Chapter 10 #3
The skylark flaps her wings, as if to shake herself free of the viscount’s troubles, and continues in a southerly direction, towards the estuary, and if she were looking closely at what was below it, she might spot a tiny manikin, moving from field and beyond, upwards, to the highest point on the whole peninsula: Eugene.
He is traversing the bog, where he comes most days, after he has finished his morning tasks, and before he starts those of the afternoon, hopping from stone to stone in his bare feet with practised ease.
He has rested near where the bog-girl lies for a moment or two, catching his breath, communing with her in silence, before going on his way.
He likes to climb the highest hill every day, at noon or thereabouts. He likes to push himself through this ritual, feeling the hammering of his heart, the racing of blood through his veins as it tries to keep pace with his exertions.
At a piercing noise above him, Eugene looks up, shading his eyes.
A lark, female, wheels through the sky, setting her course between land and cloud.
Eugene guesses she will be heading back to her nest, with food for her young.
He watches her, one foot raised above the other, for he, too, for a moment is thinking like a lark or an estuarial bird, but then she is gone.
He lowers his foot and climbs the remainder of the way.
At the top of the crag, a frisky and insistent wind harries him, tugging at his lapels, trying to tunnel up his jersey. Eugene turns his back on it, ignoring its rude parries. He crosses his arms, to keep in the heat of the climb, and surveys all below him.
His look-out hill, he thinks of this place.
He can see along the length of the peninsula, and most of the road into town.
He can see over the north inlet and the south, as far as the next headland, where on clear days he can make out the crumbling remains of an old castle.
There is the fishermen’s cabin, down by the harbour bay, and their currach, tethered to its usual stone.
There the house of the sisters, with its line of turf-smoke, blurred by wind today, and the fence enclosing their goat.
He can make out the widow’s longhouse, despite a crosshatching of sea-mist between him and the shoreline, and it’s just possible to spot the woman herself, bent over something beside the byre.
Behind him, he knows without looking, is his own dwelling, the cottage, the haggard, the field.
Rose might be outside, pegging out the washing or lugging the churn in through the open door.
But Eugene isn’t thinking of Rose today.
He is looking down at the manor house, at the conservatory, which, he sees, is collapsed at one end, its wooden spars and elegant panes shattered into a heap of broken glass and splinters.
He is noting, too, unlike the lark, the overgrown garden, the laurel walk almost closed over, the algae-clogged lake, the amount of greenery and moss adorning the roof, the potholes on the driveway.
Hard, Eugene has heard, for a man like the viscount to be getting labourers or servants, these days, to be finding people to rake his gravel and mow his lawns.
When Eugene accompanies Rose to market, he listens in to the swirl of conversation and from it he gleans all kinds of information.
An earl was bludgeoned in his sleep, not far from here, only last month; a lord in County Sligo had his grain stores burned.
Other landowners have beaten a retreat back across the water and stayed there, leaving their estates to run themselves and the fine houses to fall into disrepair.
Their viscount, however, has dug in his heels.
He is staying, he has told his tenants. He is not running scared from the new mood taking hold of this country; it will take more than a few peasant rebels with pitchforks to frighten him off his land.
And yet, Eugene sees, far below him, the same thing he saw only a few days ago: the viscount’s land steward leaning down from his horse to tear from a gatepost a notice that has been nailed there in the night.
The piece of paper flutters in the man’s gloved hand before he crumples it up and shoves it into his pocket.
Eugene knows what the notice says because it has been the talk of the parish for weeks now: who might have written it, who nailed it up, who would dare write such rousing lines or take such a rebellious tone.
In a fine and even copperplate hand, it addresses itself to “Those who pay rent by work and labour to the viscount.” It exhorts them to “stand antagonistic and defiant in the face of this unmerciful exploitation, to resist, resist, resist.”
With a kick of his heels, the steward urges his horse on to the next gatepost, where he rips off another three of the notices. Eugene watches closely. The notices, he knows, will reappear in the night, and the steward will have to remove them all over again.
Unseen, the skylark passes over Eugene’s head, and she drifts down towards the estuary on a high cross-breeze.
His thoughts, to her, are opaque: they don’t cling in shreds, like the viscount’s, but slip past her, unreadable.
She is, anyway, thinking only of her nest, the four green and speckled eggs hidden there, and how she will sit upon them now and warm them with the soft feathers of her belly.
Enda is once more afloat, crouching in the prow of a ferry shuttling her across the muscled currents of the St. Lawrence river.
It is 1880: a leap year. Elsewhere in the world, an inventor is patenting his incandescent electric light-bulb.
A mathematician is introducing his new pictorial concept for demonstrating the logical relations between sets.
After a bout of heavy rain, there is a landslide in Nainital, and a hundred and fifty people drown after being buried in mud.
There is a prolonged gun-fight in Australia, at the end of which a notorious bushranger outlaw is captured; months later, he will be hanged by the neck until he is dead.
The First Boer War is beginning. Two circus impresarios join forces.
A vaudeville star makes her debut on Broadway.
There is an earthquake in Zagreb, which reduces the Gothic cathedral to rubble.
Enda has been in the quarantine hospital for more than six weeks.
She has eaten at least a hundred meals. From other inmates, she has learned tunes from more than nineteen countries.
She has slept in three different wards, the first of which had windows that looked out, a doctor informed her, on the graves of thousands upon thousands of people from her country buried on Grosse ?le.
They’d made it across the sea during the terrible famine, in a weakened and starved state, the doctor said, as he examined her, only to die as they arrived, sometimes as they crawled up the beach.
Enda spent all her time in that particular ward at the window, staring out; sometimes, if the nurses weren’t around to stop her, she would play airs on her fiddle, sending the music out towards the graves.
She is at last leaving Grosse ?le, the small ferry cutting a path towards the city of Québec, through those of the huge ships passing back and forth.
Their proximity makes Enda flinch—she grips the rail but not because of seasickness; she does not suffer from it.
With her other hand, she guards her jacket seam, sewn with coins and notes.
The wharfside buildings pull closer and closer still.
Enda chews at her lip until she tastes blood on her tongue.
She tries not to look at a group of brothers and their sister in the prow of the ferry, the girl’s arm through the older brother’s, the excitement evident in their faces.
You will be all right, Enda chides herself fiercely.
You will not give in to weak thoughts. You will do this alone, if you have to. And you have to. No good giving up now.
Instead, she fixes her eyes on the city ahead.
Québec, from the river, looks to Enda like a flight of stairs or a pile of books, buildings stacked behind other buildings, edging backwards up the cliff.
There is the sprawl of the long dockside buildings—warehouses, wharfs—and then behind them a layer of tall brick edifices, with flags on their turrets and white window frames.
There seems to be a patch of greenery, perhaps a park, and Enda can see tiny figures, grouped together, walking along paths.
Vehicles cut past each other, along streets, through gaps.
At the top of the cliff there are large houses or mansions, their gables turned to the water.
Excitement and fear vie within her. Here it is; she is here. She is about to enter the city. Any moment now, she will be one of those people moving through the tree-lined park, along the streets.
She has, in her pocket, the address of an apartment, given to her by an Ulsterwoman from the hospital.
It is a curious stream of numbers, separated by slashes, followed by words in a foreign language that the woman said was the street’s name.
Enda could stay there for a while, the woman said, the rent would be cheap, and at least she’d have the company of her own people.
There had been something not wholly trustworthy about the woman, Enda is thinking, as the ferry pulls up alongside the dock, something in the way her eyes travelled over Enda’s face and clothing, the way she laughed and clutched her arm when Enda said she had come over on the boat alone.
Enda would prefer not to have to use this address, not to go to these people from Ulster, but what choice does she have? She will stay for a night, perhaps two, certainly no more than three, until she finds a better option.