The place was bleak, gray, and cold. Every night the wind howled past the windows and every night it sounded like a woman’s screams. The tenants were sullen. The food was bland. Gerald couldn’t imagine bringing his sweetheart here, couldn’t imagine lasting in this landscape for more than a year.
The land to the west of the estate was too sandy for the sapling, the land to the east too rocky. Everything smelled of the sea. As the months passed and the apple tree refused to take root, Gerald began to associate the smell—salty, fishy, wet with rain—with the unrest of the estate and his unease at the helm of it.
At night the screaming kept him awake.
He took to wandering the hills with the sapling in his arms. The staff of the Big House hushed when he came near. The tenants in their small stone huts averted their eyes when they caught sight of him. When he was out of earshot, the men spat on the ground.
“It’s the apple-tree man,” he could hear the children whisper. “It’s the madman. It’s the ghost.”
And Gerald did feel ghostlike, as if he might well disappear. He thought of his mother at seventeen, who almost died with him in her womb, brought back to life by the bite of an apple, a fairy tale in reverse. He thought that if only he could persuade his sapling to take root, then the tenants would cease their angry simmering, then the rain would stop, then the winds would die down and he would no longer hear the screaming.
One night, after a visit from another local landowner, Gerald got lost. His guest had drunk his way through most of Gerald’s wine cellar and had complained all night about taxes and tenants, and Gerald had been desperately, desperately bored. Not entirely sober himself, he picked up his sapling (the branches drooping now, the buds shut tight, the bark growing dull) and set off across the bog in the middle of the night in search of the right spot to plant his orchard.
He had walked for almost an hour in the near-dark of the cloudy sky, under relentless drizzle and through never-ending mud, when he saw the light. A wink, a glimmer, like laughter up ahead. When he ran to the spot, the light appeared to blink out, then reappear farther away. Gerald followed it. It danced and twinkled, flitting like an insect, a flickering candle, and Gerald, encumbered with his apple tree, turned his ankles on rocks and stumbled over hillocks, splashed through mud and puddles deeper and deeper into the bog. Then the light went out and did not appear again.
Gerald took another step and the firm ground beneath him gave way to wet, sucking mud. It rose around his ankles, pulling him down, and the more he thrashed and tried to run, the more he sank. Thigh-deep in the bog hole, Gerald cried out, knowing full well there’d be nobody to hear him but the ancient bodies buried under the turf. The wind screamed as he shouted louder, trying to drown him out. For hours Gerald struggled, the sapling thrown to the grassy rocks too far for him to reach, his strength waning, his voice fading, the darkness his only constant.
Then he saw the girl, candle in hand. He’d heard the chambermaids talking about banshees: the howling women, the ones with bone combs and ashen skin, the ones whose voices—wordless screams—if heard, foretold death. He waited for death to take him.
Of course, the girl was not death. The girl that Gerald saw that night in the bog was Mary Ellen Boyle, our great-great-grandmother, which means you now know exactly how this story is going to go.
When the girl pulled Gerald out of the thick black mud, the heavens opened and the misty, drizzly air became sliced through with cold, hard rain. Mary Ellen grabbed Gerald’s hand, he hoisted the sapling into his other arm, and they ran through the deluge to the edge of the cliff, to a tiny cottage that might once have been a shepherd’s hut, staring out at the stormy sea. It had no windows, doors, or roof, but a cluster of hawthorn trees had grown over it, making a canopy to keep out the rain.
Gerald was wracked with tremors, shivering so hard his teeth clacked inside his mouth. He could not tell if this was because of the cold, the effort of having struggled inside the bog for hours, or if it was simply the effect this beautiful, ghostly woman was having on him.
When he spoke, his voice was hoarse from having shouted half the night. His voice was faint from wanting.
“Are you death?” he asked the girl.
She only smiled and shook her head, and her hair, under a damp woolen shawl, escaped in copper tangles.
She took him in her arms to warm his bones, to calm his quaking, and if he truly believed she had come to take him to his death he would have gone willingly. He left his mud-covered clothes on the dirt floor of the hovel and she threw down her shawl for them to lie on. If the rain came through the hawthorn roof, neither of them noticed.
In the morning, Gerald put his damp and muddy clothes back on, retrieved his sapling from behind the tiny cottage, and returned to the Big House with the full intention of forgetting this whole misadventure completely.
But he couldn’t stop thinking about Mary Ellen. Never mind his wan blond wisp of a fiancée. Her face drifted in his memory. Did she have green eyes or blue? Mary Ellen’s were sea-gray, as light as clouds before dawn. Her face was freckled, flushed with the abrasive salt air of the coast. She was all the more lovely for it. Her arms were roped with muscle, her thighs sturdy where his fiancée’s were slim and soft. Mary Ellen looked like she could easily survive the end of days, no matter how starved and pinched her cheeks were underneath their half-apple cheekbones.
While Gerald ate in a warm and comfortable dining room, his workers went hungry, were soon ready for revolt. Inspired by others around the country, Gerald’s tenants organized a rent strike. It did not go well. There weren’t enough of them for the strike to be effective, and Gerald evicted seven families from his land in one night, calling on the constabulary to break the cottage windows to ensure the families could not return.
The screaming got worse. He could hear it in the daytime. He could hear it as he took his tea. He could hear it as he sat on the toilet. He could hear it as he wrote a hundred letters to his half-forgotten sweetheart that he never sent, and plaintive missives to his mother to persuade his father to reconsider and send his younger brother here instead.
As the weeks went on, the only light in his constant dark thoughts was Mary Ellen. He went to the abandoned cottage on the cliffs across the bog every night, waited like a shadow by the entrance. And, every night, she met him there.
His heart was pulled by his sheer hatred of this godforsaken place and his obsession with the young woman. Strong arms, strong thighs, freckles in places he’d never before thought that freckles could be. Rough lips chapped by the cold and the sea. Callused hands he longed for more than his sanity. For a few stolen hours in the middle of every cold and rainy night, the couple kissed and whispered, touched and held and dreamed.
Perhaps he truly loved her, but he hated her country more. At no moment in their secret meetings did he ever mention his sweetheart back in England. The woman to whom he was engaged to be married. The woman who was his ticket out of this awful place, away from the screaming wind and never-ending rain and the sour-faced peasants. Because, once he was married and his new wife was with child, it would simply not be possible to stay on at the Big House. These cliffs, these rocks and bogs were no place to raise a baby. His father would surely agree: The next generation of Ryses would have to return to England, their feet never to touch Irish soil again. He would be more glad of this than he had words to say.