To the Sea Page 22

  But what would Connery do when Wynne was not given to him? Would he punish them? Would Wynne be troubled by her father’s calls and suffer as she had done when she was a baby? Had Ornice sentenced them all to a life of suffering? He had only asked for one daughter. Ornice could have shared her whole life with Connery and their children could have known a life of love and plenty. But she had given all that up with her lie to Connery and her choice of Wynne over him. She must live with her choice.

  On Wynne’s seventh birthday, Ornice woke early to Connery’s call. So did Wynne. The girl was out of the cabin and down near the water’s edge at dawn. Ornice brought her back but Connery’s call was stronger than ever. His voice wrapped around Ornice’s heart. In spite of everything, it was a balm to her soul to hear it after so long.

  The day was a torment. Wynne cried and cried, and kept asking her mother to let her go to the sea. Ornice kept all three children inside. By early evening, the pull was more than mother or daughter could fight. Wynne had a fever and was seeing creatures and strangers in the cabin. Ornice soothed her with a potion but Wynne was miserable. Ornice too felt hot and feverish. She sent the boys off to Ailish and Etain’s for their supper.

  By evening, Wynne lay listless in her cot. She was still feverish and talking dully of strangers and songs she could hear coming up from the sea and filling the cabin. She kept saying that she must go. Ornice’s heart was breaking but she did not take Wynne down to the sea and to her father.

  Late in the night, as Wynne faded further into delirium, Ornice remembered the night Connery had brought her back from the island with baby Bran. He had held them, there on the shore. He could be in the cove. He could come to the cabin and take Wynne. If he came now, Ornice was too weak to stop him. She should have left the cove days earlier. She wept with frustration at her stupidity. She lay in her bed, sweating and faint, watching the door. She expected Connery to walk through it sometime in the night, lift Wynne from her cot and simply take her away.

  Inflamed by fever, Ornice felt excitement run though her tired body at the chance to see Connery again after so many years. She had been a fool to think she could disrupt the inevitable chain of events which she set in motion when she walked to Connery’s bed all those years ago. She was resigned to her grief, but mingled with her grief was a new found excitement. Connery may come. She could not suppress her longing for one last glimpse of him. She struggled to stay awake for the moment he came but eventually she fell into a fractured sleep.

  When she woke it was morning. Wynne was sleeping fitfully beside her, pale and wasted from her terrible ordeal. Ornice knew it was not over yet. She could still feel Connery calling her. After three more days of torment, she knew that he would never cease calling Wynne to him. Connery would have his daughter. One day when Ornice thoughtlessly relaxed her vigilance, Wynne would go into the water and her father, surely then, would take her. Or she would happily race to his embrace. Ornice knew the joy of that flight.

  Ornice had never asked Connery how he would take their daughter, where she would go or how her life would be lived. Ornice cried as she watched Wynne sink into rapidly spiralling despair. Now that her daughter needed her for her very sanity and survival, Ornice was useless.

  But on her rare days of peace, Wynne swam with her brothers as she had done all her life. She remained restless and confused, but she was safe. Ornice wondered why Connery didn’t claim the daughter he had been promised. She remembered back to her first visit to the island. He told her that he had been calling her for years but she had to come to him. He waited, first in the water until on the day of the Perigean tide she went to him, and later in his bed until she walked across the cabin to him.

  Wynne told Ornice of following a voice in the water. She wanted to go to it but she was also afraid to. She would not go too far or too deep. She feared getting lost far from her mother and brothers. Her little girl words could not explain her tortuous unrelenting dilemma.

  In the end, the decision to leave the cove forever with the children was no decision at all. Wynne was fading. The boys were unaffected by Connery’s call, but they were distressed to see their sister suffering. Ornice had no idea where she was going other than away from the coast. She did not know how far Connery’s call could travel but she felt that he would have difficulty finding her or Wynne in the mountains or in dense woodland.

  She went south and inland, as far from Mayo and the north as she could. Ornice and her little family followed the narrow lanes and eerily empty bog roads of Mayo and the Connemara. She was many times afraid on those lonely, windy plains that dragged endless to the horizon but she and her children walked on, always moving away from the Atlantic. Across the brown flat valleys, their feet ankle-deep in sphagnum moss and sucking bog. Waterfalls fell sharp white down the steep rounded faces of nameless brown mountains, flooding the valleys until Ornice feared they would all be sucked under and lost.

  In deeper patches the flood waters formed endless grassy lakes that had to be skirted with great care. To drown in wet grass is still to drown. In the Connaught wind, lake waters rippled and blew up and away in white sheets dancing above the water like smoke. The lake is on fire, Bran said. Wynne cried. Her children huddled to her for protection against this land they did not know. Ornice huddled into herself.

  After weeks of walking, she and the children settled in the Slieveardagh Hills in the green province of Munster. After the desperate brown loneliness of the Burren and the Connemara, Ornice was glad to reach this gentle place. She found an isolated cabin in a wooded glen where she could live for a small annual rent, and she attempted to start a new life. She had money. She would survive.

  Wynne had not fully recovered from her illness. Her skin was as white as her hair and would remain so for the rest of her life. She was listless and would often hear strange voices or people singing to her in a language she felt she understood but could never remember accurately. She became a strange little girl, boisterous and fun-loving with her brothers at rare times of happiness but more often retreating into another tormented world only she could occupy.

  Fingal and Bran were still just children themselves, but they were Ornice’s strength. They missed the cove and the sea as well as their family and friends. They were sweet boys, however, and they made the best of it. They could see the illness which had befallen their sister, and accepted what life dealt them. They were keen to ease whatever burdens they could for their mother and baby sister.

  Despite the money she had brought with her, life was hard for Ornice. She had no way to earn a living and she and her children lived out of their garden and from the few livestock she bought. But they were not farmers and her children all pined for the sea. Wynne faded into herself in the hills and farmland of Munster and Ornice knew that she would have to move closer to the sea if her daughter was not to waste away.

  Wynne celebrated her eighth birthday and soon after they were all on the move again away from the torment of the call. This time they left Ireland and moved to the wet hills of Wales. Wales provided only brief respite, and over the following years Ornice and her family travelled through England and then through France and the Lowlands.

  After nine years of exhausting pilgrimage, the little family arrived in Catalonia. There, in the glaring sunshine, colour and noise of Spain, they finally found many years of relief. It was as Ornice had hoped; Connery could not find them here. It was a time of peace in Spain and they were able to settle in a prosperous port town on the Mediterranean. During these years of happiness, Fingal and Wynne both married into local families. Bran followed a calling of a different kind and dedicated his life to God in a monastery in Cadiz.

  Ornice and Wynne did not tell Wynne’s adoring merchant husband the story of Connery, or of Wynne’s life up to her arrival in Catalonia. Such a story could only lead to pain and death in this fanatical Catholic land of black-hooded priests and enthusiastic torturers. It was to be a story for mother and daughter only.

  Ornice kn
ew that only Wynne would bear Connery’s heirs. The line was to be through his daughter, not his sons. Connery had explained all this to her one cold night as they lay in their fur-covered bed on the island. He had held nothing back from her about their sons and so he had unwittingly prepared her for this life with Wynne. Ornice prayed that any child of Wynne’s would be spared the suffering Wynne had had to endure these many years, and both women waited through Wynne’s first pregnancy, clinging to what hope they could find between themselves.

  Wynne’s first child was a daughter; a blonde-haired, almond-eyed beauty like her mother. She was the one. Connery was with them still.

  A long tradition began with this child. Wynne called her daughter Deidra. Any Gaeilge speaker would think it a strange choice, since Deidra means ‘dark one’. It was a trick Ornice and Wynne hoped would keep Connery and his people at bay. By giving her a dark name, she would be harder to find. Like Ornice, Wynne could not give up her little daughter. Not now, not in seven years’ time, not ever. Their fate and the fate of all the daughters to follow was sealed.

  That tradition of bestowing a name from the dark ones on the daughters of the line continued for almost twenty generations. I was the first child of Connery’s line not to be given such a name. Zoe was the second. It was clear from my mother’s tragic life and death that a mere trick of a name provided no protection. My mother abandoned the useless practice and embraced the promise of a new life when she named me Aoife, which means ‘beautiful’ or ‘radiant’.

  Another history which began with Wynne and Deidra was the keeping of the old language. The story of Ornice and Connery had to be passed on to each daughter. They could not survive without it. A beautiful woman who could cross between the worlds had to learn secrecy and deceit. She must choose her home and her confidantes well. For the story to remain alive and secret, the story was only ever to be told in Gaeilge and only ever from mother to daughter.

  Over the centuries, there have been rare exceptions to this. Sometimes, to save a life, a husband must be told. Sometimes a treasured son. Sometimes, in the rarest of times, a stranger. The women in my family have proven themselves capable of great strength and even greater purpose. No matter where we have lived over the past twenty generations, the story has gone with us and has remained close to only us in the old language. Even when the language all but died out in Ireland, we kept Gaeilge alive and used it as a shield to protect our daughters.

  My family has lived in Spain and most countries of Europe, Russia, the Baltic States and northern Africa, far away from the waters of Mayo. Always moving on when at last we are discovered. In all that time, no one was prepared to give a daughter to the sea. They did not know how. Since Ornice’s time, we are people of both the sea and the land. The call to return to the sea is strong. We can feel it but we have never known how to heed it. We have been too long on land.

  Wynne had a second daughter the year following Deidra’s birth and although she was just as blonde and as treasured, she was not of Connery’s line. There could only be one. The years passed and the children grew. When Deidra was a strong-willed seven year old, aware of her gifts but not yet in control of them, Ornice returned to Mayo. She had missed its grey skies, its biting winds and the roll of its brown open land.

  But most of all she missed Connery. He was all she wanted. Her children could no longer fill the emptiness in her life. She was some years into her forties and her beauty had faded, but she had not yet found any grey hairs in the black lushness of her long ringlets. And she had tried to keep what beauty she had in the desperate hope that one day, somewhere, Connery would see her and love her and call her.

  She returned to a small cluster of cabins near the cove of her childhood. Her parents were long dead. Ailish and Etain had moved to a larger settlement. The cabins seemed smaller and grimmer.

  She knew within minutes of her return that she could not reveal who she was. The stories about her had grown in the years of her absence but every story had twisted and darkened. She sat and listened to young men telling the legend of how Ornice the Black returned from the sea one month after a Perigean tide, enchanted, and become one of the sea people. She gave birth to magical children through her mouth. The fish followed her into fishermen’s nets in numbers which threatened to swamp even the biggest five-man currachs. But she was a dark one. With the fish came hardships. She brought unseasonal gales and huge waves that killed some of the best fishermen along the coast, but her own family were always spared tragedy. She brought the plague to the coast, killing half the population, but the selchie woman, Ornice, was spared as were her enchanted children. She could kill with a look and if another woman crossed her, Ornice would ensure the woman’s husband did not return from his next trip to sea. He would be trapped in the watery underworld, kept a prisoner for all time as Ornice’s plaything. She had mated with a finman, it was said, and it was he who had cursed the cove and its fishermen when Ornice abandoned him.

  She travelled farther north to a peninsula with a larger community where some of the tales about her were told but not with such vehemence. There was a nearby friary and Ornice took great heart from its presence, attending services and taking in sewing for the monks. She felt closer to Bran here. She moved into a nearby cabin and tried to make a life for herself. But she was not living. She was waiting for Connery. At night she wept for the unspeakable loss she had brought upon herself. She spent hours of every day out on the black rocky peninsula telling the stories he had so loved to hear. At the end of such a day she would smoor the little fire she had kept alight during her vigil and imagine him there behind her, waiting for her to turn to him.

  And then one day, no lonelier or emptier than all the others that had preceded it, she dragged a small currach belonging to a neighbouring fisherman down to the shore. She sailed out of the cove, past the outer islands and headed out to sea. She knew the island was out west and she would find it. She sailed all day. The ocean swelled beneath her and the waves, now white-capped, threatened to swamp the fragile little currach. She cried out to Connery. She cried out her regrets, her love, her need of him. She just cried.

  As the sun dipped below the horizon and the waves rose in grey walls all around her, she knew that he would not come to her. She must go to him. She remembered back to the young girl she had been and the wondrous too-short life she had known on the island. The joy she had shared with Connery and which she had sacrificed for her need and her love for her daughter. A daughter whose love for her mother was now as faded and as unremarkable as that of any grown child for its parent.

  She knew now that only Connery’s love could have lasted all these years. But she had traded it for the short-lived, intense joy that can only be shared between mother and child. She marvelled now at the choices she had made, but knew she could not have made others.

  Connery had warned her of the price to be paid. He had warned her of the hardship she would face. He had waited until she came to him. He had seduced her but he had not tricked her. He had given her everything he could. And she had taken the risk and accepted the price.

  She dived over the edge of the little boat, just the way Connery had taught her. She swam down deep into the familiar green. She swam down until her lungs could go no further. And then she waited. For the fast swish of light. The flash of blue and silver bubbles. The warmth. The golden embrace. She had come back to him.

  In 1816, Dorcha, a daughter of Ornice’s line, was living in a seaside villa in the Crimea. She and her husband Douglas had been driven from Italy where Dorcha had been born because she could no longer withstand the constant noise of the Mediterranean.

  She considered moving to the New World – the Americas. It was far away, maybe far enough away to find the peace she craved. But then she and Douglas met a British sailor who told them about the new British colony of New South Wales, a fantastical land at the bottom of the world, further away than was holy. The sailor doubted God would ever find New South Wales. He had not found it yet, o
f that the sailor was sure. As Dorcha listened, she was drawn to that faraway place where white men were still so few and their survival in the hot wilderness not yet certain. Surely she could find peace there. A lifetime of peace. Many lifetimes.

  And that remarkable woman left the northern hemisphere with Douglas and in less than one year had arrived in the British colony of Van Diemen’s Land. She could go no further south. Dorcha and Douglas were not drawn to the wide lush grasslands and woodland plains like other settlers. They had arrived in a land of plenty. They could find an empty pocket of that generous island which would provide for them and their children.

  God had left only the long-limbed blue–black people of this island to enjoy what God’s white men would squander. The natives were generous in sharing what they had with the white men who, unimagined by the black men, wanted it all. Within the lifetime of Dorcha and Douglas’s grandchildren, the black men and their quiet wives and giggling children would be gone. Their absence hung in the air, in the rustle of leaves in the dry trees of the east coast, in the swirling snow of the highlands and in the empty rivers of the west. It hangs here still.

  Dorcha and Douglas would hunt and farm in the first years, but they were not hunters or farmers. The sea would sustain them and from it they would build on their already substantial wealth. They bought a boat and sailed along the banks of the Derwent River and then further along the south and east coasts, looking for their new home, which was surely too far from the waters of the north for their daughters to ever be tormented. And the waters of the south were silent. Dorcha could not know how long the silence would last, but she breathed it in and was invigorated by the enveloping peace.