Erin Hart - Lake of Sorrows

He had never seen Quill in the intervening years, but he had seen that same desperate look come into his father’s eyes. It was when the Guards had come to the house, asking questions about some animals that had been mutilated and killed out along the bog road, two lambs and a kid goat taken from his mother’s small flock. Everyone had thought he was responsible, Charlie knew well, but they had all been wrong; he could never have done those things to any animal. The memory of blood in the pictures they’d shown made him feel ill, even now.

Charlie whirled as something brushed against him from behind. Turning in place, he found that he was alone. He had felt a distinct touch—unless he was imagining things—in the very same place where Desmond Quill’s hand had once rested on the back of his neck. Trying to shake off the feeling of disquiet, he moved through the ruin, surveying the splintered mass of debris where a few days ago there had been a house. If there had been no explosion, the structure would eventually have collapsed from the weight of knowledge, the roof beams finally unable to withstand the burden of shame and guilt they had supported for so long. All the things he had wondered about—his mother’s secret absences, the photograph of her he’d found in his beekeeping shed, the artifacts hidden under the flagstones—were fragments of the picture beginning to take shape in his mind.

If it was true, what Ward had told him, then Danny Brazil might have been something more than his uncle. He remembered the first jarring sight of the body in the bog, the cord around its neck, and his fingers moved unconsciously to his own leather charm. He’d tied it there nearly ten years ago and had never taken it off since, believing those three knots somehow held the power to protect him from harm. No one had explained to him exactly how Danny had died out on the bog. They didn’t have to; he’d seen enough for himself to imagine how it had happened. He couldn’t avoid thinking about it. Over the past several days, going about his work out on the bog, he would suddenly picture the scene, and the earth would feel as though it were dropping away beneath his feet. He would stumble or tip backward, feeling unbalanced, disoriented, and dizzy.

It didn’t help that he’d hardly been able to eat or sleep for worry about Brona. He had to see her again soon—he couldn’t keep away. He understood that if he showed his face at the hospital everyone would know, but none of that seemed to matter anymore.

Three times over the past eleven nights he had sneaked into the hospital to see her. The first two times he’d just watched her as she slept. But last night she’d been awake, and when he’d reached out to touch her face she had taken his hand, placed it over her own beating heart and then down over the curved softness of her belly. He had closed his eyes and traveled back to the night of their third miraculous meeting.

He had lit the bonfire and was watching the flames, thinking of Brona, aching inside to see her again, to feel her fluttering pulse beneath his hand, when suddenly across the fire he saw her face, illuminated in the flickering blaze. She started circling slowly around the fire, and for some reason he moved in the opposite direction, away from her. Three times they circled the bonfire. He knew almost instinctively what had to be done, and felt the hair prickle at the back of his neck. For the first time in his life, he felt no hesitation. He seized Brona’s hand and together they took a few steps back, then threw themselves forward and hurdled the fire. He felt its scorching heat and the flames licking at the soles of his shoes. If they fell they would surely be done for—but he knew they wouldn’t fall. They landed safely on the far side, heels first, and toppled forward. Before he could recover himself, Brona Scully was lifting him up, taking his face in her hands. Her fingertips felt lovely and cool.

Standing beside her hospital bed, he had opened his eyes again and looked down at the place where his hand rested, and had felt filled up, vibrating and brimming over with life. The vision of Brona cloaked in living insects still haunted him and filled him with wonder. In a flash he had understood what she must have felt.

Charlie moved through the debris and stood in the place that had once been his room. He saw how few steps it actually was from the door, the sitting room, the kitchen. He finally saw the very small universe in which his family had traced the separate orbits of their daily lives, avoiding one another more often than not. He lifted a piece of roofing to find that the shelf where he’d kept all his beekeeping books was flattened sideways, the books charred at the edges and warped from the water used to douse the fire. He felt their loss acutely, although he knew that everything he needed from them had already been absorbed, and was locked up safe inside his head, worn into his consciousness. He needed no more lessons; he knew what was to be done simply by gauging the temperature and rainfall, feeling the dampness in the air, anticipating the seasons for trees and meadow flowers, reading the moods of the bees themselves.

He began climbing the hill and looked back at the empty space his parents’ house had once occupied, and knew at that moment that he didn’t want or need to know which of the Brazil brothers had actually been responsible for his existence. When the time came, he would bury two fathers. There was no need to think about it right now. At this moment he had Brona to think about. Besides, it was midsummer, and the bees needed looking after.

On their return from the hospital, Nora tried once again to persuade Michael Scully to come and stay at the cottage, or at least to let her or Cormac stay the night with him, but he scoffed at the notion.

“Haven’t I survived here on my own this last week and a half? I’m not so bad that I can’t endure one more night. Go,” he said, “and enjoy the time you have together. You’ll not budge me on that, so you may as well give up and be gone, the pair of you.”

“All right,” Nora said, “but we’ll be back to say good-bye before we have to leave tomorrow.”

“Just one more thing before you go,” Scully said. “Do you happen to know what’s become of Charlie Brazil? Has he any place to stay? I should have inquired before now, I realize, but—”

“You’ve had plenty of other worries, Michael. And Charlie’s all right. I saw him in Kilcormac the other day and he told me he’d found a bedsit above one of the shops there. Probably not ideal, but he’s got a roof over his head, at least.”

Scully nodded. “Good. That’s very good.”

Nora returned to the Crosses thinking about Michael Scully’s question. Had it just been neighborly concern, or was there some other reason he might be interested in Charlie Brazil’s welfare?

“Fancy a walk up the hill before the sun is gone?” she asked Cormac.

“Lead on,” he said.

They walked up the hill, close but not touching, as they had when Nora first arrived. With each step they took toward the setting sun, she felt time diminishing, slipping away. Night’s cloak would cover the landscape for a few short hours before the daylight came again, and with it, as the song said, a dreary parting.

At the topmost point of the hill they came upon a huge pile of ashes, the remains of a bonfire. They walked around it, either side. Nora saw two sets of deep footprints, the heel marks deeper than the rest. “Look at this,” she said to Cormac. “What do you suppose happened here?”

“Did you ever hear of midsummer bonfires?” Nora shook her head, and Cormac continued, “It’s one of those leftover pagan traditions that’s probably fallen off in most areas. Sometimes it was just a family, but sometimes a whole community would come together and build a fire big enough to burn all night. It was supposed to be a time for blessing the house, the crops, the animals. People walked three times sunwise around the fire to ward off sickness, and sometimes young people would leap the flames.”