Chapter 12: The Healer's Cottage

We came down off the high ground by the long way round, through the peat cuts and the furze, so that we would come into the village from the north and not past the hall. Declan carried the tin box in his jacket and I carried the photograph inside my shirt, and by the time we reached the shore road the church bell had stopped and the village was up and the gulls were loud over the pier.

"The healer's cottage," I said. "You said his name is Ronan. He was at the wake and he touched his chest when he saw me. He knew my mother."

"He knew your mother and he knew your grandmother, if that photograph is what I think it is." Declan stopped at the gate of the cottage and looked at me. "Before we go in, you should know a thing about Ronan. He has been the healer of this pack for fifty years. He brought every wolf in this village into the world and he sat with every one of them when they died. He is the only person alive who remembers the old days, and he does not like to talk about them, and when he does not want to answer a question he will offer you tea instead."

"Then I will not take the tea."

"You will take the tea. And then you will ask him again." He opened the gate. "He likes being asked twice. It is his way of finding out whether you mean it."

The cottage was down by the church, half hidden behind a wall of fuchsia and a wooden gate that had swollen with the rain and did not shut. There was a garden behind the wall, neat rows of cabbage and a herb bed with the leaves shining wet, and a small stone outbuilding with a slate roof and a chimney. The door of the cottage was open.

Ronan was in the kitchen with his sleeves rolled up and his hands in a basin of water. He was a small man, shorter than I had thought at the wake, with white hair that stood up off his head in tufts and a face like a wrinkled apple and brown eyes that were very bright. The brown cardigan with the missing button was hanging on the back of a chair and he was wearing a shirt that had been mended at the elbow. He did not look surprised to see us.

"Declan," he said. "And the woman with her mother's eyes. Sit down, the both of you, and let me get this blood off my hands."

There was blood on the water in the basin. I looked at it and then at the table, where there was a cloth and a bottle of something brown and a small sharp knife and a spool of thread.

"Tom's boy cut himself on a net hook," Ronan said, drying his hands on a towel. "Six stitches. He will not lose the hand, though he will tell everyone he nearly did." He hung the towel on the rail and came and sat down across from us at the table. "Well. What is it you have brought me?"

Declan put the tin box on the table. Ronan looked at it and did not touch it. Then he looked at me and his bright brown eyes went from my hair to my eyes to the shape of my face and back again.

"You shifted this morning," he said. "I can smell it on you. The first one is the hardest. How did it go?"

"I stayed," I said. "I did not run."

"Good. That is a strong wolf that does not run on the first night." He nodded slowly. "I told your mother, when she brought you to me as a baby, that you would be a strong one. She laughed at me. She said, Ronan, she has just been sick on my good shawl, she is not strong, she is a menace."

The kitchen went quiet.

"You knew me as a baby," I said.

"I delivered you. The night of the storm in November. Your mother had the cottage on the hill then, and your father was out with the boats and could not get back, and your sister was five years old and stood at the end of the bed holding a candle and would not be sent away." He smiled at the memory. "You came out with a full head of yellow hair and a pair of lungs on you that could be heard across the harbor. Your father said you sounded like a foghorn. He called you the foghorn for a year."

I could not speak. Declan put his hand flat on the table and said, "Ronan. We found this on the high ground, in the old charter house. In a cache under the peat."

Ronan looked at the tin box again. Then he looked at me and his face had changed, the brightness going out of it, and he said, "Open it. I am too old to be opening boxes."

Declan opened it and took out the photograph and set it on the table. Ronan looked at it for a long time. His hands were folded on the table in front of him and they did not move, and his face did not move either, and then he closed his eyes.

"Maeve," he said.

"Who is she?" I said.

"She is your grandmother. She was the Alpha of this pack before Mairéad, and she was Alpha for thirty years, and she was the best of us." He opened his eyes. "And she died in 1961 in a fire in the old charter house on the high ground, and there is not one word about her in the charter in the hall, and I have not said her name out loud in twenty years."

Declan had gone very still. "The fire in 1961. My father told me it was a lightning strike on an empty house."

"It was not lightning and the house was not empty." Ronan picked up the photograph and looked at it. "Maeve was in the house with the charter and with two other wolves. The charter was saved. The two wolves were saved. Maeve was not." He put the photograph down. "That is the story that the pack was told. It is the story I helped to tell."

"Why?" I said. "Why would you help to tell a lie about your own Alpha?"

Ronan got up and went to the stove and put the kettle on. His back was to us and his hands were busy with the tea things and he did not answer for a while.

"Because the woman who came out of that fire and took the Alpha's seat told me that if I spoke the truth she would put every wolf in this village out of the territory before the year was out," he said. "And because I was a coward. And because the two wolves who were saved from the fire were children, and she had them in her hand, and I did what she told me so that they would not be harmed." He turned around. "The two children were your mother and your aunt. Your mother was sixteen. Her sister was nine. And the sister was named Siobhan, the same as your sister, because your mother named her first daughter after the little girl who came out of the fire."

I put my hands flat on the table because they had started to shake and I did not want him to see it. "My mother had a sister."

"Your mother had a sister and the sister was taken out of this village in 1961 and no one has spoken of her since." Ronan brought the teapot to the table and set it down. "I do not know where she went. I know that your mother never spoke of her, and I know that when your mother was dying she sent for me and told me to keep an eye on her girls, and she told me one thing more. She said, Ronan, if the yellow haired one ever comes back, tell her the truth about the fire. Tell her everything. And then let her decide what to do."

The tea was going cold in the pot. The wind came up and rattled the little window and somewhere out in the garden a blackbird was singing.

"Ronan," Declan said. "The cache on the high ground. It was dug in March and it was dug again recently, within the last week. There was petrol on the earth. Someone has been up there and taken something out of it, and someone has tried to burn the place where it was buried. Do you know what was in that cache besides the photograph?"

Ronan did not answer. He poured the tea, three cups, and pushed one toward each of us, and then he sat down and folded his hands again.

"Your sister came to me in February," he said to me. "She came at night and she sat where you are sitting and she asked me about the fire. She had been reading the old charter, the one that is not in the hall, and she had found the name Maeve in it, and she had worked out that the dates did not add up. I told her what I have just told you." He looked at the cup in front of him. "She was quiet for a long time. And then she said, Ronan, if there was another copy of the old charter, a copy that was not in the hall and not in the frame, where would it be? And I said, the only other copy was in the old charter house, and the old charter house burned in 1961. And she said, no it did not. The house burned. The charter did not."

Declan leaned forward. "What did she mean by that?"

"She meant that she had found something. She would not tell me what. She said it was not safe to tell me and it was not safe to tell anyone." Ronan looked up at me. "Three days later she was dead. And now you are here, with the yellow hair and the eyes, and the pack is frightened of you, and Mairéad is taking a boat out on Saturday to prove to everyone that the line of Maeve is finished." He picked up his tea and drank it. "I am eighty years old and I have been a coward for sixty of them. I am not going to be a coward for the rest."

"Then tell me what was in the cache," I said. "You know. I can see it on you."

Ronan put his cup down. "The cache was mine. I dug it in 1961, the night of the fire, with your mother standing beside me holding a lamp. We put the photograph in and we put the old charter in, and we put in one thing more, a thing that Maeve had been keeping in the charter house and had told your mother to save if anything ever happened to her." He looked at me. "It was a ring. A silver ring with a crescent moon on it. And your sister came to me in February and told me she had dug it up."

The kitchen was very quiet. Out in the harbor a boat's engine turned over and caught, and the sound of it came up through the garden wall.

"Where is the ring now?" I said.

"I do not know. Your sister would not say. She said she had put it somewhere safe and that when the time came she would bring it out in front of the whole co-op and it would end Mairéad's rule in an hour." Ronan's bright old eyes were steady on mine. "And then she died, and I thought the ring was lost. And now a woman from Galway comes back to this village in March and digs on the high ground in the dark and finds something, and a week ago the boathouse burns." He reached across the table and took my hand, and his hand was warm and dry and very old. "Your sister sent the woman from Galway here. She sent her to dig up the cache because she did not trust anyone in this village to do it. And whatever Bridget found, she did not keep it. She put it back in that locker, and then someone took it, and now you are the only one left who can find it."

The blackbird sang. The boat's engine faded out toward the mouth of the harbor.

"Who else knew about the cache?" Declan said.

"Your mother knew," Ronan said. "She was standing beside me when I dug it. And your father knew, because he was the one who carried the lamp when it was too heavy for her." He looked at Declan. "And if your father knew, then when your father died in 1987 and Mairéad came to sit with the body before the wake, she had a whole night in this village with an old man who had just lost his best friend and no one to talk to but the woman who had come to pay her respects."

Declan's face had gone the colour of the sand.

"You told her," he said.

"I did not tell her with my mouth. I told her with my grief, which is the same thing to a woman who can listen." Ronan let go of my hand. "I am sorry, Declan. I have been sorry for thirty years."

The door of the cottage opened and a woman's voice said, "Ronan, the boy is bleeding again through the stitches, will you come."

We all turned. Nora from the shop was standing in the doorway with her coat on and her face flushed, and when she saw me and Declan at the table her face did something complicated, and she said, "I am sorry. I did not know you had company."

"Tom's boy," Ronan said. "I will be there in a minute." He stood up and put the photograph back in the tin box and closed the lid. "Take this with you," he said to me. "Do not leave it in my house. And Niamh, there is one thing more, and then I want you to go and not come back until Saturday."

"Say it."

"When Maeve was Alpha, there was a tradition in this pack that the Alpha's ring was given to the heir on the night of her first shift, in front of the whole co-op, by the old Alpha, with the charter in her hand." He looked at me. "The ring that your sister dug out of the cache is that ring. It has been underground for thirty six years. If it comes out in front of the co-op, with the old charter in your hand, then the pack will know what it means before Mairéad can say a word. It will not be a challenge. It will be a crowning."

Nora said from the doorway, "Ronan. The boy."

"In a minute, woman." Ronan put his hand on my shoulder. "Find the ring before Saturday. If you do not find it by Saturday, do not go up to the high ground, because Mairéad will not let you leave it alive." He turned and went out through the back and Nora stood aside for him and looked at me across the kitchen with an expression I could not read at all.

Then she said, "There is a man in the village asking for you. He came into the shop half an hour ago and bought a bar of chocolate and a bottle of water and he asked me where he could find the woman who used to be a guard in Dublin." She pulled her collar up. "He said his name is Padraig and he said he was your partner and he said to tell you he has been driving all night."