Us.
Florence disappears from my view and I glance again at the feast. How many more creditors will this bring to our door? How did Aoife coax anyone to extend credit? She knows as well as I do there’ll be nothing going spare after Óisín’s will is read. We’ll be lucky to keep the house, but the last of the ships will need to be sold off to cover what’s owing.
Not to mention the death duties.
Once, we’d have known what they might be, what portion, but there’s no longer a council to decide that. It’s been thus for almost four years, since a woman arrived in Breakwater and began to make it her own. The gathering of men who’d governed gradually died off, apparently naturally or accidentally, and those who remained were happy to benefit from Bethany Lawrence’s new order. She has her finger on the pulse of the city and where she applies pressure, it either speeds up or halts altogether. The tales we hear from the tinkers who travel the length and breadth of the land say she’s called the Queen of Thieves behind her back (sensibly), and she gathers taxes and bribes and tithes as surely as both Church and State once did (the archbishop too is her lapdog, by all accounts, accepting whatever scraps she throws to him). Mind you, it’s said she keeps the municipality clean and well-run. What might she demand from us? Rumour has it that the rich families of Breakwater have found themselves either providing coin or favours when an inheritance is in the offing; sometimes both. It strikes me as the sort of deal an O’Malley might once have made, but she’s not one of us. Neither Aoife nor Óisín have had contact with her and she’s never approached either in person or via go-between; a sure sign of how insignificant we’ve become, that predators don’t give us even a glance. Or perhaps, just perhaps, some of our reputation remains, some echo that makes even the powerful wary.
Perhaps we’ll hear nothing. Perhaps our poverty is too deep, too known, for anyone to bother demanding anything of us. One can but hope.
‘Miss, shall I put out more of the salmon?’ One of the borrowed maids appears at my elbow.
I shake my head. ‘No, it will only encourage them to stay.’
The girl bobs her head, gives a curtsey and moves off.
Soon they’ll all be gone, these family members here to see what they can see, not to give comfort in a time of need, merely to celebrate that it’s not us who’ve gone beneath.
I remember Óisín as I sat by him in the days before the reaper came. There was no pale wailing woman at the window, nor did a storm blow up when he died – that only happens when the women go; no one knows why or if they do, no one’s saying. I remember my grandfather becoming a scared child, shrunk into himself on the vast mattress where our matriarchs and patriarchs have bred and slept and died. I remember him weeping that no one would lament his passing, a sudden wish, a need for affection when he’d never given much himself. And I wondered at that, that he’d be yearning not for absolution for his sins, which surely must be numbered in a very large book, but for love.
Yes, soon they’ll all be gone and it’ll just be Aoife and me, rattling about at Hob’s Hallow as it decays around us, Maura and Malachi teetering along the lip of the grave. Yet I cannot see beyond the moment when the door closes behind them all; cannot truly imagine what shape my life might take in the weeks and months to come. It’s like enduring a storm, I suppose, though a strangely quiet one: Just hang on, Óisín used to say and I hear his voice now, hang on to whatever’s solid. A seaman’s mantra. What he’d tell me whenever Aoife took me swimming in the sea.
And abruptly I’m aware of the hole in my middle: the old man will be missed. I clench my fists, press them against my stomach, and blink hard to keep the tears away as I take the steps, twenty, thirty, to get to the expanse of windows at the other end of the ballroom. If I know anything for certain it’s that neither love nor hate is ever simple.
Some cousins try to speak to me, but I move past as if I’ve not heard and they fall away. At last, I’m standing in front of the bank of diamond-shaped panes, staring out.
The overgrown lawn is the brightest of greens, rolling gently away to the cliffs. Both sky and sea are grey; the optical illusion of it makes it seem as if they’ve been stitched together, a patchwork quilt with only the subtlest of seams showing. It looks like the horizon is missing; what might happen if that line were gone? That line to which we all head, knowing we’ll never catch it, but driven toward it like a seabird following a migration path year after year, life after life.
I imagine the sound of the waves because I can’t hear it in here over the murmur of voices, the clink of fine china tea cups, the chewing, the tap of boots across marble floors. But I know it thuds and retreats with the constancy of a heartbeat, the shush and crash as it hits the shingle down below. Just the thought of it helps to calm me, which is funny because when I was very small I was so terribly scared of the noise. All the waters in the world are
