Benjamin Black - Holy Orders

The woman shut the window and advanced slowly between the beds and stood looking down at him. Her expression was one of mild interest, tinged with amusement. “I was keeping an eye out for himself,” she said. “Had he of found you here he’d say we were spurking and that’d be the end of you.”

“Spurking?” Quirke said.

“Doing it, you know.” She bit her lip, laughing a little. “ Spurking, we call it.”

“You said this was your place,” he said, “that no one would come here.”

“Himself knows no bar,” the woman replied darkly.

Quirke looked again at the sleeping child. She was breathing through her mouth, making eerie animal sounds, little yelps and whinnies. “Dreaming,” the woman said, looking too at the girl. “What about, God knows.”

She sat down beside Quirke on the bed. He looked at her toes braced on the bare planks of the floor. Feeling his look, she waggled them. “What did you give me to drink?” he asked.

“’Twas tea”—she pronounced it tay —“and nothing but. You had a great sleep, all the same. You’re the weary man, surely.”

He smiled sidelong at her. “Yes, Molly,” he said, “I’m the weary man.” He took out his cigarettes and offered her one, but she shook her head, with a flick of disdain. He found his lighter. He wondered if his wallet was still in his pocket — she could have stolen it, while he was enjoying his great sleep — but he did not bother to check. It was pleasant and restful, sitting here beside her in companionable warmth; he was at peace, after so many tempests. “Tell me about the priest,” he said. “Tell me about the two of them, the two sharogs .”

“Tell you what?” she asked. She was smiling sideways back at him now, a teasing light in her eye.

“Tell me who killed the young one. Tell me who killed Jimmy Minor.”

She went to the stove and opened the fire door with the metal hook and lifted a log from a wicker basket under the bed in which the child was sleeping. She dropped it into the glowing embers and shut the door again. Quirke looked to the half door that was open at the top and saw the moon shining low in the sky, a strangely small but intensely bright silver disk. When had the rain stopped? He drew back his cuff and looked at his watch, and was astonished to see that it was just coming up to ten o’clock. It seemed to him he must have been asleep for hours, but it could hardly have been for more than a few minutes. How had he come to be lying down, in the first place? He had no memory of stretching out on the bed — had Molly helped him? Strangely, it did not trouble him not to know these things. His muddy shoes had begun to dry out; he could feel the tightness of the leather.

The stove tended to, Molly sat down again, but this time she sat opposite him, on the bed in which the girl was sleeping. Quirke looked into the opening of her blouse, at the slope of her breasts and the soft shadow between them. Spurking: he smiled to himself.

Molly had set a hand lightly on the girl’s narrow forehead. Nothing, it seemed, could wake her from her sleep. “’Twas the cuinne that done it,” Molly said.

The dog had returned, and was outside, whimpering to be let in.

“The priest?” Quirke said. “What did he do?”

A long interval passed before Molly spoke again. The moon shone in the window; the dog still whined. Quirke saw again the priest leaning against the bar in Flynne’s Hotel, smoothing his tie with his hand and lifting the whiskey glass in the other and smiling at him over the rim.

“They’re a queer crowd, them priests,” Molly said. “I’ll have naught to do with them. Himself it was that brought him here.”

“Packie, you mean?” Quirke said. “It was Packie who brought Father Mick here?”

“Aye.” The child in the bed gave a little mewling cry, as if she were in pain, and Molly laid her hand once more on her forehead. “Took a great interest in this one, he did,” she said. “Told Packie he could help her, could teach her book learning and the like. What book learning, I said to himself — what book learning could he teach her, and her with no more than a scrap of understanding? Oh, no, he says, Father Mick will learn her, Father Mick is the man .” She was looking down at the girl, and her mouth tightened. “So he started coming out here, every week, of a Sunday night. I knew by the look of him what he was.”

“And what was that?” Quirke asked.

She seemed not to have heard him. “Taught her, all right, he did — oh, aye, he taught her.”

“What kind of things did he teach her?”

She looked at him, her face tightening. “The like that you wouldn’t find in any decent reading book. Had them all at it, at the learning, so called, all the lads and the girleens in the camp. Himself was delighted. Oh, they’ll all be great scholars, he’d say, they’ll get grand jobs and keep me when I’m old . The mugathawn .”

She stopped. Quirke eyed the moon in the window, and the moon eyed him back. His throat had gone dry. He saw again the priest standing at the bar in Flynne’s Hotel that rainy night and turning with a smile of broad disdain to watch the red-faced young man walking stiffly in the wake of his angry girlfriend. What was it he had said? Something about love, and love’s difficulties.

“And what did you do?” he asked.

It was some moments before Molly replied. “I didn’t know,” she said, very softly. She stroked the forehead of the sleeping child. “She never told me.”

“Why not?”

“Why? You might as well ask the wind why it blows.” She slowly shook her head. “She wouldn’t tell me, but then there was no more hiding it.”

“Hiding what?”

“That she was granen —in the way of a babbie coming. And she hardly more than a babbie herself.” She stopped, and Quirke saw to his surprise that she was smiling, coldly, with narrowed eyes. “She told him, though.”

Quirke waited a beat. “She told Packie?”

The woman nodded. “Aye. She told him it was the sharog, and all about the things he done to her — and not only her.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sure, wasn’t he doing it with half the childer in the camp!”

“There were other girls, like Lily—?”

“Girls, aye, and the lads, too, the ones he was supposed to be teaching the book learning to. He didn’t care what they were, so long as they were childer.”

“Why had none of them spoken? Why hadn’t they told what was happening?”

She looked at him pityingly. She did not have to speak; he knew what the answer was. To whom would he have spoken, when he was a child at Carricklea? Who would have believed him? Who would have so much as listened?

“What did Packie do,” he asked, “when she told him?”

“He wouldn’t have it that it was the priest, of course, so he sent Mikey and Paudeen after that poor young fellow instead. Somebody had to pay the price.”

“But you knew it wasn’t Jimmy Minor that she meant when she said it was the sharog . You knew which of the two it really was.”

“Ach!” She made a grimace, screwing up her mouth as if to spit. “What matter was it what I knew? Himself knew it too, anyway.”

“But he knew it wasn’t Jimmy.”

“What matter? It was the sharog done it, that was enough for him. Sure, you couldn’t touch the priest — you’d have no luck after that.”

“And the baby?” he said. “What happened?”

The woman was gazing at the child, her hand still resting on her forehead. She shrugged. “She hadn’t a strong enough hold of it. How could she, after the sinful way it came to her?”