When she turned away from the seaward windows and looked through the window that faced the rocky way leading down to the village, Ineen Fitzgerald could see that someone was coming up toward the house. He was having some difficulty; at times the rainy wind seemed to snatch away his cloak entirely and to be on the point of taking flight, but he hauled it in and wrapped it around himself again; and by pulling himself up the stones and planting his feet heavily he made progress toward her. The rippled diamond panes of the window, streaked with the rain, made the little figure seem to shift size and nature continually; sometimes, when the wind threw a mighty slew of rain across the glass, he disappeared from view entirely, as though he had been drowned.
Cormac, she thought. He was coming all the way up from the strand to tell her what she already knew: that was like him. She, who always knew first whatever happened in the surrounding country and on the sea, for her house stood above the village and oversaw not only the road that wound under great Ben Bulben from the east, but the sea-road and the long stony spit as well: what had she to do but watch? Yet he would always come up to her with cold news. That a curragh which had gone out with four brothers in it had come back on the tide stove in and empty, and lay overturned on the beach. That a line of English soldiery was coming from the east with pieces of ordnance and a man in armor at its head. “Yes, Cormac,” she would say patiently, for she had seen them already at dawn, counted their cannon, and seen the glint of armor in the sun. It was only that he loved her, not that he was an idle gossip; the fiction that he was bringing her news was understood by both of them for what it was and she didn’t dislike him for it. Yet she did feel, as she turned away from the window, a small irritation. Why hadn’t he more sense than to climb up here uselessly in a storm?
Out the seaward windows she could see that the huge ships were coming, helplessly, nearer the shore. The black, white-fringed waves rose so high that now and then the ships were lost to sight entirely, as though swamped and sunk already, but then they would appear again: one, a fleck of white sail only, far off; the other westerly and straining to keep to the open sea; and the third, seeming to have surrendered to its awful fate, nearest the land, near enough for her to see the red cross on its sails, its shrouds torn away and waving rhythmically—or was that only the spray of rain cast off its spars as it creased the storm? The waves that bore it landward seemed to rise with an unreal slowness, like the great crushing waves that rose in her dreams: seemed to rise endlessly, black glass hung with froth, each one falling against the tormented strand only at the last moment before its movement upward would become unceasing and it would rise up and drown the world.
She, who had watched the sea most of her life, had never seen a catastrophe anything like this one, had never seen the sea attempt to destroy men on such a scale. She had seen storms as bad, and worse, but they spent themselves against the land, which she knew could always bear it. And the sea even in a mood of mild petulance could kill fishermen of the village, singly or in pairs, and send their curraghs to the bottom; and then she would feel a sickening anger at the unfairness. But she had never seen ships the size of these galleons, like mansions put to sea. There would be dozens of men aboard them, hundreds; she could see now, with a thrill of terror, that tiny men actually clung to the masts and rigging of the nearest ship, trying to cut loose the luffing sails as large as meadows, and as the sea canted the ship over suddenly, one man was flung into the sea.
What should she feel? Pity for them? She couldn’t. For the destruction of the floating castles? The pride of them, even in destruction, forbade it. She could only watch fascinated the two monstrosities, sea and galleon, contend.
The same winds that carried the ships toward shore tormented the house, hooting in the chimney and rattling the windows in their frames. Small winds, wet and salt, were in the house, couldn’t be kept out. In the silences which came momentarily when the wind turned round she could hear her father, in the loft praying. Ave Maria gratia plena Dominus tecum. If her father died this night, that would be right; she, caught up in the vast wasting of human life by the sea and somehow fiercely indifferent, unable to feel pity or shock, wouldn’t feel then at her father’s death all the guilty anguish she had long expected to feel when at last his strong, mad ghost gave up its body. She almost, wrapped in a sudden draft of cold sea air, almost wished for it.
The nearest galleon had begun to break up on the drowned stones of the causeway that ran out beyond the spit. Farther off, the seaward ship had lost its battle, and, a loose sail flapping with slow grace like a handkerchief, swept down toward the cliffy places to the south. The third she could no longer see. The sea had thrown it away.
At the other end of the house the unbarred door was opened, and shut again. She felt a gust of wind that made her shiver.
“Bar the door, Cormac,” she said. She turned with reluctance from the window and went into the narrow tangle of hallway that led to the door. “You’re a fool, Cormac Burke,” she said, not quite as gently as she had intended to, “to come up all the way here in this weather, and to tell me about the ships, who is it?”
She stopped then, because the man turned to face her from barring the door wasn’t Cormac Burke. She didn’t know him. The water coursing down his mantle and the brim of his hat spattered rapidly on the floor; there was a puddle around his booted feet, and when he stepped toward her the boots made a sodden sound.
“Who are you?” she said, stepping back.
“Not the one you named. One very wet.”
They stood facing each other for a long moment. In the darkness of the hall she couldn’t well see his face. His Irish had a Scots intonation, and sounded wet as well, as though the water had got into his throat.
“Might I,” he said at last, “claim the hospitality of this house? A seat by the fire, if you have such a thing? I wouldn’t trouble you at all.” He held out both hands, slowly, as though to show he wasn’t armed. His two hands seemed to glow faintly in the dark hall, as silver objects and certain sea-shells do in dimness.
She came to herself. “Yes, come in,” she said. “Warm yourself. I didn’t mean to refuse the house.”
He stripped off his mantle heavy with water, and followed her into the comparative warmth and light of the main room of the house. He stood a moment looking about himself, seeming to take inventory of the place, or as though trying to remember if he had ever been in it before. Then he went to the chimney corner and hung his mantle and hat on a peg there.
“We get few guests,” she said.
“I think that’s odd,” he said. His hair was thin and gray, and his face was white like his hands, though now in the light of the fire and the rush-lights they seemed to glow as they had in the hall. His eyes were large and pale and with some humorous melancholy in them that was disconcerting.
“Odd? We’re far off the travelled roads.”
“But it’s the finest house hereabouts. A traveller who put out the effort might be likely to find more than a cup of water for himself.”
She ought to have resented this calculation, but she couldn’t, he said it so frankly. “You are a stranger here.”
“Oh, I am.”
“And from where?”
He said a mouth-filling Scots place-name she didn’t recognize, and said that he was called Sorley.
“Like Sorley Boye?”
“Not of that clan or name,” he said, with a slight smile that made Ineen wonder if he was lying, and then wonder why she wondered. “And what might your name be called?”
“Ineen,” she said, and looked away.
“And right, too,” he said; for ineen is only girl in Irish.
“Ineen Fitzgerald,” she said. To another that might have stopped further inquiry. She felt it wouldn’t with this Sorley, and in fact he right away asked her what one with such a name did living in this northern place.
“There’s a tale in that,” she said, and turned away to the window again. The near Spanish ship was stove in now, the breach in its side was evident, it was shipping water and seemed to pant like a dying bull as it rose and fell on the heaving surf. There was flotsam, boards, barrels. Did men cling to them? With a sudden fear she realized that the sea might not take them all, not all those dozens. Some might live, and gain the strand. Spanish men. Spanish soldiers. What would happen then?
“They are only men after all,” said Sorley.
So intent was she, had she been all that day, on the ships that she didn’t find it odd that he seemed to have read her thoughts.
“All up and down the coast,” he said, “from Donegal down to Kerry, they’ve been putting in, or trying to; coming to grief, many of them. Most of the men drowning.”
“Why have they come? Why so many?”
“No reason of their own. They never wanted to. They were meant to sail and conquer England. The sea and the wind drove them here.”
She turned to him. “How do you come to know so much of it?” she asked.
“Travel with eyes and ears open.”
“You came up from the south, then.”
He answered nothing to this. The wind rose to a sudden shriek, and the rain made a fierce hissing in the thatch of the roof. Outside, something loose, a bucket, a rake, went blown across the yard, making a noise that startled her. In the loft her father groaned, and began murmuring the Commination: Cursed be he who putteth his trust in Man, who taketh Man for his salvation …
Sorley looked up toward the dimness of the loft. “What others are in the house?”
“My father. Ill.” Mad and dying the word meant. “A serving-girl. Gone down now to the strand, to watch the ships.”
“When the Spanish come on the strand,” he said, “they will be murdered. Half-drowned they’ll come out of the sea and each be struck by a mattock or an axe, or be stoned or sworded to death, till all those not drowned will be just as dead.” He spoke all this calmly, as though it had already happened, perhaps years ago. “Ill luck, to come up out of the sea, alive, and speak no Irish.”
“They never would!” She—a Geraldine, a Norman, however she might have fallen—had no illusions about the villagers below her. But to murder the Spanish, their true friends, only because they are foreign to them—that was too absurdly savage. Sorley only smiled his thin fixed smile; she had begun to think he smiled only as hawks frown, out of his nature somehow and not his mood.
“Would you have anything to eat?” he said. “I seem to have come a long way on yesterday’s dinner.” Called to herself again, reminded of how inhospitable she’d grown in her long exile, she blushed, and went to see what might be in the house. On an impulse she drew a jug of red wine from one of the remaining tuns. When she returned with this, and some herring and a loaf, he was sitting on a stool by the fire, looking at his long pale hands. “You see how much sea has blown in today,” he said. She looked more closely, and saw that his hands were dusted with a fine white glowing powder. “Salt,” he said. His face was dusty the same way. She accepted his reason for this without thinking that while stones and driftwood left long in the sea may become salt-encrusted like that, her hands and face had never been, though she often spent whole days walking in sea spray. She brought him a bowl of water, and he dipped his hands into it. When he withdrew them wet, they had again become glistening and faintly opalescent.
“Now it’s sea-water in the bowl,” he said. “Look into it, Ineen Fitzgerald.”
She did look in, apprehensive and not knowing why. The bowl was old dark crockery, thick and cracked. For a strange moment she did seem to see the whole sea, as though she were a gull, or God, looking down on it; the ripples Sorley’s hands had made in it lapped its edge as tides lap the edges of the world. She saw something moving over the face of the waters, indistinct and multiform, as though the creatures might be rising to look up at her as she looked down; then she saw it was only a faint reflection of her own face. She laughed, and looked at Sorley, who was smiling more broadly. Her apprehension was gone. She felt as if she had been playing a children’s game with him, and it seemed to make an intimacy between them; an elation almost, the same fierce indifferent elation she had felt watching the ships. She was then aware that a charm had been worked on her, like the charm in fast sea-breezes and scudding cloud, a charm to make her free. Stop it now, mad girl, she told herself, too much alone, stop all that. She pulled her shawl around her. Sorley ate herring and bread, delicately, as though he didn’t need it for sustenance. He poured wine into a battered cup and tasted it. “Canary,” he said. “And fine, too.” Without really considering it, she took a cup for herself and filled it. “What do you do abroad, Sorley?” she said.
“Looking for a wife, Ineen Fitzgerald,” he said.
On the strand, Cormac Burke stared helplessly at the oblique lines of waves folding together and dashing against the stony beach with a noise like a rising but never climaxing peal of thunder. His voice was raw from shouting against it. A few shards and pieces were still coming in on the tide: a window frame, a barrel stave. Strung out across the strand in tight, self-defensive knots, the villagers ran from one to another of these treasures and exclaimed over them. He had tried to organize them into a troop of sorts, armed men in front, then other men, the women to salvage, a priest for the dying. Hopeless. He had tried to explain to them that there were three things that must be done: aid should be given to the hurt; the goods should be rounded up and put in piles; the soldiers must be disarmed and, for the moment, made prisoner, for the English would certainly see them as invaders, and any Irish who helped them as rebels. Their arms could be taken from them and hidden; later … But it was useless. The sea was mad; and there was no schooling these men. On the strand, now nearly covered in sand, lay three—four—bodies. If he had not known them to be Spaniards he wouldn’t, as darkness came on, have known they were men. But he knew; he had rushed toward them with the others when they came tumbling from the sea, staggering away from the withdrawing water. They had reached out hands to him: Auxilio. Succoro, Señores. And the Irishmen with him, crying out like animals, their faces distended so that he seemed not to know them at all, had murdered them; had almost murdered Cormac when he tried to stop them. Now he stood farther off, afraid to watch any longer to see more Spaniards come ashore, knowing he would not again try to interfere in the villagers’ madness, unable to leave, yet with no way to stop them.
If he had a gun.
He turned away from the sea and looked up to where, just raising itself above a coign of sea-wall, the roof of the Fitzgerald house could be seen. Was there a light burning? He thought there was. And what did you do when they came ashore, Cormac? I could do nothing, and the Spanish were murdered, Ineen. He pulled his feet from the muddy sand and began to work his way down the shingle, watching the sea and the knots of men, and, far off, the ship, whose masts were now aslant to the slabs of sea that bore it up.
It wasn’t the wine, not entirely: though when she went to draw another jug she noticed that her lips and nose itched a little, growing numb, and that filling the jug she was slapdash; she spoke aloud to herself, saying she shouldn’t have babbled on to this stranger, and laughed.
She had told him about her father, who had been a priest, and was a cousin of the Fitzgerald Earl of Kildare, and how the English had persuaded him to come into the new dispensation and he would soon be made a bishop by the Queen; how despite all his kin’s despising him for it he did so; how he renounced his vows and the True Church, and married the frail daughter of an English colonial. His family rejected him, his wife despised him and lived in a continual state of loathing at Irish ways and the Irish until she departed for her father’s house—which was soon after Ineen was born to a serving-girl in the house, a Gael. And after their promises, and in spite of a hundred letters her father sent to London, and twenty visits to Dublin, the English never began raising her father toward the promised bishopric, not so much as a wardenship—apparently satisfied that promises had been enough to draw him out of his church. In the end he had lost even the empty parish the English had given him, where he preached to nearly nobody, because Desmond—his distant cousin too—rose up then against the English and heresy, and her father had to be taken off by sea lest he be hanged by his flock. Was it that terrible story, or was it God’s vengeance at his defection, that had made him mad? The English, as though tossing him away, had placed him in this western isolation and given him a piece of the wine trade—wine! that with his breath he had once altered in its red heart to the blood of Christ!—and let him live on a tariff he collected, a useless middleman. Was all that enough to make him mad? Or was God’s vengeance needed?
“It hasn’t made you mad, Ineen,” Sorley said, and she saw that the story had washed over him without altering his features. “And the Captain of Desmond is dead, who fought for Mother Church. Whose vengeance was that, then?” She lifted the jug, and filled the cups; two drops splashed out and stained the linen of her sleeve as quick as blood. She dipped the sleeve in the bowl of water, pressing water through it absently. “I wouldn’t like to drown,” she said. “Not of any way.”
“Avoid the sea.”
“They say men drowning can see treasures lost in the sea—ships sunk, gold, jewels.”
“Do they? And do they have candles with them to light up the darkness?”
She laughed, wiping her mouth. Her father cried out, dreaming; a sob, as though someone were stifling him with a pillow. Another cry, louder. He called her name; he was awake. She waited a moment, feeling vaguely ashamed. Maybe he would sleep again. But again he called her name, his voice edged now with that piteous panic she knew well, which worked on her senses like a rasp.
“Yes, Father,” she said gently, and went to the press in the corner, from which she took a jar of powder; some of this she mixed into a cup of wine, and, having lit a rush-light at the fire, carried the wine and the light carefully up into the loft. Her father’s white face looked out from the bed curtains, his white cap and large pinkish eyes making him look like a terrified rabbit looking out from its burrow. “Who is it in the house?” he whispered urgently. “Cormac?”
“Yes,” she said, “only Cormac.” She had him drink the wine, and kissed him, and said a prayer with him; then when he groaned again she laid him firmly down, speaking calmly but with authority, as she might to a child. He lay back on the pillows, his stricken eyes still searching her face. She smiled, and drew his curtains.
Sorley sat unchanged by the fire, turning his cup in his fingers.
Why had she lied to her father?
“They say too,” she said, taking a gulp of wine, “that there’s a bishop under the sea. A fish bishop.” She had seen a picture in a bestiary of her father’s.
“Certainly,” Sorley said. “To marry and bury.”
“What rites does he use, do you think?”
“And the mackerel is the fish’s bawd. Men!” He shook his head, smiling. “They think even the fish live by the laws they live by. A little handful of folk, huddled up on the dry land that’s not a tenth part the size of the seas, and dreaming of bishops for the fish.”
“How is it, then, in the sea?” she said, for some reason not doubting he knew.
“Come with me and see,” he said.
Where they went that night was not seaward. Cold as his touch was, it was strong, and she would not have been able to resist it even if she’d chosen to do so, which she did not choose. She thought to press her hand against his mouth so that he would not cry aloud, but he was not the one who cried aloud. She slept then like one dead, and he was gone when she awoke, and her father was awake too, calling from the loft, but she paid no mind, and got up; felt run down the inside of her thigh a dribble of slime she thought might be blood, but no, she hadn’t bled.
He would not have gone far. How she knew it she could not have said. She wrapped herself in a long black shawl and went out into the day, where the storm-wrack still filled the sky and the sea. The ship she had watched could still be seen, dis-masted now and smashed in the rocks like unswallowed fragments in a mastiff’s mouth. She went down along the way to the strand, and it wasn’t long before she saw him striding ahead of her, holding his hat on his head for the offshore breeze. She passed the place where last night the men from the Spanish ship had come up onto the beach; their bodies lay dark and shapeless as seals, half-buried in sand: no place a human soul could rest. They must be buried as Christian men, whatever. She would ask Cormac Burke to help.
He, Sorley, had not turned at all to look at the bodies of the men on the strand, kept on till the turn of the cove. He was after tossing away his hat, and then his cloak, and when he came to the rocky place he was as naked as he had been in her bed in the night. And when he bent to reach into the sea-weed and the crusted stones wedged in a great split of the rocks and found something there to don, she knew whom she had had in her. She thought that she had in some way known it all along, but now she knew it to see, and to think: to think what would come of this, now and in the months and years to come.