Rainbow's End (6 page)

‘How far down did you go?’ Grainne asked. ‘I nearly came down . . .’

‘T’ank the good Lord that you didn’t,’ Fidelma said piously. ‘For though we got t’rough the passage safe enough, it comes out near a great, rushin’ underground river, like Dadda always said it did. We felt around, Roisin an’ me, hopin’ to catch a holt of one of the others, but there was nothin’. It’s my belief that earlier, when they went down, the river was floodin’, an’ took them.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Grainne said. ‘For that river comes up to the surface and then goes underground again all across the Burren. I’ve heard Dadda say so many a time. Oh, Fid, thank God that you an’ Roisin didn’t venture too far!’

‘Then . . . then you t’ink poor Maura’s drowned as well?’ Fidelma said, her voice a whisper. ‘I hoped they’d be carried above ground an’ spat on to dry land . . . oh, if only I’d kept a holt of them, Grainne! If only I’d not let go, once we were in the cavern.’

‘You couldn’t know what would happen,’ Grainne said. ‘When Dadda’s stronger we’ll go out and search the place. The boys haven’t come back yet, I suppose?’

‘Not yet,’ Fidelma said. ‘You’ve brought food though, Grainne – shall we try to light a fire and make somet’ing hot for Dadda?’

Before night fell, the boys came home, shamefaced, shivering. Sean had a bruise the size of a cooking apple on his brow and Kieran had a four-inch slash right across the crown of his head where a plank had fallen on him when the stable collapsed, but they were all right, they assured their sister. The two of them had been nearer the Caseys’ cabin when the hurricane started, so they had sought shelter there. It had been all right at first, they had clustered round the fire with the Casey family, telling stories and joking, but then the cabin had simply fallen about their ears, which was how they had come by their wounds.

‘We were a sight,’ Sean said. ‘Black as ink from the mud, Grainne, an’ wet as mermaids. Where’s Maura? She’s all right, isn’t she?’

‘She hasn’t come home,’ Grainne said slowly. ‘You didn’t see . . . anything . . . as you came along?’

‘Not a t’ing,’ Sean said, with Kieran echoing it. ‘Only dead sheep, dead rabbits, dead bords . . .’

Fidelma, listening, put her hands over her face and turned away, and Grainne hastened to comfort her. ‘It’s all right, Maura’s a sensible girl,’ she said, hugging the younger girl. ‘We’ll find her, I know. You see if we don’t.’

But they did not.

It was spring in the Burren and the limestone crags were bright with spring flowers. The Feeney farmhouse, however, was still roofless. It looked untenanted and indeed it was about to become so, for the Feeneys, with their small possessions in a handcart which Paddy had knocked up with bits of plank from the stable, were leaving.

They had spent the first few days after the hurricane searching the countryside for their possessions and had found some of the things which the wind had snatched so cruelly from them on that terrible night. Their haystack had gone, whirled away to land, no doubt, on someone else’s property, but they foraged further afield and found hay, gathering it up in their arms and carrying it home, to lay it in the bit of roofed shelter which they had made, for bedding, warmth . . . even to get a fire lit.

They found some pans, dented and filthy, but not past repair. And rags of clothing, some torn blankets . . . not theirs, but ‘refugees’ from some other domestic disaster of the hurricane. And there were dead sheep, so they would not starve, and fish, carried inshore by the wild tide and stranded on unaccustomed grass and slabs of limestone rock.

But it was not enough. Paddy did his best; he went into Ennis to try to see if someone would lend him some money so he could buy stock, a donkey, the makings of a new beginning. The trouble was that the hurricane had affected everyone. People were scratching around trying to repair their own fortunes. The Feeneys would have to manage somehow.

And then the letter arrived, with a Dublin postmark and a genial invitation to go and stay with Tomas Feeney and to find work so that they might restock the farm once more.

‘It makes sense, alannas,’ Paddy said pleadingly when Grainne had read him the letter. ‘I know you want to stay here, but we’ve not even a roof over our heads, not so much as one bonaveen left to us. Tomas will see us right, don’t you fret.’

The older girls had fought against it, both of them. Grainne had said that she was promised to William and intended to stay on the Burren and marry him, even if they had to live hand-to-mouth for a bit, if his parents disowned him for marrying, as they thought, beneath him. And Fidelma tightened her lips and said she’d plans of her own, so she had, and she wouldn’t be goin’ to old Dublin no matter what.

‘Me brother Tomas says to come to Dublin,’ Paddy told the Caseys and the O’Hares, who were rebuilding their cabins and doing everything in their power to keep themselves fed whilst they planted potatoes and built up some stock. ‘We’ll earn easier in Dublin than we can here. The girls can work, I can work . . . me leg’s niver stopped me workin’ here, so why should it stop me there? . . . an’ when we’ve our fortunes made, isn’t it back we’ll be comin’, with all the speed we can muster?’

Grainne let her father make his plans because she understood that he needed to do so, perhaps he even needed to get away for a while, with two of his five daughters dead. But she told him straight that she wouldn’t go with him, because she just knew that William would want to wed her as soon as his hurts healed, but then rumours began to reach her that all was not well in the McBride household. And one beautiful sunny spring day when her father’s preparations for leaving were all but complete, she took her courage in both hands and walked over to the McBride farm. She knocked and Mrs McBride answered the door.

‘I’ve come to see William – we’re promised,’ Grainne had said boldly. ‘I must see him.’

She expected a flat refusal or an argument, but after staring at her for a moment Mrs McBride stood aside. ‘He’s in the front room, on the sofa,’ she said. Nothing else. Neither welcome nor reproach.

A front room – how grand, Grainne thought inside her head, but she said nothing aloud, only went out of one door and through another.

And there was William. He looked just the same for a moment; dark-red hair, brown face, white teeth when he smiled. But there was something different about his smile. He looked . . . empty.

‘William?’ Grainne said, going near. ‘William? It’s me, Grainne.’ Almost without thinking, her hand went to her stomach. ‘William, do you remember the night we went to the barn, you and I, and climbed up amongst the hay in the loft? William, I think . . . I think . . .’

Her voice died away as he stared at her, apparently unheeding. Slowly, she held out her hand and he took it in a vicelike grip. He hurt her fingers. After, there were bruises. ‘Pretty,’ he said. ‘Pretty, pretty, pretty!’

She was frightened, then. She tried to tug her hand away and he clung, with something so pathetic in his blank face, something so akin to sadness in his eyes, that she could have wept . . . yet the emptiness was frightening, the very fact that he could look at her as he would look at a stranger so painful that she felt she could not bear it.

‘Pretty, W’m . . . wanna pretty,’ he kept saying over and over, and the look on his face, the sadness, the longing, became mixed with something else, a sort of brutish determination. He tugged at her hands, crushing her fingers. She cried out involuntarily with the pain. Grainne was able to tug herself free only because William saw a little beetle running across a patch of sunshine on the whitewashed wall and let go of her in order to squash it.

Grainne ran from the room. She ran from the house, but then she was ashamed, turned back and reluctantly went in through the door once more.

In the kitchen Mrs McBride was making soda bread. There was butter in a crock and milk in a bucket and the kitchen smelled warm and good. She said: ‘Did he know you?’ But there was no real hope in her tone, no real questioning.

‘No,’ Grainne said flatly. ‘What’s happened to him, Mrs McBride?’

‘The doctors say the blow on the head addled his wits,’ Mrs McBride said. ‘He should get stronger in himself, but he won’t get his good sense back. Oh, when he heals he’ll work in the fields and plough the land and shear the sheep. But he won’t ever marry, or read a book, or talk sensible.’

‘I’m terrible sorry,’ Grainne said awkwardly. ‘He – he was a lovely feller, Mrs McBride. I really did love him.’

The older woman looked across her baking at Grainne and nodded. ‘I b’lieve you did,’ she said. ‘But it’s God’s will.’

‘It’s cruel hard on William,’ Grainne said, tears trying to choke the words in her throat. ‘He did love to laugh and joke, and he read any book he could lay hands on. Won’t he ever read again, Mrs McBride?’

‘No. Doctor says it’s all gone,’ Mrs McBride said. ‘We’ve had a week or two to think about it, so I don’t cry any more. He’ll never leave me now, William won’t. He’ll stay with his mammy and daddy until we all die. He won’t inherit, elder son or no, but we’ll take care of him.’

That, for Grainne, had been the turning point. Now, she had no reason to stay on the Burren, none to protest that they might survive here without taking a step so dubious as making their way to Dublin city. And she found that she wanted to go now. Without realising it, she had been counting on William’s help to get the farm back into shape and without that help the struggle would be so uphill that she doubted if they would ever attain a decent, normal sort of life again. They could fish, gather seaweed, trap rabbits and perhaps scrape together enough money to buy a few hens, in time another cow, perhaps. But it would be unbelievably hard – and life on the Burren was hard enough in the ordinary course of events. Once she had seen William and acknowledged that the William she loved was no longer there, she discovered what all young lovers know: that every path you have walked with your love becomes a part of the love you’ve shared. It was painful to her to go down to the beach for seaweed, because she had walked the length and breadth of that beach with William beside her. She no longer wished to fish from the currach, because she and William had fished together. The lanes they had wandered, the secret places they had met, were no longer beautiful, sacred, but somehow horrible, because she would never meet William there again. Or not the old William, the man she had loved. Worst of all, in a horrible sort of way, was that the
shell
of William was still here. She might meet the beautiful face and athletic body at the market, or on the winding road to Ennis. And face to face, she would see the emptiness behind his eyes, see those same eyes, which had once shone with love for her, blank, indifferent.

‘I agree with Dadda,’ she had said at last to Fidelma, a week or so after her visit to the McBrides. ‘We should leave. There’s nothing for us here.’

‘I don’t want to leave and I won’t,’ Fidelma said stubbornly. ‘I want to stay near Durvan. Him and me are promised.’

‘You’re nothin’ but a pair of children,’ Grainne had said furiously. It wasn’t fair! Fidelma was a child, it should be she, it should be she . . .

‘You’re a jealous cat!’ Fidelma had shouted, face scarlet, tears starting. ‘You were happy enough to stay when you t’ought you were goin’ to marry William. Well, I won’t leave me lovely Durvan, I’ll stay wit’ him, his mammy likes me . . .’

‘You’ll come wit’ us, an’ give a hand,’ Grainne had said coldly, implacably. ‘The Caseys don’t want an extry mouth to feed an’ well you know it. Fid, we’ll both of us have to work, so we shall, an’ then, one day, we’ll mebbe come home.’

Fidelma had snorted. ‘Is that what you want? To work like a slave until you’re an old woman and then to come home to find William even more mad than he is already? To find him drooling after you, pawing at your clothes, saying
pretty, pretty, pretty
? You want to t’ink about gettin’ yourself a real man, Grainne, before you’re too old to be a wife!’

‘Oh, and Durvan’s a
real man
, is he? Well, if he is, he ought to t’ink about gettin’ himself a
real woman
, Fid, an’ not a spoilt child!’

The sisters glared at each other, Grainne’s fingers itching to slap her sister across her increasingly pretty, increasingly appealing little face.

‘Dadda, did you hear what Grainne called me? A spoilt child, she called me, an’ me only wantin’ to go to me intended. She’s jealous, Dadda.’

Quarrels like this sprang up all the time now, as the tension caused by their troubles stretched their nerves to snapping point.

Paddy flapped a hand at them. ‘We’re all goin’, and we’ll all come back when the time’s ripe,’ he declared. ‘No more quarrellin’ from either one of ye or I’ll do something desp’rit!’

So now here they were, with their few possessions on the handcart, setting out for Dublin. Fidelma with a face like thunder, Grainne pale and sad, and the other children clinging together, clutching Tinker, sobbing quietly.

They missed their dead sisters, of course, Grainne told herself. As did she. She really did. But none of them knew pain like hers. She missed William so badly and felt such terrible sadness for him, yet still there was the longing, hot in the pit of her stomach, for their closeness, which had gone for ever.

She walked along the dusty road beside Fidelma and glanced timidly at her sister from time to time. Finally, she laid a hand on her arm. ‘Fid . . . I’m sorry for all the things I’ve said and the way I’ve behaved, honest to God I am. There’s a reason for it, indeed there is, one day you’ll understand that I can’t help the way I feel. But we’ve got to pull together now, and I’ll try me very best to be fair to you and to please you. Will you give me a kiss now, an’ be friends?’

‘No,’ Fidelma said coldly. ‘You’re me enemy, Grainne Feeney. You don’t want me to be happy wit’ me Durvan because you can’t have your loony William. Just you leave me alone an’ I’ll leave you alone.’