Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [80]
"Does it?"
"Reminds you there's more to the whole business than you own little life." She gives me a wholly unmerited smile. "I like to think that no one ever really dies as long as their folks remember them."
"Perhaps they'd prefer to."
"Remember them?"
"Prefer to die."
"Oh. Oh I don't think so," says the woman, as if to reassure us both.
I ask to be directed to the Ladies; this seems the best excuse for poking around. For all the dark wood, most of these walls look new; these smooth beams have never had a sconce stuck in them. I hitch up my tights, careful not to tear them. I take off my heavy ring to wash my hands. My face looks back at me with a hint of defiance: no new lines today. On the wall, a Kondo-Vend machine offers me a Quality Range of Luxury Lubricated Sheath Contraceptives. I can tell I won't find what I'm looking for in Kyteler's Inn.
As I cross the narrow elbow of St. Kierán's Street, I find myself humming a tune, a very old one; I realise that it has been stuck in my head since Dublin. The words slide onto each other like water over worn rocks. Voice on anonymous voice, disciplined in melancholy resignation.
Quiconques veut d'amors joïr
Doit avoir foy et esptrance
Such patience the singers had back then, giving every melancholic syllable its own line of music, a full half minute to a phrase, as if they had all the time in the world. The seeker of love must have faith and hope. Faith to keep you longing, hope to relieve your despair.
The town has become a maze of gift shops and boutiques; I can't tell where anything used to be. As I step off a kerb, a car roars by, inches from my handbag. Labhair Gaeilge, says the bumper sticker, as if simple encouragement to Speak Irish could set my tongue to talking the language I've long forgotten.
What was Petronilla's first name, I wonder? The one she knew herself by when she was a raw servingmaid who could speak only two tongues and both of them with a County Meath accent. When her hair still fell loose under her white coif, not yet having been tucked away as the mark of womanhood. When she came in a cart to Kilkenny, telling her beads, before her mistress renamed her for the saint whose day it was, the Roman Virgin who tended Peter: Petronilla. What went through the girl's head those first months, I wonder, as she ran to order: "Fetch my Venetian brocade, the rayed one you fool," or "Strap on my pattens if you would not have me wade through every puddle in town," or (in a low voice) "Have you fetched candles of beeswax for the ceremony?"
Petronilla was Dame Alice's loyal bondswoman from the start; she was a dagger thrown back and forward between those ruby-weighted hands. The first Sabbath made her retch in a corner, but she said nothing, told no one, never broke trust. The girl had no malice of her own, but her mistress's orders girded her like chain mail, and obedience made her brave.
The most inexplicable thing is that at no point in her eventual imprisonment and trial did Petronilla try to run away. Did she keep hoping Dame Alice would return from England to burst the doors, with all the force of law or simply a click of her stained fingers? Or did the maid simply keep her garbled faith, offering herself as ransom for her vanished mistress, waiting on the pleasure of the dark master? Or, more likely, did some portion of her drugged conscience feel her execution to be a proper end to the story?
What is clear is that she was not one of the weeping, piteous victims who flock across the pages of history. She embraced her death as a final order. Does that make her mistress's betrayal better or worse? All the records have to say on the matter is that at the hour of her death, Petronilla declared that Dame Alice was the most powerful witch in the world.
I feel slightly faint. I am standing on a street corner with a slightly crazed expression on my face. A small girl leaning against a lamp post watches me; she has a purple birthmark the shape of a kidney. "Lights changed ages