The Fall of Light (39 page)

“She’s in here,” Clancy said.

Teige went to the stable half-door. When he got near enough to see only the shadows, the mare inside turned and swung around
away from him and snorted with her face to the wall. Teige placed his hands on the top of the door. He leaned there and looked
in at her. She was a five-year-old, high and fine and white.

“She’s ready for him,” Clancy said. “But you bring her near and she won’t take him. We’ve brought her three times last year.
He’s Bonaparte, lad. You’ve heard of him?” he asked, and at once knew it was foolish. “Well, he’s over East Clare. He’s the
one himself wants for her.”

Teige opened the door and was inside the stable before Clancy could tell him not to. He was whispering the sounds he whispered
in that language that was not language in any sense other than it existed between him and horses. He stood still and whispered
and raised his hands very slowly until they were flat-palmed up to the air like one holding a most delicate and invisible
wall. He breathed outward and let the presence of him establish and mix and become inextricable from the sunlit motes of straw
dust and the fumes and odours of dung and urine and sweat that hung and made thick the air there. The mare whinnied. She did
not turn back her head. Thrice she stamped her hind leg on the off side of him. The damp straw of the bedding was moved aside
by that action and the hoof hit the stones of the floor under and made a retort sharp and angry.

“She knows her mind,” Clancy said.

Teige turned and looked at him, and Clancy understood and said he would leave him to it and they would take her to the stallion
in the morning.

For the rest of that day, Teige and the mare became familiar each with each. Pyle, the youth that had before brought him his
food, was now a redheaded fellow muscled but callow, who came and stood with a bowl of potatoes and a sullen expression. Teige
thanked him for the food, but the fellow said nothing but stood and cracked each of his knuckles and then went off. The day
was fine and warm. Flies travelled
the sunbeams. They buzzed about the horse and felt her heat and she whisked her tail to little avail. The signs of thirst
were on her, but she would not take water and was restless and nervy and seemed ill at ease in her own horseflesh. After a
time Teige put on her a halter and brought her out and led her clopping across the yard and out down the avenue. He walked
her with short lead firmly and said things and kept his head close to hers and allowed the softness of the day to ease her
and let her feel her liberty from the stall. He took her on down the way but then turned at the fork and crossed to follow
the main avenue so as not to bring her past the grazing horses. He was some way along this when he saw the carriage coming.

The mare flicked her ears, then locked and planted her feet and stood like the semblance of a horse cast in iron or bronze.
The noise of the wheels and the beat of hooves and the sleek dark black colour of the rushing carriage all quickened the air
there. Teige tried to coax the mare to the side out of the way, but she would not budge. And the carriage bore on toward them.
Its dust rose in a cloud and hung pale and luminescent like the fore- or afterpresence of a deity. Teige could see the coachman
in livery and see the fellow wave his free hand to clear the avenue, but the mare snorted then and snuffled and shook her
head and turned about on the short lead and did not step out of the road. She sniffed the excitement out of the air, and though
Teige shush-shushed her and reached his hand to pat the side of her neck, still she frisked and turned and tried to step about
in a small circle. The coach was all but on them then. In moments the coachman cried out and stood upright and reined hard
back to his chest, and at last the mare moved off the avenue onto the verge of grass. The coach stopped and the mare grew
more anxious still. Teige released its lead to the full and let the animal sense it had its freedom. When she moved back so
did he. He was in a small, scuffling, pulling, dragging scene then, with the mare moving this way and that and he following
with the line fully extended, when the woman in the carriage looked out the window, and he saw in side view in the briefest
instant that it was Elizabeth.

He saw her. Then he saw the other figure, a man in a black suit of clothes sitting close by her side.

The coach passed on. Teige tugged sharply on the mare’s lead and brought her closer to him and they stood
then in the wake of dust and fading noise and the slow reassembling of the world. He could not breathe. He stood a time looking
at only the soft curved line of the mare’s back and the fields beyond it, and all were tranquil and still like the changeless
and unreal country of dreams. He did not look after the coach. He studied the green horizon of hedgerow and blossom as if
such might secure him to the earth. He opened wide his mouth. Then the mare pulled up her head twice and he snap-tugged at
the lead and admonished and turned her about and brought her back up that avenue to the stable, where that time she drank
water. He left her there then and went across the yard and worked the pump hard and fast until it gurgled and a frayed water
came. He stooped and doused his head and the water was first slightly sun-warmed and then cold and then colder still. He shook
off the drops and then cupped his hands and drank some and looked across his dripping fingers to see the youth watching him.
Teige walked over. Pyle’s eyes lowered and were gone then beneath a fringe of lank red hair. Teige stood next to him.

“Busy at the house, are they?” he said.

“I suppose they are.” The fellow cracked his knuckles.

“Visitors?”

“Feck all I care,” Pyle said, surly and short, his gaze fixed on the ground at his feet. “More logs, more water, more logs,
feck,” he said.

The afternoon sunlight beheld them. Flies and honeybees flew. The snout of the pump dripped a slow, heavy drip of aftermath.

“Feck,” said Pyle again, daring beneath the blind cover of his hair. “What fires do you need and it fine as any summers day?
But fires in every room it’s to be. More logs. And more. For the married ones. Feck.”

Teige did not speak then. The blue sky seemed to pulse. He turned about and found it best to squat down against the wall a
moment, as if to study the cobbles of the yard. Then the other fellow got up and went off and Teige stayed there and held
back his face to the sun blaze.

For the rest of that afternoon he did not take out the mare. He sat
outside there and watched across the yard where the maids and butlers came and went briskly. From time to time he got up and
went inside the stable and spoke to the horse and stroked her, but she was restless in the heat and the flies. The time passed
slowly. He turned in his head the news that Elizabeth was married. He turned it this way and that, as if trying to find comfort
while a stake was in his heart. He told himself it was to be expected. He told himself he must have known all along, that
she was certain to be married as soon as she left there and went back to Cork. She would hardly even remember you, he said.
You were nothing to her. You were how she tolerated the boredom of being here, nothing more. She probably told her friend
and they laughed at you and how you came across the roof in the night to sit and see her naked. He told himself such things,
as if bitterest medicine worked strongest. He made mocking images of himself and watched them portentous and comedie in the
theatre of his mind. He derided all notions of love and made of them pathetic constructs of artifice and lies for innocents
and fools. Anger roiled in him and came and subsided and came again. He saw his life like a story and one without great event
or passion, but instead a long dwindling of days islanded with his father. He took from this the solace that such was meant
to be, but soon this too was found frail and its comforts thin and chimerical. In the labyrinths of such considerations then
the afternoon passed. The lustre of the sun was slowly diminished and the walls of the yard transformed from yellow to gold
to an umbered brown. Red-combed hens walked about and pecked the straw stuff, scrabbled three-toed, stood one-footed, dunged
a blanched dung, and made sharp head turns, quizzical and affrighted. To these Teige tossed powder of crushed oats that lay
in the deeps of his pocket. The hens flurried and ran in startled, swooplike movement. They pecked fast and frantic and in
the still emptiness the tiny tapping of their beaks on the cobbles sounded. When the ground was cleaned they stood attendant
and Teige got up then and flapped his arms and they scattered in all direction with noise and feather and were in riot so
when Elizabeth came into the yard.

He saw her. She wore a dress of pale blue that touched the ground. She carried above her head a parasol and crossed slowly
to the stables.
There she stopped not ten feet from him and made to look in on one of the other horses stabled there.

“Are you going to say hello to me?” she said at last. She had not turned. She was hidden beneath the parasol and studying
the gelding that had come forward for her touch.

Teige stood. He looked across the yard, but there were only the hens in retreat. He turned back to the door of the mare’s
stable and stood and looked within.

“You heard I am married now?” she asked him, still not showing her face.

“I did,” he said. His voice was low, his breath seemed to move through ashes.

She reached her right hand and touched the long face of the gelding.

“And what do you think?” she said.

“I have to tend to the mare, that’s what I think,” he said then, and opened the door and stepped into the darkness.

“Teige?”

He heard her say his name, but he did not answer. He took brushes from where they lay in the straw and with swift, arcing
motion set about grooming the horse. When he paused later he listened and then came up to the door and looked outside and
she was gone.

That night he lay in the straw and could not sleep. He watched the occluded moon cross the partly clouded sky. He heard owls
and bats and others nocturnal traverse the dark. The mare shuddered in dream and lifted her hind hoof sometimes and stamped
as if in crude imitation of one demonic. Then she stilled again and her breathing resumed its slow and steady heave, filling
and venting the vastness of her chest in rhythm hypnotic. Mice myriad and minute scuttered over the stones, vanished into
the walls and under the doors. Teige rose and walked out. The vaulted hood of stars glittered in revealed fragments as the
clouds passed. Cassiopeia shone her tale of tragedy to all that might read it there, but Teige did not delay. He crossed the
yard and by instinct and memory moved to the shadows beneath the wall. He pressed himself close to these and followed their
line around by the house. He did not see the red-haired fellow that saw him. He came around by the kitchen and found then
the holds between the stones
for his fingers and climbed up onto that first low roof. He crouched low and was a shadow and again did not see the shadow
of the youth below in his wake. He came to the window and found the sash partly raised. He lifted it with two hands then and
waited to still his breath before he stepped inside onto the floorboards of the hallway.

All was an umbrageous hush. Ghosts and their shades ambled and paused momentarily, quizzical and looking askance to see one
living among them. Then, in the grave and somnolent manner of their kind, they passed onward and were as shadows as they went
about their ceaseless business in the halls of that old house. Teige stood and listened, the dreaming and the dead alike making
the softest sounds. Then he stepped forward barefoot and with hands out as if to fend off attack or to balance on a rope.
He came to the door of the room where she had slept before and he pressed his ear against it and could not hear the breath
of any. Slowly he squeezed the handle around and opened it inches and then he leaned in and saw that the bed was empty. He
blew a long, thin breath and tried again to still himself, and while he did he passed through brief, sharp agonies of indecision
familiar to all such lovers, and then he went down the hall to the next door. He listened. She was not there. He went on,
around the turn of the corridor, emboldened now and grown more reckless as he proceeded. The floorboards creaked, ghosts and
dust and dreams astir. He came to a door then and stopped and knew that she was within. He tried to still himself. Then he
reached and opened the door.

There were shadows on the bed. The darkness was jumbled with shapes and shades, tones grey and pewter. Teige stood, strange
like a creature incorporeal. He waited, attendant on some discovery and incipient disaster, and with the passing of each moment
could not quite believe that none came. Slowly the shadows assembled and were the shapes of a man and woman sleeping. He moved
a step closer and could see her then where she lay with the man’s arm outstretched across her, a pale raised line like the
weal of a scar. Teige moved again and this time knelt down on one knee and was close enough now to be enveloped in the smells
of her. Her face in sleep was calm and very beautiful and Teige studied it then without haste or anxiety, as if the progress
of all time had since ceased and such perusal were his business eternal. Then she moved and the man’s arm moved and she
pressed her head back and angled in the pillow and showed the line of her neck that was fine and white like a fabulous bird’s
and Teige reached and touched it.