Bettina shivered. But her father had spoken of that as well.
Remember, they bring the little deaths, too: sleep, dreams, change, the step from this world into la época del mito. You don’t need to be afraid of them, but you should respect them.
Bettina touched one of the colorful carvings that she’d placed on the table before her.
“I’m not afraid of them,” she said.
“No,” Nuala told her. “The innocent never are.”
Bettina frowned, but Nuala was already turning away, back to the counter where she had been chopping vegetables for a stew. Gathering up the carvings, Bettina returned the colorful dogs to their box, along with Janette’s painting and her sister’s letter. She stood up from the table, the box in one hand, her coffee in the other.
“What?” Nuala asked, the steady rhythm of her chopping falling silent for a moment, speaking now as though their earlier conversation had been about nothing more profound than the weather. “Won’t you have some breakfast?”
“No, gracias,” Bettina said and returned to her room where she set out los cadejos around the base of la Virgen.
She regarded them thoughtfully, sitting on the end of her bed, finishing her coffee. If death was the secret in a dog’s eyes—and Bettina knew that Nuala had really been speaking about los lobos—then what was the secret in Nuala’s eyes?
Setting the empty mug down on the floor, she took the rosary Mama had sent from the pocket of her vest. She fingered the beads, saying a decade of Hail Marys before she even realized what she was doing. A smile touched her lips when she was done. It had been a while, but the comfort she’d once gained from the simple act could still affect her. She started to lay the rosary at the base of the statue, making room for it among the carvings, but then replaced it in the pocket of her vest.
It was time to go. She was supposed to sit for Chantal this morning. But first she made the sign of the cross before the statue, lowering her gaze respectfully. She would have to phone Mama and thank her for the rosary.
Chantal de Vega had a studio on the ground floor, on the other side of the house from Lisette’s. She was a sculptor, a tall, square-shouldered woman with a long blonde braid, a healthy ruddy complexion, and a penchant for loose-fitting clothes. Bettina always thought of her as an incarnation of Gaia, a statuesque earth mother, larger than life and generous to a fault. She had the easy good nature that Bettina remembered from her father’s amicable, if somewhat laconic, Indios cousins, and the most beautiful hands, large and strong, capable of easily lifting fifty-pound bags of clay, or pulling the finest detail from a sculpture. Bettina didn’t think she’d ever seen her in a bad mood and today was no exception, although she was apparently packing up her studio when Bettina arrived for her sitting.
“¿Y bien?” Bettina said, her unhappiness plain in her voice. “What are you doing?”
Chantal gave her a cheerful smile. “Got handed my walking papers this morning.”
“But how can that be possible? You’ve only been here a few months.”
And of all Kellygnow’s residents, Chantal would be the last person to be asked to leave because she didn’t get along or fit in.
Chantal shrugged. “Well, it’s sooner than I thought it’d be, but it’s not like it’s some big surprise or anything. Everybody who comes here knows it has to end sooner or later.”
Bettina crossed the room to where Chantal stood, filling a line of cardboard boxes with the materials she’d brought to outfit the studio last autumn. She knew that this residency had meant a lot to Chantal, allowing her a comfort zone to explore a new direction with her art.
“I loved what I was doing,” she’d explained to Bettina once. “But I needed something more. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those people who draw a strict boundary line between craft and fine art, but I’d been a potter for too long, and frankly, I’d been too successful at it as well. I was always in that enviable position—at least from a business point of view—of getting more orders than I could fill. It’s pretty amazing in this day and age to work at something like I was doing and have to turn away commissions.
“But for all that I love making art you can use—you know, teapots and mugs and vases and bowls and the like—I’ve always wanted to do more fine art. More sculpture. Not just a piece here and there where I could fit in the time, but to really devote myself to doing it full time. The trouble is, it was a real struggle turning my back on the cash flow just to find the time to see if I could do it. If I even really wanted to do it. That’s what Kellygnow’s giving me. The opportunity to find out who I want to be.”
“And will you give up your pottery if you find you do like being a sculptor more?” Bettina had asked.
“Lord, no,” Chantal told her. “I couldn’t ever give up the feel of the clay between my hands when it’s turning on the wheel. I just don’t want to have to do it.” She grinned. “I want the luxury of doing whatever I damn well feel like doing and have somebody out there willing to pay me for the results.”
Now what was she going to do? Bettina thought.
“It’s a little early to say,” Chantal replied when Bettina asked. “I still have some money in the bank, but you know how quick that can disappear in the real world. Except for what I’ve got here, most of my stuff’s in storage. Truth is, I’m tempted to put it all in storage and just take off for a while.”
“It doesn’t seem fair,” Bettina said.
“Well, I won’t deny that I wish I could have finished that piece I was doing of you.”
“Just tell me when you’ve set up a new studio and I’ll come sit for you.”
Chantal smiled. “You’re okay, Bettina. I appreciate that.”
“De nada. Don’t worry about it.” She sat down on the windowsill, feet dangling. “But I still don’t understand why they want you to leave.”
“That’s simple. They need the space for someone else.”
“I wonder who.”
With perfect timing, Nuala appeared in the doorway carrying a suitcase in one hand, a small bundle wrapped in cloth in the other. Entering the room behind her with a cardboard box in her arms was the woman Bettina had met yesterday. Ellie Jones. Various art supplies poked out of the top of the box she was carrying, sculpting tools, books, sketchpads.
¡Mierda! Bettina thought. This was all her fault. If she hadn’t helped Ellie out yesterday, Chantal wouldn’t have lost her residency.
“Hello,” Nuala said, greeting them, her voice mild, guileless. “Lovely morning, isn’t it?” She set down the suitcase and placed the cloth bundle on a nearby table. Turning to Ellie, she added, “I’ll leave you all to get acquainted then, shall I? You remember where I said your bedroom will be?”
“Yes. Only—”
But Nuala was already out the door, as suddenly as though she’d been carried away on a sudden gust of wind, and an awkward silence rose up to fill the space she’d left behind.
4
“They’re like fallen angels,” Miki said.
She held her tea mug cupped between her palms, as though needing the porcelain’s warmth to get her through this. Hunter nodded encouragingly when she fell silent. He’d considered taking her to Kathryn’s Café, out on Battersfield Road, but she hadn’t been up for either a long trek in this cold weather, or for taking public transport, so they’d settled on Rose &Al’s Diner, just around the corner from her apartment. The atmosphere wasn’t as warm and relaxing as Kathryn’s, but it had its own charm, being an odd hybrid of an English tearoom and an old-fashioned all-night diner, complete with booths, a curving counter and padded stools, chrome and red jukebox in the corner.
The couple who ran it were from Somerset, England, and couldn’t make a decent cup of coffee if their life depended on it, but they served their tea by the pot, baked their own biscuits and crumpets, and it was one of the only places in Newford that served real Devon cream. Some places offered all-day breakfasts; at Rose & Al’s you could get an English tea with scones,
jam, and that Devon cream, from opening until closing.
“These… uh, Gentry,” Hunter said, prompting Miki when she didn’t continue. “You say they’re like fallen angels.”
She nodded. Shaking a cigarette free from her pack, she lit it and exhaled a stream of blue-gray smoke away from their table.
“Think of them as—what’s that Latin term?” It took her a moment before she found it. “Genii loci.”
Hunter gave her a blank look.
“You know,” she went on. “Spirits normally tied to some specific place. A valley, a well, a grove of trees. These—the ones I’m talking about—are ones who’ve strayed too far from their normal haunts. Without that connection to their native soil, they’ve all gone a little mad—the way the angels who sided with Lucifer did when they lost their connection to heaven.”
“Okay.”
Miki gave him a sad smile. “Christ, I know how this all sounds, and I don’t half believe it myself. But that’s not the point. They believe it, and so, apparently, does Donal.”
“But what exactly is it that they believe?”
Miki sighed and took a sip of her tea. Hunter had already finished his first cup and was working on his second. Eleven o’clock on a Monday morning, they pretty much had the place to themselves. Which was probably a good thing, considering where this conversation was going.
“What don’t they believe?” Miki said. “I listened to so much of this shite when we were staying with my Uncle Fergus that all I have to do is think about it and I can hear his bloody voice ranting away in my head. God’s truth, at the time it all sounded like adolescent boys deciding what they’d do if they ruled the world. You know, take a bit of this Roman lore, some of that Druidic ritual, a dash of Wagner and Yeats, mix it all together so that it works—in your own mind at any rate. I can’t recite all the details, in all their bloody confusion, but basically it boils down to a belief system that conveniently incorporates whatever they might find appealing or useful from a number of different folk traditions. Most of it comes from sources that have their origin in folklore from the British Isles and the Continent—myths, granny tales, fairy stories— but it becomes unrecognizable in their hands.”
“Such as?”
Miki stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. “Well, this business with the Summer King, for one. It’s an old belief, the idea that the ruler of a land is directly tied into its well-being. He sows his seed in the spring, lives high and mighty through the summer as the crop grows tall and green, then comes the harvest and he’s cut down with the rest of the yield, sleeping in his grave through the winter only to rise up again the following spring. But in the hands of Fergus and his lot it comes along with all sorts of made-up garbage that, in the end, lets them simply string up some poor, daft bugger—to give them personal luck and power, forget the welfare of the land, if such things ever did work.”
“You mean they kill him?”
Miki nodded. “Which makes for a Summer Fool, rather than a King, I’d think. Of course the poor sod never knows the truth until it’s too bloody late. And you can bet there’s no rising from the dead involved either. That dumb bugger’s dead and he’s not coming back.”
“How do you know all this stuff?”
“That’s the laugh, isn’t it? From my da’, the old drunkard. But I’ll give him this much: Even he turned his back on Uncle Fergus and his cronies. ‘A man can find enough ways to hurt himself on his own,’ I heard him tell Fergus once, ‘without turning to the likes of your hard men and their ugly magics.’ “
Hunter shifted in his seat.
“Makes you uncomfortable?” Miki asked. “Calling it magic, I mean.”
“No, it’s just this bruise on my side. Doesn’t matter what position I’m in, it just starts to ache after I’ve sat still for too long.”
“That’s something else Donal owes us.”
“You don’t think he had anything to do with it, do you?”
Miki shrugged. “I don’t know him anymore, so I can’t say.”
Her voice was casual, but Hunter could see how much it pained her to say it.
“So why do you call it magic?” he asked. “You don’t believe in that kind of thing, do you?”
“If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have said no. But right now?” Her gaze took on a distant look and for a moment Hunter thought he’d lost her again. But then she took another drag from her cigarette and focused on him once more. “Right now, I don’t know anymore.”
Hunter decided it was time to get back to her brother and what had started her off on this morbid line of thought which was so out of character for her.
“So,” he said. “You think these Gentry are planning to use Donal as their Summer King?”
“I know it,” Miki told him. “Why else would he paint his own face behind the Green Man’s mask?”
“But he knows the same stories you do.”
Miki nodded. “Except it’s like my cigs,” she said, holding up the cigarette she was smoking. “I know they’re going to kill me, but somehow I can’t believe that it’ll actually happen to me. Don’t ask me how it happened, but it seems Donal’s got himself convinced that he and the Gentry are working for the same cause: taking back a piece of the world for themselves because, well, the bloody world owes them, doesn’t it? It’s so pathetic, but I shouldn’t be surprised. It would take an Irishman to buy into such a cobblework of shite and pledge himself to their cause.”
“What does being Irish have to do with it?” Hunter asked.
“It’s that you’d have to be either drunk or mad, and we’re too good at both.”
“But—”
“Well, Ireland’s a peculiar place, isn’t it?” Miki said. “It seems to breed loyalties that grow all out of proportion to reality or common sense. Back home, a feud is as real today as it was a few hundred years ago. It doesn’t matter that all the original participants are long dead and gone. The descendants will continue with the hostilities until there’s no one left, on one side or the other.”
She lit another cigarette from the smoldering butt she’d been working on before adding, “It must be something in the air, or that comes up from the land itself.”
All Hunter could do was think of the former Yugoslavian Republic, or Rwanda, or any of the how many other places in the world where intolerance was the norm, genocide the solution.
“I think it’s an unfortunate part of human nature,” he said.
“Maybe so, but it also seems particularly Irish to me. What are we known for?”
“Before or after Riverdance?”
“Ha, ha. No, I’m serious.” She held up a hand and ticked them off. “Drinking, fighting, melancholy… and overwrought songs and novels concerning the three. It’s bloody pathetic, but you know, it’s not such a bloody lie, either. Christ knows I like a drink myself, and I’m just as liable to give someone a whack to settle a difference as talk it out.”
“I think you’re generalizing.”
“Well, of course I’m generalizing. But the thing with generalizing is that it holds a certain grain of truth, overall. Look at the peace process Blair’s negotiating. Everybody’s going, hurrah, but if you think Northern Ireland’s not still a bloody powderkeg waiting the tiniest spark to set it off, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you.”
There was nothing Hunter could add to that.
“Anyway,” Miki went on, “what seems to be happening here is, one, the
Gentry plan to use Donal as their Summer King, and two, something to do with that—maybe the power they’ll accrue—is going to let them take the land here from its own genii loci.”
“That’s presupposing any of this is real,” Hunter said. “Summer Kings. Magical powers. Even the genii loci.”
Maybe especially them, he added to himself.
Miki nodded. She butted out her cigarette into the ashtray and for once didn’t immediately light another.
“I know it sounds mad. But there’s something else b
esides us in the world, don’t you think? And if there is, who’s to say what it’ll be like? You’ve seen the Gentry. They’re not just creepy, there’s something more to them.”
Hunter put the palm of his hand against his side.
“Being nasty doesn’t also make them supernatural,” he said.
“But where do they live? How do they live? All they do is speak bloody Gaelic, so how do they get by?”
“They spoke to me in English,” Hunter said. “With a thick accent, I’ll grant you, but it was still English.”
“Fine. But that doesn’t change the otherness of them.”
“And I still say—”
“I know, I know. But ever since I listened to Donal go on about them last night, I’ve had a bad feeling that all this shite Fergus and my da’ talked about could be real.”
“So we need to rescue Donal from them.”
“I don’t think that can be done,” Miki told him. “You know Donal. That moroseness of his isn’t all an act. If he thinks he sees a way out, a way to get even with the world, he’d take it. And he’s so bloody stubborn.”
“Unlike you.”
That won him a faint smile.
“I’m only stubborn when I’m right,” she said.
“And you’re always right.”
The smile grew a little. “As good as,” she said, before it went away again.
“So what is it you want to do?” Hunter asked.
“It’s not a want so much as a need.”
Hunter nodded encouragingly.
“I don’t want to see them take what isn’t theirs from those who were here before them.”
“But that’s how it works,” Hunter said. “Isn’t history one long summation of conquests and the like? The Celts didn’t originate in Ireland—they took it away from someone else.”
“That doesn’t make it right.”
“No. But… well, why wait until now? What happened when these Gentry showed up with the original conquering Celts?”