Chapter 8 #12
To take the papers, to leave, to sail away, without so much as a word to any of them.
To have planned it all but said nothing to Rose, her only sister, no farewell, no explanation.
Rose had initially refused to believe it possible: Enda would never betray her like that; she would never take the emigration papers and her tobacco tin of saved pennies and her fiddle and lie to Rose’s face about where she was going that day.
A day or so after Enda disappeared, Rose had gone out beyond the haggard to feed the donkey, and near the copse and the streams, she came upon strange scatterings of bright strips.
For a moment, she couldn’t understand them, couldn’t tell what they were.
They looked like tethers or bindings, and they possessed an odd familiarity, and then she saw what they were: Enda’s hair.
She must have come up here, with a pair of scissors, and cut it off, severed the length of it from her head, all the better to pass as the man named on the papers she had taken from beneath Liam’s pallet.
Only then, as Rose scrabbled about on the ground, snatching up the strands of hair, rage and grief tearing through her like a gale, did she fully comprehend what Enda had done.
Enda had gone, had left her, had hatched this plan and not told her, had abandoned her here, to look after their father and their wordless brother, in this lonely place.
She would never come back. As Rose knelt on the grass and moss, she was aware of a horrible cawing noise coming out of her, like that of a furious gull.
Enda had gone and Liam had gone, within weeks of each other, and neither of them knew of Tomás’s accident, and how was she to manage, because here she was, left out, just like when they were children, unheeded, the last to know.
As she stands by her eggs, she thinks she will never again utter her sister’s name, that it will be relegated to silence for evermore.
She thinks that if Enda were to appear to her now, before her, in this marketplace, Rose would not forgive her.
She might very well strike her; she could not be held back.
She has barely sold anything today. The beautiful domed shapes of the hens’ eggs remain where she put them this morning.
She knows it is because she is standing with her back to the clock tower, not catching anyone’s eye.
This is no way to sell, she can hear the widow—or is it perhaps the voice of her mother?
—telling her. You’ll be heading home with empty pockets.
You need to call out, catch people’s attention.
Fresh eggs, best eggs, laid this morning, dulse for you, go on, shout it loud, with a smile on your face.
So Rose breathes in, and calls: “Fr—” She has to stop and clear her throat, and it occurs to her, in that moment, that she hasn’t spoken at all, today, not once, since she woke, she and Eugene sharing a silent breakfast then making their way down to the lough, their father out God knew where, on one of his secretive wanderings.
She might lose her ability to speak altogether if she goes on like this, with no one to talk to.
“Eggs,” she croaks, the sound not even reaching the people passing right in front of her—a woman holding two children by the hands, a frozen-looking boy with no shoes, and the eldest son of the viscount, who is raising his arm to greet the knot of gentry across the street, calling to those of his kind over the heads of the townspeople as if they are simply not there.
Something about this young man riles Rose, fans a flame of anger in her.
Him with his silver-buttoned waistcoat, his smouldering cigar, his yellow-patterned cravat folded just so about his fleshy neck.
Suddenly, her fury has a direction in which to travel: it has a target.
How dare he? she’s thinking. How dare he strut through this town, looking like he’s never lost anything or anyone in his life, decked out like that, when his father—
“Eggs,” she bawls, just as he’s passing her by, causing him to jerk his head sideways and bring up a protective hand to cup around his ear, “fresh this morning! Get your eggs here! Fresh eggs, fresh this morning.”
People wander over. The woman with the two children buys a dozen, and Rose slides the money into her pocket.
The jangle and slide of coin over coin is a comfort: it gives her a feeling of purpose.
Eugene will like to look at them, one by one, when she gets back tonight—he will run his thumb over the markings, noting to himself the numbers inscribed there.
He will stack them in piles, then rearrange them according to whatever private rules he has made for himself.
A family of five stops at her stall, and fills their basket; a woman with barely any teeth in her head wants a half-dozen eggs to feed her sons.
Then one of the gentry comes over, a lady in slender-toed button-boots, drawing leather gloves off her white hands, and Rose tries not to stare at her but it’s not often she sees someone like this up close, and everything about her is fascinating to Rose: the delicate pin-tuck pleats of her starched collar, and the way it brushes against her jaw, and Rose would like to know if it itches at all, and the tiny blue stones that hang by golden hooks from her earlobes, the way they shimmer and pull the daylight into their centres, the pale softness of the skin on the cheeks and across her nose, as if she’s never been out in the sun.
When she speaks, her lips part over straight shining teeth, and Rose has to shake herself to listen.
“I say,” the lady says, “how much for a handful of the moss?”
Rose doesn’t correct her, doesn’t say, It’s not moss, it’s dulse, it’s from the sea, not the land.
Before Rose can answer, the lady twists her neck to speak to someone behind her, and Rose sees it is the viscount’s son again, still with the stinking stub of a cigar in his mouth, the man who will one day inherit the estate and take their rent and direct their labour.
It is the first time she has ever seen him at close quarters but she has heard much about him: that he once horsewhipped his groom at a point-to-point, that there is trouble between him and his father, the viscount, because of all the debts he runs up, and that as a boy he used to tie burning sticks to the tails of sleeping dogs.
Rose examines him and observes that his sleek good looks are somewhat marred by a pair of slack, moist lips.
He stands there, feet apart, glancing at his watch, wholly unaware of this imperfection, and Rose finds herself tempted to point it out to him, just to see what he would do.
“Simply marvellous for keeping chills away,” the lady is saying to him. “I swear by it.”
The man laughs, a short bark, thrusting his watch back into his waistcoat pocket. “If you say so.”
“Do you doubt me?” She taps him on the arm playfully. “You stir it into hot water and then, hey presto, you knock it back.”
“Rather you than me,” he drawls, removing the cigar from his mouth and flicking the ash to the ground.
As he does so, he shifts his attention from the woman to Rose, and his eyes skate over her, from her face all the way down the front of her apron and back.
His gaze is belligerent, interrogative, as if saying he will look at whatever he likes, for as long as he likes, as if daring her to object.
The lady is addressing Rose again, asking how much for the dulse, and Rose is relieved to be able to turn towards her.
And because of her discomfort, and because of the horsewhipped groomsman, who bears a scar on his face to this day, Rose names a price so excessive that she’s sure the lady and the viscount’s son will draw back and walk away.
There is a strong urge in Rose not to sell the dulse, collected so carefully by the widow at low tide, to these people, to let them walk away without it, to condemn them to a winter of endless chills and bad chests.
Hey presto, she thinks, what a way to talk.
But, astonishingly, the lady gives a nod with her angular chin.
She reaches up her coat sleeve for a small velvet bag adorned all over with glistening beads arranged in triangles.
Rose watches, mesmerised, as the elegant fingers draw apart the strings, as they count out the correct coins—a shocking amount, Rose is ashamed to watch—and then hold them out in a neat stack.
Rose takes them, releases them into her apron pocket, telling herself that it will please the widow, it will see her through the winter, and hasn’t the widow paid enough in tithes and rent in her lifetime to more than line the pockets of the gentry, didn’t the woman lose her whole family to the Great Hunger and these people and their ilk did nothing?
All the same, Rose gives the lady not one but two handfuls of the dulse, and says, God bless you, at which the lady bestows upon her a gracious smile, saying, Thank you, dear, before turning away and taking the proffered arm of the viscount’s son, and together they rejoin their friends.
Rose has no idea that she is being observed from across the street. Tomás stands with one shoulder pressed into a wall, most of him hidden from sight, his right sleeve, sewn shut, tucked into his jacket.
Several minutes ago, as he was making his way along the street, he realised that the girl selling eggs over by the clock tower was his daughter. Ever since the amputation, he finds he loses track of the day of the week, the times of the day, the rhythms of his house, if in fact he ever knew them.