Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

“It is neither true rain nor real sun, but lifeless drizzle, they say. It is like fine netting, we need a storm to move it off us.”

Teige ate silently and felt the day press more firmly upon him. When the other had gone, he returned to the horses but in a short time realized that it was useless. He had no connection with them and at last hunkered down and sat in the middle of the field in the falling rain. Slowly, in the gradual passing of that afternoon then, the horses began to move closer to him, and it was as if he were a rock or a bush or a tree or any other part of their domain and they did not shy or move away. Soon they were all about him there and grazing at the grass that was by his side. He sat and a foal approached and then nipped at the shoulder of his shirt. The black colt with the white blaze was less familiar and stood off and sometimes pawed at the ground and blew. But Teige appeared indifferent to all and made no movement toward any of them. At some time then he heard noise in the gravelled avenue and lifted his head and saw a coach and horses pass down that way, and from the curtained window the face of Elizabeth’s friend appeared and disappeared. The coach did not slow or stop and he could not tell how many were inside it. He watched until it was gone.

That night he awaited the darkness. It fell slowly, the light lingering a long time in some higher part of the heavens where the sun had stayed all day. When at last he had to wait no longer, Teige rose and hastened as stealthily as he could past the wolfhounds to the kitchen. He climbed as before, this time slipping twice on the wet slates and pressing himself flat there for moments, awaiting alarm. But none came and he made his way to the window and opened it and stepped again into the corridor, darker now without the moonlight. Where he stepped, his feet printed wet on the floor. He dripped to her door and held his breath and screwed tight his eyes to squeeze the handle and twist and open it, and all the time he was both fearful that she had gone away and expectant of her cry. The scent was the first thing to meet him. It arrived in his nostrils while the door was only slightly ajar and caused a quivering in his spine. The darkness of the room was deeper than the night before, and at first he could make out nothing at all. He stood there and heard his breathing and again tried to quieten it and as he did he heard her move.

“Hello.” She spoke across the darkness. She did not seem surprised.

Teige took a step back to the door and they were still as shadows to each other as she spoke again.

“It’s all right.”

A pause, in the stillness his breathing.

“I knew you would come again.”

He stood and tried to understand what he should do. Then he heard the match struck and saw it aflame and she was lighting a small waxen candle at her bedside. The amber light glowed and he saw her within it and saw the white linen nightdress she wore and how her hair fell loose on her shoulders to her breasts. She lay back on many pillows then and looked at him with her eyebrows arched.

“Well,” she said.

Teige had lost his tongue.

“You can sit down.” She pointed to a wooden chair near the bed.

But Teige did not stir.

“You can’t just stand there,” she said. She moved and released an invigorating scent from the lavender pillow at her side.

“I wanted to see you,” he said at last.

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

She smiled. She smoothed the smooth quilt covering.

“What is your name?”

He didn’t want to say. He didn’t want to talk to her at all, only stand there and look at her and hear her voice and smell that scent.

“I can find out,” she said.

“It’s Teige, Teige Foley.”

“Sit down, Teige.”

He did not move.

“You must do what I tell you. Sit down.”

So he sat then and placed his hands on his knees and lowered his eyes briefly from her and felt an obscure shame or guilt as though he were a thing unworthy or had brought her by deceptive means down to this earth.

“Tell me about the horses,” she said. “Have you found one for me?”

He told her he had not and she told him he must, that she would want to go riding in the summer, that friends would come visiting and he could have horses ready for them, too. She drew her knees up under the quilt. Her face shone in the candlelight. She said she had been to town that day to buy a summer dress. She thought blue suited her, but the shops were so dreadfully poor and not at all like the ones in Cork where she mostly lived.

And all that she said Teige listened to, not for its meaning but for the sound of her voice that was to him then like a charm.

“You can look at me, you know,” she said. “You can.”

And he did. He looked boldly at her eyes and her lips and the hollow of her neck and the curving line of her breasts, and she turned her head slowly this way and that for his better admiration. And they stayed so that way for some hours, he seated in the chair and she laid out on the goose-feather pillow, telling him things about her taste in flowers and dresses and friends and whatnot. The candle burned low. When at last she tired, she told him that he must go now. He stood up.

“You can kiss my hand,” she said, “before I sleep.”

She offered it in the air.

“My uncle will kill you if he finds you here, you know that,” she said as he approached.

“I know that.”

Teige reached and touched her fingers and balanced them a moment on his and then bent and kissed them.

“Good night,” she said. “Go on now. Go.”

She snuffed the candle.

“You can come again,” she said, and in the sudden darkness Teige turned then and slipped away.

So it was that he visited her there in her bedroom every night after that. All the nights of May and into June he crossed the courtyard in the darkness and climbed onto the kitchen slates and across them to the window. The hounds no longer lifted their heads when he passed. The owls and bats that hooted and flew in the soft crepe blackness of the night knew his shadow, as did the yellow-eyed fox creeping furtively through the dark to sniff at the door of the henhouse. To all such he was as familiar as a star and crossed the night with the same mystery and resolve.

By daylight Teige was strangely renewed. Though he had not slept almost at all, he worked among the horses with vigour and energy. Soon he had chosen for Elizabeth a white filly and coaxed her into handling and then lunging on a line. Other horses he managed also, and was to be seen then riding some or walking them as Elizabeth and the other, who was her cousin, Catherine, came for their daily exercise along the fence. They came now even in the drizzle that spoiled the weather all that early summer. They carried light parasols and twirled them on occasion in a manner that suggested mirth. At no time did Elizabeth show him any recognition then. Sometimes she stopped and the ladies stood and studied and appraised his progress. Sometimes Catherine called out to Teige and waved for him to approach and the high clinking of her laughter carried out across the pasture, but he did not respond. He stayed closely engaged with the horses and whistled and whispered and gestured to the animals in ways he knew they understood, and then too he drew one to him and caressed its flank and stroked and pulled its ears while all the time the ladies watched. Within a few weeks many of the horses were under his dominion. All those in his care improved steadily in form. The ones whose diet he oversaw lost the bulge of belly or beginnings of laminitis, colic, and other ailments. Clancy came and stood by the fence a long time and with legs widely planted scrutinized Teige working. Then he turned on his heel and went off and said nothing.