Away

by Jane Urquhart

  They walked some distance in silence, the priest with his hands behind his back. Normally he would have complimented his friend on his few square acres of native landscape, its cliffs and pastures, the dark lakes and the sea in the distance. He would have commented on a neighbour’s lambs or a new calf. He would have continued with reference to the splendid view of Rathlin Island that could be had from this or that point, and he would have ended with a long speech on the island as being the best bit of rock that God had ever flung into the sea. But his thoughts were elsewhere, on a white neck, a green eye, a burning halo of hair.

  “What is it then?” O’Malley eventually asked.

  The priest looked hard at his birthplace, then into the eyes of his friend. “There’s a terrible fever sweeping the island,” he whispered.

  “Not the cholera again?” The faces of all his pupils leapt into the teacher’s mind.

  The men had stopped walking.

  “No, it’s a fever of the mind,” said Father Quinn, though he, of all the islanders, knew it was a fever of the body as well. “There’s one on the island,” he continued, “who is away.”

  “Now Father … this is mere superstition. How it persists is beyond –”

  “No, listen: you don’t believe it but it’s tragically true. She’s had one from the sea for a lover and now she’s away. Wasn’t she found asleep and he lying drowned in her arms, and the beach stones all changed and she, too, changed utterly?”

  They were walking again. “And how is it that she’s changed?” asked the teacher.

  “She’s …” Father Quinn’s voice caught on the word. “She’s beautiful.”

  “And was she not before?”

  “She’s beautiful,” insisted the priest, ignoring the question, “and she’s only speaking now in verses and songs.” Father Quinn strode angrily ahead so that O’Malley had to hurry to keep up. “And it’s the men of the island, old and young, that are stricken with the fever. Tossing, they are, on their beds at night, and then stumbling into my confession box during the day to tell me their wild thoughts. And they’ve gone all soft, no one planting or fishing, or planting and fishing without their hearts in it and having all their dreams at night taking unholy courses. And she, herself, down by the sea on that ungodly beach, singing to no one we can see, and sometimes” – the priest reddened with shame – “sometimes swimming naked.”

  “I don’t believe it!” asserted O’Malley.

  “Ah, but it’s true, I’ve seen her my –” Father Quinn broke off suddenly.

  O’Malley swallowed a smile. The shadow of a cloud pursued the two men down the road, shaded them briefly, then went on momentarily to darken the schoolmaster’s white cottage which had just come into view.

  “I’ve never seen the likes of it,” Father Quinn went on. “Everything blooming at her doorstep – and none of it planted, mind – and they say when there’s rain falling, it falls everywhere but on her mother’s cabin and she in it.”

  “And this poor, unfortunate drowned creature, who was he, then?”

  “I’ve already told you who he was. He was one of them. Sure he’d stolen some poor mortal’s flesh to be visiting her, but one of them it’s certain. Didn’t he bring an unholy flood of whiskey with him? That and a gathering of silver teapots so plentiful you couldn’t walk but you’d be crushing one beneath your heel.”

  O’Malley referred to the recent shipwreck and his own poem about it.

  “Ah yes,” said the priest darkly, “and who was it I wonder who caused this poor ship to founder? She has a look on her would tempt God himself.” Quinn’s face went soft. “Never mind bring one of them up from the sea.”

  So she was beautiful before, thought O’Malley, but he kept his own counsel.

  Entering the cottage’s gloom, the priest remembered his mission with distaste. I haven’t the cunning, he thought, of the true matchmaker. Already I’ve revealed too much. I’ve forgotten what I meant to say.

  “She’s good natured,” he began now, “and not likely to be away much longer, I’d think. Perhaps –”

  “Would you show her to me, Father?” the schoolmaster interjected.

  “Perhaps with some prayers and some holy water …”

  “I’d like to see her.”

  “Some long prayers might bring her back soon.”

  The schoolmaster squatted near the hearth, his broad back to Quinn, blowing on the ashes, hoping to find some fire to boil water for the tea.

  “Does she say the poems loud enough to hear?”

  “With some prayers she’ll not be saying them at all. Her mother says she works hard. I’ll do all I can to bring her back. If you come in a month …”

  “I’ll come with you,” Brian said, “in the morning.”

  “But she’s …”

  The schoolmaster rose, having managed to coax a flame from the remaining turf. “I’m of a mind,” he said, “to see her as she is. I’m of a mind to see her now.” He poured some water from a pail into the kettle.

  The priest walked back and forth across the flags. He hadn’t the heart to speak anymore about Mary, and his spirits were too low to introduce the topic of philosophy.

  O’Malley set the kettle to boil.

  “What was the name of that ship?” the priest asked for want of something better to say.

  “Moira,” said O’Malley. “The Moira was her name. She came out of Belfast, I believe.”

  The priest registered the name but did not comment upon it. “And where was she bound?”

  “For America, I think they said, a place called Halifax.”

  “She hadn’t gone that far on her journey, then.”

  “No,” agreed the schoolmaster, “she hadn’t gone far at all.”

  SHE awoke at first light, swimming upwards from deep, green dreams.

  The desire for the sea was on her. Liquid.

  This was the only room she had ever known. From that small window she had watched her father’s departing sail, her small hand flat against the cool glass.

  Now the room was bathed in blues and greens; the furniture dim as if holding onto night.

  In her dreams her father’s sail collapsed into a green horizon. Gone.

  His wake had tumbled around and eventually out of her memory. Coffinless. The singers and the smokers. Herself near her mother’s skirts and all the women wailing.

  She had waited for him to return for three years until even his absence became absent.

  Now she lay in the dawn with the desire on her and armies of new words in her mind requesting that she say them.

  “His forehead,” she whispered, the words pushing out past her lips, “his long arm.”

  She lay flat on her back with her hands open on her stomach, the idea of his arm as real as if it glistened there before her.

  “Just below the surface,” she began, “with the tatters of your shirt around it and the fluid between us, the flower of your hand turning in the ocean’s mind, your arm a bright banner, your forehead an approaching sail. My own arms pushing wind aside to plunge them into salt. Let me breathe this green with you and be with you. Our breastbones touching.”

  Her bed was hard and dry. Sheets rasped, papery, against her skin and blankets were heavy on her limbs. Anything solid was an impediment when there was this sea change upon her. Her body, it seemed, was composed of salt fluids: blood and tears.

  She left the cabin quietly, timing each footfall to coincide with her mother’s snores and settling the doorlatch back into place soundlessly. Soon her bare feet were covered with dew and the bottom of her skirt drenched in it. Her mind already awash with love, her eyes fixed on the black beach over which she had to walk in order to swim. Dark morning birds lifted away from the earth she walked on, her words spinning in the sky then flying over the fields to the shore.

  She would swim until cold and exertion caused her body to ache and her mouth to gasp. Then she would swim harder and he would begin to take shape. She would see his ribs in t
he sand ripples and something in the surf would begin to speak to her. “Moira, Moira,” until all of him, a taut muscle, glided by her side. Salt-lipped, slick-thighed. And afterwards they would stagger to the black beach where she put her head on his still chest.

  There was great wealth in this, great treasure. She had him, even when far from the sea in all the new words that sang and spoke in her mind and spilled from her lips. And then the pictures he had shown her: distant harbours, far shores, rivers penetrating foreign continents, a glimpse of a strange dome or monument, a riot of flowers the colour of flame dancing on a weird strand, mountains flickering on a horizon. He would open his hands under the water and there would be steeples, towers, forests, a crowded wharf.

  She could build him with stones and smooth driftwood, with salt water and sand, the architecture of his body fragile and impermanent, the sea reclaiming it when she turned again towards the world. But the next time she needed him the materials would come into her hands as she swam and she would know the pleasure, the craft of reconstruction.

  This morning, as always when she awakened on the beach, he was gone. As she stood to return to her mother’s cabin, the world drew fractionally closer. She saw the ferry crossing from Ballycastle in the direction of Rue Point, her own island. It would dock, she knew, at Church Bay, only a few hundred yards from the spot that she used to call home.

  INSIDE the not-so-picturesque ruins of Bunnamairge Friary, one mile east of Ballycastle, side by side on camp-stools, sat Osbert and Granville Sedgewick, bachelor sons of Henry Austin Sedgewick the Third. Osbert was making a watercolour of one of the Friary’s few remaining arches, and Granville was composing his forty-third lament concerning the sorrows of Ireland. Both were cold, damp, and generally uncomfortable, but unshaken in the belief that, despite the mud and water that filled their shoes and the wind that threatened to snatch their creations from their laps, they were communing happily with the spirit of their country’s past.

  Ever since the first Irish Sedgewick had been granted estates in Glen Taisie in the early seventeenth century, this family’s members, unlike many Anglo-Irish landed gentry, had exhibited nothing but surprise, delight, and a certain charmed mystification whenever they examined the details of their surroundings. Dedicated collectors of almost everything, they had dragged an extravagant amount of information and unprecedented numbers of specimens and objects into their damp, ill-lit halls, going about the task with such zeal it soon appeared they wanted all of County Antrim under glass. They scoured the coastal cliffs for birds’ eggs, flora and fauna, the moors for ancient carved stones, and the cabins of their tenants for quaint bits of folklore and songs. Their satchels bursting with the finest sketchbooks and round cakes of green watercolour paint, they committed hundreds of views to paper, and stairwell after stairwell of the ancestral home was filled with these fading efforts, the rest of the house being stuffed to capacity with cases and shelves.

  By Osbert and Granville’s time, the floorspace in the halls was as crowded as the rest of the house as a result of their father’s discovery of, and subsequent enthusiasm for, the art of taxidermy. One of every creature, great or small, that crept or ran or flew or swam in and around County Antrim was now on display at Puffin Court (so called because of Henry Austin the First’s obsession with this unusual bird which flourished on the nearby cliffs and which he was said to resemble to an uncanny degree). The puffin itself was well represented in the stuffed menagerie, appearing as guardian figures in cases filled with smaller, and more nervous, native birds. It also perched, or rather stood flat-footedly, on the backs of the horse and cow, the only two large beasts available in County Antrim since the demise of the Irish stag in prehistoric times. The puffin did not appear with the foxes but, for some inexplicable reason, a small example stood among the hounds, all of whom had been docile family pets, but who now exposed their yellowed teeth to full advantage.

  Henry Austin Sedgewick the First had authored a lengthy Latin text on the puffin – Fratercula arctica Hibernica – much of which was written from the puffin’s own point of view. “Ego sum Fratercula arctica,” it began. “Habito in ora Hibernica.” All ten copies still remained in Puffin Court’s vast and dusty library. Until quite recently, no further Sedgewicks had managed to get their musings into print, though many of the library’s shelves sagged under the weight of ancestral day books, scrapbooks, diaries, and handwritten, handbound odes and epics. Only the previous year, however, a London firm had published twenty of Granville’s laments in a small leatherbound edition, an encouragement that had inspired him to produce, in the following few months, over two dozen more.

  Granville could not compose at all, however, unless he sat, as he now did, in close proximity to some crumbling evidence of Ireland’s former glory, and hence his portable lap desk, which he kept in his knapsack, was one of his most cherished possessions. It had travelled with him to all of North Antrim’s most interesting locations; from the Giant’s Causeway to Bruce’s Cave on Rathlin Island, from Oisín’s Grave to Doonfort at Fair Head, from Dunseverick Castle to Carrick-A-Reed. Now, while his brother applied another grey wash to the old stones depicted in his watercolour, Granville was writing his lament for Bunnamairge Friary and the Black Nun he knew was buried under its threshold.

  The Sedgewicks were a fair-minded if eccentric family and Osbert and Granville were as well loved by the peasantry as any pair of landlords could ever hope to be. The tenants had given up trying to understand the family during the incumbency of Henry Austin the First and had lapsed into a kind of bemused acceptance of what was termed “the antics of themselves.” Several of the older men in the community kept their minds busy inventing new folklore to relate at their firesides during Osbert’s and Granville’s note-taking visits so as not to disappoint the young masters whom much of the male peasantry had come to know, thirty years before, during the Great Walk Making Employment – a project conceived by Henry Austin the Third when Osbert and Granville were small boys.

  In a particularly ambitious attempt to get yet another facet of County Antrim onto his demesne, if not into the house itself, the father of the boys hired fifty of his tenants to help him create suitably romantic and lengthy walks for his children. One of these promenades, two miles long and liberally scattered with man-made grottos of every description, was known as the Cave Walk. Its crowning glory was a structure made with thousands of bottles from the Ballycastle Glass Factory inserted into mud and wattles so that their necks and mouths were exposed to the air in hopes that the wind might blow into them and create “a symphony of sound.” The Cliff Walk was never completed owing to the difficulty of getting rocks large enough and precipitous enough and in sufficient quantity onto the property. Many arbours, however, sprang up at this time, as did fountains of varying intensities. Three or four artificial lakes were created, complete with the man-made islands called crannogs. Osbert’s and Granville’s creative careers had begun at the ages of six and eight when their father had commanded them to sketch, and then compose a sonnet about, one of the little crannogs. Although’s Osbert’s drawing was far superior to Granville’s, despite the former’s younger age, Granville displayed a natural aptitude for poetry. From that day on they pursued their chosen gifts, happily, never once intruding into the other’s territory, but almost always working together.

  The old Friary was a great favourite with the brothers for several reasons. First, it could be reached easily, after a pleasant hour-and-a-half stroll, downhill, from Puffin Court towards the sea. Second, its history was undeniably tragic as well as undeniably finished – a requisite for Granville’s laments if not for Osbert’s watercolours – and third, it was, of course, connected to the Roman Catholic Church for which all of the Sedgewicks, who were, naturally, Protestant, had great affection. They were charmed by their tenants’ passionate faith, by their beads and Hail Marys and crucifixes. At the time of the Catholic emancipation in 1829, bonfires were lit and torches were waved at Puffin Court in response to
those glowing all over the neighbouring hills. As might be expected, this gave rise to great suspicion in the minds of the other Protestant gentry and Presbyterian farmers in the region, but as the years went by, and the Sedgewicks goodnaturedly went on with the business of collecting gulls’ eggs and mineral specimens, and as they appeared in the appropriate church with regularity, this lack of judgement on their part came eventually to be ignored.

  The Black Nun upon whom Granville now mused was buried beneath the Friary’s portal because, in a moment of extreme humility, she had expressed a wish that, when dead, she be trodden upon by those entering and those leaving the religious house where she had lived. Why she inhabited a friary was never fully explained, though it may have had something to do with her role as a prophet. During her lifetime she had made a number of predictions, none of which had, as yet, come true, but all of which might, if one were merely to wait long enough. She predicted that Knocklaid Mountain would explode, causing a muddy flood for seven miles in all directions. She predicted that Rathlin Island would disappear into a dense fog and never be seen again. She predicted that Finn Mac Cumhail’s great dog Bran would return to Ireland in the form of a leopard hungry for British blood. And she predicted that Ireland’s liberation and independence would be announced by the appearance of a ship with sails of flame in Ballycastle Harbour. This last prediction fascinated Granville who had great sympathy for the cause of an independent Ireland. He intended to focus two stanzas of his lament on a description of this mythic ship – the sparks showering the sky, the fire reflected in the water, the Black Nun herself, her face glowing, joyfully haunting the prophesied event. Then, because this was, after all, a lament, he intended to have the whole scene evaporate before the poet’s very eyes, leaving him longing for,

  All days evermore,

  The sails of sun, the victory won,

  The joy upon the shore.