kicked and throttled the Lawlesses all to death, and Silas and the circus were in the thick of that slaughter, battling shoulder to shoulder with the Molly Maguires. And I did nothing, nothing. Silas squeezed my arm.
‘Come away with us, my boy. We have money now, and the caravans are loaded with provisions. No worries. It's not a bad life, you know, better than staying here. What do you say, eh? Let him have the damn house if he wants it so badly. What good will it do him-or you?’ He halted and spun me about to face him and laid his hands on my shoulders. ‘Don't be a fool, boy.’ I stepped away from him and he dropped his arms. From the garden came a low whistle. Silas glanced toward the window and fixed his eyes on me again. ‘Well?’ The whistle came a second time. I would not speak. ‘Gabriel, Gabriel, you disappoint me. I credited you with wisdom, or at least the base cunning of your class, and now here you are ready to make a fool of yourself for this…this
He turned and skipped away down the stairs, pulling on his gloves. I heard him below muttering with Cotter as they went out into the garden, and from the window I watched them set off across the field toward the caravans. Cotter plodded along on his flat feet, and the shotgun, open at the breech, flapped like a flail by his side. Silas was laughing. Even at that distance I could see his fat shoulders quiver. I began to miss him already, the sly old evil bastard. They disappeared behind the caravans, and at that moment the Molly Maguires stepped out of the trees on the drive, three stark men in tattered dresses, with cropped heads and murderous eyes, carrying shovels over their shoulders. They went down to the camp, but as they drew near it Cotter appeared again by the black caravan with the shotgun raised. Here was the last act. The gun roared twice, and two men fell, and a shovel flew up like a spear and glittered in the bright air. Cotter calmly reloaded, and the last of the Mollies turned and ran. The dress clutched at his legs and tripped him, and, as he went down, the third blast, both barrels at once, burst open his head and sprayed the spring grass with blood. The circus moved out. Under the lilacs a figure in a white gown appeared, and a face leaned out into the sunlight and looked up at me with terrible teeth clenched in a grimace and red hair glittering.
38
I STUMBLED FRANTICALLY around the house barring the doors and windows. I was not trying to lock him out, but to lock myself in. From the kitchen window I peered out across the lawn. There was no sign of him now, but that absence only increased my panic. I found a malevolent friend in a drawer of the dresser, a sleek black knife, a Sabatier. The blade crooned and quivered as I drew it from its wooden sheath and tried the edge against my thumb. I fled with it upstairs to the attic and squatted there in the oniony gloom, moaning and muttering and gnawing my knuckles. The day waned. Rain fell, and then the sun again briefly, then twilight. The tenants of the little room, a brassbound trunk, the dusty skeleton of a tricycle, that stringless tennis racket standing in the corner like a petrified exclamation of horror, began their slow dance into darkness. My face with its staring eyes retreated stealthily out of a grimy sliver of mirror, and then I knew that he was in the house, for I could feel his presence like a minute tremor in the air. I waited calmly. The stairs creaked, and the spokes in the wheels of the tricycle tingled, and the door swung open. Michael, with his legs swaying and the wide skirts falling around him, stood on his hands out on the landing like a huge white mushroom upside down. I could have killed him then, with ease, I even imagined myself flying at him with the knife and plunging it down into his heart, but he was, after all, my brother.
Yes, he was my brother, my twin, I had always known it, but would not admit it, until now, when the admitting made me want to murder him. But the nine long months we had spent together in Martha's womb counted for something in the end. He flipped over on his feet and threw out his arms and grinned, and I picked up the knife in its sheath and pushed it under my belt. His grin widened. He had not changed. His red hair was as violent as ever, his teeth as terrible. I might have been looking at my own reflection. Only his eyes, cold and blue as the sea, were different now. He disappeared. Night fell, blueblack and glossy.
I rattled down the rickety stairs, stumbling in the gloom, and paused on the lower landing and lifted my head and listened. Dark laughter floated up the stairwell. I peered over the banisters. He was down in the hall, juggling with a ball, a blue block and a marble. I started after him, and he fled into the library clutching his dress around him and shedding laughter in his wake, and when I got to the door he had already plunged through the french windows. He danced across the garden like a mad bird, hooting and shrieking and flapping his arms.
In the wood the silver leaves whispered. There must have been a moon, wind, stars. I remember none of them. A pale form glimmered among the trees, but when I swung at it the blade whistled in empty air and the dress fluttered to the ground. Something collapsed under my feet, one of those treacherous hidden caverns in the turf, and I fell headlong into a tangle of thorns. Again that laughter. I lay for a long time with my face in the briars, and he began to sing afar. The anguished evil music settled like black rain on the thorns and trees, the trembling leaves, and soon all of the wood was singing his terrible enthralling song. I went on again on hands and knees. The singing ceased. I came to the edge of the lake. The windows of the summerhouse were faintly lit, and the door was open wide. I crept up the steps. The place was still cluttered with bits of Birchwood's past, deck chairs and straw hats and broken mirrors, but in the midst of it all a kind of lair had been scooped out, and there was a brass bed, and a packing case, and an oil stove and a lamp, a folding chair unfolded. On the bed Papa lay in his black suit and waistcoat with a blue face and staring eyes and a thick protruding tongue. Michael stepped out of the shadows and smiled down upon him faintly.
‘Our father, which art dead.’
He looked up at me and the smile faded, and there again in his eyes was that icy white fury as of old. From its sheath I slipped the gleaming panther and clasped it in both hands above my head so tightly that the blade shivered and sang under the strain. He stared intently at the wicked weapon and glided backward slowly, slowly, toward the open doorway, into the shadows, until only his anguished eyes remained, burning in the dark, and at last they too were extinguished. I lowered the knife and spoke aloud my own name seven times and listened to the echoes, and then returned through the wood and across the garden to Birch-wood.
39
I SLEPT THAT night on the billiard table in the study, I do not know why, there were beds enough. At first light I was up tramping about the house. A few chairs had been moved, and Papa's desk with its bundles of unpaid bills was gone, but apart from cavities such as these, and the healed rot and the sound roof, the Lawlesses might never have been. I had to see everything, touch everything, as though by those contacts alone did I exist. Papa would have been proud of my performance, and amused by it. A real son and heir! By the windows in the dining room I halted in a haze of luminous pink light reflected from the garden. The field where the Molly Maguires lay dead was thronged with poppies, the lawn too, blazing blood-red things, terrible and lovely. The dawn was awash with their radiance.
Birds gaily sang about me as I made my way down to the summerhouse. The lake with the sun on it seemed to hover above the ground like something on the point of flight. I opened the shutters in the summerhouse, and there on the floor was that charred patch, Granny Godkin, her mark. My father looked no different by daylight, he was still dead. It was Cotter who throttled him, I think. I cannot be sure of it, but my fierce friend had proved himself an assiduous executioner, and I suspect him before all others. I folded the sheets over Papa and bound him tightly with twine, and dragged that stiff cold larva into the wood. It was a heavy burden, and I made slow progress. In the clearing where the Lawlesses were buried there were more poppies. I thought of burying him there under those flourishing passionate flowers, but although it would have made my task lighter, I had not the heart to plant him among his enemies. Instead I hauled him up the ridge and dug a hole among the birch trees, cursing the rocky ground and the blunt spade and the dead weight that nearly pulled me with it into the grave. I covered him up, and tried to think of a prayer that I might say, not that I thought there was anyone to hear it, but that it might lend a
