Chapter 50: What Cormac Won't Confess

We went out the back way through the garden and down the bank to the cove below the cottage, and Cormac came with us because Declan would not leave him behind with two men at the gate and a woman in the hall who could call him with a word. The boat was a small open one with an outboard and we got in and went along the shore under the headland with the engine at half throttle and the sky going from grey to a thin cold yellow over the sea.

The north side of the headland was black rock and steep grass and no track at all, and we came up onto the cliff path from the water and lay in the furze and looked at the coastguard cottage.

It was a low stone building with a slate roof and a chimney and two windows, and it stood on a shelf of rock above the sea with a wall round it and a gate that had fallen off its hinges. There was smoke coming out of the chimney and there was a light in one of the windows and the door was shut.

"There is someone in it," Declan said. "There has been someone in it for thirty six years and I have signed the paper for the coal and the paraffin and the food and I have never once come up here to look."

"Who signs for the coal and the paraffin?"

"The co-op. The Alpha signs it and the Beta countersigns it and it goes into the co-op's books as a maintenance payment for a property that is not used." He looked at the cottage. "I have countersigned it twenty times."

We went down the cliff path in the furze and came to the wall and went over it and across the yard to the door. There was no lock on the door. There was a bolt on it and the bolt was on the outside and it was drawn.

I put my hand on the bolt and looked at Declan and he nodded, and I drew it back and opened the door.

The room was small and warm and clean. There was a fire in the grate and a bed in the corner with a patchwork quilt on it and a table with a bowl and a jug and a plate and a cup. There was a chair by the fire and there was a woman in the chair.

She was old. She was older than Ronan and she was very thin and her white hair was long and loose and her hands were in her lap and she was looking at the door with her head up and her eyes open. Her eyes were sky blue. She had my mother's eyes and she had my eyes and she had the eyes of the woman in the photograph in the tin box under the peat.

"Siobhan," I said.

She looked at me for a long time. Then she said, "You are not Siobhan. You have her hair but you are not her. Siobhan is the one who came in the spring with the light and the spade and the cold hands and she sat on that floor and she told me she was my sister's daughter." Her voice was dry and very quiet and it went on. "You are the other one. The one in Dublin. The one she said was a guard."

"I am the other one," I said.

"Then you are Niamh." She lifted one hand and let it fall. "I have been waiting for you since April."

Declan was behind me in the door and Cormac was behind him and I heard Cormac's breath go out of him.

"Ma'am," Declan said. "My name is Declan and I am the Beta of this pack and I have been signing the papers for your coal and your paraffin for twenty years and I did not know you were here."

"I know who you are." The old woman looked at him. "You are Fionn's boy. You have his chin and you have his way of standing in a door." She looked past him at Cormac. "And that is the boy. The one the Alpha calls. I have heard her call him from here on the nights when the wind is right. He walks up the shore road to the hall and he goes in and the door shuts."

Cormac had gone white. He came into the room slowly and stood in the middle of it with his hands at his sides.

"You have heard her call me," he said.

"I have heard her call you on the wind for eight years." The old woman looked at him. "She calls a wolf with the pack voice and the wolf goes to her and does what she says and the wolf does not know why. I have been listening to it since I was brought here and there is not a night when I do not hear it." She turned her blue eyes back to me. "You have come to take me out of this cottage."

"I have come to take you out of this cottage," I said. "But there is a thing I have to ask you first and I am going to ask it now because there is no time. On the night of the fire in 1961. The old charter house on the high ground. You were nine years old and you came out of the fire with my mother and there was a woman in the house who did not come out. What did you see?"

The old woman was quiet for a long time. The fire ticked and the sea came up on the rocks below the wall.

"I saw my mother go into the house," she said. "And I saw Eileen go in after her. And I saw the door shut and I heard a thing fall. And then I saw the fire in the window and my sister took me by the hand and we ran down the hill and we did not stop until we came to the healer's cottage." She looked at the fire. "I was nine years old. I told the healer what I had seen and he told me to say nothing and he put me in this cottage and I have been in it since. And every year the woman with the silver hair comes to the door and asks me if I am ready to say that my mother set the fire herself and every year I say no."

"Mairéad comes to the door," I said.

"The daughter. She came first with her mother and then alone. She came in March this year with the woman with red hair and she stood in that doorway and she said, aunt, you are an old woman and you will not live forever, and when you die I will put a stone on the hill and I will write on it that Maeve burned herself and her own child in her own house and no one will ever say otherwise." The old woman looked at me. "And then my sister's daughter came in the spring with the light and the spade and she sat on that floor and she said, aunt, I am going to take you out of here, and I said, child, you cannot, and she said, I can and I will and it will be on a Saturday in the summer."

I knelt down in front of the chair and took her old hand.

"There is a thing I have to ask you and then we are going to take you out of this cottage and down the cliff and into a boat and you are never going to come back to it." I looked at her. "On the night of the claim. The Thursday in March. There was a woman on the floor of the hall and there was a boy in the hall behind the table with his hands over his ears. You have heard the Alpha call that boy on the wind for eight years. Did you hear anything else on the Thursday night? Did you hear the woman on the floor?"

The old woman looked at Cormac.

"I heard her," she said. "The wind was from the south that night and it came up the cliff and into this chimney and I heard a woman say a thing that I have not been able to forget." She looked at Cormac. "She said, the boy is not to blame. She said it three times. She said, the boy is not to blame, the boy is not to blame, tell the boy it is not his fault."

Cormac made a sound and went down on his knees on the flagstones and put his hands over his face.

And then the door of the cottage opened and the woman with the silver hair was standing in it.