Claire Kilroy: The Devil I Know

The candles flickered and Mrs Reid blessed herself again. I glanced at the ceiling. The wind was whistling through the empty passages upstairs, droning in chords like an aeolian harp. I had not known that it could do that. I had never heard that sound. I realised how little I knew about the castle, but that with Father deceased I was now at the helm. Perhaps it was protocol that all doors be thrown open upon the death of the head of the St Lawrence family so that the wind could sweep through and allow the castle itself to keen. For the Castle was dead. The Castle was in the coffin. Long live the Castle.

‘Sometime during the night, love, in his sleep. It was very peaceful,’ Mrs Reid was reassuring me, although even Mrs Reid, who never failed to give me the benefit of the doubt, must have registered that I had not enquired after his suffering.

‘Where are the dogs?’ I wanted to know instead. I fully understood that I was getting it wrong, that even in death I was getting my relationship with Father irredeemably, irremediably, irrevocably wrong.

Mrs Reid clapped her hand to her mouth. ‘The dogs. I forgot to feed the dogs.’

Father fed the dogs.

‘The gate lodge is to be vacated in the morning,’ I announced. This was my first edict as the Lord of Howth.

Mrs Reid hurried to my side. ‘Sit down, love. You’ve had a terrible shock. God almighty, your hands are freezing.’ She tried to steer me into one of the mourner’s chairs but I was having none of it.

‘Larney has to go,’ I decreed. ‘That’s the end of it. We bury Father tomorrow and then we throw Larney out.’

Mrs Reid stopped trying to warm my hands with hers. ‘Larney?’

‘Yes, Larney. Furthermore, he is not welcome at the funeral. On no account is he to show his face. I want him gone.’

‘Larney is gone, love. He has been dead for years.’

‘Years,’ she repeated to reinforce her point when I just stared at her. ‘Sure, didn’t I lay his poor crooked body out myself?’

‘ What? ​’

Fergus, it gets worse. ‘Tristram!’ Mrs Reid cried after me when I broke free of her and fled the castle, but the poor soul was too terrorised to venture past the threshold, not after what I had told her — that I had seen a dead man. Who is the corpse in the coffin? You are, Larney! You’re the corpse.

My brain had slipped into its default groove and was chanting the usual repetitive guff — admitting that I was powerless over alcohol, humbly asking my Higher Power to restore me to sanity, accepting the things that I could not change and all the rest of it, when it struck me that it was nonsense. That I was chanting pure nonsense and had been for some time. ‘Do you hear yourself?’ Hickey had asked me, and suddenly I did. I did not accept the things I could not change. I would change the things I could not accept. Starting with Edel.

I set off uphill towards the rhododendron gardens. I could hear Mrs Reid beseeching me to come back until her voice faded along with the lights of the castle. It was dark and quiet then. I was at large.

I climbed the jungle bluff and emerged onto the open slopes of the West Mountain. The city lights glittered below. Edel had made this journey first, across the two mountains from her home to mine, wearing that dress I’d been so afraid of getting dirt on, that white sundress knotted at the nape with a butterfly.

I crossed over to the East Mountain. The lighthouses flashed messages to each other along the length of the coastline — Here! I’m over here! Where are you? I threaded my way along the bridle tracks. It was September and the heather was in flower. And we’ll all go together, to pick wild mountain thyme, all along the blooming heather. Will you go, lassie, go?

Although it was late, maybe one or two in the morning by my reckoning, the lights burned in the house on the edge of the moors. Edel was having a sleepless night too. I saw as I approached that a JCB was parked on the driveway. As well as a digger, a cherry picker, a steamroller and one of the gennys. But not the clawed thing that had almost killed us. The giant X had successfully made off with that. Hickey had stashed the remaining machinery where he could keep an eye on it. He was circling the wagons. Edel’s two-seater Merc looked tiny and fragile against their primitive bulk.

I made my way around the side of the house, peering in at each window until I found her. She was perched on a high stool at the breakfast bar in her science lab of a kitchen, sheaves of documents spread out around her on the polished granite worktop. I hadn’t known that she wore glasses. I was about to tap on the windowpane when I spotted her mobile phone on the counter. I took out mine.

Will you go, lassie, go​​? I texted.

Her phone lit up but she did not. She read the text and returned to her paperwork without so much as a smile. It wasn’t quite the reaction I’d anticipated. There was a calculator on the countertop too, one of those office models that printed its results onto a roll of paper. It seemed unlikely that Edel should possess such a device. It must have belonged to Hickey. Though that seemed unlikelier still.

She tapped in digits, inputting them without raising her eyes from the stacks of paper, for hers were fingers that knew their way by touch around a numeric keypad, it turned out. She frowned at the result that the calculator churned out, tore off the strip of paper and started again. The numbers were not adding up. They never would add up, no matter how she finessed them. All of the money was gone.

I’m outside , I texted. Please meet me at your front door .

She sat up and took notice when she opened that text, and deliberated for a few seconds before removing her glasses and slipping off the stool. I ran back around the side of the house, narrowly reaching the front step before she did.

‘Are you out of your mind showing up here?’ she whispered through a fractionally opened door — Hickey must have been inside. She took in the cut of me: the dirty clothes, the unshaven chin, the bloodshot eyes. And the smell. Not forgetting the smell. The fumes of stale booze on an empty stomach were enough to fell a donkey.

‘ Will you go, lassie, go? ’ I sang gently to her, thinking that… well, it’s difficult to know precisely what I was thinking, except that I was thinking it very strongly at the time. Thinking it so strongly that I could see it. Us. A future together. Life.

‘Oh my God, are you drunk?’

‘No, darling. Not any more.’

‘Look, it’s a bad time, Tristram,’ she said. ‘I don’t need this right now. There’s… well, you know the situation yourself. He’s lost everything. We’re trying to see what we can salvage.’

‘If you’ve lost everything, then you have nothing left to lose. Hickey has nothing left to offer you. So come with me.’

‘For God’s sake, how can I go with you?’

‘It’s very simple. Pack a bag. Or don’t pack a bag. Come as you are.’ I held out my hand, but she just looked at it.

‘Listen, Tristram, all this — us? It has to stop. I’m sorry. You should go home. You look like you haven’t slept in a week.’

She tried to close the door but I held it open. I was stronger than her. Or so I thought. ‘My father died.’

She lowered her head. ‘Yes, I heard. I am sorry for your loss.’

‘The castle is mine now. Come with me across the moors. It’s a soft night. You won’t need a coat. Make that same journey you made at the beginning of summer in your white sundress. You always wanted to see inside the castle. Now you may. You are its princess. You shall have your own wing.’