The Pig Comes to Dinner (3 page)

In any case, it was these same Lords Shaftoe who had been responsible for a horrific curse being laid upon Castle Kissane, which for Kitty was not least among her new home's attractions. She had not yet had an opportunity to give serious consideration to that curse. The great hall, where she had held her postnuptial festivities, had claimed her more immediate attention.

The church ceremony itself had been something less than a complete success. Father Colavin had been persuaded beforehand not to quote St. Paul's incendiary words, “Let women be subject to their husbands as to the Lord,” but Kitty's American nephew had wept throughout, possibly because he and his bride had had to content themselves with a civil ceremony. This was Aaron's second marriage, his first having been to a woman named Lucille who had subsequently run off with a baritone from their church choir in New York. Aaron's divorce was the reason they weren't allowed a church ceremony, but Lolly had consoled him with the prospect that the marriage to Lucille could readily be annulled by the Vatican based on the obvious truth that he had been far too emotionally immature at the time to have entered into a binding contract. The proof was his very choice of Lucille. That Aaron, presentable as he might be and amiable besides, might have contributed to Lucille's change of partners was given no consideration. His certainty of his genius and the unassailability of his ego were subtracted from the equation, and Lucille alone was left to bear the blame.

Once the ring was on Kitty's finger, to the relief of some, the chagrin of others, and the astonishment of everyone else, Kitty kissed Kieran, Kieran kissed Kitty, and the liturgy moved forward as a prelude to the reception in the great hall of the castle.

Not that the great hall was all that great. Since the castle had been built more as a fortification than as a seat of splendor, its boasts were limited to the impregnability of its walls and the narrowness of its deep-set windows. In truth, the hall had served, Kitty surmised, probably either as a barracks for the billeted warriors charged with fighting invading forces, or, more likely, a safe haven for the livestock during the cattle raids that provided repeated sport among the native earls and chiefs of earlier Ireland. There were no fireplaces, which suggested that the animal presence was the sole source of heat.

Still, it had its finer features. A gallery ran alongside the outside wall with four mullioned windows looking out over the courtyard. There was a chandelier of heavy pounded iron, five feet in diameter, with two interior rings, all of them outfitted for candles, at least a hundred by Kitty's count. The flooring was dark gray flagstone, aspiring to black, smoothed by the clatter of cattle and the cobbled boots of yeomen, archers, and, later, musketeers committed to the sanctity of their homeland against the invasions of the Danes, the incursions of the Normans, the coming of the Spanish, and, finally, the arrival of the Cromwellians.

But now the hall was to fulfill its higher purpose: a place of revels and song, of dancing and rejoicing, of gluttonies most painful and of drinking most challenging. In the course of the marriage festivities the true purpose of Kitty's and Kieran's largesse would reveal itself. So eager were the guests to avail themselves of each and every opportunity for excess that the bride and groom were left mostly to themselves, with only the most distant of acquaintances or the most obsequious of strangers feeling obliged to thank the hostess and the host and wish them joy in the connubial adventure to which they had committed themselves. This gave Kitty and Kieran the chance—seated off to the side, away from the musicians—to discuss this man's gorging and that woman's drinking, and to agree that the expenditures were well worth it in the distractions they provided and the privacy they insured. There was also time to look, sometimes boldly, sometimes slyly, into each other's eyes, each provoking in the other a longing and a passion that would later spend and replenish itself, then spend and replenish itself again and yet again until the dawn would decree some repose, some small respite in each other's arms before disruptions of daily life would either nourish or destroy their earthly happiness.

There were, of course, interruptions of their extravagantly purchased solitude, one of the more conspicuous being Maude McCloskey, self-proclaimed Seer of the County, a woman with powers descended from—according to legend—the Little People with whom her ancestors had interbred if not intermarried. (It had long been Kitty's habit to think of her as a Hag, a term residing somewhere between an out-and-out Witch and the more acceptable Seer. Meanness had not prompted the choice. Kitty simply found the word more interesting, more evocative.)

Maude, however, was far from the stereotypical crone, and showed in her height and in her fair form that the genetic contributions of the leprechauns and their like had long been absorbed by some highly handsome and sturdy Kerry folk. The Little People had left behind only their claims to heightened insight and prophetic certainties.

“So Castle Kissane has come into the clutches of the McClouds, has it?” The good woman was cheerful, almost giddy at this consummation, her dark eyes beaming with approval, her full-lipped mouth wide with a near lascivious grin.

Kitty drew the fringe of her bridal veil over her right cheek, shielding at least part of her face from Maude's bright and unsettling gaze. “It would seem so,” she said.

“Well, you're the woman for it, if anyone is.”

“Why, thank you.”

“And you've got Kieran Sweeney now, and that might be a help.”

“I don't doubt it.” Kitty managed not to visibly bristle at the insinuation that she was in need of a man's assistance.

“Yes, yes,” Maude said, letting Kitty know she was fully aware of what she was thinking. “But you might need him all the same.”

“Maude,” said Kitty, “if you've come to pronounce some waiting doom, make your pronouncement, please, and let me get on with my marriage.”

Maude shook her head, still smiling. “If you knew what I know, you wouldn't be so impatient to hear it all.”

“Then you mustn't let me keep you from your other pleasures.” Kitty turned away and made a point of looking at no one in particular. This gave her a moment yet once more to rehash Castle Kissane's forbidding history. The eponymous Kissane, one of the mightier chiefs of seventeenth century Ireland, a patriot and a descendent son of Kerry going back beyond the time of Saint Brendan himself, had persuaded one and all that opposition to the Cromwellian heretics was useless. So, rather than shed the blood of men good and brave, he had negotiated a surrender that would leave them all unharmed—and able to fight another day. With that, the indomitable chief had tripped the light fantastic to France, where, rumor had it, he settled in wine country and lived to a besotted old age. His trusting countrymen who had served the castle were put to the sword: warriors and smithies, fisherfolk and farmers, shepherds and bards.

For a time the intruders thrived under the tyrannies of the aforementioned Lords Shaftoe, who had been given the better tracts of Kerry land as a reward for the perfidies oft told, one Shaftoe generation succeeding the other in unopposed possession, with the exception of a few thrown stones, a maimed cow here, a poisoned well there, followed by a hanging there and an eviction here. Eventually the Shaftoe line wearied of its discomforts and repaired to London, leaving in their steads a series of agents, few of whom died in bed.

Then came the curse that so enticed Kitty and forced her expectant hand as it signed the document proclaiming her ownership. In the early eighteen hundreds, the latest Shaftoe in the succession declared himself once more Lord of the Castle, and preparations were made for his return. As he progressed beyond the pale, rumors reached him that among the improvements intended to guarantee his ease in so cold and crude a land was a built-in cache of explosives that would be ignited as the primary manifestation of his welcoming.

This deterred him not at all. Upon his arrival, the gentry were summoned to the great hall and questions put. Where was the gunpowder? Who had provided it? Who was elected to ignite it? No answers were forthcoming. Practiced in the ways of persuasion, his Lordship selected two youths, the handsomest of the young men and the fairest of the young women, both about age seventeen. They were to be detained for twenty-four hours. If, within that time, no answers to his questions had been proffered, the youths would be hanged.

And so the youths were hanged. Soon after, their lithe and lovely bodies were cut down and buried in a far and secret place to deprive the populace of the martyrs' graves that could become a place of pilgrimage and a source of discontent. His Lordship, under cover of night, set sail for Dingle on a voyage that would eventually land him in far Australia, where, as he must have expected, his despotic talents could still be exercised to the full.

Castle Kissane remained unoccupied. Few would even venture near. There the gunpowder waited. No one doubted it. Everyone continued to expect the eruption at any time. But those commissioned to carry out the plot seemed to have vanished. New rumors arose. Perhaps the handsome boy and the fair, fair girl had been, after all, the designated torchbearers. Perhaps his Lordship had been more prescient than he would ever know, which meant that no one living could dispose of the powder and the danger would forever remain until some chance gesture, some random action, would grant its release.

But then, after the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had run their troubled course, a new breed, a group of determined squatters, young women and men from Cork eager to defy augury, had taken over the castle. No one in the countryside objected. The squatters had come into the Gaeltacht, the truer Ireland that fronted the Western Sea where Irish was still the first language, where the Gaelic tongue had never been stilled. They had arrived to reclaim the long-suppressed and abandoned words and sounds that had, in distant times, proclaimed the presence of a people saintly, scholarly, and given greatly to over-rejoicing—and, one might add, a susceptibility to the myths that alone could give measure to their imaginations.

Due to taxes unpaid by the absentee Shaftoes, the castle had passed on to the nation, and no particular bureaucracy took enough interest to evict the newcomers, especially since they repaired some of the pasture stone walls, partly restored the courtyard sheds, and cleared the underbrush from the orchard, using the twigs and bramble to warm the castle hearths. They also made resident again music and laughter, lust and lovemaking, with a feud or two thrown in to prove the Irish presence.

And so it came to pass that, just as the squatters were beginning to decamp for Donegal there to seek added experience, Kitty—rich beyond repair, famous far beyond her deserving—cajoled, badgered, and beguiled enough bureaucrats so that Castle Kissane, curse and horror and history and all, now came into her possession. This seemed only fair, since her own cliffside home, long inhabited by her Kerry ancestors, had been tumbled into the all-devouring sea by the unlikely concatenation of events that had brought Kitty and Kieran to the blissful contentions that were a favored part of their current conjugal happiness.

Maude broke into Kitty's musings. “I could do with a drink, I suppose,” she said.

“And welcome to it.”

“And may I drink to your rescue—and Kieran's, too— from the curse the castle holds fast in its every stone?”

“Drink. And drink again.” Kitty made a low bow.

“And drink as well to your protection when the stones fly heavenward and the tower topples as has been destined from the years long since?”

Now the woman's smile became a benevolent laugh. And, to Kitty's surprise, it seemed that handsome Maude McCloskey was transformed, for just that moment, into one of the more beautiful women the County had ever seen. Her skin was luminous with an inner glow, her eyes deepened with a sympathetic sweetness, her proud chin relaxed to a benign serenity. An almost tender sorrow crept into her voice as she said, “You know the story as well as any. Lord Shaftoe—what was intended for him may well come down to you. We've taken a chance, all of us, to be here now. Who knows when the moment will come? Before I speak another word? Tonight as you wrestle on the nuptial couch? At daybreak? At dusk? Tomorrow? A year from now? Others search for gold. Search, I tell you, for the gunpowder. It's here.”

“Nonsense. That was all cleared up years and years ago. They dug from here to there and there to here and found nothing.”

“I know. That means it's still here. But don't let that interrupt the festivities.” With that, her face reformed itself, and she became a handsome woman again but no longer a Seer transfigured. “But consider yourself warned. Watch you and Kieran both don't go flying sky-high the way was intended for his Lordship.”

“Maybe I look forward to the excitement.”

“You won't be looking forward. You'll be looking down- ward—and from a great height and your eyes gone blind and not a limb left to scratch your nose or reach out and hold your husband's hand. Well, at least you'll be halfway to heaven. Whether you'll go the rest of the way is anyone's guess. And I won't tell what mine is.”

“No need for that, is there?”

“Oh, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty McCloud. Why do you resist being what you are?”

“And what might that be?”

“A prophet. Come now, admit to it.”

“Really, Maude. Such extravagance!”

“And I a prophet, too. As everyone knows.”

“I certainly hope not, with your foretelling me gone skyhigh and halfway to heaven and Lord Shaftoe quiet in his grave.”

“Why do you talk such foolishness? We're prophets, not fortune-tellers.”

“And didn't you just now give the notion you could see this place gone up with gunpowder and me along with it?”

“A prophet doesn't tell the future. A prophet tells the truth. A truth no one wants to hear. Or believe. And that's why you're a prophet. You're a truth teller. I've read the books you've written. And there's a truth in all of them.”