sixpence if he brings me to a lair? How long can my poor heart pound at this rate before it bursts with fright? I would turn and run, but we are crossing a long bridge and at my back there comes a handcart, which traps me into moving forward.
We are free of the bridge now, and the cart has gone. The boy has come to a halt and I look around suspiciously, but no one else appears. It seems this is our destination.
It is a quay on a narrow, sequestered stretch of waterway where few vessels are moored. I can make out in the distance two or three men in smocks who are coiling ropes. One of them looks our way, but they go on with their work. The boy wordlessly palms the sixpence and I watch him leave with a familiar feeling of abandonment and anxiety.
There are two small cutters moored upstream on the other side of the quay. I will have to find another bridge in order to reach them.
As I walk along the quay’s edge I notice that the slop of the water begins to sound more insistent. A boat is approaching.
Voices carry through the air together with the creaking of ropes and the crump of canvas. Sails show rust-red in the twilight as a vessel glides towards me. The fore-and-aft rig and single mast, and the rakish lines, define her as a cutter. We see many of these economical vessels at Parkgate.
The long bowsprit draws level, giving me a close view of a side-whiskered seaman on the foredeck unlashing the jib. The depth of tide has brought the cutter nearly flush with the quay. The gunwales are hardly six feet from where I stand. As the cutter slinks by, a lean fifty or sixty feet in length, I note the swivel guns mounted on the deck railings. The boat is so near I can make out the detail of the helmsman’s appearance, his dark hair curled all around, the red-and-white checked shirt under his short jacket, his tarpaulin trousers and low shoes. A rowboat dangles from curved davits beneath the vessel’s high transom stern – and underneath the rowboat the name of the cutter is picked out in white on the black hull.
It is the Seal .
‘Wait!’
At my cry the helmsman looks up. He sees nothing but a girl diminishing on the quay. He turns away and attends once more to his course.
I begin to run then, gathering momentum. Without pausing to argue with myself about it, I spring from the very edge of the coping.
I rise into space, and time slows, allowing me to come at my leisure to the realisation that my jumping stratagem will not succeed a second time – and why should it? To do so would offend the laws of chance. As I float aloft, feet pedalling the air, watching my target of the cutter’s deck slipping away beneath, I recall in fitful flashes a bargeman at Parkgate …
He misses his footing and pitches seaward.
The master’s cargo sinks in the beer-house hole.
A skiff sails away on the horizon.
I am grieved to find this body of mine plunging towards the sombre surface of the water, but I hold no reproach against myself for trying so very desperately to prevail.
The House of Kitty Conneely, Connemara
April, 1766
I have lost sight of the child, Nora, but do not fret. Since I turned the stones I sense their mighty influence within me and I do not doubt I have the strength in it, the ferocity of will, in fact, to bring her back now before my days on earth pass for ever. My face I have turned to the past, friend. That is where our girl was left – I will even go so far as to say that the past is where she has been imprisoned. But the turn of the stones has opened that portal. All kinds of scenes are floating towards me now.
I can see Josey O’Halloran as large as life saluting into the house of the Mulkerrins. And the coat being taken off and himself being offered the chair. And your brother Colman watching with arms folded high on the chest in that spurning way of his, and a curdled face on him. They brought in the writing apparatus then, didn’t they? And Josey drew in a mighty shuddering breath as though the
We are free of the bridge now, and the cart has gone. The boy has come to a halt and I look around suspiciously, but no one else appears. It seems this is our destination.
It is a quay on a narrow, sequestered stretch of waterway where few vessels are moored. I can make out in the distance two or three men in smocks who are coiling ropes. One of them looks our way, but they go on with their work. The boy wordlessly palms the sixpence and I watch him leave with a familiar feeling of abandonment and anxiety.
There are two small cutters moored upstream on the other side of the quay. I will have to find another bridge in order to reach them.
As I walk along the quay’s edge I notice that the slop of the water begins to sound more insistent. A boat is approaching.
Voices carry through the air together with the creaking of ropes and the crump of canvas. Sails show rust-red in the twilight as a vessel glides towards me. The fore-and-aft rig and single mast, and the rakish lines, define her as a cutter. We see many of these economical vessels at Parkgate.
The long bowsprit draws level, giving me a close view of a side-whiskered seaman on the foredeck unlashing the jib. The depth of tide has brought the cutter nearly flush with the quay. The gunwales are hardly six feet from where I stand. As the cutter slinks by, a lean fifty or sixty feet in length, I note the swivel guns mounted on the deck railings. The boat is so near I can make out the detail of the helmsman’s appearance, his dark hair curled all around, the red-and-white checked shirt under his short jacket, his tarpaulin trousers and low shoes. A rowboat dangles from curved davits beneath the vessel’s high transom stern – and underneath the rowboat the name of the cutter is picked out in white on the black hull.
It is the Seal .
‘Wait!’
At my cry the helmsman looks up. He sees nothing but a girl diminishing on the quay. He turns away and attends once more to his course.
I begin to run then, gathering momentum. Without pausing to argue with myself about it, I spring from the very edge of the coping.
I rise into space, and time slows, allowing me to come at my leisure to the realisation that my jumping stratagem will not succeed a second time – and why should it? To do so would offend the laws of chance. As I float aloft, feet pedalling the air, watching my target of the cutter’s deck slipping away beneath, I recall in fitful flashes a bargeman at Parkgate …
He misses his footing and pitches seaward.
The master’s cargo sinks in the beer-house hole.
A skiff sails away on the horizon.
I am grieved to find this body of mine plunging towards the sombre surface of the water, but I hold no reproach against myself for trying so very desperately to prevail.
The House of Kitty Conneely, Connemara
April, 1766
I have lost sight of the child, Nora, but do not fret. Since I turned the stones I sense their mighty influence within me and I do not doubt I have the strength in it, the ferocity of will, in fact, to bring her back now before my days on earth pass for ever. My face I have turned to the past, friend. That is where our girl was left – I will even go so far as to say that the past is where she has been imprisoned. But the turn of the stones has opened that portal. All kinds of scenes are floating towards me now.
I can see Josey O’Halloran as large as life saluting into the house of the Mulkerrins. And the coat being taken off and himself being offered the chair. And your brother Colman watching with arms folded high on the chest in that spurning way of his, and a curdled face on him. They brought in the writing apparatus then, didn’t they? And Josey drew in a mighty shuddering breath as though the
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