The Mersey Girls (7 page)

‘We could go to sea,’ Caitlin said. ‘It’s just an old, abandoned boat; nobody would care, probably.’

But when they reached the pebbly beach they could see for themselves that the boat was by no means abandoned. It was a curragh as they had guessed and it had been tarred fairly recently judging by the sharp smell of it and the gleam of the fresh tar. It was lying bottom up and the girls prowled round it, trying to assess just when it had last been used.

‘The tar may be shining because of the sun,’ Caitlin said at length. ‘Give me a hand, we’ll turn it over.’

It didn’t take much strength for it was a light, handy little craft.

‘Just right for two girls,’ Lucy said wistfully. ‘The inside isn’t too clean, but it’s a dear little boat. No oars, though.’

Caitlin wrinkled her nose. ‘It smells fishy, but who cares for that? We could paddle up the creek using our hands, I should think. And further up, where there’s trees, we’d probably find something we could use for oars.’

‘Shall we just push it on the water a little way?’ Lucy suggested, rocking the boat on its shingly bed with one wistful finger. ‘Sure and no one would want to keep it on land all the while, the poor little curragh; it’s longing for a dip, I can tell.’

‘Well, I suppose we could . . . but let’s take a look at the castle first. We might even find the oars there – who knows?’

The girls turned and surveyed the castle once more. It looked a lot bigger from here, but still not too dangerous; not with the sun shining.

‘It’s on a little hill; I don’t think I’ve ever noticed that before,’ Lucy said at last. ‘It’s well above the marsh now, but in winter, when the sea backs up, I’ve seen it surrounded by water more than once.’

‘Who owns it, I wonder?’ Caitlin said as they began to jump from tussock to tussock, carefully avoiding the brackish pools. ‘Your grandad’s beasts graze on the marsh but I don’t think he’s got anything to do with the castle, has he?’

‘Our cattle graze all over,’ Lucy pointed out. ‘But they’re not fools and it’s much wetter here than it is to either side because of the creek, I suppose.’

‘We’re almost there,’ Caitlin panted.

‘True,’ Lucy said. She reached the little hillock and hauled herself up on it, sitting down and breathing hard.

Caitlin came up out of the marsh dragging the bottle of lemon barley water. She sank onto the grass beside Lucy.

‘I wonder if this castle ever had a moat and if that’s why the marsh is marshier around it?’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ Lucy said. She found that she did not much want to go on sitting here, talking about the castle, with her back towards it, though. Just supposed there was someone . . . She turned and stared up at it. Close to, like this, what you noticed most was the dilapidation, the air of quiet but lengthy neglect. It must have been lived in once, but if so it was a long time ago. Lucy got to her feet and dumped her bag of food unceremoniously on the grass.

‘Sure and we’ve come all this way so I’m not going home wit’out taking a look,’ she announced firmly. ‘You coming, Cait?’

‘Of course I’m coming,’ Caitlin said, getting to her feet in her turn. ‘Castle or hut first?’

‘Oh, hut, because it’ll probably be easier to get in.’

It was true that, now they were so close to the castle, they could see all manner of rubbish piled up in the entrance. It would be the floods, Lucy thought wisely. Bits of branches, what looked horribly like a dead sheep, half a hen coop, there were all sorts in the wide stone archway, but the hut, because its doorway faced a different direction, might well be easier of access.

The two girls climbed the short distance to the turf hut and bent to peer inside. It was very dark in there, but reassuringly empty. There was a fireplace thick with ashes opposite the low entrance, a couple of what looked like bracken couches and a lopsided, short-legged wooden table, so old that it had actually sunk into the earth floor, and nothing else, unless you counted the smell which was almost thick enough to touch.

‘Someone’s eaten a lot of fish in here,’ Caitlin said. ‘Doesn’t it stink?’

‘Yes, it does. And they’ve kept hens, too,’ Lucy decided. ‘That’s chicken dirt by the bracken. Phew, let’s go before we’re gassed!’

Giggling, the two of them abandoned the hut and made for the castle entrance. Working briskly, they cleared it in ten minutes, then peered cautiously in – and were pleasantly surprised.

The small part of the castle which still stood and was referred to locally as the ‘keep’ had no roof of any description, so it wasn’t dark. The walls towered up and up on three sides but the wall facing the lough was no more than six feet high. And despite the fact that the walls were patently inside walls, they had, over the passage of time, taken on many of the attributes of outside walls. Little ferns and wild flowers grew on them, a honeysuckle had seeded itself in the shelter and had climbed the ten feet necessary and now it let its sprays of pink and gold sweetness cascade over the grey stones. To their right an enormous stone fireplace was crammed and crowded with wild roses which fought for space with tall foxgloves and with more honeysuckle, all anxious to seed themselves in this strangely sheltered spot.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Caitlin said slowly. ‘It’s like the secret garden in that book your Maeve read us when we had measles last winter. Where’s the door to the tower, then?’

They knew from their observation of the castle that the tower had no outside door and for a moment they thought it had no inside one either, then Lucy spotted it. In the near corner was a narrow wooden door, tightly closed, in silvery grey wood. Oddly, it looked in quite good repair. She pointed.

‘There’s the door. Shall we go up?’

‘Might as well,’ Caitlin said with a nonchalance which, this time, was only partly assumed. The sheer beauty of the castle keep and its wonderful collection of sheltered wild flowers had made the entire expedition suddenly less frightening. Witches, Lucy was sure, did not live in bowers!

‘I wonder if it’s locked?’ Lucy said, and gave the door a shove. It opened immediately, and the pair of them almost tumbled into a small, round room with a narrow slit window in the wall far higher than their heads and a set of curling stone steps which led up, and up, and up . . .

‘Come on, we might as well take a look,’ Lucy said. She led the way up the stairs and when she reached the slit window, stopped for a moment to peer out. ‘It’s a lovely view,’ she said. ‘Take a look, Caitlin. You can see the sea!’

‘I will,’ Caitlin said, following her. ‘Why does the staircase just stop? I always thought you could get out at the top, I don’t know why.’

‘You can, there’s a door,’ Lucy said, following the stairs round. She pushed and, like the door downstairs, it opened at once, though it gave a rather horrid creak. She found herself in a small, round room with four window slits, all giving views over different parts of the countryside. It was, she decided, a nice little room, with wooden boarding on the floor, the stone walls clean and dry . . . and a short wooden ladder which led up to what looked like a trapdoor in the ceiling. Someone at some time had dumped a good deal of hay here, it was piled up high to her right, but it neither smelled unpleasant nor straggled about; unlike the turf hut this seemed simply a pleasant, dry little room which nobody knew about but them. She was standing directly beneath the ladder looking curiously up when Caitlin appeared.

‘Phew – a secret garden downstairs and a secret room up,’ Caitlin said with considerable satisfaction, coming right into the room and looking curiously around her. ‘I don’t think witches come here, do you? Now there might be one or two on top of the tower, though – what a place to fly a broomstick from! Just wait till we tell the big boys what we’ve found! I don’t think we need go right up to the tower-top though, do you?’

Lucy already had a foot on the ladder. She turned and stared at her friend ‘Not go up? We’ve got to, and we won’t tell the big boys, or it won’t be our secret – in fact it won’t be ours at all if they ever get their hands on it. Stay if you like, but I’m going!’

She mounted the ladder and shoved hard at the trapdoor. It did not give an inch. She was going to shove again when Caitlin, staring up, gave a muffled exclamation.

‘Lu, you eejit! There’s a bolt – slide it back first.’

Lucy looked, saw the bolt, and complied, then pushed again. The trap door opened easily and she pushed it right back and then hauled herself through the gap, looking round her as she did so.

It was a round roof, of course, surrounded by spiky battlements and because the trapdoor was right in the middle of it, she was able to take a good look in all directions before climbing any further. It looked safe enough so she clambered out and onto a stone roof with some sort of tarry stuff spread on it, and when she looked back at the trapdoor she found that it, too, had been treated with tar, undoubtedly to keep the rain from penetrating the wood and soaking the room beneath. Having satisfied her curiosity on that score she crossed to the battlements, then looked over the edge.

The view was splendid, the best she had ever seen, though she soon found that if she looked down to the ground her stomach turned over in a rather nasty manner and a strange buzzing filled her head. But if she looked straight across she could see to one side of her the sea lough with Cahersiveen beyond it, every detail perfect in the clear summer air. The bridge, the burnt-out barracks, the church and every house, shop and building spread out before her like a living map.

Lucy shuffled round a bit further, still being careful not to lean on the battlements. She could see ferns and tiny plants growing between the stones and she could not help thinking of all the storms and gales the tower must have known, for Grandad said it was as old as time. But when she looked out there was the sea, with what she guessed must be the island of Valentia, looking like a relief map from here. And if she moved round further still she could see, though trees hid the finer detail, both the ivy-covered farm and the Kellys’ cottage, whilst above and behind them the hills stretched, golden gorsed, up to the brilliant blue sky.

‘What’s up there?’ Caitlin’s voice echoed hollowly round the room below. Lucy walked over and peered down at her, surprised to see that Caitlin’s face looked both pale and worried.

‘Nothing much, just battlements. But you can see for miles, Cait – want to come up and see Valentia Island? It looks like that map Miss Carruthers showed us when she took us to the museum in Killarney. And I can see your cottage and the farm . . . come on up.’

But this Caitlin refused to do. ‘Not today, Lu,’ she called. ‘We’ve got to get down yet, and those stone stairs look awful bare when you’re going down and it’s a long way to fall. Do come back here, then we can have our dinners.’

‘I thought we were going to have our dinners on top of the tower?’ Lucy said plaintively. She had climbed a long way and now she was hungry – whatever was the matter with Caitlin all of a sudden?

‘Our dinners are at the bottom of the stairs,’ Caitlin said. ‘I couldn’t carry the lemon barley water, it’s far too heavy, and you dumped your bag. Oh, do come on, Lu, I’m starving so I am!’

And Lucy soon realised that Caitlin had a perfectly valid point; going up the spiral stone steps had been easy, because you were looking up. But going down! It was a nightmare if you weren’t too keen on heights and Lucy suddenly discovered that heights, in fact, were not her favourite thing. She clung to the wall and tried not to look down, but she was in a sweat of fear until her feet touched solid ground once more and even then she felt, suddenly, that she wanted to eat her dinner in the bright, clean sunshine and not in this weirdly beautiful place.

‘Let’s go back to the curragh,’ she said as soon as they were in the fresh air once more. ‘We’ve conquered the castle, now let us be rowing off a way in the boat – we’ll use two bits of planks as oars.’ She seized two short lengths of plank and tucked them under her arm and in five minutes they were across the marsh and making their way over the sandy, gravelly strand to where the boat waited.

Had waited.

‘It’s gone!’ Caitlin’s shrill cry was disbelieving. ‘Sure and it was a fairy boat, Lucy Murphy, for hasn’t it gone entirely?’

‘It can’t have gone,’ Lucy said, though she had the evidence of her own eyes to give the lie to the statement. The little strand was empty, there wasn’t a sign of their small craft. ‘Wasn’t it further down the creek, Cait – or further up?’

‘No indeed, it was right here,’ Caitlin said. She gave an exaggerated shiver. ‘Oh, Lu, it was magic, and we touched it – turned it over! Oh, what’ll become of us?’

‘We’ll have to have our picnic on dry land,’ Lucy said prosaically. ‘Well, I never would have believed it – who can have come and taken it in the little while we were exploring the castle and climbing the tower?’

‘Only someone who was magic,’ Caitlin said. ‘A good thing they didn’t come back for it when we’d got it out in five fathoms of water, that’s all I can say.’

‘I don’t
think
it was anyone particularly magic,’ Lucy said cautiously. She had no urge to upset the little people, particularly if one was hovering nearby, eager to sink his sharp little teeth into someone’s unprotected calf. But she was a practical child in her way. ‘There’s footprints.’

‘Where?’ Caitlin said, having given the beach a quick glance. ‘I can’t see any footprints.’

‘There, right on the very edge of the sandy bit just where the tide’s coming over . . . look, quick, or it’ll be too late, the water’ll cover it.’

Caitlin looked in the right direction but even as she did so the tide gave a triumphant little hiss and water lapped where, a moment earlier, Lucy had distinctly seen the print of a bare foot, with the toes well splayed . . . no doubt the owner of the foot which made the print had been pulling his curragh into the water, Lucy told herself, whilst her friend triumphantly asserted that there was no footprint.

‘Oh well, the curragh’s gone anyway and I’m still hungry,’ Lucy said soothingly. ‘Whoever took it, it’s still not here. Do you want to share dinners? Only I guess Maeve will have put the same in for both.’