is my time, he said.
Then do not be old before you are wise, she answered. Why do you try to stop me from doing what I like?
Don’t torment me, he said. Your music has made me complete.
And what of me?
Donal had unfurled in Nyssa a vast wilderness of touch. He left inevitable traces. For the first time she was divided from herself, awake to the frail melancholy of the flesh.
That night she stared out at the ice lace on the window, with a shivering fear of falling. She stamped her foot lightly to recapture herself, raised her hopeful fiddle and played the familiar reels in her “Nana’s Boots.”
Through the wall Donal searched for ever more intriguing pieces to play together. He showed her Bottesini’s “Grand Duo Concertante” as well as the “Passione Amorosa.” She felt that Bottesini favoured the bass parts. He gave her Bach’s “Chaconne in D” and improvised an accompaniment.
Lying on her back, balancing her fiddle upright on the tips of her fingers, Nyssa said, But it should challenge you as well.
Willingly Donal acquiesced. He looked for a piece that would please them both and pulled out Handel’s “Passacaglia.” Yes, he thought, its plucking, its romantic interludes, its hard, quick bowing and nimble finger work, yes, it will please her no end. He wandered into her practice room where she lay on the floor listening to “L’arte del arc.” She said, I’m busy. You just left.
That’s not what I came for. I have found a piece for you and me, and I have a dress for you to perform it in.
She rolled to her side and said, What colour is it?
A surprise, if you’ll wait for me.
How long will you be?
All time away from you is an eternity. It is in my room. I’ll go now. Will you wait for me?
Home was not home any more. Houses in Millstone Nether burned to the ground in the freezing rain as people tried to warm themselves with lanterns and candles. Some locked their doors for the first time in all the years, afraid. Old people fingered the edges of their blankets. Children cried with cold and no boy challenged another to jump the icebergs.
Norea was confused by the uncanny cold. She could not remember the days of the week or what she ate. She sometimes did not know where she was. She began to talk to Dagmar as if she were still a child. She talked to her own dead mother, forgot that Nyssa was born. She begged her daughter to make the ice stop and Dagmar said, Not until I find Nyssa.
Norea sat in her deep-fetched darkness, wrapped in quilts. When the frozen rain tapped the window she heard the clatter of milk bottles and the cry of her young mother dying. She trenched potatoes until her young arms ached, she shivered frightened across Ireland and lay wretched in the stench of a ship’s hold. She slipped eggs in worn grey paper cartons through little doors into the houses of the settlement, and gathered up and buried dead birds. There lay a baby beside a bull. She walked into her first house, holding hands with Rory, and heard three old sheep-faced women chanting to her the old hauling home song:
Oro, sé do bheatha a bhaile, is fearr liom tu ná
céad bo bainne:
Oro, sé do bheatha a bhaile, thá tu maith le
rátha.
A chill of light hunger distracted her from the bright stream of sound and touch. When she woke up she was disappointed to be in her outside loft, caught in the tedium of aching hips and throbbing hands. She shook memory away from her like a dusting rag and reached reluctantly into the cold from under her blankets, felt for a plain cracker in the dish lying beside her teeth on the bedside table and broke it between her gums. She sucked the cracker until she could wind her old tongue around and gum it into throat-sized gulps. Her water glass was frosted and she wanted hot tea. She thought, Too creak cold to get up. I’ll just tuck my head in under here and rest. Oh, but my throat is dry. She pulled her wool hat down over her thin hair and drifted back to her imageless sleep.
For in my mind, of all mankind, I love but you alone. She heard Rory singing “The Nut Brown Maid.” Rory, dust to ghost transpeciated. Then she saw him. He stood before her in the frozen room with his disarming grin,