Away (6 page)

I
NSIDE
the not-so-picturesque ruins of Bunnamairge Friary, one mile east of Ballycastle, side by side on camp-stools, sat Osbert and Granville Sedgewick, bachelor sons of Henry Austin Sedgewick the Third. Osbert was making a watercolour of one of the Friary’s few remaining arches, and Granville was composing his forty-third lament concerning the sorrows of Ireland. Both were cold, damp, and generally uncomfortable, but unshaken in the belief that, despite the mud and water that filled their shoes and the wind that threatened to snatch their creations from their laps, they were communing happily with the spirit of their country’s past.

Ever since the first Irish Sedgewick had been granted estates in Glen Taisie in the early seventeenth century, this family’s members, unlike many Anglo-Irish landed gentry, had exhibited nothing but surprise, delight, and a certain charmed mystification whenever they examined the details of their surroundings. Dedicated collectors of almost everything, they had dragged an extravagant amount of information and unprecedented numbers of specimens and objects into their damp, ill-lit halls, going about the task with such zeal it soon appeared they wanted all of County Antrim under glass. They scoured the coastal cliffs for birds’ eggs, flora and fauna, the moors for ancient carved stones, and the cabins of their tenants for quaint bits of folklore and songs. Their satchels bursting with the finest sketchbooks and round cakes of green watercolour paint, they committed hundreds of views to paper, and
stairwell after stairwell of the ancestral home was filled with these fading efforts, the rest of the house being stuffed to capacity with cases and shelves.

By Osbert and Granville’s time, the floorspace in the halls was as crowded as the rest of the house as a result of their father’s discovery of, and subsequent enthusiasm for, the art of taxidermy. One of every creature, great or small, that crept or ran or flew or swam in and around County Antrim was now on display at Puffin Court (so called because of Henry Austin the First’s obsession with this unusual bird which flourished on the nearby cliffs and which he was said to resemble to an uncanny degree). The puffin itself was well represented in the stuffed menagerie, appearing as guardian figures in cases filled with smaller, and more nervous, native birds. It also perched, or rather stood flat-footedly, on the backs of the horse and cow, the only two large beasts available in County Antrim since the demise of the Irish stag in prehistoric times. The puffin did not appear with the foxes but, for some inexplicable reason, a small example stood among the hounds, all of whom had been docile family pets, but who now exposed their yellowed teeth to full advantage.

Henry Austin Sedgewick the First had authored a lengthy Latin text on the puffin –
Fratercula arctica Hibernica –
much of which was written from the puffin’s own point of view.
“Ego sum Fratercula arctica,”
it began.
“Habito in ora Hibernica.”
All ten copies still remained in Puffin Court’s vast and dusty library. Until quite recently, no further Sedgewicks had managed to get their musings into print, though many of the library’s shelves sagged under the weight of ancestral day books, scrapbooks, diaries, and handwritten, handbound odes and epics. Only the previous year, however, a London firm had published twenty of Granville’s laments in a small leatherbound
edition, an encouragement that had inspired him to produce, in the following few months, over two dozen more.

Granville could not compose at all, however, unless he sat, as he now did, in close proximity to some crumbling evidence of Ireland’s former glory, and hence his portable lap desk, which he kept in his knapsack, was one of his most cherished possessions. It had travelled with him to all of North Antrim’s most interesting locations; from the Giant’s Causeway to Bruce’s Cave on Rathlin Island, from Oisín’s Grave to Doonfort at Fair Head, from Dunseverick Castle to Carrick-A-Reed. Now, while his brother applied another grey wash to the old stones depicted in his watercolour, Granville was writing his lament for Bunnamairge Friary and the Black Nun he knew was buried under its threshold.

The Sedgewicks were a fair-minded if eccentric family and Osbert and Granville were as well loved by the peasantry as any pair of landlords could ever hope to be. The tenants had given up trying to understand the family during the incumbency of Henry Austin the First and had lapsed into a kind of bemused acceptance of what was termed “the antics of themselves.” Several of the older men in the community kept their minds busy inventing new folklore to relate at their firesides during Osbert’s and Granville’s note-taking visits so as not to disappoint the young masters whom much of the male peasantry had come to know, thirty years before, during the Great Walk Making Employment – a project conceived by Henry Austin the Third when Osbert and Granville were small boys.

In a particularly ambitious attempt to get yet another facet of County Antrim onto his demesne, if not into the house itself, the father of the boys hired fifty of his tenants to help him create suitably romantic and lengthy walks for his children. One of these promenades, two miles long and liberally
scattered with man-made grottos of every description, was known as the Cave Walk. Its crowning glory was a structure made with thousands of bottles from the Ballycastle Glass Factory inserted into mud and wattles so that their necks and mouths were exposed to the air in hopes that the wind might blow into them and create “a symphony of sound.” The Cliff Walk was never completed owing to the difficulty of getting rocks large enough and precipitous enough and in sufficient quantity onto the property. Many arbours, however, sprang up at this time, as did fountains of varying intensities. Three or four artificial lakes were created, complete with the man-made islands called crannogs. Osbert’s and Granville’s creative careers had begun at the ages of six and eight when their father had commanded them to sketch, and then compose a sonnet about, one of the little crannogs. Although’s Osbert’s drawing was far superior to Granville’s, despite the former’s younger age, Granville displayed a natural aptitude for poetry. From that day on they pursued their chosen gifts, happily, never once intruding into the other’s territory, but almost always working together.

The old Friary was a great favourite with the brothers for several reasons. First, it could be reached easily, after a pleasant hour-and-a-half stroll, downhill, from Puffin Court towards the sea. Second, its history was undeniably tragic as well as undeniably finished – a requisite for Granville’s laments if not for Osbert’s watercolours – and third, it was, of course, connected to the Roman Catholic Church for which all of the Sedgewicks, who were, naturally, Protestant, had great affection. They were charmed by their tenants’ passionate faith, by their beads and Hail Marys and crucifixes. At the time of the Catholic emancipation in 1829, bonfires were lit and torches were waved at Puffin Court in response to those glowing
all over the neighbouring hills. As might be expected, this gave rise to great suspicion in the minds of the other Protestant gentry and Presbyterian farmers in the region, but as the years went by, and the Sedgewicks goodnaturedly went on with the business of collecting gulls’ eggs and mineral specimens, and as they appeared in the appropriate church with regularity, this lack of judgement on their part came eventually to be ignored.

The Black Nun upon whom Granville now mused was buried beneath the Friary’s portal because, in a moment of extreme humility, she had expressed a wish that, when dead, she be trodden upon by those entering and those leaving the religious house where she had lived. Why she inhabited a friary was never fully explained, though it may have had something to do with her role as a prophet. During her lifetime she had made a number of predictions, none of which had, as yet, come true, but all of which might, if one were merely to wait long enough. She predicted that Knocklaid Mountain would explode, causing a muddy flood for seven miles in all directions. She predicted that Rathlin Island would disappear into a dense fog and never be seen again. She predicted that Finn Mac Cumhail’s great dog Bran would return to Ireland in the form of a leopard hungry for British blood. And she predicted that Ireland’s liberation and independence would be announced by the appearance of a ship with sails of flame in Ballycastle Harbour. This last prediction fascinated Granville who had great sympathy for the cause of an independent Ireland. He intended to focus two stanzas of his lament on a description of this mythic ship – the sparks showering the sky, the fire reflected in the water, the Black Nun herself, her face glowing, joyfully haunting the prophesied event. Then, because this was, after all, a lament,
he intended to have the whole scene evaporate before the poet’s very eyes, leaving him longing for,

Granville had given little thought to what might become of his family holdings were this grand liberation to take place. It seemed as vague and unlikely to him as his stuffed puffins and demesne seemed eternal. It was the myth of the desire for freedom that appealed to him – all the longing that filled the very air. The ongoing sense of emotional trouble. Ever since the first poem in his series – “A Lament on the 1704 Act to Prevent the Further Growth of Popery” – he was obsessed by the sorrow that seemed to be embedded in the stones beneath his feet. Resolution, he knew instinctively, would change the tone of the landscape, the faces of the cottiers, the melancholy of the people’s music, and the passion and stoicism of their survival – in short, all that he and his ancestors had come to love. And so, without being aware, he supported this delicate balance of injustice and defiance on the one hand and sorrow and poetry on the other. That, and the rich cloak of imagination and invented worlds that protected the peasants around him from the cold reality of their unchangeable lot.

“How is it going at O’Malley’s school?” asked Osbert, bending down to reach the little pot of water that stood at his feet. “A damp season for it, I’d say.”

Both brothers loved and supported the “little hedge academy,” as they called it, it being one of the few to survive the advent of state education, once it had become legal to educate Catholics at all. Osbert occasionally gave free drawing lessons
to the children, and Granville, who had written “A Lament on the Demise of the Bardic Schools of Ireland,” donated books. The children were invited once a year to Puffin Court and given the run of the Cave Walk while Granville and the hedge schoolmaster compared poems.

“They’ve a fair bit of thatch,” said Granville, “it shouldn’t be too bad. Punic wars, is what they’re doing now, I think.” He paused and stared into the distance. “I wonder if this Black Nun had a youth?” he mused.

“They say school’s been out for a couple of days. O’Malley’s gone to the island with the priest.”

“Ah … the priest-philosopher. Was he here, then? Pity I hadn’t known. I could have asked him about the nun.” Granville began counting syllables. “Can you think of a word that rhymes with cloister?” he eventually asked, “or perhaps another, something besides hosiery for rosary?”

“He was only to be gone overnight but he’s not returned.” Osbert squinted at his arch. “Usury,” he said, “not exact but close enough.”

Overhead a family of hawks circled once or twice before departing for the cliffs at Fair Head. The brothers worked for some time in silence until Granville completed a draft of the lament, with his characteristic dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s all the way down the page, and looked towards the island’s cliffs off shore. “Surely the priest couldn’t keep O’Malley away from the school for more than a day. They’ve usually argued it out in three hours or so.”

“It was to look at a woman that he went over there. There’s a woman on the island they say is ‘away.’ “

“ ‘Away’ … off with the faeries, is she?”

“Not this one,” said Osbert, tying his portfolio. “They say this one has a daemon lover.”

“Is that so?” said Granville, closing his notebook and capping his pen, “How interesting.”

As the brothers climbed the path that led from the Friary the rain began in earnest. Simultaneously, two black umbrellas unfurled, and just at the moment when the fabric became taut with the accustomed and satisfying snap Osbert recalled another of the Friary’s legends, one that had been omitted from his brother’s lament. It was rumoured that the friars, just before their final eviction, had buried the contents of their treasury at the most distant point to which a candle’s light reaches when placed in the east window of the now ruinous chapel.

The absence of light on the one hand, the absence of darkness on the other, and where the two absences meet, treasure. He thought of the woman on the island who was away. Then, as he and his brother walked through the rain into the glen towards their demesne, these two concepts became wedded, somewhere in the back of his mind.

O
NLY
traces of her previous self, her previous life remained when she was not by the sea. Fragments.

She remembered how to perform various chores: stirring, pouring, hoeing, encouraging flame. But her memory could have been anybody’s memory; a pattern borrowed from a passing brain, the routine of an ordinary day, instructions dictated to her from outside of herself. Now bend, now lift, now fold. Dry activity. And herself a mere memory of herself.

Porridge, potato, a knife, three or four earthenware bowls, the rough wool of her mother’s skirt in a house where nothing shone. The solid hand at the end of her wrist that reached and grasped, just the trace of a hand from before, covered in shadow. The real, now, was a hand shimmering under water, distorting in the liquid atmosphere. The full, liquid caress.

And so, when she saw the two men enter through her door, they were just ideas of men she remembered from before; the priest a black hulking shape, heavy in one of the room’s corners, the other dressed in muted colours. And their voices coming at her from far across the air.