The Star of the Sea

The Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor Page A

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Authors: Joseph O'Connor
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that he might have done nothing; that was to bring in gratuitous complications. The men beating Mulvey had done nothing either, but that had not spared them when the reckoning came. Their land was gone. They were men without a purpose. Hungry and beaten; finally conquered.
    Once they had been harrowers; now they were the harrowed. They still smelt of their land as they smashed him half stupid. Their canvas gloves, their farmer’s boots, still caked with clumps of dead, black soil. Fingers which had tended and planted and coaxed now choking, wrenching, tearing at his face. They had let him escape and then caught him again – as though to say there will be no escape . One had a mongrel, another a hunter. The yaps, the howls were the worst things to remember: the hot, wet breaths of the starving hounds, the scrape of their claws and the urgings of the men. A clod of gravelled earth was snatched from a ditch and forced into his choking mouth until he gagged. Stones rained on his body and still the beating did not stop. He felt something of what they themselves must have felt, in every kick, in every gouge and spit and punch. Even through the blood trickling into his eyes, they looked so diminished, so completely afraid. They had been made to look small, and they were, and they knew it. What had happened to his attackers was a kind of rape. ‘You’ll do this, Mulvey, or you’ll never see daylight again. And you’ll be watched on that ship to make sure you do.’ Through broken teeth, he had agreed. He would do it.
    The reasons why things are the way they are could be ferociously complicated, Mulvey knew; but in this corner of the empire they worked themselves out into cadences of mathematical inevitability. A man named X would have to die. And a man named Y would have to kill him. You could call it the dictum of the Free Market of murder: the cravings and exigencies of supply and demand. Easily the equation could have set itself the other way around, and for all Mulvey knew, one day it might.
    But this time it hadn’t.
    This time it wouldn’t.
    Christ had spilled his blood to redeem the debts of the guilty, all the inheritors of original sin. No crippled Christ was Pius Mulvey. No innocent martyr awaiting the nails.
    Let X equal Merridith and Y equal Mulvey. Impossible to fight the power of mathematical law. A river could never be made to flow uphill.
    He felt for the knife. Ice-hard in his pocket.
    All night long he would wait for his chance. Perception was clearer in the absence of daylight, in the starlit cold of the decks after dark. People’s habits and movements. Their places for strolling. Shadowy corners. How locks worked. Which doors were chained. Which windows might be left open. Whispered exchanges you were not supposed to hear: like the one between Lady Merridith and the handsome American the other night.
    How long more must we keep up this childish deception?
    For God’s sake – he’s my husband .
    A man who speaks to you as though you were a servant?
    Please stop, Grantley .
    I don’t remember you saying that when you were in my bed .
    What happened was a mistake and mustn’t happen again .
    You know it will .
    I know it can’t .
    Mulvey shuffled on, drawing up his damp collar, clasping his sodden greatcoat around his quaking frame. The moon had turned scarlet; the clouds fiery gold. Small lights were being lit in the windows of the First-Class cabins.
    Some way behind the Star he saw the sails of a ship that had been following steadily for several days. The sight seemed an intimation of approaching violence, as though Vengeance was riding the second vessel. The knowledge he was being observed hung heavily around him, like a hex bestowed by a ‘spoiled’ priest. That was a curse from which no flight was possible: the anathema of a man who had once known holiness. He wondered which of the passengers was watching him even as he walked. The girls from Fermanagh, who never laughed. Maybe one of the

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