The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters Read online

  to my caravan of nymphs

  Contents

  The first show

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part Two

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Part Three

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Part Four

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Untangling

  Historical Notes

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  The first show

  October 1865

  Joe the seaweed boy jolted us on his cart through the rain towards Kilcullen Town. High sodden hedges and our damp bonnets foreclosed on the sky. The rich mud sluiced through our wheels, uttering long vulgar kisses. Our feet pressed down on rags of dead seaweed, perfuming the air with sourness and a faint memory of salt.

  Enda held Oona’s hand and mine; Berenice clutched Ida’s and Pertilly’s.

  Darcy held no one’s hand, of course.

  The slow crows wheeled above us, sonorous in their derision for the seven Swiney sisters in their threadbare finery. Most of all they lifted their beaks against me, Manticory, for they had witnessed my disgrace on Harristown Bridge.

  ‘Would you look at that!’ Oona pointed at a sheet impaled on a pair of rakes, her finger blurring with fear.

  In letters draggling in the rain, it announced:

  The Swiney Godivas

  Seven Singing Sisters with Seven Sweet Throats

  First ever show tonight

  Old Kilcullen brooded like a beetle around the next hedge and in the heart of its black streets lurked Ladysmildew Hall, where we were to be sacrificed.

  We had a bare hour’s rehearsal before tea.

  The hall’s wooden floor rose up to trip our tapping heels in a way the dirt of our barn floor never had. And plump Pertilly landing from a leap was a thing you could hear quite loudly in the next county, according to Darcy.

  Outside, the rain beat down like a blacksmith.

  Inside, the gas lamps commenced to whisper.

  We broke for bread-and-dripping with tea, consumed in the silence of bare terror. Pertilly dressed our hair one last time, cleverly coiling and balancing it on the strength of two stout pins.

  As the second hand of the clock strutted round to five minutes before six, Darcy herded us back to the stage. Peering out through the mothy curtain, Oona and Pertilly reported on an audience of fifty sniffing matrons and two dozen sorry-looking youths who shuffled in with their hands in the pockets from which they had just extracted six hard-won pennies for the pleasure we had promised to give them.

  ‘Nobodies, noodles.’ Darcy paced up and down behind the curtain. ‘And a good thing, too. No one to bother with if you bosthoons make fools of yourselves, as you undoubtedly shall.’

  She’d neglected to whisper. Mrs Godlin from the Kilcullen dispensary tutted loudly from the front row. Pertilly waggled a hand through the curtain, greeting Mrs Godlin in our local fashion, ‘To you.’

  Mrs Godlin just had time to nod, ‘From you,’ before Darcy had her fingers around Pertilly’s throat and was dragging her away for punishing.

  Oona whispered that the seaweed boy Joe had settled himself into the very front row, like royalty.

  ‘I shall die of fright if you make me go out there,’ Oona told Darcy, over Pertilly’s sobs. ‘How shall I bear it?’

  Darcy was not your woman for ‘how’. She was more your woman for ‘when’.

  ‘Don’t be talking blethers,’ she growled. ‘You’ll be lying in your straw bed tonight dying of nothing to eat if you don’t do this now.’

  ‘Or maybe sooner, if you cross her,’ I said.

  ‘You are the worst thing on two feet in Ireland, Manticory.’ Darcy stamped hard on my left one. Under her breath, she muttered, ‘You and your goings-on on Harristown Bridge. Is it worried you are, that he’s down there in the audience?’

  My heart dropped into my belly that she’d said those things aloud.

  The curtains were already creaking apart. We stood still for a moment in a state of fossilising fear. Then Darcy swept to the centre of the stage and began to sing. The hall filled up like a milk pail with the goodness of lovely noise, for the throat of a nightingale was in Darcy’s neck, even if a viper’s tongue was in her mouth.

  From the wings, I ran my eyes over the audience. He was not there, himself, the man.

  Only Darcy knew of him. The oldest of us she was, nineteen at that time, Darcy of the Ethiopian-black hair, coiling and crink­ling like the sea in a sunless cave. With her hair came a serpentine muscularity of body and will. Darcy’s rages could encircle and choke the life’s will out of you.

  Darcy retired from the stage, applause clattering behind her.

  Next were our twins, lively Berenice and my most darling Enda, who had matching shades of soft brown – Madonna-coloured – hair. They sang a tense duet, each gesture in perfect harmony, as if they did not hate one another worse than a devil and an angel.

  Could I tell Enda what had happened to me on Harristown Bridge? So soft, so tender, Enda would cry a well for me, but could she help me?

  Could I tell Berenice? I could not, brave and bold as she was. She was my enemy, because she was Enda’s.

  Now chestnut-tressed Pertilly bumbled out in front of the audience, perfectly sure, as ever, of disappointing. Poor Pertilly was not pretty at all. Not quite thirteen, she did not have even that freshness of youth we in Harristown called ‘pig-beauty’. Her nose loomed too large and her fleshy upper lip hung unbecomingly over the lower one. Worst of all, her eyebrows drooped the wrong way like the dispirited tails of two dead mice. She laboured away at her stanzas.

  Could I tell Pertilly? No, Pertilly would carry it hard. She would sag with the sorryness of it. The secret would seep out of her, somehow. And Darcy would pummel her for that.

  Pertilly’s song was mercifully done away with. Then Oona stepped up on the stage to refresh the desire of the audience for Swiney sisters. Oona, fairy-featured and amiable, had blonde hair, thick and soft as mounds of fresh butter churned in a moonlit barn. Like Oonagh, Queen of the Fairies, she had a fey, coaxing way about her. But even at eleven she spoke in a strong bass voice and could pass for a man in the dark. When she
opened her mouth on her ballad of first love, the audience sighed with shock and delight.

  Could I tell Oona? I could not. The nerves on her were so delicate and eleven was too young to take on my burden.

  Next on stage was Ida, christened ‘Idolatry’, the dark-brown baby of the Swiney sisters, with dark-brown moods to match, and an irrepressible tendency to pluck the hairs from her head and wind them round her wrists and ankles. She lisped her lines about a beloved dead kitten with a furrowed brow and wandered uncertainly from the stage in the wrong direction.

  How could I tell Ida? She hadn’t ten years on her yet. I prayed she would not even understand the goings-on upon Harristown Bridge or in the copse beside it.

  Although I am the middle sister, Darcy had left me to last.

  Myself, I am called Manticory, tiger girl, on account of the red hair that is fierce upon my head. Darcy wanted me last on the stage, to give me the longest agony of anticipation, as a punishment, and because of my hair, the redness of it, which was enough to have got me into the heinous kind of trouble that I could not tell my sisters about.

  Aware only of the pins and needles in my hands and the shame that clothed me tighter than my bodice, I gave them a song of a red-haired shepherdess. Darcy’s drilling served me well, galvanising my legs and arms, drawing the songs out of me, as if I were still in the tumbledown barn. I danced. I bowed. I walked off the stage in a wind-up kind of fashion and into Enda’s arms.

  ‘You’re stiff as a corpse,’ she whispered, kissing me. ‘Calm yourself. It’s a done thing now. Nearly.’

  For we had still the ensemble piece to perform. It had nothing to do with music, or dancing, or young Irish girls singing their Famined hearts out.

  It was the thing upon which Darcy pinned the whole show and our fortunes.

  We filed on stage, carrying seven wooden chairs. We set ourselves upon them with our backs turned to the audience.

  Simultaneously, we raised our white arms, extracted the crucial pins from our chignons and lifted our loosened hair high above our heads.

  And that was when the Swiney Godivas of Harristown slowly liquefied the fat of every heart in Ladysmildew Hall.

  Slow, it was, because hair bunched by hand and then let to drop does not do so in a single moment. It falls in sighing increments, a first flump, a gradual unwinding, to twists of blunt ends slithering against the neck, the hanks still smooth and unified from their confinement. Finally, each separate hair finds its appointed resting place.

  The hair of the seven Swiney sisters took a long sweet time in falling, not just because of the great weight of it, but because of its unreasonable length. You see, between us we’d already grown forty feet of the stuff, enough to swaddle twenty babies or wind ten grown corpses; more than enough to cover our Swiney bodies and to caress our heels.

  Our hair fell with a palpable breeze that touched the faces of those in the front two rows, turning them bloodless or coralline.

  And still it kept slithering and sidling and tralloping down to the dust of the wooden floor.

  Just like the thin geese, the slow crows and the kittens who had witnessed all our rehearsals, the matrons and boys watched us in breathtook silence, their heads as stiff on their necks as the stump of the round tower at Yellow Bog.

  When all the uncoiling, rustling and falling was done, we presented a shimmering waterfall of hair, black, brown, red and blonde, a quantity of hair to terrify you and to knock your beating heart across you, and make you wish you’d been born with two of them just to take in all that hair without fear of a rupture.

  ‘Is that the kind of thing you’re after wanting?’ Darcy turned and asked our audience.

  The boys threw their caps in the air and the women shrieked.

  The men leaned closer and breathed like undersea creatures, like the man on Harristown Bridge.

  Part One

  Harristown

  Chapter 1

  We Swineys were the hairiest girls in Harristown, Kildare, and the hairiest you’d find anywhere in Ireland from Priesthaggard to Sluggery. That is, our limbs were as hairless as marble, but on our heads, well, you’d not believe the torrents that shot from our industrious follicles like the endless Irish rain.

  When we came into this world, our heads were not lightly whorled with down like your common infant’s. We Swineys inched bloodily from our mother’s womb already thickly ringleted. Thereafter that hair of ours never knew a scissor. It grew faster than we did, pawing our cheeks and seeking out our shoulder blades. As small girls, our plaits snaked down our backs with almost visible speed. That hair had its own life. It whispered round our ears, making a private climate for our heads. Our hair had its roots inside us, but it was outside us as well. In that slippage between our inner and outer selves – there lurked our seven scintillating destinies and all our troubles besides.

  Back in the very beginning – long before Darcy ever marched us onto a stage or a man laid a hairbrush on me upon a bridge – we Swineys were born into the full melancholy of the Famine and lived in hungry and ungenteel seclusion on the Harristown estate in County Kildare, fatherless and befriended principally by the lice. In those days, when the Swiney sisters sang, our only accompanists were the slow crows whose constant keening hung in the ribbons of Harristown’s rain.

  And it was remarkably fond of the rain where we were born. The sky was always weeping; the earth was a greedy sponge for it; the rain flowed down through our hair, inserted itself under our smocks and slid down to our feet. The thin geese were always slick with water; their eggs were slippery with it too and dropped through our hands, leaving all too few to trade with the travelling hagglers who passed through Harristown selling dusty semblances of tea and flour. The rain eased itself through the gutters and overflowed the barrels under the eaves.

  You may be thinking now that my words are very and too much like the rain, pelting down on you without particularity or mercy. And I shall say that perhaps it is the rain forever scribbling on our roofs and our faces that teaches the Irish our unstinting verbosity. It’s what we have, instead of food or luck. Think of it as a generosity of syllables, a wishful giving of words when we have nothing else to offer by way of hospitality: we lay great mouthfuls of language on you to round your bellies and comfort your thoughts like so many boileds and roasts, or even a lick of Finn MacCool’s finger dipped in the milk that simmered the Salmon of Wisdom.

  The little Swiney girls of Harristown occupied themselves not with wise salmon but with foolish geese as thin as a fat goose’s feather. When we were smaller than them, we were chased by the thin geese. When we grew a tint bigger, we chased them back. Darcy wrung their necks for them at Michaelmas, my sisters’ mouths candidly awater at the thought of goose fat on slices of Saturday’s little soda loaf baked in the turf stove that cast such a devilish light on our few pieces of pewter. Only I myself and our mother Annora had a scruple, and never laid a hand on a thin goose’s throat or even tasted a morsel of warm white friend. From each hatching, my mother always chose a favourite goose; it was invariably christened ‘Phiala’, meaning ‘saint’s name’. Annora would frequently call out to that saintly goose in a cooing voice, particularly in the dewy sadness of the evening.

  And Darcy would mimic Annora’s voice mockingly, and then Enda would protest, ‘Where’s the harm in a goose, bless her?’

  And Berenice, always contrary to her twin, sneered, ‘Don’t you sicken on yourself, being so sweet?’

  But it was Berenice who sickened with the whooping cough, and filled our cottage to the rafters with her unearthly howls. Annora resorted to the folk remedy of a hair sandwich, cutting a curl from Berenice’s nape to put between two precious slices of bread that she threw out of the front door for an animal to eat. I saw Enda creeping outside later to rob the fox or stoat of his supper and Berenice of her cure. But Berenice recovered well enough to beat her when Enda boasted of it later.

  The turf stove smoked in the kitchen that doubled as sleeping quarters
for the youngest Swineys – Pertilly, Oona and Ida – who muddled together in a press bed unfolded every night. Some winters, our kitchen hosted the sourest cow in County Kildare, and her occasional spindly bracket calf, who usually died quite promptly on her curdled milk.

  Sheets and shirts festooned our roof-beams, a constant virginal parade day. Our mother Annora laundered and ironed like a desperate woman to keep us in potatoes and Indian meal, but never enough of either. The Famine lasted longer in our house than it did elsewhere in Harristown. Many days we lived on turnip tops, or sand eels and seaweed brought by Joe on his cart from the coast. There were mornings when Annora gave us young hawthorn leaves to chew as there was nothing else. Or we breakfasted on the smell of rashers snorting out of the La Touche kitchens as we marched past their stone mansion’s rear end on our way to school in Brannockstown.

  ‘And sausages they’re having for themselves this morning.’ Pertilly could always tell what we weren’t eating.

  ‘With sage and apple gravy,’ she’d add wetly, for the hunger pumping through her body filled her mouth with saliva.

  Like our next potato, the shelter of the cottage was uncertain. The rain made our floor dribble foaming mud, and whenever it happened to wax dry, our bodies baked under the rat-eaten thatch like little loaves ourselves. Whenever the wind blew bitter, it rifled the tired petticoats that served as curtains or searched out the fissures in the walls and came scything through our clothes to murder any living warmth on our skin. Then we took turns to lay our haunches on a perforated pot under which some precious coals pinkened. Otherwise, seated on our stake-legged stools, we competed with the thin geese for the warmth of the fire, taking a short heather besom to their roasted doings every morning.

  Yet we were not the worst off. Our landlord John La Touche showed no sign of evicting us. Some days there was a whole potato for each of us in the straining basket – barely boiled ‘with the bone in’ so that our young teeth had something to learn on – and a kitchen of buttermilk in which to dip it. The Hunger had taken one in three in County Kildare. All around houses stood empty, except of rumoured bones. Certainly no Swineys but ourselves had survived the cull. The poorest children of Harristown were born with Famine’s imprint, like a bruise from a fist dark under their cheekbones and a startled look as if they’d just been kicked from behind towards their graves. Their mothers carried baby corpses around, begging for coffin money even at our poor door. Older children starved quickly and quietly; we came to know the pitiful signs of it and turned our heads from the sight of a boy or a girl whom we’d not see the next day. The adults went about it in wilder ways. You would not want to go to nearby Naas, the priest warned us, for fear of the mob that might lynch you for the meat on your bones, and its streets lined with those who’d delivered themselves to town just so that someone could witness them dying. They lay down in the street so they must be walked over.