Daughter of the Waves

Running Wild

My father and I tried to put our lives back together, but the hole left by my mother's absence was too big to fill with the little things of every day. I believe my father's music helped him, and Orla and Sean's friendship was certainly a balm to my spirit, but I still felt that I had been abandoned. Despite the fact that I should have been grateful for my daring rescue,  resentment grew and grew and came to include my father as well as my mother. I became angry and disobedient to my darling father. I began to blame him for not being able to keep my mother with us, and, increasingly for being vulnerable to the rather obvious flirtations of Bridie. I also blamed him for not standing up to Father Kelly, although with hindsight now I can see that he could do nothing about the priest who had the backing of the all-powerful church behind him.

Bridie became a frequent visitor to our home, speaking honeyed words to my father, as she sat at our table stroking my father's hand, telling him how much she admired him and how hard done by he was by his faithless wife. Truth be known, I sometimes secretly agreed with her on this point. She tried all she could to win her way into my father's heart, but the memory of the great love he had felt for my mother kept his heart in thrall, and for a long time he and Bridie were nothing more than friends. 

Sean and I no longer wandered the shoreline, looking for shells and playing games as we once did. I wondered if I would ever love the sea as I once had, before it took my mother from me. Da had taught Sean and I to read, as there was now no schoolteacher in the village as there had been when he was a boy. Orla shyly entered into these lessons, as she was ashamed that even though she was almost four years older than us, she knew less reading and writing than we did, having been forced into service at a young age when her parents' died. She need not have worried. She took to these lessons with gusto, and soon surpassed us in knowledge. It did surprise me, however, when one grey drizzly day almost a year after I returned, my father presented her, and not me, with my mother's medical writings, and Eilish's gift from the Selkie woman. He had been watching her, taking note of her kindness, and the exceptional ability as a nurse she had begun to display. The children of the village loved her, as they had once loved my mother, and she often tended to their little needs - scraped knees and stubbed toes, with sense and compassion. I am ashamed to say that when Orla received these gifts, I was resentful, and it lead to a brief falling out between her and I, if one can truly fall out with such a good soul as Orla. My father, with uncharacteristic bluntness, told me that my anger towards my friend was proof that I was not yet ready for the responsibilities of a healer. I was too young, and needed to do some growing up first. It stung, but deep down I knew he was right. Orla was soon tending to more than childhood scrapes and bruises, and proved a natural healer, although of course without the gifts that my fey mother had possessed. 

My father was often away playing his fiddle in other towns and villages, and despite Orla's best efforts to keep me at home, I began to grow wilder and wilder, and by my fourteenth birthday I was running with a crowd that my father and Orla ( and Sean, when I saw him ) desperately tried to extract me from. But their very wildness, and the frisson of danger they possessed, was intoxicating, and a strange balm to my wounded heart, and I would not be deterred from their company. 

One cold and wet day in the Autumn of the year I was with my disreputable new friends in an old abandoned house on the edge of the village. We used it as place to go when we wanted somewhere out of the weather. The only person missing was Seamus Boyle. He was the oldest, at twenty, and our unofficial leader. Our mood was affected by the foul weather, and we were bickering, mainly about the expected success or otherwise of the anticipated uprising against British rule, of which only snippets of news reached us in our little far flung outpost. I wished Seamus was here, he liked to boast about having links to the rebels, and would have been able to tell us more, even if some of what he said was hearsay.

 Unexpectedly the door burst open and Seamus entered, trailing rain off his coat and his tri corn hat, and bringing a stranger with him.

The stranger was a young man, about the same age as Seamus, maybe a year or two older. I was immediately drawn to his height, his broad shoulders, and his confidence. His face was well favoured also, if a little too long in the chin to be considered truly handsome. He carried himself like no one I had ever known. Like a leader. 

Despite this, he waited for Seamus to speak, which he soon did. "Everyone, meet Cillian MacDermott!" The stranger doffed his hat and said "Pleased to make your acquaintance, friends." Immediately Eoin, a small, perpetually angry boy I found it hard to like, demanded "And who the hell is Cillian MacDermott, Seamus, and why have you brought him to our place, eh?! I thought new members of the gang were to be agreed upon unanimously, not just sprung on us unawares!!" A hubbub of voices agreed. I did not join in. I was intrigued by this new comer and wanted to know more before I judged him. 

Seamus waited for the hubbub to subside before continuing. "I know this is a little against the rules, but what good are rules if they are not broken occasionally? And besides, Cillian is in trouble with the law and needs a place to hide for a while." There was a general noise of approval at this, because all of us despised the authorities, whether that was Father Kelly, whom we regularly harassed, or the hated English. 

And so it was that Cillian MacDermott came to join us. He soon displayed a strong personality, as well as great personal charm, which I was still too young to be suspicious of. I was swept up in his wake, in truth we all were, and almost without us being aware of it, this enigmatic stranger quickly inveigled his way into our group and became our de facto leader. 

He revealed little of himself to us, which only made him more attractive. It wasn't long before I fancied myself in love with him, and trusted him implicitly. 

I was not to know then, at the tender age of fourteen, how dangerous my infatuation would prove to be.