4
It’s three days before I can bring myself to go to Óisín’s study. I stand on the threshold, wicker basket in hand, surveying. I don’t want to be in there but Aoife wants some of the account books to take to Aidan Fitzpatrick for his inspection. Why, I’m not sure, for all they’ll do is confirm what everyone already knows: we’re impecunious. The room smells like my grandfather and that’s a kind of comfort – old paper that’s become foxed, and port-wine tobacco from the red-gold meerschaum pipe shaped like a giant squid on the windowsill where he used to tip the ash out. (I’ll give it to Malachi, I think, someone should get joy and use of it.) Yet it’s cold with no fire been lit, with the curtains pulled so no sun can get in. The air’s not crisp but stuffy.
The desk is black, ebony, but for the inlaid mother-of-pearl on the sides, woodland scenes rather than seascapes: centaurs and maidens, all finely made. As a child I’d sit on the floor and trace the patterns, tell myself stories. I was allowed to play at Óisín’s feet if I was quiet.
And quiet I was so I suppose he decided I was teachable. It began with ships: how to recognise them, which amongst our fleet were fastest (outrunning pirates was a concern, since our own days of brigandry were well behind us), which were best for what sort of cargo and how much might be carried, and what it might be sold for. How to time an arrival so that one of our brigantines or caravels might be anchored off Hob’s Head for the evening; how a lifeboat might be sent ashore in the dead of night bearing any particularly valuable items to be secreted in the tower’s cellar (because we weren’t too fine to stop smuggling). Then the next morning, the ship would moor at the Breakwater docks, close by the Weeping Gate where men and women waited and wept for their loved ones lost to the sea. Then the maritime tax agents would board to take their share of our hard-earned merchandise. My grandfather taught me how to value the exotic items we shipped, the fabrics and gems, the wines and brandies and whiskeys, the wood and metals sought by artisans, the toys and weapons, the animals wanted by the very rich as pets or morsels… and to calculate bribes, to assess what a man might sell his soul for, yet thus far I’ve found no chance to deploy this skill.
In a better world, I’d have put that knowledge to good use, but even then we were diminishing. So he taught me old things, past things, gave me knowledge for which I would have little service.
The study is a small room, the smallest I think, in this vast place. It’s in the central tower on the second floor. There’s just the enormous desk and its chair, also an overstuffed wingback on the rug by the fireplace, and the shelves built into the walls; it’s sparse, no doubt. There’s dust on all the surfaces, testament to Óisín’s dislike of anyone coming in here. I can’t imagine Maura changing habit now; this room will decay like the rest.
I wonder at how I’ve avoided where he’d idled most of his time at home: this room. I think about this too: Óisín spent his early years in the offices by the docks in Breakwater, but when those closed (because who needs such a place of business to manage two meagre ships?) and the townhouse was sold to Aidan (the funds used to eke out an existence at Hob’s Hallow little longer), he retreated to this tiny space. He passed his days here, hunched over account books and those that dealt with the law of the sea, which he’d pilfer from the library and keep until Aoife noticed the holes in the shelves and kicked up a fuss for their return – the library was her place. One of their battlefields, one of many.
Sometimes he’d walk the gardens (carefully avoiding the walled one Aoife had claimed as her own), growing more gnarled as the rose bushes and yew trees did, but I don’t think he’d taken the switchback path down to the shingle in years. Unlike his wife, he’d stopped swimming. It was too hard for him to come back again, with the arthritis mining through him. He’d take his meals, mostly, with Aoife and I in the small dining room, then retreat to his suite on third floor of the tower. They’d shared a room, once, and they must have had some sort of passion, I suppose, for they made a daughter. Or perhaps that bedchamber was simply another battle that Óisín lost or gave up.
I put the wicker basket on the desk, then pull the curtains aside to let in some light and it floods the den. Motes of dust spin through the air like snowflakes. Above the fireplace is a painting of a ship, the Heron’s Bow, Óisín’s first: built at his direction, captained by him for three years, lost to a storm the first year he stayed on land. He’d passed the helm to a cousin, Aidan’s father Fergus; upon hearing of his death, Fergus’ wife Oona died on the spot. Water’s dripping onto the canvas from somewhere above. A burst pipe; there’s a bathroom located on the next floor, I think. I must remember to tell Malachi.
It looks like the ship’s in a tempest, that it’s drowning. The bookshelves are to the left, and I can see the dark blue spines of the account books. I cross the room in six steps, and lay my hand on the first demanded volume. It sticks to its neighbour and I pull harder, hoping the damp from above hasn’t seeped elsewhere. At last it comes with that strange noise of one thing peeling itself from another. Sticky
