'There are wolves in the woods, Rose,' he blurted out. 'And men with fox faces down by the river. There are things out there. Like the face watching us swim.'
But she was a thousand miles away. 'Watching me, he was,' she murmured. She took his hand and set it on her navel. 'Do you know what's in there, Michael?'
He struggled with the change of tack. 'Guts and things?'
She giggled. 'There's a wee girl in there, sleeping now, and when she wakes up she'll come out, and you'll have somebody to play with.'
He raised himself on to one elbow. 'Rose!'
'It's true, Michael. That's why I'm going away.' Her voice thickened but he hardly noticed.
'How did it get there?"He was still dubious. Her reply was drowned in thunder.
'And she'll come out ... here.' She touched herself again, lower down. His hand pursued hers, below the nightdress, brushed the curly mat of hair, found a narrow dip and followed it until his questing finger was on a moist pout of flesh and Rose tensed. Her hand closed over his, lifted it gently away. There was that tightness again, a steady pressure below his stomach. Rose tapped it, then took it in her hand through his nightshirt, squeezed gently. He thought his breathing would stop. The thunder raged on forgotten. A tense, ecstatic, terrifying second, and she released him, kissed his nose. The lightning made her smile perilous. 'I'm a fallen woman,' she whispered in his ear. 'I'm in mortal sin, Michael.'
The words were grown up, frightening. The Devil is listening, he thought. Mortal sin. Rose was going to hell, then. And she would never come back to him again.
'I'll say my prayers, Rose,' he whined. 'I'll pray for you.'
She laughed loudly, the thunder roaring its way along the roof like a mad horseman. 'Prayers! It's the priest is sending me away, Michael. It's him that's making me leave home. Prayers!' She sat up in the bed, as electric as the racing clouds in the wind-bitten sky beyond the window. 'Say no prayers for me. Save them for the child. It'll be a girl. I know it will be a girl. And they'll take it away like they drown the runt of the litter. It'll be a bastard, Michael. It has no father.'
Lightning forked in her eyes like luminous cat slits. She was as tense as a bent branch in the bed, blue light illuminating her face. When the lightning died Michael could see her eyes hovering disembodied before him, bright after-images.
'Don't forget me, Michael. And don't believe all that you hear. They're going to take me away, but if I don't return I want you to find me, to bring me back. Or my daughter,' she added in a whisper. And in the same low tone said: 'My soul.'
'You'll do that? You'll look for me no matter what they tell you? Promise?'
He promised, fearful and puzzled.
She smiled brokenly. 'There are worse things than sinners in the world, little Michael. Much worse.' Then they embraced each other in the narrow bed and lay like lovers until sleep muffled the thunder.
THE FARM SLEPT, the rags of the storm tumbling off in the west like the rear of a battered army. Down in the kitchen old Demon twitched and sniffed in his sleep, smelling ancient smells, seeing things he had sensed but never known—old things that were lodged for ever in the hind part of his canine brain. Snow and ice, and great rime-coated beasts lumbering through the drifts. The drip of water in caves, the scrape of teeth on warm, marrow-sweet bone. He whimpered, his claws scraping the stone floor, but he was an old dog and did not waken.
Rachel slept also, her dark tresses unbound in the bed, the hard lines of her face relaxed. She was dreaming.
Dreaming of her beautiful man, her sloe-eyed suitor with the red lips and skin thorn-blossom pale. The dark man with his clothes elegant and fine on him, tapering from the broad shoulders to the slender hips.
Still sleeping, her legs scissored a pillow, pulling it in to her.
But he had left her. Even when she had ... even when she had wanted it, had agreed, was aching for him in the grass with her prayer book thrown aside and her hair fanned out in the buttercups. The flower-print frock was up over her thighs, and if she had dared she would have touched herself where she wanted him to touch her, so desperate was her need. And he had smiled and wagged a finger. Left her without a word, her legs spread in the field and her clothes clinging to her.
Soundlessly and unconsciously, Rachel wept in her lonely bed. Old Mullan was dreaming too.
'That's a Papist name,' the recruiting sergeant had said, his UVF badges on his shoulders and his eyes as narrow as keyholes.
'I'm no Pape.'
'So you'd say fuck the Pope, then?'
'I-I would.'
'Say it.' And he had.
He was crumbling Flanders mud in his grimy fingers, as hard and pale as old chocolate in the baking sun. The sweat ran down under the lining of his helmet and the dust clung to it, streaking his face. His uniform was hot and sweat-soaked, hitched, and itching, and his webbing gnawed at his young shoulders. The dried-out earth glued itself to the blue-black oily barrel of the 303 and powdered the wooden stock as though claiming it. Far off there was the crump of guns.