*
Eryn’s grounding had come to an end, and her routine of weekly bottle collecting had been grudgingly returned to her.
She stopped at the foot of the Waeshenbach property and laid her sack of bottles in the grass. She was forbidden to step on the land beyond the gateway, and Samantha had dropped their empty bottles and jars unceremoniously in the road for her to collect. She looked up to Boen’s room blankly, wishing she could do something other than stare, and then she crouched and slowly began picking them up.
Her brother had delighted in telling her that Boen’s head had been caved in, that he was crippled and would spend the rest of his life in his bed. She knew he was teasing her grossly, but the stillness of Boen’s bedroom window, the lifelessness of the entire house, made her feel as though there were truth in his words.
She clutched her skirts tightly and thought of what she had caused. All for her wish to find out what had happened to Richard Kelly, whom she was thinking of increasingly less. His grave was now riddled with weeds and would soon be the same as any other in the churchyard. Her memories of him were dampened by the blows she had received and the devastation she had caused by her curiosity. Such a strange thing, she considered, to have felt such passion for Kelly when he was so much older than she. Such a strange thing, to have caused such disruption for a dead man, to get Boen into so much trouble on a whim and a fancy.
She still had the papers she had stolen from the Marisco Tavern, hidden beneath a board at the bottom of her wardrobe. She had looked at them countless times throughout her incarceration, had hoped that she might find some use in them, for Boen’s sake if nothing else, some piece of information that might at least help her understand more the life of Lundy. She had given up on the hope that they served as any kind of clue, they were nothing but sketches of birds, bank details and pages of numbers. It were as though the leaves of several ornithography, calculus and memoir folios had been scattered and gathered haphazardly. They were an irrelevant riddle to her, too detached from her life to be related to one another, and so she looked less and less at the pages of numbers, then less at the pages of correspondence, until finally she only looked at the leaves upon which were drawn birds, and only then because they were pictures of birds, and less because she were attempting to unlock a mystery that had consumed her so completely the previous month.
Her mother had tried to coax from her what she had been doing with Boen. Why had she suddenly been spending so much time with him? She had never shown an interest before. Why had she risked damaging one of Guliven’s boats? Why had she jeopardised the safety of the village?
To these questions Eryn had no other answer than to shrug and say that she didn’t know. She had felt emboldened by breaking from Mortehoe’s chains and crossing the starry sea to Lundy, yet that emancipation had been thrashed out of her by her father’s belt. It had also served to install the very same questions in her mind that her mother now pressed her with. Why had she done it? Why?
When she had worn the very meaning of ‘I don’t know’ to the bone, she withdrew to mere shrugs, an act that did little to sate the increasing frustration of her mother who’s volatile, highly strung temperament had been a source of much whispered conversation amongst the village since time immemorial, never more so on evenings when she could be heard admonishing Eryn. The still of the village would be broken by sudden flares of piercing exclamation, and all in earshot would share looks and pull faces.
Poor Eryn, they thought. Poor girl, they said, and yet no-one went to her aid or even pretended they had heard a thing. When her mother returned to the bar with a bright smile and a joke on her lips, everyone reciprocated the smile and laughed at the revelry. That was as it had always been, they thought. You can’t change things that have always been.
Eryn stood, wrestled the bag of bottles over her shoulder, and remained looking towards Boen’s window for a few moments in the hope there would be some kind of movement from within. A twitching shadow. A glare of light, anything.
Her thoughts were distracted by the sound of George and Seb on the road beyond the hill. They were singing Kelly’s Song, named so because it had been he who had sung it first after a run to Ballycotton.
On hearing the tune she was struck by the memory of first hearing it as though smacked in the cheek. Kelly had sat at the bar and ordered everyone to be quiet, then exclaimed he had brought something home more valuable than the petty novelties they always pestered him for. At the time she had been shocked by his words, and soaked up the exasperated faces about the room. He had sung an old Irish song, ruined by his drunkenness and forgetfulness and yet, over the years, people had taken to it, one of the few outside songs to be cherished by the villagers.
The old winds of home call me back East, my boys,
There’ll be feasting on Geese when I’m there, when at home,
Where the sun meets the dawn with a song and a call,
Back East, back East, hear them all calling me home.
Kelly’s Song, it became known as, it had been sung at his funeral and would forever draw fond memories of him from the recesses of everyone’s minds. Yet Eryn, on hearing it, turned away from it and hastened home, harried.
A month ago she would have waited for George and flirted with him nonchalantly on his arrival, let him give her a piggy-back home and squeeze him overly so as to make sure he noticed. She would have done anything to gain his attention under a weft of indifference. She would play all the games the chemicals in her body provoked her to play, and yet now she wanted nothing more than to remain unnoticed. She felt labelled a freak for consorting with Boen, for consorting secretly with him in the early hours, and would do anything to shed the weight of people’s eyes and gossip.
The words of Kelly’s Song behind her stopped abruptly, and she heard George call her name. She quickened her pace, as much as the weight of the bottles would allow, and instinctively she turned to see George and Seb trundling wheelbarrows laden with sacks. They shared confused frowns as she hastened away. They were perplexed by her retreating from them, and yet to her it was conformation that all in the village considered her as nothing more than a monstrous anomaly.