The Good People (52 page)

‘Peter. God bless you.’

He was staring at her, sucking his bottom lip. ‘Praise God they freed you,’ he stammered.

Nance placed her hand on his forearm, and he gripped it, overcome.

‘I thought you were gone from me,’ he choked out. ‘There was so much talk of the trial. They were saying you’d be hanged or sent away. And you only trying to help.’ He raised her fingers to his face and pressed them against his stubbled cheek, chin quivering. ‘I was afraid for you.’

‘They could not touch me.’

‘I was afraid for you, Nance.’ He turned away, wiping his eyes. When he turned around again, he was calmer.

‘They have burnt me out,’ Nance said.

‘When the verdict was heard, ’twas decided.’

‘Seán Lynch.’

‘He came back and found his wife gone and his money with her, and he came here the night before last. He had an anger in him.’

‘Kate Lynch is gone?’

‘Swept. He was in a state, Nance. He thought you had a hand in it. I couldn’t stop them.’

‘I know.’

‘I tried.’ Peter placed a hand over his eyes. ‘He had a party of hard men behind him. I’m sorry for it.’

‘’Tis not your fault.’ She took him by the shoulder and he leant into her touch.

‘You never did a thing against me. Against anyone.’

They sat in the ashes then, until rain appeared on the hilltops in the distance, and the lowing of animals filled the air.

‘You can’t stay here,’ he said.

‘No.’

‘Come with me.’

He took her to his cabin, tucked on the raw face of the mountainside, helping her up the steep slope. As they approached he began to explain what had happened.

‘They did it at night. All of the men except John O’Donoghue. He wouldn’t have a part in it.’

‘Daniel Lynch?’

Peter frowned. ‘All but John and myself. But when I saw the pack of them going off after sundown, I followed.’ He looked at Nance, disgusted, then motioned her inside the cabin.

Nance stood for a while in the darkness, then gasped.

Her goat stood in the corner of the room, tethered to a battered dresser, piles of droppings at her feet. The exhaustion and relief Nance had been suppressing since the trial suddenly overwhelmed her, and she staggered towards Mora, falling over and throwing her arms around the animal and her familiar warmth, her smell of hay and milk. She rubbed her face in Mora’s coat, her eyes suddenly wet.

‘My dear one. Oh, my dear one.’

‘They were going to slit her throat.’

Nance stroked Mora while Peter stood aside, watching.

‘I thought she was dead,’ Nance murmured, finally releasing the goat and gingerly drying her eyes with her dirtied shawl. ‘You took her.’

‘I would not let them kill her like that. Now, Nance. Would you not lie down and close your eyes for a small minute? You must be dead tired from the road. ’Tis a long way you’ve come.’

Nance slept in the quiet cool of Peter’s cabin that day. From time to time she woke and saw him sitting in the doorway, squinting out across the rain-soaked valley, or walking softly about indoors, setting the room to rights. At dusk he woke her and handed her a piggin of warm goat’s milk, a cold potato. He watched her as she ate. ‘You’re looking mighty thin on it, Nance.’

‘’Twas little feasting to be had in Ballymullen.’

‘I was meaning to tell you. You’re welcome here, Nance. With me. ’Tis not much, what I have, but there’s no kin of mine left in the valley and . . .’ He flushed. ‘What I’m trying to say is that I could marry you. There’s nothing they could do then. Against you.’

‘I’m an old woman, Peter.’

‘You’ve always been kind to me, Nance.’

She smiled. ‘An old woman without a man is the next thing to a ghost. No one needs her, folk are afraid of her, but mostly she isn’t seen.’

‘Will you think it over? I’m an able man.’

‘I will, Peter. Thank you, I will.’

They said little else that evening. Peter sat by the hearth while Nance rested on the heather, and occasionally they looked at one another and smiled. When night had finally wrapped itself around the cabin, Peter said the rosary, and they washed their feet and lay down to rest by the smoored fire.

Nance rose before dawn. Peter was still asleep, snoring softly where he lay by the raked hearth, sprawled, arms above his head. He looked older in sleep, Nance thought.

Quietly, so as not to wake him, she unraked the embers on the hearthstone and selected a fat lump of charcoal. She let it cool as she milked Mora, and when she had the pail filled, she placed the drink and the dead ember on the dresser and blessed them both.

Then she untied the goat and silently left Peter’s cabin.

Her bones ached. Nance set out towards the lane, the goat’s rope loose in her hand, limping from the soreness in her hip.

When did I become so old? she wondered.

The air was sweet and damp. A morning mist rolled down off the mountains and their purple skins. Hares moved lightly through the heather, white tails scuttling through the dark tangle of brambles before the rowan trees, blossom-white, the clover. The lane was empty before her, and there was no movement in the waiting valley, no wind. Only the birds above her and, in the slow unpeeling of darkness, a divinity of sky.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This novel is a work of fiction, although it takes as its inspiration a true event of infanticide. In 1826, an ‘old woman of very advanced age’ known as Anne/Nance Roche was indicted for the wilful murder of Michael Kelliher/Leahy (newspaper accounts list different names) at the summer Tralee Assizes in Co. Kerry. Michael had been drowned in the river Flesk on Monday, 12 June 1826, and had reportedly been unable to stand, walk or speak.

At her trial, Nance Roche claimed that she had been attempting to cure the boy, not kill him. The boy had been brought to the river in an attempt to ‘put the fairy’ out of him. Nance was acquitted on these grounds.

There have been several recorded cases of death and injury suffered as a consequence of people attempting to banish changelings and recover those believed to be lost to them. The most famous of these cases is that of twenty-five-year-old Bridget Cleary, who was tortured, then burnt to death by her husband and relatives in 1895, in Co. Tipperary. Angela Bourke’s
The Burning of Bridget Cleary
(1999) is an outstanding account of this case, and I recommend it to anyone curious to discover more about how and why such tragedies have occurred in Ireland and abroad.
The Good People: New Fairylore Essays
, edited by Peter Narváez (1991), also provides modern-day considerations of the medical afflictions possibly suffered by those considered to be changelings.

Irish fairy lore was (and remains) a deeply complex, ambiguous system of folk belief – there is little that is twee or childish about it. As Bourke mentions in her preface to
Burning
, ‘A large part of this book is concerned with considering fairy belief as the products of rational minds, operating in circumstances that are outside the experience of most people in modern, literate societies.’ In writing this work of fiction I have sought to portray fairy and folk belief as part of the fabric of everyday rural nineteenth-century Irish life, rather than as anomalous.

In creating the fictional character of Nance, I drew heavily on the stories and accounts mentioned in Gearóid Ó Crualaoich’s
The Book of the Cailleach: Stories of the Wise-Woman Healer
(2003), and the fairy stories of Lady Augusta Gregory, Thomas Crofton Croker, and Eddie Lenihan and Carolyn Eve Green’s
Meeting the Other Crowd: The Fairy Stories of Hidden Ireland
(2004). Nance’s use of and reference to herbal medicine was informed by Patrick Logan’s
Making the Cure
:
A Look at Irish Folk Medicine
(1972), Niall Mac Coitir’s books
Irish Trees: Myths, Legends and Folklore
(2003) and
Irish Wild Plants: Myths, Legends and Folklore
(2006), as well as the work of John Windele, James Mooney and W.R. Wilde on superstitions and popular practices relating to medicine and midwifery, much of which was published in the mid-nineteenth century.

My depictions of Irish rural life in the pre-famine days of the nineteenth century were informed by many sources, including but not limited to the work of Kevin Danaher (Caoimhin Ó Danachair), E. Estyn Evans’
Irish Folk Ways
(1957) and the scholarship and publications of Claudia Kinmoth, Jonathan Bell and Mervyn Watson, Patricia O’Hare, Anne O’Connor and – the ‘bible’ (as I so often heard it called) – Seán Ó Súilleabháin’s extraordinary
A Handbook of Irish Folklore
(1942).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

While researching this book I was blessed to have the opportunity to meet and speak with many erudite historians, curators and academics who generously gave up their time to answer my sometimes strange (and often ignorant) questions about Irish folklife. Thank you to the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin for its vast specialist library on folklore and ethnology, and to Bairbre Ní Fhloinn for her assistance, suggestions and time. Thank you to Clodagh Doyle, curator at the Folklife Division of the National Museum of Ireland, for the tour and for offering me access to the division’s research library. Immense gratitude to Stiofán Ó Cadhla from the Department of Folklore and Ethnology at University College Cork for his correspondence and for providing me with much invaluable research material. Thank you to Sarah O’Farrell and Helen O’Carroll from Kerry County Museum in Tralee for their assistance and kindness, and for allowing me to borrow the ‘treasure chest’ of information from the Poor Inquiry. Thank you to Patricia O’Hare from Muckross House Library for generously giving me a private tour of the grounds and permitting me access to the library records.

Any inconsistencies or fallibility found in my depiction of Irish folklore, folklife and fairy belief in this novel are my own, and should bear no reflection on those who so kindly sought to inform and support my work.

Thanks must also go to Seán O Donoghue from Salmon Leap Farm in Co. Kerry for showing me the old
cillín
on his property next to the original ‘Piper’s Grave’, and for allowing me to wander over his farm to see the Flesk. Thank you to Michael Leane for giving me a tour of the river, and for telling me of times past. Thank you to Chris and James Keane, and to James’s mother, Mary, for their hospitality and for so patiently letting me step on everyone’s toes at the
ceilidh
.

Thank you to the staff of Flinders University and my colleagues at
Kill Your Darlings
for their ongoing support. Thank you to the friends who shared their various stories and ideas with me, and who may recognise, in this novel, traces of past conversations.

I am indebted to the support and passion of my publishers, editors and early readers. Heartfelt thanks to the marvellous Alex Craig, Judy Clain, Paul Baggaley, Sophie Jonathan, Mathilda Imlah, Gillian Fitzgerald-Kelly, Natalie McCourt, Cate Paterson, Geordie Williamson and Ali Lavau. Thank you to my incredible agents: Pippa Masson at Curtis Brown Australia; Gordon Wise, Kate Cooper and colleagues at Curtis Brown UK; Dan Lazar at Writers House; and Jerry Kalajian at the Intellectual Property Group. It is an honour to work with you all.

Finally, love and gratitude to dearest Heidi, and to Pam, Alan and my sister, Briony, to whom this novel is dedicated.

About Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent is the co-founder of Australian literary journal
Kill Your Darlings
. In 2011, she won the inaugural Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award for her debut novel,
Burial Rites
, the story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last person to be executed in Iceland. Since its publication in 2013,
Burial Rites
has been translated into nearly thirty languages and has received numerous awards and nominations.

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