Chapter 59: The Sister I Never Knew

The hall was dark and the green door was locked and I went round the seaward side and in through the window that did not catch, the way Padraig had, and dropped down onto the floor of the co-op hall.

The lamp was on the long table where Ahern had left it and the frame was on the wall behind it and I went up the floor with the key in my hand and put it in the lock of the frame. It turned. The frame came off the wall and there was a press behind it, a shallow iron press with a door on it, and the door had a second lock and the key turned in that too.

The press had four things in it. There was a book bound in green leather with a clasp on it. There was a box of red wax with a seal in it. There was a bundle of papers tied with string. And there was a small tin box with a lid on it that was dusty and had a print of a hand in the dust.

I took the green book out first and opened it and there was the bloodline clause in the middle in the hand of the clerk who had written the first page and there was the clause about the land in the front in the form that a co-op could use, and on the inside of the cover there was a bookplate with a border of oak leaves round it and a name in ink: Siobhan Mac Carthaigh, 1901.

I took the tin box out and opened it. There was a ring in it. It was silver and heavy and the band was wide and the face of it was a crescent moon and inside the band there were letters and a date. S. 1921.

I put the ring on my finger. It fit.

Then I took the bundle of papers out and untied the string and spread them on the floor in the light of the lamp, and the first thing on the top of the bundle was a letter in my sister's hand.

It was addressed to me.

"N," it said. "If you are reading this then you have got into the press and you have got the book and the ring and you are the wolf I hoped you would be. There is a thing I have to tell you and I am going to tell it plainly because I am not going to be there to say it kindly. In April I went north with the salvage crew and I did not go north to build a pack. I went north because I had a broken mark and a broken heart and a sister in Dublin who did not know what she was and a village that was going to be given away on a boat in the summer. And in the north I found a woman who was living in a cottage on the coast with a pack of wolves who had been banished from this territory and she was building a thing out of them. Her name was Eileen and she was the daughter of the woman who burned our grandmother and she had been banished in 1988 and she had been waiting for twenty years for a wolf of the line of Maeve to come to her. She said, together we can take this village, and I said, I am not going to take this village with a wolf who killed a wolf in 1959, and she said, that was a lie my sister told, and I did not believe her and I went to Athlone. And I have been in Athlone since April and I have been watching the shore road and waiting for you. But there is a thing I did in the north that I have not told you and that I am going to write down now because I cannot carry it any longer. I gave her the record. The record of the shifts. I gave it to Eileen in the north because she said she needed it to prove the pack had been stolen, and I have been telling myself ever since that it was for the village. It was not. I gave it to her because she was the only wolf in the north who looked at me and did not see a claimant. She saw a woman with a broken mark and she put her hand on my arm and she said, I know what that is. And I have not been able to forgive myself for it. S."

I sat on the floor of the hall with the letter in my hand.

And then the mind-link opened.

I do not know why it opened then. Declan was somewhere in the village with his son and his fear and the weight of a seat he was going to have to hold in the morning. But the link went wide and it was not Declan's fear that came through it. It was a memory, and the memory was not mine.

There was a woman on a cliff in the north with her hair in the wind and she was laughing, and she was my sister, and she was not the sister I had known in Dublin. She had a rope in her hands and a pack of wolves behind her and she was shouting a thing at a man with a red face and she was alive in a way she had never been alive in the cottage on the hill. And in the memory there was a warmth that came off the wolves behind her, the warmth of a pack that would follow her into the sea, and it was the thing I had been looking for since the first night and I had not known I was looking for it.

And under the warmth there was a cold thing. There was a second woman in the memory and she was standing at the back with her arms folded and her face in the shadow, and she was watching my sister the way a woman watches a horse she is going to buy.

The link closed. The hall was dark and the lamp was on the table and the letter was in my hand.

I sat there for a long moment with the ring on my finger and the book on my knees and the letter in my hand, and then I got up and put the book in my coat and the papers in my coat and the tin box in my coat and I went out through the window and down the lane to Ronan's cottage.

He was still at the table with the charter open and he looked up when I came in and his face changed when he saw the ring on my finger.

"You found it," he said.

"I found it and I found a letter." I put the book and the papers on the table and sat down. "Ronan. There is a thing in the letter that I have to say out loud. My sister gave the record of the shifts to Eileen in the north in April and Eileen has it now. The whole record. Every first shift in this village for fifteen years. Names and dates and places." I looked at him. "And Eileen is coming down that shore road in the morning with a pack at her back and a claim and the record in her hand."

Ronan put the lamp down very carefully on the table.

"Then the record is not proof of the theft," he said. "The record is proof that your sister was gathering it for a claimant in the north. And if Eileen puts it in front of Ahern in the morning and says, this is the record I gathered with the help of the woman who is now in Athlone, then it will look as though your sister was working for her all along, and the co-op will believe it, because the co-op will see a woman who has been in the north and a record that was given to her and a claim that was made in March by a wolf who has been dead since April."

I sat at the table with the ring on my finger.

"There is one thing more and then I have to go to Ahern and I have to go to Athlone," I said. "In the letter she wrote, my sister said a thing about Eileen. She said, I am not going to take this village with a wolf who killed a wolf in 1959, and she said, that was a lie my sister told. My sister did not believe that Eileen killed a wolf in 1959." I looked at Ronan. "And Maire told us she was born in 1942 and she was the firstborn and she was sent to Galway in 1959 for a thing that could not be forgiven. And there is a thing in the letter that does not fit. My sister wrote that she was in the north with Eileen and that Eileen had been banished in 1988 and had been waiting for twenty years for a wolf of the line of Maeve. And she wrote, she put her hand on my arm and she said, I know what that is." I put my hand flat on the letter. "Ronan. A wolf with a broken mark can smell another wolf with a broken mark. And Eileen has been banished since 1988 and she has been waiting twenty years and she has been in the north building a pack out of wolves who have been banished from this territory. Who broke her bond?"