Chapter 4 #9
If stationed in the yard, Tomás spent a lot of time gazing through the railings at the town streets, at the twisting silver surface of the river, watching people come and people go, soldiers marching past in formation, scattering all before them, weapons gleaming, their sergeants yelling orders, the way the cobbles shone in the rain and yielded up billows of dust in the summer.
The donkey cart continued to arrive, intermittently, through the locked gates, bringing more orphaned children to the door.
One day, Tomás was asked to go and take care of the cart’s beasts.
Strangely, he found that he knew just what to do: grip them by the harness, unhook the yoke from their soft necks, all the while speaking to them in low and reassuring tones, and rub a knuckle near their long-lashed brown eyes, then say, Hup-hup, and guide them to a bucket of water.
He watched his hands and heard his tongue perform these tasks and knew, in an embedded, airless part of himself, that he had done it all before, and many times, in the unknowable life he’d once had.
He found, too, that he knew to wedge the water bucket with a stone so that they didn’t kick it over in their eagerness and thirst. As he stood near the beasts, inhaling their remote-familiar-upsetting-soothing scent, he noticed that a girl had climbed down from the cart, come up to the donkeys and, like him, was pressing her knuckle into their furred foreheads with a movement of such gentleness and care.
It struck Tomás in that moment that these were qualities he had not observed in anyone for a long time, so he turned to examine her properly.
She was slight, of course, with something of the bird about her, a linnet perhaps or a thrush—that same brightness of eye, a quizzical tilt to the head.
Most incredible to Tomás was the curling yellow hair falling to below her waist. He looked at the waterfall of it—it had been a while since he had seen hair like that—and decided not to tell her that the wardens would have it severed from her head in a matter of minutes.
It was said they sold it to wig-makers. He looked at the tears spreading silently down her cheeks and knew that she, like him, had had another life and was now embarking on this one, and he was surprised by the urge in himself to speak to her, to ask her where she was from and who her people had been.
“What’s your name?” he heard his voice say, which took him aback because he generally found speaking painful and unnecessary.
The girl paused in the crooning noises she was making to the donkeys and looked at him across their backs, as if wondering what kind of a person he might be.
For a moment, he believed she wouldn’t speak, that she would decide he was not to be trusted, that she would turn and walk away. But she cleared her throat.
“Seraphina,” she answered. “But I’m always called Phina. And you?”
Reflexively, he touched a hand to the breast pocket of his jacket where his name was spelt out in black thread. Her eyes, unnaturally large in their sockets, followed this movement.
“Tomás,” he got out, then fell silent, not because he had nothing more to say to her.
He found, in fact, that he would have liked to ask her many more questions, such as had she scrabbled with her fingernails in the soil to see if any of the crop had escaped the blight, had she been reduced to living in a ditch with only branches to cover her head, had she been driven to eat grass or weeds that turned her mouth to a green cave and her bowels to water?
He was silenced because he didn’t want to say to her that the wardens would shortly be taking not only her hair from her but her name too.
“Seraphina” would, he knew, be deemed too ornate for a starveling.
So he said nothing but stood with her as they petted the beasts.
And when some of the others ran up to her, saw the fine woollen shawl she had about her shoulders and tried to snatch it, Tomás stepped towards them and thumped two of them in the side of the head—he found that he knew how to do this, too—and told them to let her alone.
The shawl, patterned, with a long fringe of tassels, he had seen was much too big for her, it was of a size meant for a grown woman, but she clutched it as if her life depended on it.
Her name Tomás was right about—and the hair. It was cropped to her scalp that very night, and she was informed by the wardens that she would henceforth be “Frances.” They also took the shawl, saying it was far too smart a piece altogether for a girl like her.
With a sure and righteous hand, Father Joseph pushes open the upper section of the widow’s half-door and surveys the scene before him.
A single long room, cast in a dim pall, despite the patchy sunshine outside; a waning fire cracks and grumbles in the grating; three fish recline, open-eyed, in a bowl of salt on the windowsill; a couple of smoking rush-lights rest on the wooden board that serves as a table.
At the table stands a man. Father Joseph is particularly interested in this man—reports have been reaching him in his wind-blasted chapel, an hour’s walk away, of the map-maker and how his mind has been turned, his wits lost. There has been a certain amount of disorderly speculation about a spring up near the mountain, and the effects of its supposed magical waters, but Father Joseph has always been firm about such heathenish nonsense.
He’ll have none of it, he has told his flock.
There will be no blessing of wells in his dominion, no praying to false pagan deities, no reliance on witch-doctoring or curers.
So he has come all this way, his soutane flapping in the breeze, his head wrapped in a scarf to keep off the cold, to peruse this person for himself, and to put paid to these rumours of hydromancy and visions, to show the whole parish who has the upper hand here.
That hand being his own. And God’s, of course.
What does he see, from the threshold of the cottage?
The man is younger than Father Joseph had been led to expect, perhaps close to his own age.
The priest takes in the wild hair standing up off the brow, the crown of wilting leaves, the several days’ worth of beard-growth.
He sees the intent and focus of the man as he makes marks on the ledger and page before him with blunt and inky fingers.
He hears the mumble and hum and sudden laughs that erupt forth from the poor soul’s mouth.
He observes the bared legs below the tattered hem of the nightshirt, and the way the shinbones curve away from each other, the lumpen ankles, and he knows enough about the effects of malnutrition to recognise that before him stands a man who lived as a child through the terrible times and there are not many of his age to be seen, unless—
“Come in if you’re coming, Father,” the man says, without looking up.
Father Joseph feels himself turning scarlet, for some reason. Then he fumbles for the latch, and steps inside.
“Shut the door,” the man commands, still without raising his head, “if you please. Draughts are the very devil to my papers, and I must keep them in a particular sequence, you see, otherwise…” He trails away, searching for something under his ledger, behind an inkpot.
“What is it you seek?”
“My…” the man mutters distractedly, getting down on his hands and knees to search under the table “…the…”
“Your name is Tomás, is that correct?”
From under the table: “It is.”
“I am Father Joseph.”
A noncommittal hmm.
“You are named for one of Christ’s apostles,” Father Joseph presses on—he always feels it best to make some connection between a challenging situation and the scriptures. “He who was the first to recognise and acknowledge His divinity, His grace, and—”
“And the one who doubted the veracity of the Resurrection.”
Father Joseph pauses, trying not to betray his surprise. He has heard the map-maker was a learned man, but he did not expect to encounter the word “veracity” in this cottage.
“You know your scripture,” he says, after a moment’s pause.
Tomás straightens up. “That I do.” He places, on the table before him, four stones, one at each corner of a piece of unrolled parchment. “I was schooled, in part, by men of the cloth.”
“Oh? And where were your people from?”
Tomás’s eyes narrow. “My people?”
“Your…” Father Joseph flounders. Like a man stepping unknowingly onto the wet terrain of a bog, he is alert, instantly, to his error. “I meant, before…before the…”
The man shifts his lips against his teeth, as if his mouth is dry. His eyes glitter with madness or rage, hard to tell which.
“What about you, Father? Where are you from? If I’m not mistaken I detect perhaps an accent from across the water.”
Father Joseph clears his throat, finding himself wrong-footed once more: how febrile and agile is this man’s brand of madness.
“Ah…you are…What a fine ear you have, Tomás, I commend you. I…I was born near a place called Cliffony, which is in—”
“Sligo,” Tomás finishes, then stares at him, unwavering, his chin lifted. “But?” he prompts.
“But…” the priest gives a weak laugh, hating the sound of it “…you are quite correct…My father…he borrowed money for a passage to Liverpool before…just as all the trouble was starting…and so…” Will this sentence ever end, will he ever finish what he is saying, and why is he saying this? “…I lived over in England—”
“I thought as much.”
“—but I made sure to return as soon as I was ordained. I requested to come back here to do what I could for my country, in its hour of—”
Tomás holds up a hand. “The hour of need, Father, has passed. A long time ago.”
“Well, I feel that need still present. How could it be otherwise? We all of us still live in the shadow of the—”