The Fall of Light (6 page)

He followed her.

“Ailinn,”
he called after her when she turned in at the gates of the house.
Beauty.

She stopped in the road. She had known he was following her. She had already weighed the possibilities of the moment like
pebbles in her palm and, with the intuition gifted her by a grandmother who spoke with fairies, knew that her life would roll
from her fingers into those of this stranger.

“Is it me?” she said in Irish, turning her face into the fall of her fair hair.

When he came to her, Francis Foley fell into the first reverence of his adult life. He lost at once the hoop of words he had
expected to throw over her. He said nothing. Emer smiled. The soft April noontime touched them both, then she said: “I suppose
I shall see you tomorrow on this road.”

There was no reply, though the air between them was already eloquent. Emer walked on. Francis lay himself in against the weeds
in the ditch. The following day he awaited her there. When she arrived a thin rain was drizzling and a scarlet headscarf covered
her hair. Without slowing her walk, she passed along by where he stood and then felt the presence of him in her stride. It
was as if she had collected him, and he her, and they were in each other’s air already. So, without words, they walked off
the road to the town and into the damp new grass coming in the meadows.

From the first, Francis Foley gave her his dreams. The dreams he had once dreamed for his country now became the condensed
but powerful dream of a perfect place for this woman to live and bear their children. He imagined it fiercely. He told Emer
the home he would make for her. He described it as if it were its own republic, as if he hoped now to step outside the reality
of history and find a place only theirs. Emer raised her eyebrows at him yet loved the way he made her feel again a queen.
When she went out with him in the nighttimes after the dining was done and the ware washed, he made her forget the disappointments
of her life.

She lay back on his coat in a field under the night sky.

“Do you know the stars?” she asked him.

“Some of them I know.”

“My father told me their names and stories,” she said, and then told him something of the old master and of the stars’ names
in Latin.

He listened and loved her more still and the following days went and inquired of a schoolmaster thereabouts names of further
constellations, and these he brought to Emer like the gifts of that courtship.

“I want a place for us,” he said to her.

“There are many places. Where will we go?”

“We’ll have a house of our own.”

“Yes,” she said. “A fine house. A house with a yard and garden and hens.”

“I will make it for you. I will make the finest house any man ever made.”

“You won’t be able to.”

“I will.”

She angled herself on her elbow and looked into his face, pale in the night.

“You are a man who thinks he can change the world.”

“Of course I can,” he told her, and took her in his arms.

They married in May. Emer ran to him at the end of the avenue when the sky was releasing its stars and the night sweetening
with scent of almond from the furze. The May night was warm syrup. The tenderness of the air, the hushed green of the world
that was luscious, sensual, primordial, the soft low light, the sighing breaths of beasts in the fields, all these entered
their memories that night as if such things were themselves the guests at the wedding. They met the priest at the roofless
ruined chapel of Saint Martin’s and were married with a twist of Latin over their heads like a cheap, invisible corona. When
the priest had slipped batlike into the shadows, Francis Foley and Emer clung to each other. It was long moments before they
moved. Then they ran down the road and across the nighttime fields to a stone cabin for cattle, empty now, and which was the
first house of all those that fell short of Francis Foley’s vision of paradise.

They began a home there. She left her work. He would not have her going there, and she herself was glad to walk in with her
head high and say she would not be back. Then there was a brief blue summer of three weeks before the weather turned around
and came at them from the east. The wind burned the hay. Seeds did not come to proper
fruition, trees lost their leaves in August, and by September a fierce winter had already arrived. Emer carried their unborn
son like a promise of new spring and watched the dark days for signs of light. Her husband, who had dreamed so extravagantly,
had to hire himself at fairs. He disappeared before dawn and did not return until the physical exhaustion of his body was
brought about by those who paid him less than the cost of feeding their horses. Slowly, so slowly, a sour disappointment seeped
into the cottage. Tomas was born in January, when the snow was lying thick on the fields and there was no work even at the
fairs. They ate small birds and berries. In the deep silence of the one dim room their marriage staggered under the impossible
weight of dreams. Words were a reminder of other words and went unsaid, but the vision of the place that had been conjured
remained. It lingered like a shadow in the corner, and soon Francis Foley could not look at the leaking thatch, or a place
where the mud floor puddled, without hearing the reproach and mockery of his own words. Years slipped past them. The twins
were born. Francis lay in the low bed at night and listened to the scouring wind and then for the first time in his adult
life said a prayer to God for guidance.

He was too rash and independent a man to wait long for reply, and the following morning when none had come, he loaded his
wife and family on their small cart and moved them northeastward into the wind. Emer did not want to go.

“This is madness,” she said.

“Nothing is gained by sitting still,” he told her as the gale bit off his ears. “This is not our home.”

“It could be.”

“No, it couldn’t. Look at it. We are going. This is not what I promised you.”

“What if I said I didn’t care?”

“You’d be lying.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“This is not our home.”

They wandered like biblical travellers looking for a sign, and were met with blizzards. Gulls were blown out of the sky. To
keep his family alive, Francis stole sheep and killed them with his hands. They slept under hedges of whitethorn, the father
lying himself down and letting
the others rest wrapped upon him as the cold rose into his bones and by the dawn made of his face a white, bloodless mask.

When at last they found a place to live, it was no better than the one they had left behind. They stayed a year and two months,
then moved again.

And so on it went, that life of struggle and hardship that followed the innocent days of love so swiftly that soon they themselves
were almost forgotten and survived only as the thinnest faded memories of a once upon a time sweetness. They did not find
a home. They lived on for times in various cabins and ruined cottages, deeply mired in the disappointment
of
their dreams. They stayed awhile and then moved, each time at the insistence
of
Francis over the increasing resistance of his wife. At last, when Teige was born Francis found work as one of an army of
gardeners on an estate. They had a small cottage. The country itself was lost too in disillusionment. Spies and betrayals
were everyday, the air of towns was opaque with mistrust and the yellow scent of greed. Those who owned the land did not live
on it, and those like Francis who worked it imagined they were little more than the beasts in the field. It was a long, hard
kind of living. And though he heard the whispered news of rebels, the perennial plots and hot dreams of those who promised
a new country of their own, Francis Foley resisted joining them. He bowed his head and stayed working, clucking the horse
and leading the mower down the long lawns of the estate, trimming the hedges and tending the perfect gardens of Lord Edward
James Fitzroy
of
the county of Essex.

Emer was by then almost contented. She was the mother of four boys. She tried to teach them classes in the Latin and Greek
her father had taught her, but Tomas was impatient to be with his father and the twins rolled and knocked each other about
and showed little interest. Only Teige sat and listened. His hair was first blond and then fair brown, and he had a way of
sitting in close attention that was serene and knowing. His mother told him he would be a master. She ruffled his hair and
touched his face with floury fingers.

But trouble was already gathering. Francis had no garden of his own and tended another man’s instead, clipping the laurel
bushes that the lord himself never saw, grooming them into globes of green in case the lord should visit this year, and bringing
home the clippings to add
to the stew of their dinner. He planted potatoes, dug carrots and turnips and parsnips that were marshalled in such straight
lines that they mocked the crooked stonewalled boundaries of the fields outside the garden. His hands grew black with earth.
When the old angers rose in his chest, he reached down and tore at the weeds with fury. And shortly he was noticed by the
head gardener, Harrington, for none rooted at the ground like him or pulled up the stumps of dead trees or turned over the
soil with the same fury.

The garden was a kind of paradise. It was made to defy the typical view of that country in the drawing rooms of London. From
there, the neighboring island was a place unruly and wild where everything rioted in nature and a straight line was not to
be seen. But in that garden was a proof of empire, a living evidence that in the hands of the educated and well-bred even
the most inauspicious place, the damp, dreary ground of that estate, could become transformed into an elegant country residence
that would not offend a visiting lord. It would both reflect and inspire. It would show the natives the advantages of dominion,
of what could be done, mirroring in its majesty the glory of its owner while subduing them to it at the same time.

Within it, Francis worked silently from grey dawn until the gloaming. The years ran into his hands and lined his skin like
the knots in trees. The lord never came. The house was prepared several times, fires lit, woodsmoke hanging in the trees,
and every plant and bush in the garden balanced on the instant of its best display. Rain was prayed away. Maids ran about
in black dresses with white aprons and caps and polished the dishes that had never been used. The world waited and was disappointed
once more.

It was the evening after one of those false visits, when all day eyes had watched the avenue for His Lordship’s arrival and
the gardeners had looked at their garden as though it were the painting
of
a garden, a masterpiece in which every detail had been painted just so, that Francis Foley came home angrily to Emer. He
sat at the table and placed upon it his hands brown with mud.

“What are we doing?” he said to her.

“We are living our life. Get yourself cleaned,” she told him.

“We have nothing.”

“Stop. Don’t. I know what you are going to say and I don’t want to
hear it, Francis,” she said, and went to get the food for the dinner. The boys stood about and watched silently to see calamity
coming. But that evening it did not.

Later that night Francis left the cottage in the falling darkness and broke into the big house. He felt he had been scorned
by the lord and that this was only the latest of all those assaults life had made on his dreams. He opened a window and stepped
inside that mute and perfect world. He walked through its ordered elegance, down the polished oak floors that reflected the
stars, and into rooms that offered themselves like nervous debutantes, hoping for approval. He stood in the bay window and
saw in the stellar light the long view down the garden. He saw it the way it was meant to be seen, and in those moments, hearing
his own breath sighing in the empty house, he was struck with a cruel knowing of how completely he had surrendered his soul.
Bulbs of anger exploded inside him. He was in the middle of his life and realized how much of it was lost. He touched the
smooth painted sill with his fingertips, then he crossed the dark room and looked out at the western view of the rosebed,
the eastern view of the boxwood. He moved from room to room to see out through each of the windows, and as he did, his rude
boots making creaking noises on the floors, he felt a tightening in his heart. The whole country is a jail, he thought. They
have us prettying it up for their visits, and they never even come. He was in the library looking outward, and when he turned
away from the garden view in anger, he saw behind him the great brass-and-wooden contraption that was the telescope.

At first he did not even know how to look through it. He did not know about angles or focus, but he knew the stars he had
learned for Emer. The moment he touched the telescope, his life had already begun to change. For he was at once reminded of
his courtship, of the innocent nights beneath the sky when he and she had imagined the world spread before them. It was a
memory made bitter now He turned his eye to the glass and looked up into the clouds.

It was three nights later before the skies were clear and Francis saw Venus from the library. He saw it and stared. He watched
it with the kind of wonder children know and was still watching the stars when the light of the dawn thinned them into nothing.

When he told Emer, he thought there might be conjuring magic and it would return them to the early days of their life together.

“I have seen Andromeda,” he told her in the dark of their low bed. “Will you come and see tomorrow night?”

“You shouldn’t be in there,” she said.

“There are more stars than you can see with your eyes. They are like stars kept from everyone, like ones not for our viewing
but only His Lordship.”

“Francis.”

“Don’t tell me we were not meant to see them.”

“You will be caught and we will be thrown out on the road.”