“Then? Sick. And angry. Scared. After that, just surprised. I’ve been surprised ever since I got here.”
“And when was that?”
“I don’t rightly know. I should say maybe a couple of months. My wounds healed.”
“You said men were fleeing? Was there an army? What army?”
“The army of the Parliament. Ironsides. I was with my brother, and his friend, my betrothed before he died. They were infantry. I started out a washerwoman.”
“I ought to kill you,” said Jim Conneely.
“I don’t know that it works that way here,” said Meg.
“What, we’re in heaven, then, are we?” said Jim, acidly.
“There’s no such thing as heaven,” replied Meg.
“Well, that’s one thing we can agree on, anyway,” said Jim.
* * *
When Nellie arrived on Inis Caillte through the blazing door of her own pain, the first thing she met was the sea. Nor was she pleased to do so. She lay on a patch of damp grass close to a rocky shore. While her insides were no longer burning, she was instantly and thoroughly uncomfortable. All around her, and going right through her head like a knife, was a great whooshing, thundering roar. It was horrible and vast and got right inside her. She sat up. The grass stems made a kind of squeaking rustle. They seemed alive. It was terrible. She shrank away from them. The rushing and sighing of the air by her ears, in her ears, went on and on. A cricket hopped and made a nasty clicking noise. Noise. That’s what it all was. Of course, it’s completely stupid to describe it in this way, as Nellie did not have words for roar, rustle, click or noise. She could not match them with any sensations. But this was trivia. Much worse was that she could not match the sensations she was now having, which were those of hearing, with the ones she was used to. With seeing and feeling and smelling and understanding where her limbs were in space. Hearing, if you must do it for the first time, is positively deafening. After five more minutes of it, she had to roll over and vomit. She sat trembling for fifteen more minutes before she could get up or move around. When she did, she got dreadful vertigo every time she looked at the sea beating and beating against the shore. It called attention to itself like a crying baby or a needy drunk, endlessly. She shaped her lips into a word she had seen on Aoife’s mouth, and others.’ Loud.
Fortunately, she breathed it only and made no sound. She was spared the further shock of listening to her own voice, as untrained as that of a wild animal.
So, Nellie was unusual in that the first human voice she heard was not her own.
* * *
The second person Jim Conneely met on Inis Caillte was Mary MacIntosh, the girl he was going to marry. He wouldn’t have called himself a marrying man at the time.
He and Meg Haylock were proceeding inland across a field of sheep, quite companionably. Jim felt on the one hand that he was in duty bound to throttle her as an enemy of his people, and on the other an equally strong resistance to doing anything that duty bound him to do. As Meg was big and strong and pretty well as tall as he was, and quite unperturbed by their uncanny situation, he figured that the sensible thing was to go along with her in case he needed an ally. She had helped him out with the currach.
There was an uncommonly pretty girl watching over the sheep. “Ah, Mary,” said Meg, coming up to her, “Look, here’s another one. His name is Jim.”
“Jim Conneely,” he said, and wished he had a cap to remove with a flourish. Unfortunately, his cap had been the first victim of the squall that had brought him there. There was no cap in history that would have made it through such a gale, not even one belonging to Hannibal.
“Are you a Conneely from Inis Mór, then?” said the pretty girl, Mary.
Jim was thunderstruck. “Yes!” he said. “Yes, I am! It seems to me that it’s just over there, no more than a mile south. Is that true? How can that be?” And then he added, “And you, Miss MacIntosh, are you from around here?”
“It’s true it’s no more than mile. Still, it’s very hard to get to. Half the time, we can’t even see it. And I myself”—she smiled gaily, showing a dimple on one side—“am a native of this place, Inis Caillte. These are my father’s sheep. Our farm is just over the hill.”
“So, there are people from here, born here?” asked Jim, eagerly. “It’s not just that lost people wash up here?”
“Oh, no,” said Mary, “It’s the whole island that’s lost. We’ve been on it a long time. As long as you on the other islands, I expect. You know how it is on an island. We’re independent. But there’s something about this island that attracts the lost. Like a lodestone. They’re drawn here. They pop up from time to time.”
“From anywhere?”
“So it would seem. My father once met an Afric prince.”
“But Meg here is from the from the seventeenth century! From the time of the Cromwellian wars! That’s two hundred years ago! And she’s been here only a few months.”
“Yes,” said Mary, “it works like that.”
“What year is it, anno domini? Here?”
“1840,” said Mary. “Why, what is it where you come from?”
“1840,” said Jim, relieved. He didn’t want to live through the Middle Ages. “How’s the fishing?” he said.
* * *
Meg Haylock came from the same village as Cromwell himself, the great general. The Lord Protector. She and her brother got some credit for this. Cromwell had been their member of Parliament, though of course their family were not of the class who could vote. They were good Puritans, though, dissatisfied with Anglican compromise and with a healthy hatred for the foreign and Catholic-loving king. There had been a party with a bonfire in Huntingdon at the news of Charles’s execution. Ah, the Parliament was bringing a new day!
Of course, this new day couldn’t dawn until they had mopped up the king’s Catholic allies, many of whom were in Ireland, another foreign nation. And while the Haylocks, as yeomen, couldn’t vote, they were perfectly acceptable to the Parliamentary army. Meg’s brother joined and was given a pike and a helm and some plated leather armour and some infantry drill. And a wage. Meg joined too and was given none of these things. That is, she went along with her brother and his friend Christopher, to whom she had become engaged at the bonfire party, as they departed the fens, first for London and then for Dublin. Their parents were dead and their farm had been first mortgaged and then destroyed in the fighting that swirled over East Anglia in the early years of the civil wars. Even the New-Modelled Army needed women. Armies needed cooking and cleaning and carrying and comfort; everybody knew that. She wasn’t the only local woman to go. None came back.
Christopher died of dysentery weeks after they landed. He never saw any action. For Meg, the main action of the war in Ireland was marching in mud, closely followed by fighting for space in wagons, lifting heavy objects, lighting fires in rain, and strapping wounds and ulcers in the feet of her brother and his immediate friends. Then she was raped by some ally or other, a Presbyterian—he had a Scots accent—on a field during the siege of Wexford. There was a lot of ferocity during that siege, and ferocity spreads in every direction. After that, her reputation was tarnished. Her brother couldn’t protect her, and after a while, he didn’t care to. Having a whore for a sister has many perks in a near-starving army. The wench from Huntingdon increased in value as the campaigns went on. It was as close as men could come to fucking Cromwell.