A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [99]
His father had smiled. “Now that is the definition of avoidable difficulty,” he said to his son. “Who but a fool would choose to live in such a wild, inhospitable place? No one but an Irishman would endeavour to haul furniture to such a grey, destitute, though”—he had admitted with an uncharacteristically dreamy look in his eye—“in certain lights, beautiful mountain.” From where he had been standing, he assured Branwell, he had been able to see traces of neither grass nor animal. This young O’Shea should have forgotten about the woman and her cows, his father insisted, should instead have walked in the opposite direction and got out of the place altogether, unless of course, he had been able to do something about draining the godforsaken bog, the vapours from which had undoubtedly floated up the mountain and killed him.
Branwell remembered this story now as he and Ghost continued to sweep, sand crunching under their feet when they moved and filling in the areas they had cleared just a short while before. His father, he realized, would have met a courteous people in Ireland, a people delighted by the appearance of a stranger, eager to relate their own history that, not being able to write, they would have carried with them—letter perfect—in their minds. They would have had the whole of their vast territory—thousands of acres—in their memories: each rock, each bush, all hills and mountains and the long beaches called strands. They would not have understood (and, according to his father, could not have understood) the idea of maps, maps like the ones Annabelle had shown him, and probably would have been suspicious of the notion that all known things could be reduced to a piece of paper no larger than a tabletop. They had named everything already, and from the sound of the names his father sometimes recited angrily, wistfully, the poetry of the naming had entered their speech. Ballaig Oisin was such a name.
“Ballaig Oisin,” he said, leaning on his broom. “Who but a fool would endeavour to remain in this impossible place just because it is beautiful under certain angles of light?” It was especially beautiful right at this moment when the dunes were painted mauve and pink by the lowering sun and the water beyond them was blue and black satin topped by white lace, made so by the same wind that was bringing sand into the interior corners of his hotel. In the bay, a stranded schooner tilted sideways, its bow driven deep into one of the new invisible sandbars just beneath the surface of the water. Even the lake itself seemed to have joined this conspiracy of relentless sand. For all he knew it could be turning itself into a desert.
“I’ve seen that boat,” Ghost nodded in the direction of the abandoned schooner. “I’ve seen that boat unfurl its sails and cross the bay in the middle of the night. Could see all the passengers too, and the crew, stretching out their arms and calling from the deck.”
Branwell raised his eyebrows and looked at his friend. “You dreamed that,” he told him. “Everyone on that ship waded to shore. In another week they could have reached land without getting their feet wet.”
“Dreamed it … saw it … makes no difference. A ghost ship is never a good sign.”
Branwell could hear the sounds Marie was making in the kitchen, cleaning up after the evening meal she had prepared for the three of them. It was autumn; there were never many guests remaining in the hotel in this season, but Branwell had every reason to believe that, next summer, there would be no guests at all. The Ballagh Oisin was finished. He was certain of this.
“You’ll be here for a while yet,” said Ghost. “You’ll stay here until your son moves and gets settled up in that big house on the hill.”
There were times when Branwell felt that Ghost’s telepathy was intrusive, but he had learned, over the years, to trust what the man had to say. “ What hill?” he asked. “What house?”
“Thirty