‘Will you read to me?’ I ask without much hope, for I’m eighteen and Grandmother’s not read to me for the longest time. Maura, to whom I’d run for comfort as a child, never read me anything, but used to tell fairy tales. Maura’s singsong recountings were of children taken away to hidden places; of women turned into birds and bugs; of soul clocks and dark magic; of boys who sometimes went on two legs, sometimes on four; of girls who changed their faces, grew horns, and danced away from their old lives; of brides stolen by robbers and heroes laid low by a woman’s curse. And she told me, too, of places other than here: Lodellan and Bitterwood, Tintern and Bellsholm, and stranger places like Calder in the Dark Lands where the Leech Lords reigned.
Aoife, when she was in the mood, would read from the book wherein generations of our kind have written tales that might be lies, might be true. Scribbled in different hands, some harder to decipher than others, but all ones that, as a child, I took as gospel.
Perhaps, too, I remember my own mother reading to me from the black-covered volume, the pages yellowed, discoloured with ink and age, with the fingerprints of the dead and tiny drawings to enliven or mar the margins. Perhaps I remember a voice sweeter than Aoife’s, gentler, more like to laugh than not, whose tellings were less frightening, so I did not wake from nightmares, but rather slept cradled in the arms of my ancestral memories. But perhaps I imagine it. Perhaps Isolde is merely a thought I once had and will never be anything else. But perhaps, just perhaps, my mother’s voice left a trace in my dreams. There’s not even a hint of a memory of my father, Liam; all Aoife’s ever said about him was that he unsuitable and a few other words besides, none of them complimentary.
Other families might have stories of curses, cold lads and white ladies, but we have old gods, merfolk and monsters. I never doubted, when I was little, that these stories were true. Now, less a child, I’m not so sure.
But this night, for whatever reason, I need to hear such tales again and, for whatever reason, Grandmother is feeling generous and she nods. I place the book in her lap; the soaring points of her chair look like a throne with the wings of a bat. I curl on the green velvet chaise longue across from her, prop my head on a cushion, feel the warmth of the fire spread through me, knowing it will be too warm by the time the night is done, but not caring. I don’t ask for a particular recounting. It’s the telling that matters.
For the moment, there is peace.
And Aoife begins, in a voice that sounds only a little like an old woman’s, to read something I’ve not heard for many a year.
Three children there were in the house: the firstborn, a girl to inherit; the middle a boy for the Church; and the last another girl, and a grief it would be to her mother if she fulfilled her purpose. The family had argued it back and forth, but the order must be respected; they did not get to pick and choose, the children’s great-grandfather reminded.
There was nothing to be done about it: the tithe had to be paid whether they wished it or no.
And so the children’s mother lowered her eyes and bowed her head. She sat in the nursery day and night, held the baby with her red-gold hair as if to take all the moments with her she could. When the rest of the family stopped watching her with suspicion – for who amongst them would go against the patriarch? When women ruled the O’Malleys there was more give and take, a greater flexibility with rules and boundaries; but the great-grandfather’s tenure had seen a tightening of the reins that held his women in check. Now, it seemed he’d never die, and those of his own blood found themselves hoping for his demise. And his granddaughter, the mother of the babe in question, was tired, tired of her bent back and bent knee, of giving way in all matters large and small and, without ever really knowing it when it happened, rebellion flared in her.
And so the day before she was to say goodbye to her littlest, she sent the oldest and middle children to the sea. Take the path, she said, down to the shingle. Be careful not to slip. There’s a cave at the far side of the cove, you’ll love to see it, love to play there, perhaps find treasure, my sweets! She wrapped them up warmly, for the day was grey and cold.
The eldest, Aislin, knew better than to question her mother, yet her excitement was tempered by some instinct. The boy, Connor, was more enthusiastic than his sister, not so wary, and the girl said nothing to dampen his spirits. She knew this excursion was important from the tension in her mother’s body, from the way her eyes were so dark and hard, the way her lips pressed so into whiteness. Aislin nodded and took her brother’s hand.
‘But don’t,’ their mother said as she adjusted the silver bell necklace around her oldest child’s throat, ‘let anyone see you. Let’s make it a game. How clever can you be? How quiet and sly, my little mice?’
So Gráinne sent those children, she did, down to the
