Chapter 23: The Man in the Garden

I went in and I bolted the door and I did not go to the garden. I went up to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed with the light off and looked out of the window at the yard, and the yard was dark and the buoy was a black shape against the wall and nothing moved.

At about eleven I heard the gate.

It was a small sound, the click of the latch going up and then down again, and then boots on the path, and then nothing. I did not go down. I sat on the bed with my hand on the ring in my pocket and waited, and the boots did not come to the door.

They stopped in the garden. I got up and went to the back window and looked down and there was a man standing in the middle of Siobhan's vegetable bed with his hands in his pockets and his face turned up to the window.

He was not young. He was somewhere in his fifties and he had grey hair going white at the temples and a long face and a nose that had been broken at some point and healed badly. He wore a dark coat that had seen weather and a scarf wound twice around his neck, and he was standing on the cabbages as if he had not noticed them.

"Miss Niamh," he said. His voice carried up to the window easily and it had an accent I could not place, somewhere north of Dublin. "I am not going to knock. If I knock the whole road hears it. Come down to the garden and we will talk in the dark like two sensible people."

"Who are you?"

"A man who has been waiting a week for you to stop being a grieving sister and start being a guard." He took his hands out of his pockets. "I knew your sister. I am sorry about your sister. And I have been standing in that garden for an hour while the Alpha told you she has buried three claimants, and I have a thing to say to you about that."

I went down. I put the back door on the latch so I could get in again and I went out into the garden in my coat and my boots and I stopped ten feet from him with my hand in my pocket.

"Say it."

"The Alpha has not buried three claimants," he said. "She has buried five. There were two before your sister who are not in the ground on the hill and who are not in the charter and whose names nobody in this village says out loud. One was a man called Donal who came down from Donegal in 1969 and made a claim and lost and was found on the rocks a week later with his boots on the wrong feet. The other was a woman called Roisin who was born in this village and went to America and came back in 1975 and asked too many questions about the fire in 1961." He looked at me. "Your sister was the seventh. There was a woman in 1981 who they called a boat claim and there was a man from the north in 1974 and there was your sister this year. Five before her and two after her and not one of them in the ground on the hill behind the church."

"How do you know that?"

"Because I have been keeping a list for twenty years and my list is longer than the Alpha's." He took a step forward and I took a step back and he stopped. "I am not here to hurt you. If I was here to hurt you I would not have stood on the cabbages and announced myself. I am here to tell you a thing that will keep you alive until Sunday, and then I am going to go away and you are not going to see me again until you need me."

"What thing?"

"Your sister was not the first wolf in this village to be taken and held." He said it quietly. "The clause in the charter about a challenger who is taken and held was put there in 1975. It was put there by a lawyer from Galway at the request of the Alpha's mother, and the reason she wanted it put there is that she had just done the same thing to Roisin and she wanted the law to say that a held challenger meant a vacant seat, because she thought it would make her look lawful." He smiled without any warmth. "It did not make her look lawful. It made her look like a woman who had read her own charter too carefully. And when the co-op found out what she had done, she had to hold a vote in the hall to keep her seat. She won it by two votes. Two votes, Miss Niamh. That is how close this village came to being free of that family fifty years ago."

I stood in the dark garden with my hand on the ring. "Who are you?"

"A man with a list." He put his hands back in his pockets. "There is a second thing. The enforcer Korkut is not here because the Council sent him. The Council has not sent an enforcer to this coast in fifteen years. He is here because the Alpha sent for him, and he is here because she is going to need him on Saturday, and the reason she is going to need him on Saturday is that she is not taking the Mary Rose out to prove that the line of Maeve is finished. She is taking it out because there is a thing on that boat that she wants the whole co-op to see, and when they have seen it they will not vote for you even if you put the ring in their hand."

"What thing?"

"That I do not know. I know it is in the locker in the boat and it came from Galway in the spring and it came in a box with the Council's seal on it, and the woman with the red hair brought it." He looked at me. "You have met the woman with the red hair, or you have met the idea of her. Ask yourself why a woman who was banished nine years ago is doing the Alpha's errands, and ask yourself what she is being paid, and then ask yourself what she would do if the payment stopped."

He turned and walked toward the wall.

"Wait," I said. "Your name."

"Not tonight."

"Then tell me one thing that is not a riddle. Why did you come to me and not to the co-op?"

He stopped at the wall with his hand on the stones.

"Because I came to the co-op in 1975," he said, "and the co-op gave me to the Alpha in a hall with a vote, and I have spent twenty two years paying for it. I came to you because you are the first wolf in this village in fifty years who has not asked the co-op for anything." He swung himself up onto the wall. "The two votes in 1975 were a man called Ronan and a man called Fionn. Ask the healer about the night he voted against the Alpha's mother and what it cost him. And Miss Niamh. When your sister wrote to me in February she wrote one thing at the bottom of the letter that I have not been able to forget. She wrote, if I am wrong about this, tell my sister I was wrong, and tell her to go home. She was not wrong. But you should know that she knew she might be."

He dropped down on the other side of the wall and his boots went along the lane and then there was nothing.

I stood in the garden for a long time. The wind came up and the cabbages moved and the sea was a sound on the left. Then I went in and bolted the door and sat down at the kitchen table and got out my sister's letter and read it again by the light of the lamp, all four pages, and I came to the bottom and I read the last line that I had read a dozen times and had not understood.

"If I am wrong about this, tell my sister I was wrong, and tell her to go home."

And underneath it, in smaller writing, so small that I had taken it for a fold in the paper: "The healer voted against Eileen. Ask him what it cost."

I put the letter down. I sat in the kitchen with the lamp and the clock and the wind and I thought about an old man in a brown cardigan with a button missing who had told me he had been a coward for sixty years. And then I thought about the word he had used. Sixty. He had said sixty and I had not heard it.

I got up and put my coat on and went out into the lane and up to the healer's cottage, and the light was still on in his window and I knocked on the door.

Ronan opened it in his nightshirt again and looked at my face and said, "You have had a visitor."

"A man in the garden. He told me the charter clause about a held challenger was put there in 1975 after the Alpha's mother did the same thing to a woman called Roisin. He told me the co-op found out and there was a vote and Eileen kept her seat by two votes." I looked at him. "He told me the two votes were you and Fionn. And he told me to ask you what it cost."

Ronan stood in the doorway with the candle in his hand and his old face went through a thing I had not seen on it before, which was not grief and not shame but something closer to anger.

"Come in," he said. "And shut the door. And this time I am going to tell you the whole of it, and when I have finished you are going to understand why I have been a coward for sixty years, and why I am not going to be one for the rest of this week."