Page 4 of The Sirens

3

MARY

OCTOBER 1800

Cove of Cork, Ireland

Waves slapped against the dock, the spray icy on her cheeks. Her sister’s hand brushed hers, the fingers warm and soft. Mary tried to clasp them in her own but was prevented by the bite of steel shackles at her wrist.

She looked into wide-set eyes, innocent in their blankness. Love formed a fist around her heart.

Mo dheirfiúr.

My sister.

‘Please,’ Eliza whispered. ‘Tell me. What can you see?’ Mary swallowed. She could still taste dust from the road. The light had seared her eyes since they were pulled from their cell at Kilmainham, with its scurry of rats and its drip of water on stone. In the cart, the landscape had rushed past, the green-gold of it so bright it lodged hard and painful in her throat, with the knowledge that she might never set eyes on it again. She was not the only one who looked away: the other women crossed themselves when they passed through the places where the fighting had raged two years before. The places where burned-out cottages mouthed the sky; mud walls already strangled with green, or else still blackened from fire.

At these moments, Eliza said nothing, a veil drawn across her face, and Mary knew that though her sister could not see the land with all its wounds, she could smell the cinders in the air, could still hear the echo of musket fire. She knew she was wondering what might have been, if the rebellion had not failed. If the English had lost their hold on the land. It seemed safer then, not to look, to keep her gaze fixed on the grime between her toes. She’d learned not to make eye contact over the last long months, in the cold stone gaol cell, where the male prisoners poked black fingers through the bars, reaching for them.

Until now, Eliza had not asked her to tell her what she saw, had not asked her to perform her sisterly duty.

Since babyhood, Mary had painted pictures for her sister with words, brought the world to life inside her mind. Walking through sun-dappled woods, she’d pluck crunchy red leaves from the ground and lift them to her sister’s nose. Together, they’d breathe the scent of peat and earth, of things ending and beginning. She had traced the shape of the distant hills in her sister’s palm, had told her it was the red-breasted robin who chirped so, the black hooded crow that screamed.

But she did not know how to show Eliza this. More than that – she did not want to.

‘We are standing at a dock, in a crowd of many others,’ she whispered, trying to keep the trembling from her voice. ‘Packed tight together, like closely woven cloth.’ She remembered this, the feel of flax beneath her fingers. Her father smiling as she spun the fibres to ready them for the loom, just as he’d taught her.

Mary swallowed. She did not tell her sister of the other women’s faces – for they were all women, with deadened eyes and hollowed cheeks – and how their fear mirrored her own.

‘The sea is before us,’ she continued.

‘I can smell it,’ Eliza said, nodding. ‘What do you think it would feel like, to touch it? Would it sting, like the water in the stream at home?’

Mary thought of the little creek near the village, the forbidden burn of it on her skin. Human hair, tangled with green fronds of duckweed.

Byrne’s hair. His face, still and slack in the water. The heart-swallowing moment when she’d thought – when part of her had prayed – that he was dead, that the wet thud of the rock against his skull had killed him. But that would have meant the rope around both their necks.

They had been lucky, the judge had said, frowning across the courtroom as Byrne spat his disgust at the sentence. Assault meant only exile.

Only. Such a small word for it. For never seeing home again – the little cottage with its ripple of blue flowers, the sweep of hills to the horizon. The silver light on the stream.

For never seeing Da.

‘Yes,’ she lied, for the sea was nothing like the stream. It was grey and furious, lapping at the rocks as if it would eat the land. It stretched as far as Mary could see, a murky gold line in the sky.

‘And the ship?’ Eliza asked, sounding smaller now. She had heard the lie in her sister’s voice. She had an ear for lies, Da always said, as she did for a wrong note.

Mary did not know how to describe the ship. She knew only that it was the biggest thing she had ever seen. Its sails billowed like huge wings while its mast seemed to pierce the clouds. Mary could see at least three decks, the wood tarred and shining. There were some very small windows – from here, scarcely the size of a fingernail.

It looked as though it would be very dark inside. ‘Mary?’

And then Mary’s eyes settled on the figurehead.

‘There is a woman,’ she said. ‘At the ship’s prow. She is not of flesh and blood but wood and paint, larger than three men put together. Her hair tumbles down her back in carved knots, her eyes are brightest blue. And instead of legs, she has …’

She paused. Now she wished she had not seen the figurehead, that she had not begun to describe it to her sister.

Someone pushed her from behind and she stumbled. They were being taken to the shore’s edge: she could see little boats waiting for them in the water below. Mary and Eliza and the four score women around them would be taken to the ship in these and then there would be months of fear and darkness before they arrived in a strange land with a name that was foreign and frightening on her tongue. New South Wales . Far, far away from their little village, their goat with her soft eyes. From Da.

‘Mary?’ Eliza’s voice was high and thin with fear. ‘What does she have instead of legs?’

Mary pushed back against the crowd, grasping for her sister’s hand, even though the irons chafed her wrist.

‘A tail,’ she said, yelling now to be heard over the other women’s shouts. ‘She has a fish’s tail.’

‘She’s a merrow,’ Eliza said. ‘From the tír fo thuinn, the land beneath the waves. Just like in Mam’s story.’

Mary did not answer. She did not want to think of Mam, and what had happened to her. Not now, when fear already bloomed inside her belly.

As the crowd pushed them closer to the dock, to where the little boats bobbed in wait, she turned her gaze from the figurehead. But she could not forget the painted woman with her curved tail; the green scales discoloured by rust.