Kit Read Free Page B

was all, somehow, unfair ; that she had been cheated. For he was only a man. How could a man, a man of middle height and weight, take up so much space, leave such a hole? She saw in her mind’s eye the barrel of claret which had been shot by the redcoat on the night Richard was taken – the wine spilling forth, the red lake on the floor. She became obsessed with the image. The smallest breach of a castle wall could let the enemy in; a single cannon shot in the midships could sink the greatest galleon. And even a small bullet hole could empty a barrel.
    Worst of all, her grief had a racking familiarity – the hole Richard left, so vast and cosmic, so small and domestic, was the same shape as the hole left by her father. Her body remembered this pain – she woke with the same sick, churning stomach, and lived her days with a constant, dull ache of unhappiness caged behind her ribs. Her mouth was dry and tasted metal, as it did when she held her hairpins in her mouth. Eating became a functional necessity, not a pleasure, for food was dust in her dry mouth. Her clothes ceased to fit. Her hair fell dark and lank. She felt herself emptying, that leeching, bleeding loss she had felt as a child. Sometimes her father’s fate and Richard’s became so muddled and entwined that she forgot that Richard was alive. It hardly seemed to matter; he was gone.
    Aunt Maura tried to comfort her – she had sent letters to the magistrate, to the mayor, even to Kit’s second cousin, Padraic Kavanagh, who had gone for a soldier. Kit would hear word soon. Richard would get leave eventually and return from wherever he was with a healthy commission. But Kit could not be comforted. She wandered around the gravestones of Glasnevin, reading the names on the headstones. The words beloved husband etched themselves into her mind as firmly as into the stone. She would stand for long moments, glassy eyed, before the tombs where husband and wife were buried together, envying them their eternal, night-black embrace under the earth. She would calculate how long they had been married, those brides of bone; then count the days she had been married to Richard. Then she counted the days he had been gone; marking them neatly with a stub of pencil on a piece of paper, as a prisoner might mark the walls that held him. Dreading, living through, then passing day thirty; the day which marked a dreadful milestone. Day thirty, the day when he’d been gone as long as they’d been wed. She kept the dreadful little tally of pencil marks folded in her bodice, where her sadness lived.
    Day thirty-one without Richard. Day thirty-two without Richard. She had to remind herself constantly that he wasn’t, as far as she knew, dead. Now he was gone she was sure that Richard was all she had wanted, that moment of doubt forgotten. Now she was left with the old folks and the regulars she realised how much she loved him and missed him. She would replay their first kiss, their first coupling, their every minute interaction. Even the time when he’d smiled at her, that last day, and she’d been too slow to smile back until he’d turned away. And this brought it home to her. The guilt. For of course, it was her fault Richard had been taken. That one, idle moment at the bar, when she had wished for more and missed his smile. That instant when she’d imagined Richard in a red coat, when she’d acted that sick little scene with him in the cellar, had she cursed him then and doomed him to the pressing? If she’d taken Richard upstairs to bed after they’d kissed in the beer cellar, if they’d left Aunt Maura to close up, he would not have been pressed. But the lure of those silvery shillings, those tinkling tempting coins, had been too much. And one, just one of those shillings they’d so greedily craved, had been his undoing.
    Sometimes she was angry with Richard himself – could he not escape? But she knew too well from her father’s tales that to escape from the army was to