Himself(50)
Benny, riveted, moved closer, but in doing so disturbed her. She jumped to her feet with her hands held behind her back and the kind of bold expression that invited violence.
Benny gamely lunged forwards to grab hold of her and give her a bit of a shake. But as soon as he laid hands on her she came alive and twisting under him, all teeth and hair. Then the little bitch laid a fierce bite on his hand. It was a bite that could have come from a rat or a dog. (Indeed, Benny would still have the stamp of Orla’s teeth on him seven years later when he died roaring of a tumefied liver.) The child fled from the graveyard, dropping a handful of papers in her haste. Benny picked them up and was astounded. By the time Benny took the evidence to Father Jim, he had already told ten people.
Orla was in deep shit.
Chapter 22
May 1976
Mahony is a natural.
As soon as he gets up onto the stage a peculiar kind of magic starts to happen. Some spit on his name, but they feel it. Some wish him to hell, or back to Dublin, but they feel it. Every last judgemental do-gooder, backstabbing old biddy and jealous boyfriend feels it.
Mrs Cauley looks on in delight. It is what she expected and better than she expected. The town is needled, its bollocks are truly twisted, for try as they might they can’t resist Mahony.
She had known this from the start.
And so Mulderrig is caught between love and fear, spite and affection, with Mahony always on their minds. It’s everything Mrs Cauley could have hoped for: confusion, bewilderment and a good shake of their parochial notions.
She grins. The play is a Trojan bloody horse, landing Mahony right inside their defences, where he can disarm them with nothing more than a lively stride across the stage in an open shirt and a tight pair of breeches.
Such is the power of theatre.
Such is the power of a handsome, dark-eyed, daring man.
Father Quinn stands in the wings, watching.
Only he sees the peril of this ambush, this infiltration, which must lead to dropped guards and careless talk.
But still, he has to admire the cunning of his enemy. For he has no doubt it was Mrs Cauley’s plan from the first to take Mahony’s brazen charms and amplify them with the pagan spell of her theatre.
Father Quinn sees it all: a town run by an actress and a libertine, where illegitimacy is honourable and morality a crime. Where Orla Sweeney is a saint not a sinner, and those who fought her diligently, with unimpeachable resolve, for the sake of the village, are vilified.
This is no more than a second wave of corruption, bringing with it all the evil of the first. Orla is back, riding the village into submission; only her tactics have changed.
Father Quinn tirelessly monitors village opinion, sending out legions of poisonous whispers and whole armies of noxious slanders to counteract Mahony’s growing popularity. The villagers nod and agree but they forget to despise Mahony the moment they lay eyes on him.
It appears that nothing can destroy Mahony in the eyes of Mulderrig. Not scandal, not truth, not history. Mahony will take the good character freely hung on him as his past falls away like the arse-end of a burning comet.
Father Quinn watches and waits in the wings. He starts to follow Mahony everywhere, looming like mortality in dark corners, as shifty as a fox with a hen in every pocket. He starts to mutter and scrawl in notebooks. Sometimes he forgets to shave and change his underpants.
But he sees it all.
Soon most of the village are showing up at rehearsals and soon all of them could understudy, the way they mouth each word silently in chorus. Mammies start bringing down scones and sandwiches to keep the audience going and Tadhg has the bar boy running over and back with a tray from Kerrigan’s Bar until his legs threaten to fall off him.
Jack Brophy comes in off-duty. He watches Mahony out of the corner of his eye and smiles as he raises the set out of wood and canvas. Soon there is a cut-away cottage with half a thatched roof. Bridget Doosey paints the views beyond the open door using bruised colours in big strokes and the audience begin to see a far-off bay and mist-shrouded mountains.
The house on the stage becomes the exact place remembered from childhood or visited in dreams. The walls are whitewashed and the troughs are planted. Furniture arrives, solid and old-looking. The shelves of the bar are stacked with stone jugs and bottles. A bucket and mop are propped in the corner. Someone thinks to bring a mousetrap, or a jam jar full of flowers, or a pair of gingham curtains.
Róisín Munnelly brings her sewing down so that she can sit in the corner and listen as she finishes the costumes. And soon it is Róisín that Mahony’s looking at when he says his lines most gently, and she scuppers more than a few easy seams in confusion because of it.
Father Quinn sees it all.
And he bites his hands in the dark and waits for his moment to come, for he knows how this will end.
Mulderrig will bring down a plague on itself and it won’t be the first time.
Chapter 23
May 1976
It is a truth universally unacknowledged that when the dead are trying to remember something, the living are trying harder to forget it.
Mrs Cauley has been interrogating her commode for the past half hour. In the absence of reliable testimony from the living she has decided to turn to the dead. Recognising the dead priest’s description from Mahony’s anecdotes of his drunken evening with Desmond, she has had the haunted commode moved to her bedside in order to extract a statement from the late Father Jim Hennessy.