Chapter 10 #13
Without discussing it, the following night, everything changes.
It begins in the same way, with him reaching for her pocket, but Enda, to her consternation, sees her own hand darting out to intercept his, and how enormous his hand feels, when entwined with hers, what breadth there is to his palm, how smooth the skin of his fingers, how ragged the nails, but also how warm it is, and there is an answering grip coming from it: her own, much smaller hand, raw from the floor soap, from the scrubbing brush, from the mop and duster, with calluses on the fingertips, is being enfolded by his.
Then, suddenly, he has her, all of her; he has taken possession of her whole self, and he is lifting her off her feet, carrying her deeper into the shadows of the alleyway that runs alongside the inn where he works, and he is pressing her up against the clapboard wall, as if he would affix her there, and Enda somehow knows that she will always remember what is happening to her.
Without discussing it, they pause; they lean sideways and place their respective instruments carefully on the ground, and then he lifts her again, with both hands spanning her waist, and she thinks, fleetingly, of the moment he and his sister tied the skirt around her at Grosse ?le, but then she doesn’t think of that any more because he is talking, saying her name over and over again, and he has his face pressed into that part of her where her neck meets her shoulder—what can be the name for that part of the body, why does it not have one?
—and then he is quiet, for once, and he kisses her on the skin of her jaw, then cheek, temple, mouth, his movements deliberate and unhurried, and he is muttering something to himself, or her, a brief phrase in his own language, and how beautiful it seems to her, the sound waves make when the sea rakes through pebbles on a shore, and then she stops thinking altogether.
She becomes solely sensation: the shocking whiteness of his chest under his loosened shirt, the soft scrape of his stubble against her clavicle, the bewildering things her body wants to do or wants from his, and knows how to do, the plush press of his mouth on hers, the silk-firm slide of his hands over her ribs and stomach and more, the fathomless lock of his gaze on hers.
She would remember it all; it will return to her, at unbidden moments, for the rest of her life.
The day has felt wrong to Eugene since the beginning.
When he woke, he could feel that the wind was coming from the south-east, which was an unusual direction altogether, and it was skimming up and over the widow’s roof in irregular gusts, some strong and prolonged, others skittishly brief.
In the byre, the widow’s cow was bellowing, calling out to someone to come and milk her, even though the dawn had barely broken and she was never normally seen to at this hour.
When Eugene swung his feet out of bed, he found his boots, as always, beside the pallet, but they had been switched over, left to right, the laces knotted and pulled out of their eyelets.
He didn’t like the look of all this. Outside, the air was warm—unseasonably so for early autumn—and sudden cross-breezes tugged at Eugene’s hair in a way he found unpleasant.
The sea, when he came around the side of the house, was grey and swollen, resembling a pot about to boil, with white-crested waves gliding in from beyond the breakers.
As he walked to look at the grass in the lower field, he was startled by two ravens lifting out of the undergrowth, and Eugene was uneasy, for everyone knows that a raven leaving the ground on which you walk means a death before nightfall.
He didn’t like it, he didn’t like it at all, so later, when Rose said the bread wasn’t rising and mentioned that she was intending to walk over to the far side of the town to deliver some spun wool to a family there, Eugene had put down his spoon with a bang and shaken his head.
“What is it, Euge?” Rose said. “You don’t want me to go? Is that it?”
Eugene had nodded, once, very firmly.
“Whyever not?”
And when he had directed his gaze, pointedly, to the bread, she had laughed.
“Because the bread didn’t rise I shouldn’t go over with the wool? Eugene, that’s—”
He had let out a growl and tapped her on the wrist, his signal to her that he meant what he said, that he needed her to listen to him. Rose had stopped laughing and covered his fingers with her own. “Very well, Euge. I’ll stay in today, then, will I?”
He laid a hand to her shoulder briefly.
“Have it your way,” she’d said, and got up to stir the fire.
Eugene has walked up here, to the old house, to cast his eye over their land, to see that the hay is drying, to check on their hens and collect the eggs.
The wind is even more noticeable up here: the hens, when he wades towards them through the lough, are all roosting in the tree.
None of them have laid this morning. He stands for a while, fists on his hips, in the lee of the ring fort, or rath, as their father referred to it, deciding what best to do with a day such as this, and he comes to the conclusion that to dig would do no harm, to turn the sod in the widow’s upper field before the cold of winter sets in.
He is glad, as he fetches the heftiest of his father’s spades, to think of Rose and the widow safe in the house, where nothing can reach them, except perhaps a twist of the peculiar wind reaching down the chimney.
Rose, however, does venture out later in the day.
It’s only as far as the shore, she reasons to herself, which is in calling distance of the house.
She tells the widow that she’s away to the strand to collect mussels at low tide.
She will bake them later on a hot stone, for their supper, and Eugene won’t know she has broken her promise because she’ll say she fetched them yesterday, and he may not even ask because he loves a baked mussel, after all, and he’ll be distracted by the eating of them.
So she whistles for Bran, and the two of them take the lane out of the village and then the path that drops down to the shore.
The strand, she is saying to Bran, we’re off to the strand, because the stretch of yellow sand is his favourite place, where he, despite his advancing years, will sprint in crazed circles, yapping and letting his tongue fly out in the wind, round and round her, his long legs kicking up sprays in his wake.
But Rose never makes it to the strand that day, for when she reaches the place where the path splits in two, one fork leading down to the sea and the other climbing up to the cliffs, she sees the figures of two men.
They are not men from the village—she knows this straight away—because even through the half-light of dusk she can see that their physiques are thickened and well-fed, and that they are wearing the layered and buttoned clothes of the gentry, their throats muffled with white cloth, their hats high and brushed to a sheen.
She also sees that they are dangling something between them and she would have thought that it was perhaps an animal they had slaughtered, because she knows they do this for sport, a rabbit or a fox, except that the creature is wriggling and making a noise, and such a desperate, unholy sound it is, a squealing and a yipping, and Rose knows instantly that the creature is a young pup, they have it strung up by its neck, paws flailing helplessly in the air, while they take turns to land blows with their whips on its soft grey hide and belly.
Without thinking, Rose moves towards them. The pup is so like Bran, it is him in miniature, it has to be one of his, for he has fathered many around here: the same sleek, pale underside, and the feathery back, the long, curved tail.
The taller man—and Rose recognises him as the viscount’s eldest son—lifts the arm holding the whip, and she hears him say that the pup is a cur, a scoundrel, that he will teach it a lesson it won’t forget.
“Ah, please,” Rose calls out, for she cannot help herself, “don’t be hurting it. It’s just a baby.”
The men turn towards her and their faces are incredulous.
The landowner’s son still has his arm raised, his mouth open, but Rose doesn’t care.
She steps forward and puts her arms around the young dog, lifting it so that the collar no longer strangles, feeling the tremble and the terror racking its slender body, and it whimpers, recognising at once a sympathetic touch, burrowing its narrow nose under her hair and into her neck.
There now, she murmurs to it, over and over again, you’re safe, you’re safe, and in answer it darts out a tongue to lick her ear.
The viscount’s son is still holding the leash, so that he and Rose are connected, the puppy between them. She hears him murmur something to the other gentleman, who gives a short snickering laugh, and for the first time Rose wonders if what she’s saying to the puppy is true: are they safe?
She lifts her face from the animal, and its fur is so familiar, so warm she cannot believe herself to be in any real danger.
“You can’t be beating it like that,” she says imploringly. “You can’t—”
“Is that so?”
The landowner’s son seems amused, his head on one side, his riding crop tapping the side of his boot, but Rose is not fooled: she can see the glitter and shift of his anger, like the current beneath a frozen sea.
“And who are you to tell us what to do?”
The manner of his speech strikes Rose as peculiar. The words are clipped and separate yet he hardly moves his lips as he utters them.
“I’m—” She is about to tell them her name, but she veers away from it, for these gentlemen will not care. “I…I’ve a dog just like this one,” she says instead, because it seems important to establish this. “I’m certain he must be the father, they are the spit of each other anyway, and perhaps—”