Erin Hart - Haunted Ground

“Hugh’s asked whether Aoife and I might like to come and live here. I still haven’t decided what to tell him. But sometimes we actually do feel like a family.”

“It seems to me you both deserve a little happiness, after all that’s happened.”

They worked for a moment in silence. Nora glanced at the two men, wondering whether Hugh had mentioned anything to Una yet about the confession, and the astonishing twist it put in the whole Osborne family history.

“Una, I was wondering—the name Mag Annaigh wouldn’t by any chance be a variation of McGann, would it?”

“Oh, aye, all those names, McCann, McGann, MacAnna, makes no difference, sure, they’re all just different spellings of the same name. Why do you ask?”

“Just curious. We think we may have found out who our red-haired girl was after all.”

When the supper was finished, the dishes washed and dried and put away, it was getting close to Aoife’s bedtime, and Hugh offered to walk Una and her daughter home. As they were leaving, he turned and spoke to Jeremy: “Why don’t you show Nora and Cormac what you’re working on while I’m gone?”

The boy’s expression didn’t change, but he led them to the room on the ground floor directly across from Hugh’s workshop, and switched on the lights to reveal a spacious whitewashed studio, its walls taped with rough pencil sketches. On a table against the near wall was a miscellany of twigs and leaves, a fox pelt, and a collection of feathers. Nora started slightly when she noticed a large hooded crow, awakened and blinking in the bright light, on a perch in the corner.

“Don’t worry,” Jeremy said, approaching the bird and gently stroking the feathers on its belly. “He won’t hurt you. He’s only an old pet. But he’s very smart.”

Nora began to peruse the drawings and the paintings. This work was not at all like the desperate splashes of paint they’d seen covering the walls of the tower, Nora thought, but it did retain a certain measure of the raw expression they’d witnessed there. Jeremy leaned against the wall by the door with his hands in his pockets, trying to affect a look of bored nonchalance.

“You did all these?” she asked. “They’re really wonderful.”

The boy shrugged. “Hugh thinks it’ll keep me from topping myself.” There was a glimmer of the old defensiveness in Jeremy’s tone; he obviously wanted a reaction.

“And does it?” Cormac asked.

Jeremy deflected the question. “There’s something seriously wrong with this one,” he said, lifting the nearest canvas up for them to see. “I can’t figure out what it is. What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Nora said. She studied the finished and nearly finished pieces, looking closely at the intricate layering of paint on the canvas, and remembered wandering through the silent studio upstairs, surveying the veiled, dreamlike images of wings, strange tropical plants, and exotic animals. These pictures shared with Mina’s work a certain technique that suggested dappled light and shadow, though the subjects were the ordinary flora and fauna of the Irish countryside: the owl and the woodcock, the fox and the wren. And, Nora noticed, in nearly every composition, some representation of a crow. In one piece only the bird’s beak and bright black eye intruded into the lower corner of the frame; in another, the tip of an open wing seemed to brush the edge of the canvas.

“Jeremy,” Nora asked, “did Mina teach you anything about painting?”

The boy had been studying her, with his hands still in his pockets, bouncing slowly against the wall. When she asked the question, the bouncing stopped, and he looked down at his feet. “I used to watch her up in the studio. She showed me how to draw, looking at the thing you’re drawing, not at the paper. She said it was a way to find out how you really saw things.”

“These are wonderful, Jeremy. And I’m not just saying that; I really mean it.”

“Would you take one?”

“I’m sorry?” Nora said.

“If I gave you one of these pictures, would you take it?”

“I’d be very honored.”

Jeremy pushed off from the wall and waded through his paintings, searching for something suitable. The piece he selected wasn’t the largest of the canvases, but one of the most sophisticated and abstract compositions. “Take this one,” he said. “It’s the best.”

“I’d like to give you something, Jeremy.”

“It’s not for sale. Take it as a gift, all right?”

Hugh had laid a fire in Cormac’s room, but the air was still brisk; a sharp November wind whipped around the house, occasionally creating a low, howling noise as it gusted against the leaded windows in the corner tower. He wondered whether Nora’s bedroom was as chilly as this one. Neither of them had raised an objection when Hugh put them in separate rooms, the same ones they’d occupied last spring. Cormac was just regretting that fact when he heard a soft rap, and saw Nora’s head peer around the edge of the heavy door.

“Cormac, it’s absolutely freezing in my room. Could I please, please, warm my feet on you?”

“I was just about to come and ask you the same thing.”

“God, it’s just as bad in here,” she said, making a dash for the bed and pulling the coverlet up around her shoulders. “Well, if the cold does prove fatal,” she said through chattering teeth, “at least we’ll be together. What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“It’s nothing.” He switched off the lamp and slid under the duvet beside her. He lightly traced the pale outline of her face against the dark bedding, and studied her lovely features, which were now and again illuminated by firelight. “It’s just that I once imagined you in this very spot. And now that you’re actually here, it’s proved a very rewarding sight.” He twined his limbs around hers, feeling her body begin to relax into his as she absorbed some of his radiating warmth. “Go ahead, put your feet on me.” He let out a sharp, involuntary noise when her icy toes made contact with his calves. “Jesus.”

“Sorry,” she said. “Can you stand it?”

“Barely. But you’ll warm up soon enough.”

“Cormac, do you think Aine Rua and Cathal Mor ever slept in this room?”

“Not out of the question, I suppose.”

“I know it sounds crazy, but I can feel a difference in this house,” Nora said. “What was here is gone, and it’s as if some benevolent spirit has taken its place.”

“The ghost of the cailin rua?”

“Don’t be making fun,” she warned. “It’s nothing that specific, I just feel something different.”

“I’m not making fun,” Cormac said, pulling her closer. “I feel it too. And it is rather eerie how you finally got your wish, to see the red-haired girl absolved.”

“The strangest thing is that I knew she would be, just don’t ask how I knew. I can’t get over the fact that she walked all that way from the west, trying to find him. It must have been more than fifty miles, and if she had the baby when she arrived here, she must have been very pregnant. To make that journey alone—I’ve been thinking about her walking all that way. How did she know which way to go? Where did she sleep? And when did she find out that her husband had been transported? She must have been fierce, don’t you think, to try to tell what they did to her? Even when they cut off her head, she found a way to outwit them. She never gave up, not ever.”

“Reminds me a bit of someone I know.”

“What was it that you and Hugh were talking about just before we came upstairs?” she asked.

“He wanted to know what had become of the cailin rua. I think he’s been thrown off balance a bit,” Cormac said. “You can’t blame him. If what it says is true, that confession is the single thread that unravels his entire family history.” No, that wasn’t quite right. The thing was far from being unraveled; in some ways it had become infinitely more complex. As Hugh explained it to him, Edmund Osborne had married his first cousin, also an Osborne, and several similar matches in succeeding generations meant the Osbornes were not mere usurpers, but had become inextricably enmeshed, truly bound up by blood and fortune to the property and progeny of Cathal Mor O’Flaherty. An ancient and familiar story, Cormac thought, with the length and breadth of Ireland peopled by various waves of invaders, from the Celts themselves to the Norsemen and the Normans, the English, and the Ulster Scots. It was a mistake to imagine the past simply buried underground. There was that element, yes, but it might be more accurate to think of it living, breathing, and walking upon the earth as well. He himself, in every cell of his body, bore the physical essence of his two parents, the blended strands of their DNA, that mysterious continuation of the ancient matter of the universe. He also bore the impressions of everything he had ever learned over the course of his brief life span so far—from his work, from the music, from Gabriel and all the others who had touched his life, Nora and Hugh and the cailin rua, each encounter sparking some new pathway, a new divergence in the nexus that bound up body and spirit.