Chapter Five
Dawn is a long time coming.
We lie on my bed in the inner room while the candles burn down and the kitchen hearth dies low. He does not pull out of me for a long while, his body curled close behind mine, his arm wrapped around my ribs. I lie with the head on the pillow beside my own. The black eyes are open and watching.
I drift, but do not sleep. I think.
I think about my grandmother, and her grandmother, and the long line of women in my house who have known the rules of the night-things.
And who have, perhaps, broken them the same ways I am breaking them.
I wonder whether my mother, dead since I was nine, had a story she never lived to tell me, and whether some night in my own future I will sit at a younger woman’s hearth and choose not to tell her something I have learned.
He does not speak to me through the long hours.
When the first gray of dawn comes through the window, he stirs and withdraws from me. A warm flood of him spills onto the bed. I make a sound, and his hand passes once down my flank in apology.
I lie on my side and watch him.
He stands beside the bed in the dim gray light and laces his breeches, then bends to pick his head up from the pillow and cradle it in the crook of his arm. The black eyes open as he lifts it, and settle on me.
He crosses to the bedroom door and stops, then turns back.
I sit up, and the blankets fall away. I do not cover myself. Naked on the edge of my bed, my hair down, my body sore in every place that has been used, I watch him in the doorway and wait.
He does not move for a long moment.
Then a voice comes from him.
It does not come from the head; the mouth there does not move. The voice comes from somewhere in his chest, from the space where a heart might have been if he had one. It is deep and quiet, and it speaks two words.
“Tomas Crehan.”
I close my eyes. When I open them, he is still in the doorway, still looking at me.
“Crehan,” I say. My voice is rough.
The voice from his chest does not answer; it does not need to. He has spoken the name. He has named the one. The rule is the rule.
He bends in something that is almost a bow.
Then he is gone.
I do not hear him cross the kitchen, nor the door. After a long pause, I hear the measured beat of four hooves starting up the track. I sit on the edge of my bed and listen until the hoofbeats are gone.
Then I rise.
? ? ?
Once I have washed and dressed, I make tea. I stare at the kitchen table while I drink it.
From its peg, I retrieve my satchel and check my herbs, packing a small flask of valerian, a packet of comfrey, a length of clean linen. Eithne Crehan will need them when I reach her, and she will need someone with her.
I walk out into the morning. The rowan tree is bare. The horse is gone. The mud of the yard shows no hoofprints; the track to the road shows none either. The sky is the pale gray of an October morning, woodsmoke from the village rising up the valley, and somewhere a rooster crowing.
I walk down the track to the road and turn south, toward the village.
I am perhaps a quarter mile from Crehan’s place when the first wailing starts. A woman’s voice, but not Eithne’s. The neighbor, Mary Quinn, who has a tendency to let herself in as she pleases. I quicken my pace. The scene is as I expect when I arrive.
Tomas Crehan is laid out in his bed, eyes open, mouth slack, no mark on him.
Eithne sits at the foot of the bed in her shift, knees drawn to her chest, arms wrapped around them, and she is not crying. She watches him with the steady blank face of a woman who has not yet let herself understand that she has been freed.
Mary Quinn meets me at the door. “Ailish, oh, Ailish.”
“I’ll see to her,” I say.
“He’s—”
“I’ll see to her, Mary. Go and fetch Father Brennan.”
She goes.
I cross the small room and sit on the bed beside her. I do not look at Tomas; I do not need to. I put my arm around her and draw her gently against my side. After a moment, she lets her head rest on my shoulder, and after another, she finally begins to shake.
“Ailish,” she whispers.
“Hush, love.”
“Ailish, he—”
“Hush. I’m here. Hush.”
She cries into my shoulder, and I hold her. Across her bowed head I look at the dead man in the bed and feel nothing for him at all.
Later, when I walk home in the afternoon, I am tired in every part of me. When I reach my cottage, I open the door, cross to the long oak table, and set my satchel down.
I do not close the shutters that evening.
I bank the fire low and make my supper, and eat it at the table where his head rested. I lay my palm once, briefly, over that spot. Then I climb into my bed, where my linens still smell of him, and I lie on my side facing the small window.
The shutter is open a finger’s width. The night air comes in.
I do not look at the window. I close my eyes and listen. Far off down the valley, I think I hear the soft fall of hooves on a road that is not mine. Not tonight.
But there will be other nights.
I let myself smile, just a little, into the dark.
Then I sleep.
Thank you for reading!