The Black Diamond

by Francis Brett Young

Abner gave him his gorm, deciding that the owner of the voice, whatever he looked like, was a cough-drop. They drifted into a discussion of Abner’s adventures during the day.

The owner of the voice, who in the course of conversation proclaimed himself to be a certain Mick Connor, usually known as Kerry Mick, had apparently followed much the same track as Abner. He had been refused refreshment at the Barley Mow and taken a dismal pint from the hands of the landlord’s daughter at the second inn, whose nose, he said, would poke a ragman over a double ditch. He listened more seriously to Abner’s account of Tiger’s death. ‘You’re after losin’ a good friend,’ he said, and after a moment of silence in which his jaws could be heard masticating his gorm, embarked on a long story of his own youth. ‘I’ll tell you something quare,’ he said.

It had happened more than twenty years ago in the county of Kerry—Abner was none the wiser—in the very first situation that Mick Connor had ever taken. ‘There was money in Ireland them days,’ he said. ‘The country’s gone to the dogs ever sence the Boer War.’ He was engaged as pantry-boy, at six pounds a year and a suit of clothes, and he earned it by cleaning thirty lamps and a dozen pair of shoes every morning before breakfast and waiting at meal-times in the servants’ hall. The rest of the day he spent in dodging the butler, an ould devil with a lip would trip a duck, who liked his pint more than most and used to threaten to take the skin off of him with a twig whenever he saw him.

The story seemed to lead nowhere, but Mick Connor’s voice was low and persuasive and he evidently liked talking. Abner lay and listened.

Even in those early days Mick Connor had been used to the open air. He hated house-work, he said, and would often go off and hide himself under the dining-room table, a place of concealment which the butler at last discovered, to cry. He would stand at the pantry windows looking out over the fields to the river where the third footman was already enjoying himself catching eels and perch in the holes. The house was a prison to him. The only friend that ever came to him from outside it was a wolfhound who slept in the stables, but with whom he had made great friends ever since he had been in the house by feeding it with scraps from the pantry. The butler hated dogs, and this dog above all others because it had once stolen a ham. Mick loved it and fed it regularly. It used to jump up to the pantry window and lick his face through the bars.

When he had been in this place for a year or more the family moved for the summer to another house on the coast some thirty miles away. For Mick it was a happy change. He and his friend the third footman were chosen to go there and the savage butler was left behind. There were no railways in that part of Ireland, and so they went to Coulagh by road. The children were to follow with their nurse the next day, so the footman and the cook preceded them in a wagonette loaded with luggage. They went slowly, and behind them walked Mick, leading two pannier asses named Haidee and Mokie, on which the children would go for rides by the shore. They started late and the last part of their journey was made in the dark. The cook, who had a drop taken, was telling ghost stories fitting to that wild hour and place. There was one tale in particular of how she had met the devil in the flesh sitting by a milestone near Coulagh three years before that made Mick afraid to look on either side of him. He walked with Haidee on his right and Mokie on his left and the tail of the wagonette in front of him, and even then he didn’t feel safe.

When they came to Coulagh in the darkness they had a grand supper, but even in the cheerful firelight Mick couldn’t forget the details of the cook’s encounter with the devil. The house was small, and it had been settled that he, as the least important member of the party, should sleep in a little room above the stable in which the asses were housed. He was thankful that the animals were there, for otherwise he would have gone mad with the loneliness. When he reached the stable he went into the stall and talked to them and got on the two of their backs, sitting first on one and then on the other the way they wouldn’t be jealous. Then he patted their necks, rubbed their noses, and went up the wooden stairs to bed. He undressed, got into bed and put out his candle. But he couldn’t sleep, partly because the room was so strange after the cook’s stories and partly because a wind was blowing fit to bring the house down. All of a sudden the wind fell, and in the quiet he could hear another sound like a door banging and the rattle of chains. He supposed he had not fastened the stable latch, but even if the asses got their ends of cold, he didn’t dare to put his nose out of bed. But the noise of bumping and chains continued. Even when he put his head under the clothes he could still hear it. ‘I can hear it the way I am now,’ he told Abner, ‘a great, rattlin’, t’udding noise. I commenced to get terrible afraid. “Something’s surely coming now,” I thought. “God help me!” And it came on bumping and rattling up the stairs. “This is the devil,” says I, “let loose on me!” an’ when I put my head under the clothes what should I see but all the things I’d ever done in this life; all the birds I’d took the heads of off with a catapult, flittin’ about with no heads and the wings broke on them, and all the bottles of whisky I’d ever stolen on the butler. An’ the noise come bumping upstairs. “God, I’m gone!” I says, getting down middleways in the bed, and with the same there was a great t’ud and the door flew open on me and it come into the room. Bump, bump, bump it went, an’ the chairs went over and the basin of water I’d never washed in come down with a crash—and I lying there with the pespiration running down me on to the sheets like a spout. “God, I’m gone!” I says again, and that was the last word I spoke that night, for the sheets was stuck to me back. Then it comes over to the bed, and I tries to get under the mattress, but before I knew where I was I felt two great hands on the both of my thighs. “Now I’m destroyed altogether,” says I, but before I’d finished thinking it come on the top of me in a lump with the chain draggin’ along the floor, and me lyin’ there not as thick as a match. Then I commenced to feel the sheet being drew down over my face and two hairy arms round my neck, and with that a great, big, hot tongue licking me. “Ah, my beautiful,” says I, “I have you at last.” That dog was so fond on me he’d smelt me out over thirty miles and pulled the log he was tied to in the stable after him and broke down the door and come upstairs into bed with me. I loved that dog. And that’s why I say you’re after losin’ a good friend in yours. Give me the lend of another gorm to go to sleep on.’

Abner gave him the tobacco, and after that the story-teller was silent. Falling asleep, Abner heard only the regular noise of his companion’s jaws as they chewed. In half an hour they were both asleep.

Early next morning Mick Connor woke him, telling him that unless they cleared out the farmer’s men would find them. Abner was far too comfortable for the moment to want to move, but as soon as he regained full consciousness he realised that his skin was itching all over.

‘This place is alive with fleas,’ he said.