The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (8 page)

‘I have seen you trying to bring happiness to a goose by giving her a bowl of oat mash. But that is not for the love of the goose. It is for the love of her old drumsticks when she’s dead.’

Annora wrung her hands some more. ‘Don’t be plaguing me, I beg you. You know I never eat the poor Phialas. And if anyone deserves a new gown it is Ida, for she’s scarcely decent.’

She pointed to Ida’s sorry crumple of a dress that had been worn by six sisters before her. Each of us had intensified its humbleness with rips, stirabout and goose doings. Ida had added a new injury to every faded insult.

‘Ida is a dull dog. She suits a rag. Better not to draw attention to her with fancy clothes,’ observed Darcy. ‘But I’m a different case. Poverty hates me. I must
dress
.’

‘Poverty is afraid of you,’ whispered Annora, ‘the divil you are. Well, has it come to this then?’

She rose and rifled through a drawer of the dresser, producing a smeared business card. ‘It is a wig-maker from Dublin who called here last week when you were in chapel. He wants to buy your hair. He said he’d give cash money for it.’

Darcy snatched the card, roaring, ‘And why did you keep this from me?’

‘I . . . I . . . don’t want to sell my hair,’ whimpered Ida.

‘Would you prefer to starve to death and use it for your shroud?’ Darcy asked. ‘For all you’ll get to eat here, that’s your choice. No, it’s not your choice. Your doting mother already chose to let you starve, hiding this card away.’

Then Annora had to avert her eyes, and put her hands over her ears. She tried to fold her thin mouth over her large teeth, while Darcy gave her a punishing verdict on her mothering. But just as Darcy was warming to her rant, and had begun to enjoy the creature, she stopped suddenly and looked at her sisters one by one. Each of us dropped our eyes and mumbled something apologetic, as was always best in such a case. She didn’t hear us. Darcy’s lips were creased in an awful smile and those hooded black eyes were sequinned with rare, happy highlights.

‘Wet the tea,’ she ordered Annora. ‘And all sit down. Manticory, fetch me some paper and a pencil. No one talk.’

Annora crossed herself. I was relieved to see the Eileen O’Reilly’s blue eye bulging at the window for the first time in a fortnight. The left side of her head was bandaged.

‘I’m freckened,’ whispered Ida, plucking a long strand from her head and winding it round her wrist for comfort.

We all were, brimful of fear, and me most of all that it was something to do with the troll on the bridge.

For all the signs were there.

Darcy was in possession of an idea.

Chapter 8

Darcy would have gone out on her own, I’m sure of it, if she hadn’t smelled more money in our joined-up attractions. Your first thought might be that she’d set us up as female prize fighters, given the twins’ proclivities for war. There was fuel enough in the bad blood among the two Swiney tribes to deliver a rampant spectacle on the stage. In the absence of food and pleasant weather, there was moreover a great appetite for bashing in Ireland in those days – boxing matches and street fights were the bloody joy of the poor.

But that was not Darcy’s idea for turning a penny.

She drew deep on her cup of tea, settled back in her chair and announced, ‘We can sell our hair and keep it too.’

Fearful thoughts stumbled through my mind, bumping into one another and falling asunder. Thanks to my troll gentleman, Darcy now knew that men would hand over money in exchange for what the Swiney hair did to them.

‘The more hair we show, the more they’ll pay,’ she said. ‘Seven times over.’

Annora protested, ‘I’ll not have you doing anything immoral, Darcy Swiney.’

‘Very far from immoral it shall be,’ said Darcy loftily. ‘We shall make something of ourselves by way of the very singing voices and the hair that God gave us. What could be more moral than that?’

‘There’s a stupendous mass of lying somewhere in those words there,’ fretted Annora. ‘But I cannot find it.’

‘You cannot,’ Darcy agreed.

A performing septet, ‘the Swiney Godivas’, was conceived that day in Darcy’s tempestuous brain, where it buzzed like a headache until she had written it all down – laboriously, in her bat-wing script – on a large piece of brown paper, including diagrams, lists of dances and sisters matched to solo songs. We sat in silence, watching her while our tea cooled undrunk. As her plan unfolded before us, I knew that I would never now be safe from troll gentlemen with foxtails, for Darcy was planning to deliver me to them again and again, and for profit.

The following week Darcy devoted to scaring new shoes for us out of neighbouring children. There was a rumour at school that Darcy sharpened her considerable elbows on a ploughshare every night. Only the Eileen O’Reilly stood up to Darcy, kicking both her shins for her with a sharp black boot, and letting fly with a stream of blasphemy that would flay the Devil’s rosy ears and give Him pause for thought. For good measure, the butcher’s runt concluded, ‘The curse of Black Cromwell on ye!’ – this being the very worst of our Kildare lexicon at that time.

Darcy beat the Eileen O’Reilly with a hawthorn switch and left her welted, snivelling and shoeless in the dusty road, crying, ‘And if Beelzebub don’t take your rotten heart straight to his fiery bower for roasting, Darcy Swiney, it’s a wonder.’

No wonder
, I thought,
for the Devil would take one look at Darcy’s face and know it for His own likeness, and blow it a kiss on Sundays
.

Darcy marched me past the Eileen O’Reilly, and I kept my eyes lowered as if I cared nothing for her pains. Winking would have seemed to make light of her injuries, so I tried to shame her less by seeming not to notice them.

I had to content myself with Darcy’s black straw hat, which she’d hung up to dry in the yard after a drenching. I lowered the line a discreet amount and filled the hat with Indian meal. The thin geese obliged me by leaping up to rifle the hat’s crown with their sun-coloured beaks until it hung in shreds from its peg.

‘And that is one for the Eileen O’Reilly,’ I whispered to myself.

And the next day she and I began meeting in a hedge near Harristown Bridge for lessons after school. I watched her bruises bloom and fade as she bent over the writing primer I’d borrowed from the schoolroom for her. Her stub of pencil pressed hard into the page. She proved quick and lively beyond my expectations. Within a few weeks we had tamed her consonants and taught her verbs and nouns to live in harmony with one another. Her spelling showed signs of wanting to be achieved.

It was as well that the Eileen O’Reilly prospered speedily in her learning, for soon our lessons were abbreviated to snatched quarter-hours.

Our time together, so contented and peaceful, was stolen from us, by Darcy, of course.

I had to run home from school now. Darcy’s plan was being drilled, slapped and scorned into life. Every afternoon, we Swiney sisters donned the bullied shoes and practised in the barn, to the bemusement of the geese and the kittens, and also of the Eileen O’Reilly, who watched from a crack in the back wall. Annora stood at the barn door, wringing her hands and continually being told to be off with herself to mend our stockings.

Every time Annora wailed, ‘This is not right, as God is my witness,’ my heart echoed her. I very fervently did not wish to move my body to Darcy’s direction, or to lift my voice in songs Darcy chose.

There was the cruelty of our hurting limbs too. The shoes Darcy had appropriated were not the same size as our feet. They either pinched like Darcy’s fingers or flapped like goose beaks until we stuffed them with scratchy straw. Our blisters filled, scabbed, itched and filled again. We danced on our pain, grimacing when Darcy screamed at us to smile.

But in just a few weeks, each girl of us could sing and dance in harmony, even little lisping nine-year-old Ida; even stout twelve-year-old Pertilly who you’d think too thick about the ankle for grace; even eleven-year-old Oona, who’d always been too embarrassed by the deep bass of her voice to speak above a whisper. By the end of a month, we sisters could dance an Irish jig for you in perfect synchronicity, though Enda – despite her seventeen grand years – could never be allowed to stand next to Berenice, because she could not be stopped from chanting ‘Brown Bitch Heifer’ to her in time with the music, to which her twin would reply, ‘I’ll choke you for a dog!’ Once the twins were safely separated, the seven Swiney sisters worked like a fourteen-flanged mechanical toy cut from a single piece of tin. Our voices rose and fell in melodious plaitings and unravellings. We could break your heart with ballads and wash your soul with hymns. We’d finish you off with a dirge.

We could eke out our talent to fifty minutes.

That sufficed for sixpence a show, opined Darcy, over the rare luxury of a potato-and-milk supper with a scrape of butter on top. ‘We’d be wasting our time working harder than for sixpence, and us already crusted with the sweat of rehearsing. Who’s to afford more than sixpence round here? And in the meantime,’ she hectored, handing out ghostly white bandannas with eye holes, ‘not a one of you is to show a bare face or arm to the sun, even if it should visit for a rarity. If I see a solitary brutal-looking freckle, I’ll have your life.’

‘Why?’ dared Berenice, who liked to garden, although her chiefest joy was digging deep holes to push Enda into. Enda was short-sighted and never anticipated these attacks. Oona and I would brush the dirt from her hair after her falls.

‘Yes, why?’ asked Pertilly, who dearly loved to chew a stalk of grass warm from the soil.

Darcy sighed. ‘Is it more ankles than brains you have? For the sheer drama of it is why. Because if your stupid complexion is as white as a sheet, Pertilly, then your fat arms and ugly face will be a better contrast to the hair on your useless head.’

Even though she was not one of Enda’s sorority, I felt a tender pity every time I looked at Pertilly. It was only her fifty-two inches of chestnut hair that lent any air to her at all. She had a nun’s face, Darcy always said, born for a wimple instead of a bonnet. Pertilly’s was one of those Irish smiles that’s never more than an acknowledgement of hopeless adversity. Her face was rhomboid rather than heart-shaped, with spare folds where there should be none. Nor was Pertilly gifted with wit, a subject on which Darcy now expanded at length.

‘Pertilly’s an ignoramush!’ Ida chipped in joyfully, and then clapped her hand over her mouth. ‘Sorry so,’ she whispered to Pertilly.

Over Pertilly’s tears, Darcy instructed Annora to sew us seven new black silk shawls, also to emphasise the pallor of our complexions and the whiteness of our forearms.

‘What in the earthly world are you thinking, Darcy? With what money shall I be paying for black silk shawls?’ whined Annora. ‘
New
, is it?’

We had never in our lives worn clothes that had been made for us.

‘With credit money. I’ll pay it back with interest after the first show.’

‘
First
show?’ whimpered Ida. ‘But—’

Annora protested, ‘Haven’t I been trying to tell you that the credit is at the tether’s end? Silk’s an awful price. And what if—’

‘Away with your what-ifs, you stupid woman!’ thundered Darcy. ‘And aren’t there six or seven pewter dishes just begging to be sold? It wouldn’t hurt you to take in a few extra sheets for mending either.’

‘Is that your manners, girl? She’s a terrible girl for manners! She has a snake’s manners. It is not her fault, no. But she is the Dark One’s snaky minion, the serpent that she is, with that sharp tooth on her for biting at you.’ Annora crossed herself and bent over her needle, invoking seamstress saints in tearful whispers.

‘Is this a good stitching?’ she’d moan, answering herself, ‘Faith it is no such thing: it is very poor, the creature. It is the Dunlavin banshee who has put her cold hand on my fingers.’

Despite her Catholic faith, a staunch belief in fairies coexisted in Annora’s confused and beaten heart. To hear her tell it, our fields were thick with fairy forts, fairy stones, fairy trees that must be scrupulously avoided. She frequently insisted Ida’s ‘airy fits’ were brought on by the Little People who were known to infest the air, earth and water around Gormanstown Hill. Or she blamed the elfin spirits of Ratharigid and the fairies of the moat at Tournant who regularly put a dangerous excitement on the herds at Dunlavin. The two tribes of Little Folk were constantly at war; droplets of red blood would be found on the roadway after their battles. In the evil February wind – or when Darcy raged – Annora always swore she heard the cries of the banshee of Dunlavin, an ancient crone who combed her hair and pronounced scintillating curses, especially on laundresses and seamstresses. On All Souls Day, the time when the other world was deemed to be closest to ours, Annora spent every daylight hour on her knees praying for mercy on the souls in Purgatory, alternating with whispered asides begging mercy from the Sidhe of Gormanstown on their rampages.

While Annora chanted hymns to save her stitching from the Dunlavin banshee, Darcy wrenched the lice and the lice-nymphs and egg casings from our hair with the wooden comb, boiling the kettle so it whistled to cover our screams in case a constable happened to pass by. The face of the Eileen O’Reilly at the window grew round-eyed and pale as a laundered sheet.