Page 41 of The Sirens

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MARY

At some stage Mary must have fallen asleep, lulled by the movement of the waves and the murmurs of the other women’s prayers. She woke to darkness, solid against her skin: no light filtered through from the upper decks. There was nothing but the burn of the water on her body, the heave and creak of the ship as it bucked and fell. The hush of four score women breathing, the occasional whimpered cry and prayer.

And then, another sound. One soft, high note followed by another, rising and rising.

Eliza, singing a caoineadh , a lament.

It could not be true, could it?

Mary reached over the sleeping bodies of Bridie, Sarah and Annie, searching for Aoife’s hand. It was cold and limp. With her other hand she reached for Eliza, joining her own voice to her sister’s song.

Aoife was dead. The captain had killed her.

When morning came, they turned Aoife gently onto her back, smoothing the hair from her face. The thin blades of light made her features look younger, and Mary wondered if perhaps she wasn’t quite so old as she had thought. Perhaps, if she’d led a different sort of life, the forehead would always have been so unclouded, the mouth always so unlined.

A trembling rose through Mary’s body, all the way from her toes to the very tips of her fingers. It was the first time that she had touched the dead body of someone she had loved.

But she knew what ought to be done.

If they had candles, they would be lit. If there were curtains, they would be drawn. They would wash the body, dress it in fine linen. Decorate it, even, with garlands of flowers. Aoife deserved all of this, and more.

But here, in the prison deck, they had nothing, not even a proper shroud to cover her. She would be wrapped in an old sail, and sent to the blue deep of the ocean. Aoife, who had so feared the sight of the shark strung from the mast, who had cursed the captain for bringing bad luck down upon them all. They did what they could. The five of them pooled what remained of their water, tipping the rust-smelling dregs onto Aoife’s face and body, gently brushing the grime from her skin. Bridie closed the older woman’s eyes, revealing the lids, thin and blue as eggshells. They folded her arms over her chest, the limbs moving stiffly now, as death took its hold.

The cold yield of Aoife’s skin beneath her fingers, the soft murmuring as the women worked together, made Mary think of Da. Da, who had two score years already, she knew. She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to summon his face: the ripe brown health of it, the white, even teeth. But all she saw was the slight stoop to his back that had worsened in recent years, the way he had begun to squint at the distance, the new clouds to his eyes.

One day, she knew, Da would die. Alone, in the cold dark of the cottage they had left.

Who would perform this ritual for him? Who would wash his body, who would sing the lament, with his daughters exiled from the land?

She pushed the thoughts from her mind. She could not think of Da when it was Aoife whose body lay small and shrunken in the berth.

‘I wish we had some flowers,’ Bridie said. ‘Flowers, and a proper shroud.’

‘What flowers grow on the Blasket Islands?’ Sarah asked.

Mary thought of foxglove – the purple bells of it, curved and fleshy as a woman’s parts.

Purple as the bruises he gave me.

There was some justice in that, Mary thought. That nature had given Aoife such a weapon, and shaped it in the image of herself.

They took Aoife’s body away when they delivered the day’s rations. It was Wright who came, him and one other. And though Bridie clung tight to his legs like a child to its mother, though she cried and begged that they be allowed on deck to watch the body meet the waves, he only shook his head, teeth gritted.

But Mary saw the pulse of a vein at his temple, saw the way he did not meet the other sailor’s eye. The tenderness with which he cradled Aoife’s skull, as though she was sleeping and he did not want her to wake.

They had no way of knowing when she was given to the sea. They could not hear the clergyman’s English prayer, could not see the small body in its sail-cloth shroud, could not hear the splash of it entering the water, the current bearing it away.

They said their own prayers, the prayers of Ireland.

But as they murmured, heads bent over the berth that was now empty, Mary wondered at the words they spoke. The truth of them.

She thought of the ruined church where Da had taken them to worship, the altar home to a nest of sparrows who left offerings in white clumps along the pews. The priest – O’Sullivan – wore a cassock that fluttered with moths, stored in the hollow space behind a broken rock, along with the tin cup and plate for the Eucharist. He seemed so sure of the things he said, having risked everything to say them.

When he’d spoken of good and evil, of righteousness and sin, he’d made it sound easy to tell the difference between the two. As clear as sorting flax stalks from their seeds.

But where did that leave Aoife, who had killed her husband to save her own life?

And where did that leave her and Eliza?