Dry-mouthed, John O’Connor watched her.
As the weeks went on, Sunday masses were a special kind of torture, the entire parish crowded into the church together. “At least the sermons are less boring,” Julia’s sister, Lizzie, said, and that much was true: The heat had inspired the priest to lecture his flock about hellfire and damnation, which was much more interesting than his usual digressions about taxes, but Julia had to admit that there was something in the sermons she found discomfiting.
Perhaps it was how they changed the after-church chatter to dark mumblings about what the people of Sligo had done to deserve such a plight. This weather, the townsfolk decided, was clearly an act of God. Why else would only Sligo be affected? Why not Ballina? Why not Carrick-on-Shannon? Why were none of the neighboring towns and villages losing their crops to drought, their animals to starvation?
It was either an act of God or it was witchcraft.
While it is always difficult to tell where rumors are born, this one was often spread by people who had recently spoken with Farmer O’Connor. And hadn’t the widow Rys been seen around the farm far more than usual? And hadn’t John O’Connor had to stop drinking Ann Gorman’s cider after having been awfully ill? And wasn’t it strange, uncanny, two women living alone together in the middle of nowhere, with only their animals and their apples? And how were their apple trees not dying when there wasn’t any rain?
Mary Ellen heard the rumors; it was impossible not to.
“Don’t worry, love,” Ann told her. “They’ve nattered about us before and they’ll do so again. Once the rain falls, they’ll come to their senses.”
But there was something dry and dangerous about these rumors. And there was a keen on the dusty air. A sound in the night that could have been screaming.
Mary Ellen went to the farm during Sunday Mass time, climbed the wooden fence, and called to the bull. She stroked his gray head and fed him an apple from her orchard, plucked right off the tree. She wrapped her hands around his huge curved horns and whispered in his ear.
“Protect her,” she said. “Or I’ll never let you rest.”
The bull nodded his enormous head.
* * *
—
When Mary Ellen had arrived in Sligo all those years ago, pregnant, starved, and limping, Ann had taken her in. She’d fed her what she could, had warmed water over the fire to bathe her, had rubbed strong-smelling poultices into her blisters, had laid her in Ann’s own bed. For weeks, she’d asked no questions, had only offered companionship, work, and a knowledge of herbs that would serve her for years.
Later, when Mary Ellen finally spoke of how she had been betrayed by Gerald, had been evicted and shunned by her family, Ann offered her own story. Later still, she offered love.
Some loves ignite like forest fires, burn down entire towns before anybody’s noticed. Ann’s first love was one of those, and she didn’t see the blisters from the burn until it was too late. Some loves smolder like a turf fire, are slow to start but will then burn bright and steady through entire winters. Ann and Mary Ellen fell in love within red embers, but with those they built up a fire that lasted their lifetime.
* * *
—
It was so hot and dry that summer that a struck match burned extra bright. A group of town boys, who accidentally set an entire barn on fire after playing at camping nearby, got their hides tanned so hard they couldn’t sit for a week.
So it was most likely a coincidence, what happened to Mary Ellen Rys and Ann Gorman. It was most likely the exact same thing.
Julia had heard the rumors about her grandmother—everybody had. But she never really believed them. All Julia knew was that her nanny and her good friend Ann were experts on herbs and apples, could cure a cold in a day, and help birth a baby who’d turned in the womb so that its bottom was the wrong way up. Julia didn’t connect the rumors to the whispers of witchcraft that ran rampant that stifling summer. It wouldn’t have occurred to her.
It occurred to her father later, when his mother’s little cottage in its tangles of brambles burned bright and dazzling one hot, dry night. When the fire burned out, the local doctor found the remains of the cottage’s two inhabitants locked in an embrace on their shared bed, as if they had died peacefully together in their sleep.
The following morning, it started to rain.
17.
Prelude to kisses
Drumcliff, 2012
When I finished reading, the lightest rain came down like a fine mist, a gentle touch of loving hands.
“They might have burned right in this spot,” Ida said in a whisper. “Mary Ellen and Ann.”
“They didn’t burn them for being witches,” I said, watching Cale standing, like me, in the place her ancestor died. An ancestor with more in common than just a name. “They burned them because they were lovers.”
“I guess back then it amounted to the same thing,” said Finn.
Cale had said something similar earlier, but now her eyes were filled with tears. I felt complicated, like a sentence with too many small words, where you keep stumbling over the same ones, reading the whole thing wrong.
Mandy had known all this before she left. Had known our ancestor had been killed for whom she loved. I knew now that her reaction to my coming out wasn’t intolerance but fear. It didn’t matter that times had changed. In our family, so many things remained the same.
She could have told me, a traitorous thought came into my head. She knew all this; she could have told me before now. Could have said at least some of this on my birthday, before she disappeared.
I missed Mandy like a thirst, something so vital I couldn’t not think of it. I ran her letter between my fingers in the way you do a piece of velvet, rubbing it the wrong way so it almost sticks against your skin.
“It can’t have been here long,” I said.
“What can’t?” asked Finn.
“The letter. She had to have put it here recently. If it’d been there long, the paper would have disintegrated in the rain. It’s been a week. The ink would have run. It would have fallen out, blown away. An animal would have pried it loose.”
“Deena—” Finn said, but I couldn’t listen to reason. Not here, in the cottage where my ancestor died.
“I told you.” I held out the paper. “It’s a map to her. She put it here for me to find.”
“Deena.” Finn slipped his hand into mine. “If after all this we don’t—we don’t find her, what then?”
I stared at Ida. My niece. Her eyes—so like Mandy’s—were big.