Galore - Michael Crummey [53]
Virtue was almost five months pregnant when Gallery killed Elias Fennessey, setting on the man as he walked to the outhouse in the early hours of the morning. Gallery slit his throat from ear to ear with a fish knife that had been stropped to a razor edge, then walked the Tolt Road to his own home, the blood on his cuffs freezing solid in the cold. The door was barred and he climbed onto the roof to lower himself down the wooden flue into the blackened fireplace. He caught Virtue as she was shifting the chair from the door to run, dragging her back into the room by the hair, slashing at her with the knife. He pinned her to the floor until she exhausted herself and lay still. —Please, she said. —Don’t hurt the baby.
—I killed him, Virtue, just as I promised I would.
—I don’t know what you’re talking about, she said. —You’re drunk.
Gallery raised himself a little higher as if trying to get a better look at her in the near dark and he spat full into her face. He said, I killed the father of your bastard child.
Virtue turned her head away. —If that were true you’d be a dead man, Martin Gallery, and the world would be better for it.
Daniel Woundy came for Callum as soon as Elias’s body was discovered and they gathered half a dozen others to go after the murderer. They went straight to the house in the droke where the door stood open and Virtue lay as pale as sea ice on the floor inside. It was the bitter cold or blind luck that saved her bleeding to death when Gallery lost his certainty or his nerve, leaving her where she was, slashed at the neck and chest.
Virtue hovered near death awhile. Devine’s Widow replaced her dressings morning and evening, inspecting the state of the rough stitches she’d sewn in with needle and thread.
—The baby, Virtue whispered each time she opened her eyes. —The baby isn’t moving, Missus. I don’t feel him moving.
Devine’s Widow pinned Virtue to the bed against her panic, trying to keep the stitches in place. —The child is dead, she told her.
Gallery was found floating under Spurriers’ premises in the harbor a week after Elias was killed. He’d stripped down to his shirtsleeves before throwing himself into the ocean and had been dead in the water a long time. But his two hands were still black with soot.
Virtue birthed the tiny corpse on the eve of Valentine’s Day and she spent the long months of convalescence in her room off the kitchen in Selina’s House. Absalom Sellers was nearly seven years old and appointed himself Virtue’s nursemaid, bringing her water and clearing away her dishes and emptying her honeypot in the mornings. He knew nothing of the circumstances surrounding Virtue’s injuries and that particular silence was so familiar to him he thought for a time she might be his mother. The boy was never let alone outside Selina’s House, held apart from the larger community of Paradise Deep to spare him stumbling upon the details of his parents’ deaths. The slight stutter he’d always suffered multiplied in his isolation, like mold invading an abandoned house, and Virtue fell in love with the boy’s articulate reticence, his refusal to ask the first question about her torment. He made a habit of bringing her gifts, a piece of sea glass or an eagle feather or a finger of polished driftwood, and they carried on a subtle exchange after she took up her duties as housekeeper, placing scavenged presents in one another’s path through the house. They each found a salve for their separate losses in the other and as the months passed it looked as if they might escape their individual nightmares together.
After the first anniversary of Elias’s death Virtue began catching sight of her dead husband as she made her way to the henhouse to collect eggs in the morning, sitting in the highest branches of a tree to peer in the second-floor windows, occupying the darkest corners of a room beyond the reach of Ralph Stone’s lamps. She thought she was losing her mind until other servants began telling stories of a stranger on the property who couldn’t be seen but in glimpses, and eventually