Chapter 83: The Book in the Boathouse

I did not answer her. I turned round on the track and went back down it with Declan behind me and the whole co-op watching and the moon coming through the fog.

“Where are you going?” Mairéad called. “The moon is up. The fight is now.”

“The fight can wait,” I said. “There is a thing in the boathouse that I have to see first.”

I went down the track and along the shore road to the burned shell of the boathouse and I went in through the gap in the seaward wall with a lamp and Declan behind me and the whole co-op coming after us in a crowd.

The floor was swept and the ashes were gone and the flagstones were bare. I went to the corner by the seaward door and lifted the iron ring and pulled the flagstone up and there was the well with the water in it and there was nothing else.

“It is not here,” Declan said.

“It is not in the well.” I put the lamp down on the stones. “There is a thing about this boathouse that I have been looking at since the first night and that I have not seen. The stones are flagstones and the flagstones are laid on a bed of sand and the sand is over a floor of boards and the boards are over a cellar and the cellar is the old net store and the net store has a door on the seaward side that was bricked up in 1979.” I turned round. “There is a second room under this boathouse and the fire did not reach it and the water did not reach it and the whole of it has been under our feet since the night my sister was put on that floor.”

Declan looked at the flagstones and then at the seaward wall and then at me.

“How do you know?” he said.

“Because the tide comes in under this shed and fills the well and the well is six feet deep and it has never once overflowed. There is a drain under it and the drain goes into the cellar and the cellar has a door on the seaward side that is bricked up and the water goes out through the brick.” I picked up the lamp. “Get me a crowbar.”

They got me a crowbar and I put it into the crack between the flagstones at the seaward end and I lifted and the stones came up one after another and under them there was sand and under the sand there were boards and under the boards there was a dark room.

It was the old net store. It was low and it was dry and it smelled of tar and salt and old rope. There was a table in it and a chair and a shelf along the wall with boxes on it and a chest in the corner with a lid on it and a book on the table.

I picked up the book.

It was a ledger with a black cover and a clasp on it and it was the same size and the same shape as the red ledger in the church and it was full of writing. The first page said: “The record of the pack of Dún Aonghasa, kept by Deirdre, wife of Fionn, in the year 1975.”

I sat down on the chair in the cellar under the boathouse with the lamp on the table and I opened it.

The first pages were the record of a woman who had been taking children out of this village since 1961. There were dates and names and the names of the families in the north who had taken them and the sums of money that had been paid. There was the girl in 1975 and the boy in 1976 and the daughter in 1979. There was a page for each of them and a note at the bottom of each page.

And there was a page near the back that was not a record of a child.

“In the winter of 1981 the Alpha came to this house and she said, Deirdre, there is a thing I want you to do and it is the last thing and then you are free. And I said, what thing, and she said, there is a woman in this village who is called Siobhan and she has a claim and I want you to take her out of this village and I want you to put her in the north and I want you to tell her that her child is in the north and that she will see her child if she does what she is told. And I said, I will not, and she said, then I will put your son out of this village and your husband out of his rank and I will tell the co-op what you have been doing since 1961.” The writing was getting worse and the ink was blotted. “And I did it. I took the woman out of this village in the night and I put her on a boat and I put her in the north and I told her the lie about her child. And I have been carrying it since and I am not going to carry it any longer and there is a thing I am going to do and I am going to do it tonight.”

The next page was in a different hand. It was a woman’s hand and it was small and neat and it said: “The woman who kept this book went off the cliff in the winter of 1981 and she was pushed. I was on the cliff path and I saw the wolf who pushed her and the wolf who pushed her was not the Alpha and it was not Tom’s father. It was the woman who had been in this village for a week and who had been in the north and who had taken the daughter in 1979 and whose name was Eileen. And I have written this down because I am the only wolf who saw it and because I am not going to live forever.”

I turned the page. There was one line on it and it was in the same small neat hand.

“The woman who went off the cliff was not Deirdre. Deirdre went to the north in the night and she is alive and the woman who went off the cliff was a woman from Galway who looked like her and who was paid to wear her coat.”

The cellar was very quiet. The lamp flickered. Declan was standing in the middle of the room with his hands at his sides and his face white.

“My mother is alive,” he said.

“Your mother is alive and she is in the north and she has been there since 1981 and she has been keeping a record of every child she took out of this village and every lie she told and every wolf who paid her.” I turned to the last page. “And there is a thing about the woman who pushed the woman from Galway off the cliff. The wolf who pushed her was Eileen. And the woman who wrote it down was the only wolf who saw it and she did not give her name and she said she was not going to live forever.” I looked at Declan. “I know that hand. It is the hand of the woman with the grey plait. It is Maire. And Maire is sitting in her cottage on the shore road and she has been sitting in it since 1981 and she has never once said what she saw.”