The Stolen Child Read online

  Dedication

  For Liam and Timothy,

  who don’t hold back any love.

  Epigraph

  Come away, O human child!

  To the waters and the wild

  With a faery, hand in hand,

  For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

  “The Stolen Child,” William Butler Yeats

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE: St. Brigid’s Island Prologue

  Chapter 1: The Yank

  Chapter 2: Mongrel

  Chapter 3: Changeling

  Chapter 4: Nesting

  Chapter 5: The Lightkeeper’s Wife

  Chapter 6: Bonfire

  Chapter 7: Beehive

  Chapter 8: St. Brigid’s Home for Wayward Girls

  Chapter 9: Ink

  Chapter 10: Kidnapped

  Chapter 11: The Well

  Chapter 12: Anam Cara

  Chapter 13: Fairy Music

  PART TWO: The Stolen Child Chapter 14: Corncrake

  Chapter 15: Cursing Stone

  Chapter 16: Coffins

  Chapter 17: Knife Box

  Chapter 18: Midwife

  Chapter 19: Feet Water

  Chapter 20: Christmas Tree

  Chapter 21: Brigid’s Day

  Chapter 22: Fairy Stroke

  Chapter 23: Bargain

  Chapter 24: Fairy Tale

  Chapter 25: Ceili

  Chapter 26: Stones

  Chapter 27: Currach

  Chapter 28: Vigil

  Chapter 29: Birth

  Chapter 30: Evacuation

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . . About the author

  About the book

  Read on

  Also by Lisa Carey

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART ONE

  St. Brigid’s Island

  I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

  And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

  Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

  And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

  “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” William Butler Yeats

  Prologue

  May 1960

  The day of the evacuation, the first of May, 1960, dawned cloudless and still, weather so fine the islanders said it was stolen.

  St. Brigid’s Island perched like a jagged accident above the water, all grass and rock, no beach to ease the passage of a boat, no harbor to shelter it once there. Twelve miles west of Ireland, at times nearly impossible to get to and just as deadly to try to leave. It was the whim of the wind and the swelling sea that determined who landed there and who was let go. The islanders were apt to say that it was not the weather at all that decided such things. Something else, they believed, turned the world to suit itself.

  So they said it was stolen, that morning’s passage, from the good people, the fairies. They did not give such gifts, or lend them. Someone must have tricked it out of them. The islanders muttered their gratitude at the same time as they crossed themselves, in the name of their saint, against it.

  Had it not been the day they were scheduled to leave, the women would have put off their chores, set chairs outside their houses, and turned their doughy faces to the sun. Lashing rain and gales had battered the island for most of April, the sort of weather that abandoned them. Many had speculated that this day would not come at all—that it would be put off, perhaps until midsummer—and the thought of another month like the last few set the women gasping at the ends of their sentences with disapproval and fear.

  Two sisters, twins who looked more like strangers sharing the same bed, noted during the night exactly when the weather let them go. Emer breathed deeply, the invisible band that gripped her neck and tethered her loosening enough for a sigh. Rose pressed her lips together, too angry to allow a breath of concession. She had nothing packed. The other women had been ready for weeks, but she hadn’t even brought the crates in from the shed.

  Rose got up and stirred the hearth, feeding dry rushes to the orange spots of heat that had crouched, waiting, beneath the ash during the short night. The same fire had burned on St. Brigid’s Island for generations, some said since the time the saint herself had lived there. Glowing clumps of turf were buried and reawakened; whenever a new house was built, the first fire was brought over on a neighbor’s spade. Evacuation or no, Rose would not be the one to extinguish it.

  By dawn the boats were already there, anchoring out from the island because the rocks and current made approaching the slip impossible for anything larger than a currach. Four boats—the mail boat, two fishing trawlers and a Galway hooker—all piloted by men from the mainland and the neighboring island. Rose, watching from her doorway, grumbled over the attendance.

  “Sure, when we’re leaving, the vessels come out in droves; if only they’d been so keen in February.” She heard the slight change in the silence of her sister. As though the mention of February had actually stopped her breathing.

  A dozen men rowed in, along with the priest who had been essential in bringing the evacuation about. More men than had stood on that island in years. They shared a pipe together before starting the first load. All day long, families walked their belongings down to the quay, the borrowed men carrying dressers and bedsteads roped to their backs, the women lugging baskets of linens and dishes, the children gathering cats and hens and cattle and ushering them toward the water. The dogs bullied sheep into cramped, panicked flocks that tried to stay together in the moving boat. The cows and the one bull were made to swim, as well as a donkey, tied by their necks to the back end of a currach, their eyes huge and shining white with panic. One girl put her cat into a cast-iron pot, tying the top down slightly off-kilter so there was a slit to let the air in and the wails of protest out. Then, every once in a while, a nose, a paw with claws extended. Soon every covered pot on the island held a cat or a duck or a hen, and they lined them up on the grass, like a parade of badly tuned instruments, to wait for their turn on the boat.

  In the house above, Emer and Rose moved, barely speaking, through the morning routine of breakfast and chores and getting children ready. Since there were plenty of children, this took until the sun was high above the boats waiting below. The children ran back and forth from the quay to the house, reporting on whose family had loaded what, whose cat was in a pot and who was arguing about what to bring and what to leave behind. Rose’s oldest, Fiona, told them that Jimmy Moran, eighty-six years old and the only male left on the island over the age of eleven, was refusing to leave. He was parked on a kitchen chair outside his door and was striking with his cane the knees of anyone who tried to get in.

  “The old fool,” Emer said. “As if they’d let him stay.”

  Rose stiffened. “That’s grand,” she said. “Coming from you.”

  Emer narrowed her one eye. The memory of the other eye was hidden under a brown leather patch. She opened her mouth to say something further, but Rose turned away.

  Emer, who had her own house down the road that she no longer lived in, had only one trunk, which had been packed for weeks. She was leaving the rest to the birds. Rose, who was more likely to want to bring everything, still hadn’t packed a bag and was washing the breakfast dishes and putting them away in the press as if it were any other day.

  “Will I put the delph in a crate?” Emer said. Rose gave her a look that was enough to stop any further suggestions.

  Emer went outside. Their mother was propped on a stool against the stone house, one limp arm tucked beneath her breasts, her head covered in wool as t
hough the sunshine and sea air were insults she needed to guard against.

  “She’ll take her time about it, sure,” she slurred, the left side of her mouth as useless as her arm. Emer ignored her. Though her own opinions often leaked out of her mother’s half-paralyzed mouth, she refused to commiserate. Only Rose had the patience to answer her anymore.

  Emer walked the two cows and their calves down the road to the water. The man who took the rope from her did so with caution, taking care, as they all did, not to brush against Emer’s hand.

  In the early afternoon, when a man from the boat told Rose it was time—hers was the last house to go—she nodded at Emer, and they began to collect things. It was all done quickly; within an hour, a house that had seen life for two hundred years was empty. Their mother rode down on the last donkey, led by the men, like a tired child. Rose stayed behind, sweeping at the cobwebs and dust blossoms that had appeared when the furniture was moved. Emer, who had walked the children down, came back up with one of the babies on her hip and found her sister feeding the fire from the pile of turf on the hearth.

  “Rose,” Emer said, not trying to keep the sharp annoyance from her tone. “What does that matter now?”

  “No fire, no moon, no sun shall burn me,” Rose muttered, the incantation of Saint Brigid that children were taught to say when lighting a fire or climbing into a boat. It was meant to protect them.

  “It’s a little late for that carrying-on,” Emer said. She left her sister, going down to the water to wait with their mother and the children.

  Rose washed the floor, wiped down the windowsills and polished the thick glass of the tiny windows. “No lake, no water, no sea shall drown me. No arrow of fairy nor dart of fury shall wound me.” She fed the dust and dirty rags to the fire with tears running down her cheeks, swiping at them as though they were something not related to her, like a bee too close to her face. She cleaned and cried and burned what was left, and when the house was spotless and the fire was as hot as it could get, she blew her nose and stood in the open doorway. She took the Saint Brigid’s cross from where it hung on the wall, woven from rushes last February by a woman she missed more than she cared to admit, and briefly imagined igniting it in the fire and touching the flames to the thatched roof. The fire would make short work of the dense straw, it would leap from one roof to the next and feed itself long after the boats were gone. From their new council houses on the mainland, in such fine weather, they would be able to see that fire, burning on top of the sea.

  If she must go, she thought, why not leave the whole place ablaze?

  But she was a sensible woman, a mother, a sister, a guardian of the fragile leftovers of her family. Emer was the one who could get away with setting fires, burning hope away with her hands, like a possessed, grief-stricken witch. But Emer was done with all that, and Rose had never been allowed.

  She nestled the cross in the basket instead, along with the last treasures she found in the secret crevices of the house. She put on her good coat, usually worn only to Mass. In its pocket she slipped her kitchen knife, the tool every island woman kept at hand, as the men had once carried their spades. She said three names softly and closed the door.

  She saw women gathering in the graveyard, nestled in a promontory above the quay, a patch of jutting purple stones, the first and last thing you saw when pulling a boat into or away from the island.

  Rose wouldn’t bother with that.

  She walked the long road instead, up north to the cliffs, past the clocháns that had stood for centuries, solid as beehives mortared with honey, since the time when the island was a convent of loving virgins. When an island of women alone was a pilgrimage to God rather than a death sentence.

  There was too much to remember here, at the cliff’s edge, where even on a calm day the wind skinned her ears. The memories licked like fire at her throat, her groin, her heart: screaming to save her sister, lifting her skirt for a lover, building fires to cry out for help in the darkness. She could not separate the love from the terror. She listened for the trickle of water she knew ran quietly beneath the grass, a holy well hidden where few would think to look for it. She half-expected to see a fiery-haired woman with a red dog at her heels, coming to seek the water. But that woman had left the island already, following the same watery road as those who had gone before. They had trickled away, for storms, war, emigration, careers, to a handful of souls, and today was the last day people would ever live here.

  The story was that Saint Brigid swindled this island away from a king. He agreed to give her for free whatever land she could cover with her cloak. When she unfurled the blue fabric, the wind carried it in every direction, until it grew and spread and darkened itself over the entire island. The king, angry at being codded, warned her that the place was rotten with fairies, called “good people” only to placate them, for they were anything but good. Brigid, the story went, only smiled and said: “That will suit.”

  She wasn’t a Christian saint but a Celtic one—born in the doorway between two worlds, named for a goddess, suckled on the milk of fairies, ordained as a bishop—she was a woman who feared nothing, with both God and the good people on her side.

  Now the islanders were being given a village, on the mainland, for the price of leaving this story behind.

  The same cove that once protected the nuns, isolated them in devotion, was a curse in the modern world. A dangerous inlet that was not a real harbor, a rocky hollow and narrow cement quay where men risked their lives pulling a boat in. Or they used to. Now there were no men to risk it. Now there were only women, save old Jimmy Moran and a few young boys. Women not willing to pretend they had the strength of saints any longer. They knew this evacuation was coming: they’ve known for almost as long as they’ve fought against it. They asked the government for a harbor; the government gave them a cul-de-sac on the mainland instead.

  On that last walk down, down the green road that had been carved by nuns and trampled by the bare feet of children, Rose turned her mind. Now that she was packed, she would go without once looking back, let the fire go out, leave the holy water in the ground, not carry it with her in a tiny vial as the other women surely would. She would busy herself making her new council house, with electricity and a water tap and a gas cooker and a toilet and a key for the front door, into a home, and be kind to her sister, who seemed not to care that they were losing their entire lives because she had already lost far more than the boats could take away. She would build a fire in her virgin chimney, the hearth so small it was meant only for pleasure, and light it with a match.

  Rose didn’t think that morning’s weather was stolen. The fairies wanted them gone as much as Emer did. Even Saint Brigid had abandoned them. They, too, had had enough.

  On the last run, the mail boat brought a reporter from Galway, who snapped a few photographs for the sensational story that would appear in the weekend edition. He took pictures of the women kneeling in the children’s graveyard, and one of Jimmy Moran being carried, chair and all, down to the boats. The photograph that made the front page, and was used afterward whenever the subject of evacuated Irish islands came up in the news, was one of Rose and Emer, sitting in a currach, each holding a baby in her lap. Both of the sisters wore the traditional island head covering, brown sheep’s wool knitted into a tube, which could be worn over the head to block the wind, or draped as a scarf on finer days. The wool was knit in a continuous circle, a spiral, so once you put it on, it was impossible to lose it to sea air or the hands of needy children. It was said to be the same head covering, the reporter wrote, that Saint Brigid knitted for each of her new postulants.

  With this wool draped over their heads, their hair hidden, and in black and white, which smoothed Emer’s complexion and dulled Rose’s, you could see a physical resemblance that was rarely there when you looked at them in life. The set of their jaws, perhaps, the worry lines, deeper than they should have been for women still young. Though they had always been opposites, in the phot
o they were reversed; Rose, who had always been sunny next to Emer’s dark scowl, looked snuffed out, while Emer, who had spent a lifetime being asked to smile like her prettier sister, was lit from within, glowing, as if something had just been whispered to her, handed to her, stolen and then returned. As if Emer, the one who was bringing nothing, was the one most looking forward to the future. As if, the eagerly dire reporter suggested in his article, leaving the island might put to rest all the terror and sorrow that trying to remain upon it had borne.

  Chapter 1

  The Yank

  May 1959

  ONE YEAR EARLIER

  The Yank arrives on the first day of summer, with the pigs. She comes in Festy’s boat, which has to drop anchor and wait for the island men to row out in a currach. They hand her over the side, along with the mail and two squirming sacks. Rumor has it the Yank has been waiting on the mainland for two weeks, staying in the room above Oliver’s bar as the last of the spring storms battered the quay and made it impossible for anyone to approach the island.

  Emer’s son, Niall, has been watching the quay all morning. His father and uncle rowed out early to purchase this year’s piglets. Every May, during the festival of Beltaine, which marks the beginning of the summer, each family on the island gets a new pig. They are raised into the autumn and slaughtered one by one over the winter, so fresh meat can be shared among them. Pig day was a favorite for Emer and Rose when they were children, and now it is her son’s turn to be excited.

  “They’re in,” Niall comes running to tell her, though she has already seen it from the window. “They’re helping Festy bring that Yank.”

  “Amadan,” Emer’s mother hisses from her perch by the fire. Fool. No one responds. Their mother is used to complaining to the air.