he’s from, does it? It could be anywhere. Cork, or Killarny, or even Dublin.”
Emily bent and brushed up the dirt into a dustpan, not that there was much. It was a gesture rather than a real task. “No, you are right. He could be from anywhere. Were most of the people in the village born here?”
“Just about all. Mr. Yorke comes from Galway, I think, but I daresay his family are from one of the villages closer. His roots are deep. If you want to know the history, he’s the man to ask. It’s not just the tales he can tell you, but the meanings behind them.” She smiled a little ruefully. “All the old feuds between the Flahertys and the Conneeleys, the good works of the Rosses and the Martins—and the bad too—and the love stories and the fights going back to the days of the Kings of Ireland in the time before history.”
“Really? Then I must see if he will tell me.” Emily accepted the idea, although it was not the ancient past she was seeking. Again she tried to bring the conversation back to the present. “The Flahertys seem interesting. What was Seamus Flaherty like? I gather Brendan takes after him a lot?”
Maggie avoided her eyes and started to watch what she was doing with great care. “Oh, I suppose so,” she said casually, but there was a tension in her voice. “In a superficial sort of way. He certainly looks like him. Same eyes, same way of walking, as if he owned the world, but was happy for you to have a share in it.”
Emily smiled. “Did you like him?” she asked.
Maggie was silent, her back stiff, her hands moving more slowly.
“Seamus, I mean,” Emily clarified.
“Oh, well enough, I suppose.” Maggie started to move briskly again. “As long as you didn’t take him too seriously, he was fine enough.”
“Seriously?”
“Well, you couldn’t trust him,” Maggie elaborated. “Charm the birds out of the sky, he could, and make you laugh till you couldn’t get your breath. But half of what he said was nonsense. Got the moon in his eyes, that one. And drank most men under the table.”
“An eye for the women?” Emily asked bluntly.
Maggie blushed. “Oh, for sure. That was one thing you could rely on. That, and a fistfight.”
Emily did not need to ask if Mrs. Flaherty had loved him; she had seen it in her face. Behind the overprotection of her son, the slight distance she placed between herself and others, there was a deep vulnerability. Now its explanation was easy to see.
But Emily also heard in Maggie’s voice a tenderness, a self-consciousness that betrayed her too, not for the father, but for the son. Was that also a defense of one of their own, a man too easily misunderstood by an English stranger? Or was it more than that?
She bent her attention to helping complete the household tasks. Maggie did the ironing, quite a skilled work when the two flatirons had to be heated alternately on the stove, and used at a narrow range of temperatures, not so hot so it scorched the linen, nor too cool to press out the creases.
Emily peeled and sliced vegetables and set them in cold water until Maggie was ready to make the stew.
The shore itself was uneven, sand obliterating some of the old grass and flower-strewn stretches, dunes moved from one place to another as if she had mistaken where they had been. Here and there were tangles of weed, some kelp torn up from the deep beds and left dark and untidy on the sand. She could not help seeing the jagged ends of wood poking out of them, splinters of the ship that had gone down, as if the sea could not digest it but had cast it back. It was a kind of monument to human daring, and grief.
It was when she stopped to stare at one of the larger pieces, pale, raw ends of wood jutting up through the black tangle of weed, that she became aware of Padraic Yorke standing a little behind her. She turned and looked into his eyes, and saw a reflection of the same overwhelming sadness that she felt, and of the fear that the power and beauty of the sea gives rise to when one lives through all its moods.
“Do you get wrecks like this every winter?” she asked.
“Not only winter,” he replied. “But the storms are very rarely as bad as this one was.” His face looked pinched, hollow around the eyes, and she wondered if he too was thinking of that other storm, seven years ago, and the young man who had been washed up then, and had never left.
“Daniel still can’t remember anything,” she said impulsively. “Do you think anyone here could help?”
“How?” He was puzzled. “No one knows him, if that’s what you mean? He isn’t related to anyone in the village, or any of the other villages around.” He smiled bleakly. “Everyone is related to everyone else, or knows who is. It’s a wild country. Its people belong. They have to. He isn’t from anywhere in the west of Connemara, Mrs. Radley.”
It seemed a preposterous thing to say, an assumption he could not have reason to make. And yet she believed him. “You know the land well enough to say that?”
His face lit. “Yes, I do. I know the land, and all the people who live here, and their history.” He gazed around him, narrowing his eyes a little as he looked across the high tussock grasses where the wind knifed through them, tugging, swaying, and rippling all the way to the hills against the horizon. The colors changed, moving with every shadow. One moment paler, the next undershot with darkness, then a faint patina of gold.
Perhaps he saw some momentary wonder in her face, or possibly he had been going to speak anyway. “Before you leave, you must go to the bog,” he told her. “At first it’ll seem desolate to you, but the longer you look, the more you will see that every yard of it shows you some flower, some leaf, a beauty that’ll haunt you always after that.”
She smiled in spite of herself. “I’d like to. Thank you. But tell me about the people. I can’t understand the land without knowing some of the people it shaped.”
They had left the splintered wood and tangles of weed, but she was happy to walk slowly. She had all afternoon, and she wanted to learn what he had to say.
“Is Brendan Flaherty really so wild?” she said with a slight smile. “Of course I only saw the charming side of him, when he and his mother visited Susannah.”
Mr. Yorke gave a shrug, lifting one shoulder more than the other, making the gesture oddly humorous. “He used to be, but there’s no harm in him. He pushed the rules to the limit, and beyond, when he was younger. No scrape in the village he wasn’t involved in, one way or another. And no pretty girl he didn’t flirt with. How far any of that went I don’t know, and I didn’t ask. I suppose he was over the edge, at times. But that’s what happens when you’re young.”
“But not real trouble?” Emily found herself defensive, remembering sharply the flash of hurt she had seen in Brendan’s eyes.
“Of course not,” Mr. Yorke said ruefully. “His mother would always see to that. She spoiled him from the beginning. And after his father died, nothing was too good for him.”
“How do you mean?” She needed to understand, not to assume. Could Connor have challenged Brendan in some way, and having always been given anything he wanted, Brendan could not bear losing? Had there been a fight, a flare of temper, blows, and suddenly Connor was dead? Mrs. Flaherty would have covered for Brendan, excused him, lied for him, as she had always done. Perhaps believing it was an accident, Hugo Ross would have too.
Was it necessary? Or did they fear that Brendan was going to show that element beyond indiscipline, the true selfishness that destroys? Was it fear that Emily had seen in Colleen Flaherty’s face when she watched her son, or only an anxiety that others would believe of him what they had witnessed in his father?
Was it true? And had Connor Riordan come into the village, with vision not clouded by history and excuses, and seen Brendan more clearly than the others? Or was Mrs. Flaherty’s fear only her own experience with the husband she was so in love with, crowding out the truth that Brendan was another man, a different one. She could not cling on to her husband, or put right what may have been wrong, revisit the old failings.
