The Good People Read Online Free Page A

accepted a clay pipe, and spent the rest of the night smoking thoughtfully, watching the womenfolk and mourners circle Nóra like birds above a new-shorn field.
    The night ground down the hours. Many of the people, dulled and comforted by the heady fumes of burning coltsfoot, lay down to sleep on the floor, plumping beds out of heather and rushes and slurring prayers. Rain escaped down the chimney and fell hissing on the fire. A few kept their eyes open with stories and gossip, taking turns to bless the body and finding omens in the thunderstorm that thrashed the valley outside. Only Nóra saw the old woman rise from her corner, slip her hood back over her head and retreat into the darkness and the howling world.

CHAPTER
    TWO
    Furze
    N ance Roche woke in the early morning, before the fog had eased off the mountains. She had slept in the clothes she had returned home in and their damp had spread to her bones. Pushing herself up from her bed of heather, Nance allowed her eyes to adjust to the low light and rubbed at the cold in her limbs. Her fire was out – only the faintest suggestion of warmth met her outstretched hand. She must have fallen asleep in front of its heat before she could preserve the embers.
    Taking her shawl off a hook in the wall, she wrapped herself in the rough wool and familiar smell of hearth smoke, and stepped outside, snatching a water can as she left.
    The storm had thrashed the valley with rain all night and the woods behind her stunted cabin dripped with water. The fog was thick, but from her place at the far end of the valley, where the fields and bouldered slopes met the uncleared woodland, she could hear the roar of the river Flesk’s swollen waters. A short distance away from her cabin was the Piper’s Grave, where the fairies dwelt. She nodded respectfully towards the crooked whitethorn, standing ghostlike in the mist in its circle of stone, briars and overgrown grass.
    Nance tightened the shawl around her, joints creaking as she walked to the sodden ditch left by a collapsed badger set. Squatting unsteadily over the edge, she pissed with her eyes shut, her fingers holding on to bracken stalks for balance. Her whole body ached. It often did after a night of keening. As soon as Nance left any corpse house, a great, pulsing headache would swell in her skull.
    ’Tis the borrowed grief, thought Nance. To stand in the doorway between life and death racks the body and bleeds the brain.
    The slope down to the river was slippery with mud and Nance stepped carefully, wet autumn leaves slicked to the bare soles of her feet as she made her way through the brushwood. It would not do to fall. Only last winter she had slipped and hurt her back. It had been a painful week in front of the fire then, but the worst of it was that, injured, she had felt herself crease with isolation. She had thought she had grown used to a life alone, that the skittering presence of birds sufficed for company. But without visitors, without anything to do but rest in the darkness of the cabin, she had felt so violently lonely she had cried.
    ‘If there is one thing that will sink sickness deeper into the body, ’tis loneliness.’
    Mad Maggie had told her that. In the early days, when Nance was young. When her father was still alive.
    ‘Mark my words, Nance. That man who came by just now? No wife. Few friends. No brothers or sisters. The only thing keeping him company is his gout, and ’tis the loneliness of him keeping it there.’
    Maggie sitting in their cabin, pipe in mouth, plucking a chicken. Feathers in the air. The rain pelting outside. Feathers resting in her wild hair.
    That fall was a warning, Nance thought. You are old. You have only yourself to rely upon. Since then she had minded her body with tenderness. Steady steps on grass slippery with weather. No more reckless journeys to cut heather on the mountains when the wind growled. An eye to the fire and its crush of embers. A careful hand with the knife.
    The