The Fair Child

Dan Fields

“En tu infantile hermosura,

Llena de vivos sonrojos,

Hay tal hechizo y frescura,

Que hasta la luz es más pura

En el cristal de tus ojos.”

                                 ~ Rafael Obligado, “Lætitia”

The looking-glass had been her mother’s. Orlagh spent years becoming its prisoner. Her fingers knew every groove in the scrolled Indian laurel-wood. A glass trimmed with French silver would have been a lesser treasure. It framed her features in rustic elegance, ensnaring her by degrees. Observant neighbors claimed the polished eye had bewitched her, and that she’d bewitch others with it. Orlagh’s heart hardened against their murmurs. Not for vanity’s sake did she dwell in tiny worlds of reflected phantoms. The evil that lurked in her shadow bore watching. None but Orlagh recognized the fiend for what it was. Even her husband Connor was blind to it, though it gave him sweet red kisses and regarded the world with eyes the same color as his own.

In May of 1876 Connor Cahill moved his family to their own hacienda, nestled in the lee of the Southern Andes near San Juan. The household included his wife Orlagh, his daughter Aoife, and various attendants recruited from the local youth.

Aoife’s mother was dead. Orlagh was the second Mrs. Cahill.

The newest members of Argentina’s landed gentry, they’d won the distinction in typical backbreaking Irish fashion. Two centuries after Cromwell, Ireland still smarted from his brutal memory. The Cahills of County Wexford had survived the Famine as well, their bloodline constricted but never clotted. The land wars came close to finishing them. Many Irish went west by sea, but Connor had no interest in the sooty promises of Brooklyn or Chicago. Trusty sources warned that Statesiders treated his kind as shabbily as the Africans they’d legally owned a generation ago.

“Argentina, now,” he’d told Orlagh. “There’s a horizon worth tackling, my love.”

“Treoir mo chroí,” she’d whispered in his arms, Guide my heart, and kissed him fit to kindle his ambition.

South America had space for unmannered men to civilize it, and Connor’s correspondence turned up a distant cousin who agreed to take the Cahills on as farm laborers. At many points – Liverpool, the Atlantic, the pampas west of Buenos Aires and the capricious foothills of Mendoza – their quest had seemed folly, but stubbornness made the Irish good settlers. Orlagh never lost faith in Connor, though raw black earth broke her fingernails and strained her spirits. Three grueling years later, faith and sacrifice paid out. The homestead Connor purchased was modest, situated in a rough and thorny corner of creation, but it was their own. He hired hands to work it, and Orlagh became its mistress.

All should have been well, and the business of siring heirs for the estate begun in earnest, yet Orlagh was uneasy. Connor’s attentions were regular, yet she felt too nervous to catch and grow his issue. The flush of new matrimony gone, she felt aged beyond the natural span of time. Leaving Wexford had been hard, and subsistence abroad had taxed them. Her new situation promised relief and renewal, but Orlagh could not seem to recover from the lean years. Her hair went lank, its fire subdued by constant sunshine. Her reflection was pouched under the chin, wrinkled at the eye, sinewy where fulsomeness belonged and flabby where she’d sooner have been taut. She wished to grow full and ruddy, not to weather like an old sailor.

Orlagh’s mirror-glancing had grown more frequent since the resettlement, and true obsession manifested with a new object – her stepdaughter Aoife. She tracked the girl’s movements, reflected over her shoulder, with dreadful solicitude. How could Orlagh flourish with that bone-fair creature in her wake, snatching any scrap of radiance Orlagh gave off?

Blossoming at fifteen, Aoife was more carefree of the change than any lass had business being. She was adored wherever she walked. Neither ill word nor ill wind could touch her. Despite the Argentine climate she remained as soft and ivory-skinned as the day she’d left Ireland. Her lips burned red against a blushless cheek. Orlagh wondered how, amid the ceaseless fuss over Aoife, all talk fixed on her fairer-than-fair complexion. It was a marvel, sure, among the swarthy folk of La Rioja and the Cuyo. Yet her lips, Orlagh longed to shout, did none remark the blood-scarlet lips of her? No human child should possess a mouth so full and red. If her pristine pallor signified holy chastity, the devil’s mark of those lips belied the illusion straightaway.

In youth Orlagh had held suitors’ fancy with ease, yet never had her lips made such a rosy flush as glowed upon Aoife. The young mouth was perverse, made to suckle at nature not from need but from obscene lust. None save Orlagh perceived the sinister aspect under Aoife’s mask of grace.

The house had a pair of mestiza girls to tend its mistress. Orlagh found them steady and honest enough. Bright-eyed Maricel became Orlagh’s pet handmaiden by unspoken accord. She helped run the household and mind the other servants, most of them cousins to her. She was as susceptible as any comely girl to the whistles of farmhands, but all told she set a dutiful example.

The other girl, Yoana, was Maricel’s opposite – a pinch-faced imp with coarse manners and morbid talk. She could cook and keep house, her devotion and wish to satisfy seeming genuine, yet she never apologized for her untidy demeanor.

In the cool of dusk, Maricel revived Orlagh’s hair with a boar-bristle brush. The rude instrument didn’t charm the eye, but Maricel might have been a musician for her skill with it. Orlagh spent these hours of gentle stroking unconcerned with her looking-glass. Ripples as of cool water cascaded from her scalp to her flexing soles. If evil magic existed in the world, Maricel’s ministrations were proof of a countering good. Throughout the ritual, the girl lulled her with kind words.

“Tied back all day it becomes… enredado… from work and sweat. Let it down. Señor Cahill cannot overlook you.” Maricel worried over Orlagh’s careworn state without being cruel. “Tonight,” she’d whisper, “I feel the planting is good,” soothing Orlagh’s anxiety for the fertility of her marital bed.

Connor never complained of her slowness to conceive, yet his apprehension at having no son to saddle with a new-built legacy grew plain. Orlagh was of good childbearing age despite her bleak self-appraisal. Their love had not lost all its passion or variety, but the effort of gleaning pleasure while coaxing forth Connor’s essence exhausted her, leaving her no energy to will away bad dreams.

Dark legends had haunted Orlagh since childhood. Blood-hungry Abhartach and the White Woman’s keening bedeviled her earliest memories. Her Uncle Cormac, a literary eccentric, had read to her and her sisters about Polidori’s Vampire and the Pale Lady of Dumas. When she was to leave Wexford the ailing man had made her a gift of the latest printed sensation – the bloody chronicle of the Lady Carmilla, by an Irishman no less! It had cost her sleep on the voyage over.

Fear took similar forms in the new world as in the old. Folk religions huddled under the mantle of Catholic rite, that dubious gift of Spaniards and Portuguese before the Irish papist ever ventured so far from home. Queer hybrid saints, outside Orlagh’s familiar canon, were abundant. While supper boiled, black-minded Yoana extolled a macabre figure dubbed La Difunta Correa. The legend told of a young mother, Deolinda, who perished while searching for her lost husband. By some miracle she nursed her child after death, sustaining it until rescuers arrived. This Deolinda Correa, enshrined nearby, was a cult saint of longsuffering women. Troubled out of sleep and temper, Orlagh saw only the tale’s ghastly side.

“She blesses the mothers, las desafortunadas,” Yoana said with her habitual squint.

“Let her bless them, them,” Orlagh said with a barely-stifled shudder, “and let me alone.” The thought of pap from a dead breast made her freckled forearms crawl. More glum specters for her dreams.

“You don’t wish to visit?” Yoana teased. “La tumba de la Difunta, to make offerings?”

“I do not,” said Orlagh, nearly losing her grip on a kitchen knife. “And don’t you go on my account.”

Orlagh now saw her nightmares mingled in one flesh. By daylight Aoife prowled across her shadow, drinking its essence to fortify her own. By night she tormented Orlagh’s dreams, profaning the marital bed with her eidolon.

Orlagh blessed the hours when Aoife vanished from her looking glass. At first she thought of vampires that cast neither shadow nor reflection, but folklore could not account for every particular ghoul. Aoife had no powers of invisibility, though it made her influence no less insidious. Wicked forces preyed best on disbelief.

San Juan Province was a hive abuzz. Neighboring homesteads held by a mix of Irish and Spanish families traded cattle and crops, and made social calls when the work seasons waned. Up from the pampas rode the gauchos, rough high-spirited figures of romance, looking for beef and horses to drive south. Farmers bartered for their songs and stories. Connor was too busy bossing the operation to notice Aoife there, not merely watching the sweaty company but joining in the frolics.

She went freely among hard men, their dusky admiring faces plump with convivial drink. She learned their dances and simple airs to strum on their Spanish guitars. When she tried teaching them slip jigs they proved ungainly with treble-time steps, but the girl danced on unabashed in their midst. She couldn’t have charmed them less had she crawled through tall grass and dung, lowing like a calf. They were enchanted utterly, she their pitiless enchantress.

Aoife returned from every jubilant rendezvous in her state of intact delicacy, but Orlagh fancied that her mirror showed a deeper truth. Looking sidelong, she perceived traces of swollen lips, a bruised wrist, and faint sooty fingerprints of manly hands. Yoana caught her, only once, holding her mirror to a crack in the door beyond which Aoife bathed. An ill-mannered smile and a cryptic gesture from the slouching urchin sealed the secret between them.

Orlagh’s fate turned with a sudden indisposition after breakfast. When shade and cool water failed to restore her vitality, Orlagh felt a hope she hardly dared admit. Within days both Maricel and Yoana affirmed her expectancy. They’d seen enough children born to know the signs.

Orlagh waited to tell Connor until her condition was past concealing, even from a man. She anticipated his joyful reaction but knew he would run to share the news with his daughter. Mere knowledge of her pregnancy was a possession Orlagh would have guarded from Aoife, had she been able. Amid the glad ripening she averted her eyes with a shudder anytime the parasite gazed at her belly. In Orlagh’s imagination, Aoife’s tongue wet her lewd sanguine lips.

Had Aoife been a reasonable stepchild, their antipathy might have flared quickly and smoldered into tenuous truce. Aoife should have sulked, making base and jealous remarks. Instead she had the inhumanity to be kind, with affectionate overtures meant to confound guesses at her malefic designs. Orlagh could not maintain civility.

“Dear Mother Orlagh!” Aoife intoned the hated greeting one afternoon as they gathered herbs from opposite sides of a small garden. “I’ve spoken with some village women who mean to make a pilgrimage.”

“Have you, now?” said Orlagh, inspecting clusters of oregano.

“I don’t expect you’d fancy the journey, but I’d be honored to go on your behalf and light candles to La Difunta.”

Orlagh dropped her basket, turning. “My behalf?”

“For the tender wean you’re growing.”

Orlagh scarcely knew what her hand was about before it struck. Her callused palm stung Aoife’s cheek a robust, almost-human pink. Aoife stood dumb as a gate post. Orlagh half expected the milky countenance to part and show the demon beneath, but Aoife replied meekly.

“Forgive me… we’ll take more fitting steps for a little Irish one. I’ll go to a church… Saint Nicholas of La Rioja… no, Córdoba. The cathedral. Father can take me, or I’ll hire an escort from the riders going east, and…”

“And what?” Orlagh trembled.

“… and… say proper masses to Our Lady.”

With a dart of her head the glowing mother-to-be spat full in her stepdaughter’s face. Aoife gasped, hands flying to her eyes as though she were blinded.

“Do you think,” Orlagh hissed, “I’d have blasphemy on my child’s head? Shame, girl, the likes of you praying to the blessed Virgin! I’d sooner sleep in hellfire.”

Aoife sobbed, trampling rosemary as she fled. Heedless of swollen joints, Orlagh delivered a kick to turn her in the right direction.

“Go pray for your own self, scarlet pox!”

Aoife withdrew from Orlagh’s domestic sphere, cleaving to her band of rugged compañeros for protection and fellowship. No invitation to her sixteenth birthday festivities reached Orlagh, who resented feeling like the shunned party. She fell into old compulsions, consulting her mother’s mirror at least twice a day for signs of trouble.

Connor’s abstracted humor showed that he missed Aoife’s company. Never chiding Orlagh for whatever secondhand account he had of their quarrel, yet unable to ease the alienation, he vanished into work and paid her the minimum courtesy due to one carrying his legitimate, wanted offspring. Orlagh’s isolation grew with the life inside her.

Pricked by the urge that drove children to pick scabs, Orlagh charged her familiars with monitoring Aoife’s occupations. Maricel brought news of a courtship. Orlagh was bitterly unsurprised, though Connor had mentioned nothing. The suitor, Ernesto, was second son to a prominent Argentine family – industrious, handsome, destined to flourish. Maricel, though a faithful spy, was plainly smitten with the romance of it. Yoana saw it better through Orlagh’s eyes, agreeing that a boy so dazzled with his future might well fall prey to a winsome seductress like Aoife.

Not even to Yoana did Orlagh reveal the fear that Aoife’s betrothal brought. Her dreaming mind conjured a world overrun by red-muzzled hobgoblin broods, taught to despise obsolete relics and roots of which Orlagh was the symbol. Twisted out of true by monstrous rule, the adopted homeland would vomit Orlagh with her offspring into the sea to perish.

Connor gave a grand supper to introduce his family to Ernesto’s. Orlagh imbibed a draught of calming herbs for the occasion, prepared by her domestic sorceress Yoana. Thus relaxed, she comported herself with dignity before the bridegroom’s patrician clan without calling attention to her weary state. As she summoned gentle greetings for Aoife, Orlagh’s hand itched for the comfort of her looking-glass, which was locked away for the evening.

Yoana’s tincture began wearing off after Maricel had begged leave to eavesdrop on the talk among Ernesto’s fancy people, of whom she was plainly enamored. Orlagh consented, but soon found herself in dire need of water and a place to rest. She excused herself to a vacant room. Ernesto appeared in the doorway, solicitous gallantry itself.

“Señora Cahill. You are well, I trust?” he ventured in a smooth baritone. The fellow was handsome indeed, muscled without scars from the vigorous exercise of mere existence in the Paraná riverlands.

“I’m well, thank you,” said Orlagh. Her head throbbed as she forced a smile. “Only a moment to gather myself.”

“Of course.” With a dancer’s grace he lowered her into a chair. “Does it, may I ask, tire you to entertain us so cordially? Considering…” He made a vague gesture toward her midsection.

Adrift without Maricel’s anchoring presence, Orlagh fumbled to express herself. “Not so. We’re delighted, yet I’m not… altogether easy.”

“Señora? Might I help?”

Cold sweat shone at her temples. Her dry tongue slurred. “Not my place to speak, only… as a wife… and as a mother, if I may be so counted. The nearest to one that… your… Aoife’s known.” The false, awkward sentiment fouled her mouth. “Such a young thing she is. Can she make a fit wife, knowing so little of the world? I came here with my husband, and together we’ve grown into it.”

“Aoife grows wonderfully into Argentina,” said Ernesto, luxuriating in private amusement. “She is a remarkable creature.” The open implications of that shifted the fresh meal inside Orlagh.

“Consider, sir,” she pressed, “would it not be wise to wait? Springtime infatuations, the sweat of dance… against a lifetime yoked to the fortunes and feelings of another? Ah, what a woman of my years could tell you about that.”

She dropped into mortified silence at the sound of her appeal. He’d think her a conniving temptress, or at best a meddler pecking at the happiness of his intended. Rather than storm out offended, he chose a subtler cruelty. He helped her up, kissed her hand and chuckled softly.

“You are a fine woman,” he declared, “and a gracious hostess. Your husband is most fortunate of all. My compliments on the loveliness of your home.” So saying, he left.

The humiliation of Ernesto’s genteel dismissal settled Orlagh’s course. Many put the name of witch on her, if only in whispers. Let those craven souls hang. If a witch was but a woman driven by the absence of other powers to marshal obscure forces, why not live up to the uncharitable epithet?

Orlagh had a keen sense of natural perils at her disposal. She considered a bay stallion which the livestock hands had quarantined after it took a bellyful of wild rye grass and fell into senseless frenzy. The grass, resistant to extermination efforts in the grazing pasture, was infernally toxic and prone to send even strong animals mad. The poor horse had kicked one lad fatally in the skull and wounded two others in the act of confining it, yet the creature was valuable and would pass through its mania given time and care.

Before she could devise a way of luring Aoife near the beast and shutting them in together, Maricel reported having seen the girl knelt outside the stable, whispering sweet syllables through the slats for most of a morning. The stallion, having bucked and snorted through three days of hallucinations, fell into dreamy docility under the Aoife’s murmured spell.

Connor had built a pair of humble casitas with spare timber from the barn. Orlagh hadn’t aired them for wedding guests, but one sweltering afternoon Yoana said that one was open and made up with fresh linens. Fruits and wine sat ready in a reed basket, perfect for a lovers’ nest. Yoana declared that she’d seen Ernesto and Aoife peering through the draped casita window some days prior. Taking the girl at her smirking word, Orlagh sent for a snake.

The yarará, known also as vibora de la cruz, was a local object of greater dread than rye grass or mad horses. Its lethal power was such that Orlagh had watched a field worker turn a machete on himself, lopping his foot off at the ankle rather than bet on surviving a bitten heel.  Yoana had a reckless cousin whose skill was trapping and skinning dangerous reptiles.  Orlagh requested the first part of that service, bidding him leave the serpent alive in the picnic box.

When screams of horror broke the afternoon quiet, Orlagh felt a frigid thrill. She had not long to enjoy it before three livid, naked bodies were carried from the casita. The first was a youth Orlagh did not know, his face puffed and blackened from the snakebite on his chin. Someone recognized him from the betrothal supper as a relation of Ernesto’s household. The first of the young women with him had been struck above the collarbone, her twisted mouth suggesting she’d done the screaming before her throat closed off. It was no surprise that the third party was not Aoife, but Orlagh’s heart buckled when she beheld the bloodless death-rictus of her treasured Maricel, who’d invited the others to take their mutual delight in the clandestine shade of the Cahill estate. Connor and Ernesto’s father took steps to hush the matter, burying each of the fornicating parties in appropriate circumstances and threatening all witnesses against gossip. Orlagh judged it best not to question Yoana’s claim that Aoife had ever meant to go there.

The lady of the house was heartsick over the tangled betrayals that deprived her of her favorite. Yoana was the successor by default, and had her useful qualities, but Orlagh took charge of her own grooming. Heedless of fatigue and her unborn’s urgent kicking, she decided that her stepdaughter’s demise called for firsthand attention. The viper had been potent enough, but too chaotic. Stranger, more delicate plans took shape.

A common species of golden scorpion – “alacrán” in the regional dialect – was not as fearsome as the yarará, but it delivered painful stings and days of sickness to those who failed to check empty boots or privy seats. Orlagh went forth at the siesta hour, gathering a dozen of them in two days with a stick and a trinket-box. Hiding the little corral under her bed, she gave them a cruel jostle and left them alone to starve and grow hateful.

Orlagh laid aside a basket of golden pears, not easily gotten at the time of year but a special favorite of Aoife’s. She placed the handsomest fruit in the box, and either her heart or the sprat in her belly leapt when she watched the enraged alacrán sting the pear, swelling it with their nasty essence. Her lips formed a silent litany – not any sophisticated spell, but a charm Yoana taught her for strengthening poisons. At her exhortation, the impregnated fruit fairly glowed with beguiling menace.

If the concentrated venom did not kill Aoife outright –it stood a fair chance against the slender little wight – it would make her ill enough to confine away from Ernesto, in the direct care of her stepmother and Yoana. Orlagh’s mistake had been trying to kill in one blow. Aoife was a creature of cunning and luck. Doing her to death by inches allowed care and caution. Orlagh would devise clever steps to ensure the girl declined beyond hope and suffered to the end. The nursemaids would escape suspicion, provided they had time to work.

Mustering her resolve, Orlagh sent Yoana to Aoife with olive branches. The Cahills would soon be doubly blessed; old pettiness ought to be forgotten. Dutiful, if only to her father, the girl acquiesced. Black storms blowing over the foothills, perfectly in season, were not sufficient ill omens to stop the plot.

Near the fullness of her term, friendly roundness had finally softened Orlagh’s face. She kissed her stepdaughter with all the warmth she could manufacture, presenting a sumptuous roast supper for the family. Good wine and whiskey eased the gathering, but as the mood approached positive amity over a dessert of brandy-soaked fruit, a boy entered.

“Fuego, señor!” he cried. “La tormenta!”

Lightning had set the pasture afire. Prompt action might quell the flames in time to keep the stock from harm. Connor dashed out, warm with drink, sobered by worry. The worsening weather obliged Aoife to shelter in the house, despite her manifest uneasiness at being alone with Orlagh and her bondswoman. She might also have felt the first burn of the specially anointed pears Orlagh had served her.

As if in sympathy, Orlagh’s insides wrenched. Yoana gasped at her cry of pain. Orlagh was quickening, and too early. Nature’s whim, or the hastening influence of excitement, called her child forth. Vertigo rocked her. Burning pressure tore at her.

Yoana helped Orlagh to bed while Aoife gathered linens and water. The girl’s looping gait showed the poison’s effect on her as she offered help. Timing had gone askew. True birthing pains gripped Orlagh, wrapped in frenzied visions of fear. Aoife loomed above the bed, her exhalations full of wicked alacrán liquor. If she did not succumb soon, she might breathe venom onto newborn skin and corrupt the child.

In delirious panic Orlagh begged for the looking-glass, her only talisman. Aoife, glass-eyed on the brink of sensibility, moved to oblige. Orlagh cast wild eyes at Yoana.

“No, girl! She mustn’t touch it! You bring it, and don’t let her near me!”

Turning obediently from the bed, Yoana tangled with Aoife’s collapsing body. Splintering wood and shivering glass accented Orlagh’s cries of agony. Orlagh’s last glimpse was of Yoana, blinking stupidly at silver mirror-shards protruding from her palms. The world drowned in searing black silence.

Orlagh woke to Yoana’s tears hot on her forehead. Panic, and her wounded hands, had kept the midwife from her proper duty. The child was lost; unkind fate had spared the mother. Worst of all for Orlagh was that Aoife had survived as well, though narrowly.

The two lingered in their beds for weeks, Aoife serene in oblivion while Orlagh moaned and wished herself dead. Connor sat by his wife, soothing her with old songs, yet on the day of Aoife’s revival he could not help but rush away to bear witness. Orlagh cursed him and many others besides. Aoife’s face and figure, so the servants whispered, hadn’t lost a degree of luster.

Orlagh bade Connor bury their child, out of her sight. Connor protested, but Orlagh was lucid enough to convince him. The rites was modest and duly somber. Yoana prepared the tiny body according to her mistress’s command, consecrating a token of its memory in a sealed clay jar.

Weeks passed. Away from the bedchamber where the woeful mother gathered strength, in discreet tones yet far sooner than Orlagh reckoned respectful, preparations commenced for a grand fiesta – not for the advent of a Cahill son, but for the wedding of the pale apparition cherished by all save one. Planting and reaping appointed the times for work and for feasting. Orlagh couldn’t have begged further delays even had anyone listened. She forbade her few loyal servants from helping prepare the banquet, but each drifted away in turn to share in the excitement. Poor Maricel would have done likewise. Yoana alone stood true by her mistress. They whispered of the future and what might be done about it. No soul overheard them.

Orlagh decided against attending Aoife’s marriage. There would be talk, but when had there not been? What use had Orlagh for a society more content to gossip over her sorrows than have her present? The solemnities would be tedious, and Orlagh could not keep scorn off her face. Among so many gorging and guzzling to Aoife’s health, Orlagh would blight the company. Her absence would be a grudging bridal present, given for Connor’s sake.

That morning she remained in bed, making a showy profession of illness. Peace might have prevailed, but Connor appeared in the lull between holy vows and the start of the feast. Perhaps he’d only meant to look in on her, but lingering on the threshold he began rebuking what he guessed was not true sickness but envy.

“Orlagh,” he said, “You’ve lost a great deal and you’ve a right to be grieved. So have we all.”

“I’m sorry for you as well,” said Orlagh.

“It’s not of me I’m thinking. Aoife suffers, on your account and the child’s.”

Orlagh snorted, burying her head in bedclothes.

“Your grief I can bear,” Connor said, “and I’ll do more to comfort you. But this must end.”

“Aoife suffers,” Orlagh spat. “Never a day in her life. I’ve not seen an eyelash askew or a tear on her face.”

“When did you last look on her, except through that broken mirror of yours?” He glanced at it on the table. One silver shard clung to the splintered frame. “Sad thing, that,” he said.

“When did you last look upon me, Connor?” Orlagh warbled.

Connor lowered his eyes. “I won’t say I’ve done you altogether right, but God damn me if I’ve not worked to bring us better days. This bitterness has nearly killed the pair of you.” He forgot to mention the life it had already cost. “I’ll not speak to you as a child, sponge away sorrow you rightly feel. Yet if you close your heart to whatever joy we can take from these times, I fear you’ll never grow strong. I’d sooner not be widowed again.”

“I’ve lost the art of joy,” she said. “It’s easier for… her.” Orlagh couldn’t speak Aoife’s name again. Connor noticed. If she drove him to strike her in that wretched state, she could taint his enjoyment of the day. He merely sighed as if his last breath were leaving him.

“Aoife’s only young, my love. She draws life from all about her, but shares it. She doesn’t guard joy like a miser, holding the world in a mirror-glass like a–”

Witch? Madwoman? The insult died on Connor’s tongue.

“The girl slinks about sullenly enough in my view,” Orlagh said.

“She goes quietly past you because you look on her so hatefully. She wants dearly to have your favor, if not your love.”

Orlagh let that pass, wanting the quarrel finished, but when Connor tarried she found more to say. “No doubt her mother was a like sort of pretty songbird.” She didn’t regret the incivility of pricking the dead.

Connor’s eyes fell. “You’ve never asked about Aoife’s mother. Not even her name.” He reached for her hand, finding it limp and cold. “Yet you might have been Aoife’s mother as well. Aoife never would’ve protested, had you allowed it.”

“I, a mother to that?” Orlagh hissed.

“You were like her, Orlagh, when I first knew you. Your eyes drank the world with the same thirst, and I loved you for that. You lament how knotted and old you’ve grown. I never gave ear til I realized it was your heart, not your face, that was so worn.”

Orlagh wished the stony ache in her belly would grow until it killed her.

“I’ll go,” Connor said. “I wish only that you’ll come to the feast, if you can bear it, to give your blessing. Aoife shan’t be about the hacienda much after this. I hope you’ll make her welcome now and then. It’ll be seldom enough to suit you.” The maudlin quiver of his voice lingered, like an ugly sulphur smell, after he’d gone.

Spiteful of her wish to sleep away unpleasantness, the raucous wedding revels might have been heard on the open ocean. Orlagh thrashed her bedding loose, biting back howls. Her belly burned as though her lost son had come as a clawed revenant to rend her apart. She was cocking thumbs over eyes to gouge the bloodshot orbs when her body lurched with the sensation of a door shut hard.

Shut, or perhaps thrown open.

A warm hand enlaced Orlagh’s fingers – faithful Yoana, she whom Orlagh still loved, who’d only failed under Aoife’s malign influence. Yoana hadn’t stolen away to the orgy as gay Maricel would have done. In her free hand she bore the clay vessel entrusted to her many dreadful days ago.

“Señora dresses now? You will drink, brindar por su salud?”

With Yoana’s help Orlagh swung her legs to the floor, quivering as if she’d been in bed a year. Outside, the festival of stolen birthrights had another few moments to burn.

Rivulets of spilled wine crossed the earth like flayed veins. Bullocks roasted on spits around a central bonfire. The usurper danced, radiant in bridal finery. Her drunken worshipers gyrated in circles. Aoife, not Orlagh’s absent child, was the new idol of prosperous harmony among the Argentine Irish. Ernesto smiled, a fool-king dreaming of the race he’d sire on her. The bacchanal was at highest pitch when a female voice among the mob screamed in terror.

Silence fell. All heads turned to see Orlagh, haggard and ancient-looking in the firelight. Grisly canyons of shadow divided her face, while flames accentuated the sheen of her ornately bound-up hair. A green silk frock showed her forgotten shapeliness.

Orlagh’s left hand clutched a lacquered chalice of Brazilian koa wood –  an heirloom, not Orlagh’s but Yoana’s, as prized as the broken looking-glass had been. It held unspeakable magic-making properties, as had the clay jar whose contents were poured into it. The shimmering red-black liquid might have been wine. Orlagh lifted her toast.

“My husband,” she rasped, “I come at your bidding to offer my respects. What could I deny you, who plucked me away to this wild land of promise? What could I deny, save the son you wanted? To our dreams, and God damn you if you’ve not done your best by me.” She sipped and her lips glistened red. “God damn you,” she repeated. The merrymakers gasped.

“My neighbors next, for your goodwill. May putrid saints defend you from witchery and pestilence. Let ill things pass from your door, and beware the serpent in your midst. By the milk-white shade of it, striped with cruel red, shall ye know that killer of babes.” Another draught, and a crimson halo circled her mouth.

“You last,” Orlagh screamed. “Fair daughter of I know not what mother. Not I, sure!” Her cackle made bile and wine rise in a hundred throats. “I was made for bearing creatures of common dust, and have ye not shown me the folly of that hope, sweet Aoife? Are ye not yet glutted? Can your breast hold more cheer and delight?” She thrust the chalice above her head. A dark teardrop ran over the side and down her hand, soaking her sleeve. “Here’s my cheer, my delight. I raise it so all may see, but ye’ll not have one drop. This is my cup, for my lips alone. Spill forth your own, if you’d have to drink, and wreck this land with ill-made spawn. Sláinte mhaith!”

She upended the cup. The portion her mouth didn’t catch ran down her breast. Her countenance was a beacon of hell. The mingled blood of herself and her dead child, preserved by Yoana, now painted Orlagh’s lips, teeth and chin. Against her sallow flesh it made a cruel, eerily perfect mockery of Aoife, who cowered in horror against Ernesto. The bridegroom looked as if he’d want propping up soon.

The acolyte skulked into view, sour-faced Yoana, to unfasten the gown and remove it. Naked before the stricken host, Orlagh stood firm and proud as a graven goddess.

When she snapped into motion, running at full speed with a vengeful shriek, the crowd moved around Aoife. They took Orlagh’s charge for a murderous attack, yet without a glance at the newly wedded pair she leapt at full sprawl into the blaze of the grand bonfire. When one burly boy rushed forward to help, Yoana stepped into his path and shoved him back.

As Orlagh fell upon the flames, her cry reached an incredible whistling octave before dying off. With seconds to complete the spell she and Yoana had concocted, she focused her dwindling will to invoke every god, pagan saint and devil of the fire. One word encapsulated her prayer.

Smoke.

I burn, I rise. Smoke. Take my blood, my bone. Hair of my head and milk of my breast. Make of me smoke, poisoned with hate and the senseless wails of my dead child. Smoke. Waft noxious clouds over ash-white flesh. Let me smudge her, taint her. Fill her lungs, turn laughter to consumption. Let her hack me up in bloody gouts to adorn that pretty mouth. Crack besooted skin, showing her true face. Illusion, fall asunder. Let her father and the husband she snared behold the abomination.

Smoke.

Her soul cast off cindered flesh like shabby garments. True martyrs felt so. As upturned eyes melted into her skull, Orlagh received the grace of a final image. An instant, long enough to be certain. Connor’s face hung slack in astonished horror. His eyes were her mirror, the success of her magic reflected in them. Assured that all now saw the truth, Orlagh gave herself to the fire.

~0~

Dan Fields has published around two dozen stories of horror and the weird with Pseudopod, Nocturnal Transmissions, Hellbound Books, Improbable Press and others. In 2021 he released a story collection entitled Under Worlds, After Lives, and is co-author of an upcoming novel from Torrid Waters.

Judge Clare Wallace found Dan’s submission The Fair Child to be “deliciously dark in the telling and excellently voiced.”