Kit (2 page)

She watched Richard fondly, as he rolled the beer barrels into the cellar on a long tilted plank, the muscles bunching under his cambric shirt. He looked up at her, direct green eyes through a nut-brown fall of hair, and smiled. She had been so
right
to marry Richard. Kit and Aunt Maura had had their first and only quarrel when Kit had announced her intention to marry Richard Walsh, a humble potman who’d worked at Kavanagh’s since he was a boy. ‘I
like
the lad,’ her aunt had said, ‘Mary and Joseph, I almost raised him – but with your looks and Kavanagh’s to go with it you could have any man in Dublin.’ Maura waved away her niece’s protests and the pipe smoke together. ‘To be sure, he’s a good man and a solid one. But …’ Maura sucked her pipe as she sought the words. ‘He’ll do whatever you expect of him every day of his life. He’s
safe
.’

Of all the objections Kit might have expected, she had not foreseen this. Maura, kindly sensible Maura, had seen that seed of adventure in her, had known that Kit was a girl who would always choose to roll down a hill instead of walking. Perhaps she had been a girl who would roll down a hill instead of walking, too.

A second too late, Kit returned her husband’s smile; but he’d turned away and she found herself smiling fiercely at his back as he rolled the next barrel. The smile froze a little. She could see a long way ahead in that moment; her life with Richard – home-keeping Richard who had lived in the alehouse since he was a boy and would most probably die here. There would be children in between perhaps, and christenings and Communions and weddings, but one day Kit too would move from one side of the bar to the other. She would go from serving customers to counting money at the end of the bar, while her son or daughter took over. She would wear Maura’s fingerless gloves, smoke Maura’s pipe, and mark the days until she too ‘went next door’, as the regulars said, to the cemetery.

And just for a moment, she wanted something
more
. The impulse Maura had detected in her, the impulse that had made her roll down Killcommadan Hill, had not left her. She longed, in that instant, for adventure.

As if in response, from somewhere above the bar came a sound, hardly discernible above the low chatter. She looked up at her father’s sword, hanging horizontally above the ranks of bottles. Her first act as the new taverner had been to hang Sean Kavanagh’s blade over the bar, and there it had stayed, silent and silver from that day to this. But now it was singing in its bracket, vibrating with a barely perceptible ringing timbre, sweet with threat. Kit put a single finger up to still it. It felt alive. As she took her finger away a tiny red line appeared across her fingerprint. Then the line beaded like a rosary and she saw that it was blood. She sucked at her finger and flipped up the wooden top of the bar. ‘Mind the bar, Aunt?’ she mumbled around the finger, moving to the doorway, hitching her gown and repinning the heavy copper coils of her hair as she went.

Old Eamon said, ‘Expecting company, Kit?’

‘Only the King of Spain’s daughter, Eamon, come to ask for your hand,’ replied Kit with a smile.

She went to the doorway, and looked up at the inn sign, softly swinging – in, out – familiar as breathing. ‘Kavanagh’s’ painted on a red ground, with the family crest of one red lion and two red crescents on a white shield. And the Latin tag below which no one, even Aunt Maura, knew enough to read.

Kit looked right to Prospect Gate. The sun was setting over Glasnevin cemetery and the cross-shaped shadows lengthened. The stone angels folded their wings and looked down, the stone doves roosted on the headstones, and the dead settled in for another eternal night. All was peaceful in grey-black and green, framed under Prospect Arch. No dead walked, no earth was overturned – but the sound, that regular pulse that shook the very ground, began again from somewhere distant.

Kit looked the other way towards the city, and that’s when she saw it: a great swathe of red flowed down the Dublin road, red as the blood on her finger. Hundreds of boots struck the cobbles in time, marching nearer. The rhythmic heartbeat of the drum, the martial pipe of the fife. She fled back inside, telling herself the excitement she felt was fear. ‘Best roll the barrels back up,’ she called to Richard. ‘The regiment is coming.’

It was the most profitable night that Kit could remember. It was also the busiest, sweatiest, bawdiest and loudest. Aunt Maura could barely count the shillings as they slipped like silver fishes through her gnarled hands. Kit, running hither and yon with three tankards in each hand, smiled, nodded, avoided grabbing hands, whirled from one table to the next. She was exhausted but elated; never was there such a hostess as she. There was a kind greeting for each polite officer, a scathing put-down for every drunkard, a witty riposte for every flirtatious ensign, and a smile for the drummer boy. But she was jolted, too, by their presence. She listened to their general chatter but could not make head nor tail of it – there were words she didn’t know, countries she’d never heard of, cities and campaigns that were foreign to her. Fort Maurepas, Kaiserwerth, Cadiz, Klissow. But one snippet she did understand. The king, apparently, was dead.

The king is dead … now that the king is dead … of course, that’s all changed now that the king’s dead.
Kit was confused. The only king she’d known was William, the king who’d killed her father, the king whose head had been on the sovereign she’d been given, and he’d died in the spring, fallen from his horse. There was a queen on England’s throne now, for the shillings Kit took over the bar had gradually changed from William to Anne.

‘What king?’ she bawled to Maura over the row. ‘Who died?’

‘King of the Spaniards,’ her aunt shouted back. ‘Never fret. He’s nothing to us. But Old Eamon won’t get his daughter, I’m afraid. He died with no child.’ She laughed, showing her pipe-stained teeth.

Kit turned back to the throng. She was half-frightened, half-excited by these red-coated devils. For they had other words too. She had thought that two years of working in an alehouse had made her deaf to curses, but she heard oaths that she had never heard before, words that made her blush. They seemed larger than life, these soldiers – something more, something extra than other men – their colours vivid like stained glass after rain. Just for a moment she pictured Richard in a red coat, with a guilty thrill of longing. The longing turned to a sick lurch in her stomach, and suddenly they seemed too much, those militaries: their vitality, their gaudiness, their number. They were so male, so … alive. Had her father been this way too, among his fellows? Did they live so loudly because they knew they would die?

Overwhelmed all of a sudden, Kit escaped down the stairs to the cool cellar and laid her hot cheek on the damp cold stones of the wall. The noise receded to a muffled hubbub. She breathed in the peaty smell of stone, then a warm circle of arms closed around her. A jag of fear – had one of the devils followed her to the underworld? Hot lips pressed to her neck, nuzzling the tumbled curls at her nape.

‘Can you serve
me
now?’ A low-voiced growl, a fair imitation of raucous army tones.

She didn’t turn, but smiled at the wall. ‘What are you doing down here? Get gone, and be quick about it; my husband is above. He will fight you to the death to protect my honour.’

‘What honour, you wanton woman?’

He turned her round, and pressed his hot body to hers. ‘They all wanted you,’ he whispered fiercely. ‘How many of them touched you here?’ Hands on her breasts. ‘Or here?’ Hands on her buttocks, the buttocks a fancy gentleman once paid to see.

She arched against him and kissed him back hard, tasting ale on his lips. Her assailant had been drinking, heavily. She made to push him away, her arms suddenly as weak as her knees.

‘No, I want you
now
,’ he protested, ‘for I have to ride tonight.’

‘Where to?’ She could barely speak through the sweetness, his lips now moving lower.

He mumbled into her bosom. ‘Over the hills and far away.’

‘I have to go back,’ she protested. ‘I must serve the regiment. But,’ she smiled till the dimples came, ‘come to my room after closing time. Then you can have all you desire.’

‘And your husband?’

‘He’ll never know.’

A final kiss. ‘He’s a damned fool to take his eyes off you for an instant.’

Then he straightened. Groaned. ‘Would to God they would all go,’ he said in his normal voice. ‘I would close the bar right now if you’d let me.’

Kit smiled at her husband. ‘Not when they are so free with their shillings. It won’t be long now till closing.’ She laid a hand on his hectic cheek. Richard turned his head, kissed the hand and was gone.

Without him, she was suddenly ashamed of their game. Her cheeks flamed. Little
fool
to have her head turned by a red coat, like any camp-follower. Like her mother. She did not want a soldier, didn’t want to keen and cry every night wondering where her man was. She wanted Richard – safe, sweet Richard. She forced a smile and followed her husband upstairs.

Then the smile died. A snatch of song floated down the stair, wreathed her ribs and stopped her heart.

She had to lean on the wall. She had to listen.

‘Arthur McBride’. It was a Jacobite song, and she had heard it at her father’s knee every night of his leave. She had not heard the song for eleven years, had not known that she even remembered it. But she felt her lips moving as she mouthed every word.

She was ten years old again, watching her father leaving their farm on a frosty Christmas morning, his boots making perfect footprints in the rimed grass. Her father turning once to wave, the sunrise igniting his red hair, her father smiling at her with dimples like her own. She’d followed in his footsteps, as her mother had screamed at her in French to come back, that she’d catch an ague. Unheeding, she’d fitted her little footprints into his huge ones, until he’d outpaced her, and left her behind.

Kit mounted the cellar steps and faced the crowded bar and the song. Every mouth bawled the words of the song from every direction, with drink-fuelled enthusiasm.

Kit’s ears were ringing, and she had to lean on the bar. Just as she thought she must fall, the song ended and another began. A faster song, one she knew, but one that did not have the power to chill her blood.

She looked for Richard. Suddenly exhausted, she longed to lie down – it was gone midnight, and some of the soldiers were melting away. Richard could close up, Richard and Aunt Maura. But, just for the moment, she could not see her husband. She went on serving, by rote, and answered the soldiers’ bidding with the ghost of her former smile.

Another hour passed, and the soldiers became increasingly rowdy. One of them shot at a wine barrel, making a neat hole – the wine sprang forth like blood and each redcoat held the great cask above his head in turn, gulping at the scarlet gore. Kit looked round for Richard once more – the regiment had to be curbed, before Kavanagh’s lost all their stock. She crossed the red lake to Aunt Maura at the bar. ‘Make sure you charge them,’ she mouthed, nodding to the wrecked barrel. ‘And where in the world is Richard?’ Maura, pipe in mouth, shrugged.

Kit bit her lip with irritation. Richard liked a drink, and had the gift of mixing easily with their customers, but she could not believe he had gone carousing with the regiment when there was so much work to do. It was another hour before the last redcoat had finally gone; the doors were locked, the shutters were put up and Kit began to collect the tankards to wash. ‘Where can Richard
be
, Aunt?’ she asked. ‘Drinking with the regiment somewhere,’ she snorted.

Aunt Maura eyed her. ‘He must be drinking from his shoe, then,’ she said, ‘for his tankard is over there.’

Kit walked across the bar, her feet crunching on crusts and broken glass, to where Richard’s tankard stood. The tankard shared its time between a hook behind the bar and her husband’s right hand. She did not think she had ever seen it set down. She picked it up. It was empty. No; not empty.

She tipped the thing upside down and something fell into her hand.

Something round and heavy.

For the second time in her life Kit Kavanagh turned over a single coin in her palm, a coin which would change her life. But this time the imprimatur was a queen’s head, not a king’s, and the coin was silver, not gold.

The Queen’s Shilling.

Suddenly she was sitting on the floor, amid the detritus, without knowing how she got there. Numbly she looked about her, and all she could think about in that moment was what a mess the regiment had left, and that now she would have to clean it up on her own. How could Richard leave her to clear up by herself? Such a mess! Crusts, buckles, scuffed playing cards, the blood-red puddle of wine, nutshells, papers, broken glass, even a horsewhip. Yes, the regiment had left a high old mess.