Chapter 7: What the Charter Says

The boathouse was still smoking when we got there. Two of the co-op men were standing by the slip with buckets and a look on their faces like men who had been told to be there and had not been told why, and the stone walls were black up to the roof line and the roof itself was gone entirely. The smell of it was in the air for a hundred yards, wet char and something sweeter under it, and the tide was coming in over the slip and taking the ash out to sea in grey flakes.

Declan spoke to the men. I did not listen. I stood at the edge of the slip and looked at the water, and then at the ground around the walls, and then I walked the outside of the building the way I would have walked a burned-out flat in Dublin.

There was a petrol can on its side in the grass twenty feet from the wall. There was a length of hose near it. The lock on the seaward door had not been broken; it had been opened, and then the door had been closed again and the fire set inside. A person who breaks into a place breaks the lock. A person who owns a key opens it and locks it behind them when they leave. I crouched by the door with the smell of petrol in my nose and thought about a silver-haired woman with a key to the locker and a key to the boathouse and an order she had given on the headland under the moon.

The co-op men came over and one of them said, "There is nothing to be done, Declan. It went up like a match."

"It went up like a match because it was soaked in petrol," I said.

They both looked at me. The older of the two, a man with a red face and a great grey moustache, said, "There was paint stored in there. Thinners and the like. That will go up quick enough without any petrol."

"There is a petrol can in the grass behind you."

He turned. He looked at the can. He looked back at me, and his red face got a shade redder, and he said, "That will have been there from the boats."

"You keep petrol for the boats in the boathouse?"

"Aye."

"But the boathouse has burned down."

"Aye."

"Then the petrol should have burned with it." I stood up. "Unless someone carried it out to the grass after the fire was set, and then left it there, and I cannot think why a man would do that unless he wanted to be able to say, look, there is a petrol can in the grass, that is where the fire came from."

The man with the moustache opened his mouth. Declan put a hand on his arm.

"Go home, Tom," he said. "Both of you. I will deal with this."

They went. I watched them up the road and then I turned to Declan, and he was already looking at me with an expression I had not earned from him before, something like the first real look a man gives you when he stops seeing a stranger.

"Petrol can," he said.

"Petrol can. A key, not a broken lock. And the fire set on the seaward side so the smoke would blow out over the water and nobody in the village would see it until it was well going." I put my hands in my pockets. "You told me the boathouse had a locker that only three people had keys to. Who else knew what was in it?"

"Siobhan knew. I knew. The Alpha knew. And whoever your sister told." He looked at the black walls. "There was a woman in the village in February. Nora said it. A stranger from Dublin."

"Bridget." I said it before I had decided to. "There was a bus ticket in the cottage with that name on it. A library card too. And a bag of clothes in the wardrobe. My sister was hiding someone."

Declan's face changed. He looked at the burned boathouse and then at the water and then at me, and he said, "Did this Bridget have a second pair of boots?"

"Black ones. With a roll to the right foot."

"Then I know who your sister was hiding, and you are not going to like it." He turned and walked away from the slip, up the grass toward the road, and I had to go after him. "Nine years ago there was a woman in this village called Bridget who was born here and went to Dublin and came back for a summer. She was a schoolteacher. She had a room in the hall and she taught the children their letters, and in the autumn she left and did not come back." He stopped. "The following spring Mairéad told the co-op that Bridget had broken the charter and had been banished, and that anyone who spoke her name would answer for it. Nobody has spoken it since."

"Banished for what?"

"She would not say. She said the charter did not require her to give a reason, only a vote." His jaw was tight. "I was a young man then. I was not Beta. I voted with the rest of them and I have regretted it every year since, because Bridget was a good teacher and a kind woman and she had done nothing that anyone could name."

"So Bridget came back in March, after nine years, and Siobhan hid her." I was thinking out loud. "And Bridget went up to the high ground with a map and a box of matches, and Siobhan was frightened, and a week later Siobhan was dead, and now the boathouse is burned. What was Bridget looking for up on the peat cuts?"

"The place where the old charter was kept," Declan said. "Before the hall was built, the charter lived in a stone house up on the high ground. The house fell in a hundred years ago and the ground was never cleared, and there are stones up there that nobody has looked at in living memory."

"And what is up there that Mairéad would burn a boathouse to keep hidden?"

"She would not burn a boathouse for the stones. She would burn it because Siobhan put something in that locker that came out of the stones." He turned to face me. "Come up to the harbor office. I am not going to explain the rest of it standing in the open road."

The office was cold. He put a match to the stove and put the kettle on and did not sit down. He stood with his back to the window and his arms folded and the rain coming on again against the glass, and he said, "I am going to say a thing to you and you are going to want to interrupt me. Do not interrupt me. When I have finished you can ask me anything you like and I will answer it."

"All right."

"This village is not a co-op," he said. "It has a co-op. The co-op is real and the boats are real and the catch is real and the county council has our returns in a filing cabinet in Galway. But the co-op is the skin on the outside of a thing that has been here a great deal longer. We are a pack, Niamh. We are wolves. Every family on this road is a wolf family and has been since before the Normans. The charter in the hall is not a set of rules for a fishing co-op. It is a set of rules for a pack, written down in the language that the co-op uses because that is how it has always been done, and the leader of the pack is called the Alpha and she rules the co-op because the co-op is how the pack feeds itself and pays its taxes and keeps its children in school."

I did not interrupt him. I sat on the edge of the desk with my hands between my knees.

"The Alpha's seat passes by blood or by challenge," he said. "A challenge is made by a token, which is a fishing weight with a charter number on it, and the token is placed on the table of the one who makes the claim, and the Alpha answers it or forfeits. The answering happens on the headland at the full moon. It is not a debate. It is a fight, and the loser leaves the territory for a year and a day, and if the loser is very old, or very proud, they sometimes do not leave at all." He looked at me. "Your sister made a claim in March. She put your mother's weight on Mairéad's table in front of the whole co-op and said the seat was stolen from her line twenty years ago and she was taking it back. Mairéad answered the claim. They went up to the headland. Siobhan lost."

I found my voice. "You said she was killed in the old way. In the office on the pier you said she was killed."

"I said that because I believed it." He was quiet a moment. "The night they went up to the headland, I was at the harbor. I heard the fight. I did not see it. When it was over Mairéad came down and told the co-op that Siobhan had yielded and gone into the water trying to swim for the far shore, and that the sea had taken her. I believed it for a week. Then the coroner told me she had been in the water only a night, and I stopped believing it."

"And the thing in the locker?"

"The thing in the locker is the thing Bridget found up on the high ground, and I do not know what it is, and I do not know how your sister got it, and I do not know who burned the boathouse to take it." He came away from the window and stood in front of me. "But I know this. There is a wolf in this village who has been able to hear things before they are spoken for as long as I have known her, and the whole co-op walks softly around her for a reason, and the reason is written in the charter. The charter has a clause in it that nobody talks about. It is in the old book, the one they keep in the frame in the hall, the one that is on display for the council inspector. It says that the Alpha may call on the pack to listen, and that when the pack is called, the pack hears as one."

"Call on the pack to listen," I said. "In English, please."

"In English, when the moon is full, the Alpha can mind-link with every wolf in the territory at once, and hear back whatever any of them is thinking near her." His grey eyes were steady on mine. "That is how she always knows. And that is why I am going to say the next thing I have to say to you in this room with the door shut and the stove going, and not on the road."

I waited.

"On Saturday night, Niamh, you will shift. You are a wolf and you have always been a wolf, and the pull is coming on you now whether you believe me or not. And if you are in this territory on Saturday night, and the Alpha calls the pack to listen, she will hear you. Not your words. Your mind. And she will know exactly what you are, and exactly where you are standing, and exactly what you are planning to do." He put his hand on the desk beside mine, close enough that I could feel the heat of it, and the tug behind my ribs came on so strong that my breath caught. "Which is why I am going to ask you again, and this time I want a straight answer. Will you let me help you? Will you come up to the high ground with me on the first night and let me show you what you are, before the moon takes you and there is no time left?"

The kettle began to whistle on the stove. Neither of us moved.

And then the office door opened, without a knock, and Cormac came in, and there was mud up to his knees and his face was white and his hands were shaking, and he said, "She knows. She called the pack to listen half an hour ago and she heard the woman with the grey plait talking on the shore and she knows you have been asking about the boathouse. And Da, she knows about the locker, because she just sent me up to the high ground to fetch the black boots out of the cottage and burn them with the rest of it, and I could not do it. I brought them to you instead."