved him back.

  “I’m surprised to see you here, Father. It’s not the kind of evening for travel.”

  Trevallyan entered the library, and Father Nolan was struck how the room paralleled Trevallyan’s character. The rich gleam of leather and gilt on the spines of the library’s thousands of books matched Trevallyan’s intelligent, aristocratic air. Yet the centerpiece of the room was not the endless tomes of modern knowledge, it was instead the portrait of his dead Irish mother over the mantel. The Celt. The progeny of a race born of kings, a race that knew nothing of modern artifice and modern manners. A race of people who could embrace their friends and murder their enemies with the same unrestrained passion. There was an underlying ruthlessness in the gleam of Trevallyan’s aqua eyes that Father Nolan knew well. The English-Irish Trevallyan blood was a stunning mix of refinement and savagery.

  Niall took the leather chair opposite the priest. Greeves tried to offer the young man a drink on a silver tray, but Trevallyan shook his head and nodded to the door. Greeves discreetly left them alone.

  “I’ve strange business tonight, my son.” Father Nolan held out his trembling hand, almost in supplication. The serpent ring on his bony finger glittered in the firelight. “And a strange tale to tell.”

  Trevallyan’s arrogant, well-cut lips twisted in amusement. “You’ve come all the way here to tell me tales? A funny thing, Father, I thought Griffen O’Rooney was the one in the townland to weave the stories.”

  “This tale is unlike his many tales. You’d be wise to heed this one well.”

  Father Nolan studied the young man. Trevallyan was groomed and well-kempt, though he was not dressed for visitors. He wore black trousers, an emerald silk vest, no neck cloth, and a starched white shirt with exemplary points on the collar. He looked at the priest with a superior tilt of his head. Niall Trevallyan’s arrogance was notorious throughout the county, but the priest found it easy to forgive in the lad. Trevallyan had lost both his parents to diphtheria when he’d been fifteen. It was rumored the estate was in debt and that the bailiff was stealing funds from the castle accounts—heavy baggage for a boy of fifteen to handle.

  But carry the load, Trevallyan did, and well. Now the lands were said to be prosperous, the castle out of debt, the bailiff jailed, and Trevallyan had just finished his second year at Trinity down in Dublin City. The arrogance was well paid for, the priest thought, perhaps even deserved. Nonetheless, Father Nolan believed there was another reason for it. When the boy had placed his parents in the cold Irish earth, he shed not a tear. Father Nolan had come to comfort the lad in his time of need, and he had stood by Trevallyan’s side for almost an hour while the boy stared at the two freshly dug graves. Finally, in an effort to help the boy through his grief, he had asked gently, “Shall we say a prayer for them, lad?” Trevallyan had answered in a voice that cracked with impending manhood, with words that still echoed through the priest’s heart as a hollow, chill wind of despair. “’Tis best you save all your prayers for me, Father.” The boy spoke no more, and at last the priest was forced by the wind and the cold to leave his side.

  Trevallyan was indeed arrogant, but the father wondered if perhaps he used his arrogance like a cloak to cover the lonely, fearful boy who could not cry at his dear mother’s grave.

  “I’ve come to wish you well on your birthday, as well, my lord,” Father Nolan said, beginning the story he knew he must tell.

  An amused, suspicious gleam lit in Trevallyan’s aquamarine eyes. “The day of my birth is tomorrow, as you well know, Father. You christened me at my mother’s reques
t, though I profess, I find no need to attend Mass.”

  “Your mother was a good Catholic, and she is in heaven, I have no doubt about it.”

  “And my father?” The gleam turned a shade darker, a shade more wicked.

  The priest shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “The earl was tied to his Church of Ireland roots. But that does not mean I’ll forget your soul, Trevallyan.”

  Niall almost smiled. “Touché, Father, but you still haven’t explained your visit tonight. It’s not the anniversary of my birth—”

  “Ah … but it is. The time of your birth was at midnight, was it not? You were born on Beltaine, the most magical night of the Celtic year, on the druid feast of Bel. In a few hours you’ll be a man of twenty. More than old enough to take a bride.”

  Trevallyan finally did laugh. “What is this all about?”

  The priest shifted forward to the edge of his seat. His serious expression caused Trevallyan’s smile to dim. “My son, do you know about the geis?”

  “I certainly know what a geis is, if that’s what you mean.” Trevallyan pronounced it the Gaelic way, gaysh. A unsettling glimmer appeared in his eyes. “How quickly you forget I’m my mother’s child.”

  By the priest’s silence it was clear that wasn’t what he meant.

  Trevallyan chuckled darkly. “What? Are you telling me I have a geis? Now, let me see the exact definition … it’s some kind of ancient bond, or code of honor, or ritual that must be performed or tragedy will fall upon its recipient, am I correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “And I have a geis?”

  “All the Trevallyan men have a geis. ’Tis the price they paid for the land you now call yours.”