The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters Read online

  The empty Bibles became her black books, in which she recorded all crimes and offences against Swineys and most particularly against herself. Darcy kept her black books for years. So much the worse for you, and twenty pities beside, should you find your offending self inscribed there. Those Bibles were indexed and cross-referenced, so Darcy could always find an old offence to nurse or an historical insult to avenge.

  By the time I was thirteen and Darcy was nineteen, Miss Finaughty’s promised adventure was writing its opening pages.

  I was every taste as much in love with books as I had been at six, when all the words and sounds were newly knitted in my brain.

  I’d learned something perhaps unintended from all those high-told tales of ladies and gentlemen and poor little peasant girls. I’d learned this: whoever writes the words owns the story, and whoever owns the words writes the story.

  So it was with words that I now began to extract my own identity from the hot churning soup of Swineyness.

  UnSwinily – for my sisters lived for the next bashing or the next potato – at teatime you’d find me still spreadeagled in the clover with a book of verses making honey in my heart. The thing is, it was my own Manticory honey – not Swiney honey. It had its singular taste and texture. Instead of bashing my sisters or their dollies, even when they grandly deserved it, I was now more than likely to write a bashing poem or song about them. It was safer that way, too, so long as they never cast an eye on my productions, which joined the dry leaves in the barrel in the barn.

  As it was, Darcy tried to asphyxiate my love of poetry as soon as she detected the tendency: she would simply sit on me if she caught me reading it.

  I had also to worry about Annora finding me anywhere with any book that was not the Bible or a hymnal, for she’d quickly sprinkle so much holy water on the volume that the pages would blossom with damp flowers and I’d be in sore trouble with Miss Finaughty, who regarded every printed poem as tenderly as the baby she would never have.

  Darcy had a particular hate on my reading in the sweet clover of the south-facing field where she baited her rabbit traps. She made sure I had a bad memory of every time she found me there, and a bruise too. I remained stubbornly fond of the place, however, and for several reasons. The Harristown rabbits and I shared a fondness for sucking the sweetness from the clover heads that massed there. I had also a preference for that spot for it delighted me to free the little brown beasts from Darcy’s traps before the slow crows wheeled in to peck their eyes, and before Darcy herself came to deliver a worse fate.

  She never caught me in the act of liberation. But one hungry summer afternoon she surprised me in the field before I could release a trapped rabbit. I clutched my book to my chest. Darcy took out her suspicions on my reading matter.

  ‘Is it reading you are? Some old poems, is it?’ She slapped me on the ear, none too lightly. ‘Here’s poetry for you – “Manticory” rhymes with “rancid boring”. Away with the verses. Better use the pages for candle-spills. If I catch you here again with a book, I’ll knock the priest’s share out of you.’

  She opened the cage and put her hands on the rabbit I’d been too slow to save. ‘This is what will happen to you if I find you here again.’

  She grasped one back leg and swung the beast against a tree trunk so hard that its little head flew right off its body, blasting me with tepid blood and brains.

  It was in that same field and in that same hungry summer that I found the most likely reason for Darcy always chasing me out of the clover.

  I’d just freed another rabbit and was carefully resetting the snare when I saw what seemed to be a wooden spoon raising its curved head amid the tall cow parsley on the edge of the field. Although I’d not noticed it before, the spoon had clearly been standing there for years. It was grained like driftwood and had begun to give itself up to the rot and moss. I parted the cow parsley for a closer look and saw that a second spoon had been tied horizontally across the vertical one, bound by tattered rags into a small cross. The letters PS were carved into the bowl of the first spoon. Under them: November 1854.

  Ireland was full of such improvised graves. We Catholics were not allowed to bury our dead with the old rites. Few could afford coffins or headstones. The fields, dense with Famine corpses buried too close to the surface, were frequently reaped by wild dogs.

  PS, I thought. Rest peacefully. I’ll not disturb you.

  I patted the cow parsley back into shape and thought of how Darcy was forever driving me out of this field, and always throwing back in Annora’s face her story of our father Phelan Swiney, Mariner, and his salty pennies.

  I did my sums. Ida had been born in late 1855, and there’d been no more daughters to follow her.

  Could that have been because our father was dead?

  The rest of us had been tiny in November 1854 – myself aged two, Pertilly one, Oona just a baby, Berenice and Enda a mere six.

  Darcy, though, had been eight by then: Darcy who had always towered like a Gorgon over the rest of us. Even as a child she’d had a pair of terrible weapons hung at the end of her arms, always ready for a beating or a throttling. Darcy had already poisoned the Eileen O’Reilly with daft that very year. Even then she’d had a black violence at the core of her, and at the same time a lack: a lack of what reins in violence, whether shame or sympathy or a mixture of both.

  Too many stories entirely, you will say, and myself with an imagination over-ripened by the lushness of fairy tales. But in the frightening country of our Harristown childhood, who else – my fever of logic rampaged – could have killed PS but Darcy?

  Even if she was just a child, even if she couldn’t smite his head against a tree like a rabbit’s, Darcy could have found a way. She always did.

  It was not true that Ireland was devoid of venomous reptiles, I thought. The Eileen O’Reilly had said Darcy had seven drops of the Devil’s blood in her body.

  Had Phelan Swiney, Mariner, crossed his eldest daughter in some way, and suffered the horrid consequences? If only there’d been black books back then in 1854. I could have hunted them out of their hiding place and read what she had scribbled inside.

  Perhaps Darcy had laid a snare for our father, as she had threatened to do. And poisoned him after, to stop him breeding more babies on our frayed mother? She’d practised, after all, on the poor Eileen O’Reilly, who’d barely survived. Annora could have put the dead man secretly in the ground. As no one ever saw him, no one in Harristown would have missed Phelan Swiney, Mariner, thinking him away on a ship in New York or Australia. Annora would of course have kept the secret; she would not want her eldest daughter carried off for correction in a lunatic asylum. She would not want the rest of us growing up with a murderess for a sister.

  It all fitted, was all of a piece. No wonder Darcy did not believe in our father! She knew he no longer lived on this earth!

  And it made sense and more sense of Darcy’s own fascination with anything to do with death, particularly bloody and untimely death. She’d told me herself that she had learned to read only so as to peruse the handbills about grisly homicides in Dublin, a habit to which she owed her grandiose vocabulary for threats and violence and her repertoire of ripe gallows curses. Her only regular use for books was in throwing them at misbehaving sisters or thin geese. Darcy was in love with her own death, too, and a romantic spectacle she made of it. She was always collecting grave-goods to be buried with her in the coffin that she endlessly redesigned under the speckled marble tombstone she’d already picked out from the Clery’s catalogue that Mrs Godlin kept at the dispensary in Kilcullen. Despite being the most dangerous thing in County Kildare, Darcy cherished a sentimental inkling that she herself would make a young corpse, which put her in a hurry for her rights and deserts. When Annora denied her an extra penny for a ribbon, she’d hiss, ‘Well, put it in my coffin, when you’re sorry. Perhaps you’ll tend to me properly then.’

  And Annora would flinch, cross herself and weep beyond consolation.
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  That Sunday I watched Darcy singing in the chapel, her black hair billowing like a black shroud. She caught my eye and sent a murderous stare back at me.

  Darcy’s hymn-singing had for years drawn people from all the hamlets around to our tiny ruin of a chapel of a Sunday. Father Maglinn encouraged Darcy to leave her hair loose, and he had her stand where the morning light fussed through the one stained-glass window, conferring an oily sheen on her black crinkles. In fact, none of us Swiney sisters was without a pleasing voice, and a good head of Saturday-washed hair, or a smock so white that it would hurt your eyes, thanks to Annora’s laundering. And so, as each of us was confirmed, we took our places beside Darcy in the gaudy light of the chapel window, and would have almost enjoyed the sound of our voices in rare harmony, had it not been for the Eileen O’Reilly in the third pew, and her remarks about Darcy.

  ‘It’d be one on them the black-horned witch of Slievenamon up there,’ she would observe, ‘that old Arsey Swiney conceitin’ herself an angel from Heaven when she’s just a murthering hairy harridan, so she is.’

  No one shushed the Eileen O’Reilly for everyone owed her father the butcher.

  Murthering hairy harridan, I thought. Could the Eileen O’Reilly know something of the PS buried in the clover field?

  Now I asked myself, what would happen to me if I mentioned what I’d found? I feared that it would likely end in a pair of crossed spoons and cow parsley above me and the Harristown worms busy below.

  Chapter 5

  By then I knew already there was something about our hair. Those books of fairy tales, which once taught us we were humble characters, now had other information to impart. At exactly the same time our Swiney hair was lengthening and thickening beyond anything reasonable, there was a reawakening of interest in those pretty old stories. Scandalous artists away in London were painting tableaux of long-haired maidens. Fashionable poets were remouthing the old hairy folk tales. Women with sumptuous hair were being defined as goddesses, princesses even, as models and muses for these great young men with great thoughts about hair: hair and love, hair and death, hair and more hair filling up the margins of books and the frames of paintings till they were fit to burst, wrapping itself around the necks of helpless men, choking them.

  Like Rapunzel’s prince, the artists’ models – girlish nobodies like ourselves – were climbing their own ropes of hair to a higher state. Their very names were known, alongside the artists’: girls born in dubious circumstances and with nothing and no more morals than were necessary. We Swineys were already being pointed at and frankly remarked on for the hair our vanished papa had left in our blood. As that summer dwindled into autumn, I began to straighten my back and walk on my bare feet with my head held higher. I did not know where my hair would lead, but it seemed that a great story lay in store: it simply was not yet legible to me.

  But, as the fairy tales taught, whenever womanly parts draw eyes to them, young women shall also know danger. Our Swiney hair also aligned us with Rapunzel, betrayed, hurt, confined in the frail frame of her own helpless body as much as in the tower from which she so badly needed to be rescued. Our hair knitted us to vanquished Medusa, tongueless mermaids, the stripped and shamed Lady Godiva.

  At Mass, my sisters and I would kneel in front of Father Maglinn, our hair aflow, the trembling in his hand communicated via the wafer on our tongues. Then we would rise to see his eyes crooked with a queersome madness and his fingers still aflitter. What I did not realise then was this – it was the Swiney hair that did that to him. At confession in the little shack he’d contrived in the ruins of the chapel, he always asked me to thread a single hair through the grate for him to hold, so he could ‘know the truth’ of my sins. By the end of my confession, he’d invariably futtered it right out of my head. I watched it disappearing through the grate like a very slender baitworm.

  And I for one was about to be made to feel the power and peril of my red hair in a most personal and startling way, and me as yet nothing at all but a red-haired schoolgirl of thirteen thin years with calluses rasping on her chilly feet as she ran towards Harristown Bridge with a book of stories slapping in her pocket and no thoughts at all of troll gentlemen with ivory hairbrushes wanting to get going with her in a copse.

  If I’d been detained by a pebble between my toes, or had rested on a stile to steal the read of a tale, and I had never crossed paths with him, then I’d never now be asking myself if there’s a market for dried tears in handkerchiefs sold by the square inch to those who prefer their heartbreaks worn and second-hand.

  He was waiting for me on the bridge as I pelted home late and solitary from school, a man tall as a standing stone, with the last of the sun pulling a great shadow out behind him.

  It is the troll of the bridge, I thought, and me with my pockets empty of tribute. Unless it is a book of stories he’s after.

  But this was not one of Miss Finaughty’s fairy tales. It was Harristown, and it was Ireland, and it was my undersized self. A lilting way with words was of no use to me now. I felt the heat of the man’s eyes on my face, my hips and the nakedness of my feet. My scalp hedgehogged; little pinpricks bit the backs of my hands and numbed my tongue.

  My feet kept walking, however, for home lay on the other side of the troll and behind me lurked a glooming copse and then a mile of bare autumn field before the next dwelling. My sisters had long since gone ahead of me while I havered over the lending shelf.

  My legs faltered a yard in front of him. He was a stranger of middle years, full-bellied and fine-dressed; not some Famined local fellow. In elegant English, he stated politely, but with no expectation of a refusal, that he would give my hair one hundred strokes of the handsome ivory brush he now produced from his pocket.

  ‘It would give me a sizeable drop of pleasure,’ he said simply, like some sober, regular gentleman. ‘I saw you coming from a way off and I told myself, “This is a girl worth waiting on a bridge for. A girl with hair like that.” ’

  ‘I’d thank you kindly not to, sir,’ I pleaded.

  He took two steps towards me and lifted my plait, grinning like a fox.

  ‘Now that is something like hair!’ he shouted. ‘Is it four foot long this thing and thicker than my leg, and red as blood, and you still not fully grown underneath its great weight?’

  He wrenched my plait high above my head, spinning me around on it.

  ‘So?’ he demanded, when he stopped.

  ‘I am thirteen, sir,’ I told him, my eyes dizzied and hot with pain.

  ‘And is it a woman you are yet?’

  ‘I do . . . do . . . not think so, your honour.’

  He slackened his grip on my hair but he did not release it. ‘Better and far better,’ he gloated, rubbing my plait against his cheek. ‘And look at the eyes on you, girl. Green as glit.’

  This last was no great compliment, for glit was what we in those days called the weed that crusted the summer-stale ponds. But the fact that he paid me such attention was what kept me standing in front of him, just as a doe-rabbit may patiently await the ministrations of the fox whose golden eye flatters her with a stare, even if the fox thinks of her not as a fine specimen of an Irish rabbit but as tender meat and his only interest is to part her from her fur and her life.

  My knees shook and my wits began to tick. Of course I dared not ask, ‘Who are you at all?’ From his clothes, I was beginning to suppose this man a very great personage of the kind I had never myself met – a landlord. I was as awed as if receiving a Visitation from God.

  The man pocketed his ivory brush and caught up the end of my plait with both hands. Now he was unravelling it fast, the white fingers on him furrowing deftly through its redness. He grunted.

  That grunt I knew for a sin.

  Yet still I stood still, mesmerised.

  ‘That’s a fierce amount of hair you have there, now I see it all undressed,’ he said. ‘And is it not a shocking hour of the evening for a girl to be walking abroad completely alone in not
hing but a smock and such a plain grey calico dress, and poor, patched stuff at that?’

  He pinched a piece of it between the fingers of his other hand and then lifted my skirt so the cool of the evening was suddenly sharp around my thighs. ‘And a linsey-woolsey petticoat so thin and so very short.’

  I swayed, inebriated by his clear sense of entitlement. Perhaps this was what gentlemen did, I thought. I had never been addressed in any manner of means by a gentleman before. Phelan Swiney, Mariner, our absent father, had not supplied anything by way of knowledge as to how to deal with men. I knew only that I was less than this gentleman and that therefore I should serve him as best I could. I feared to mortify Annora with uncivil behaviour on my part.

  Certainly his voice was so sure and steady that I was a tint persuaded by the implication that both the hour and the shortness of the petticoat were grievous offences I myself had foisted upon him. I felt a shameful creature entirely. I blushed, for it was five days since my last confession and the sins must have been piling up in me. And even if they weren’t, the man’s hands were mighty paddles and he had two feet of height on me. He had already shown that he did not scruple to hurt me.

  Slowly, he lowered his nose to my hair parting, and took himself a deep relishing sniff and let out another great grunt. ‘There must be something in the rain hereabouts,’ he mused. ‘I have . . . seen . . . a ten-year-old prodigy of curls in Ploopluck and a creditable head by Jigginstown House. But this,’ – he raised a hank of my hair to his mouth and bit on it – ‘this is the best yet.’

  Seen, was it? And was he also so unkind to their hair?

  My heart swooped and rolled like a mill wheel so that I was sure he must hear its clattering. Its noise woke up my sleeping senses. I had mistaken myself to trust that a gentleman was always a gentleman. But I had left it too late to object to his landlordly ways. By allowing them, I had fallen in with him on the way to some fearful kind of badness.