Chapter 9: The Sisterhood of Witches

It is still dark as I feel the bed mattress shift and a draft of cold air momentarily chills me as the warm comforter is lifted to allow a freezing cold body to invade my cosy nest. Through bleary eyes I can see Etain’s grimly-set pale face, thanks to a shaft of moonlight coming through my bedroom window, her long dark hair loose and wild, glistening wet.

“Where you been?” I try to say but my tongue seems to be stuck fast to the roof of my mouth and emerges as a strangled rasp with popping lips, something like, ‘whereu-pop-pop-bin?’

“Dancing,” comes the curt reply, before she slips under the comforter and turns herself away from me. A cold butt insinuates itself into my side as I lay on my back and shocks me into wide awake mode. The last prior thought I remember of last night was Etain curled up on my shoulder as we fell asleep. Was that first cosy sharing of my bed with this beautiful creature nothing but a dream?

If you are thinking that this was the early morning after Etain had finally reached that milestone in her life that is euphemistically referred to as ‘attaining womanhood’, you’d be wrong, so keep your dirty thoughts to yourself, would you?

Etain had been a ‘woman’ in the brown-up adult sense of the word for at least six times longer than my own country of birth had even been in existence. No, last night we were both emotionally drained after our rather momentous weekend of revelation upon revelation, especially after my deeply asleep daughter Caoimhe had been carried up to her own bedroom for the night.

Etain simply insisted that she didn’t want to go back downstairs and sleep on her own on her last night as my house guest and wouldn’t consider any other option. I was easily persuaded.

She put on one of my old tees, that hung down to mid-thigh on her, yet looked sensational on her, and we gently kissed and cuddled under the comforter until we both fell asleep exhausted but happy. Her ‘womanhood’, if we insist on calling it that, remains intact.

Now, it is much later in the night and I have slept alone for sometime, judging by how cold my house guest has become.

I look at the pair of luminous dials on my battered old wind-up bedside clock, registering seven minutes after three in the morning. That trusty old clock is the one that I had used throughout my time in college and my father had used in his college time before me. It must be fifty years old and is an old wind-up Swiss folding travelling clock that used to have an alarm which no longer works, but it keeps excellent time and, before we had this cottage rewired, it was a boon whenever the electrics failed overnight and the radio clock on Ella’s side registered nothing or flashing zeros.

“Dancing?” I ask.

No reply. The burrowing butt has stopped burrowing further into my rapidly cooling torso and Etain is emitting a cute snuffling on her breath intake and breathing out with a warm gentle buzz.

She is already asleep in seconds. I on the other hand am wide awake. I nudge her gently.

“Dancing?” I pause for a moment and jab her more determinedly with my elbow. “Dancing?” I repeat louder.

“Mmm, dancing, just dancing.” Etain mumbles sleepily.

“Why?”

“Love dancing. Wanna sleep, lemme sleep.” Etain’s breathing buzzes again.

“Where?”

“Wha’?”

“Where. Were. You. Dancing?” I spell out, well, not quite, but you know, demonstrating that I want answers, now, not tomorrow, even though it is tomorrow already.

“The Faerie Ring.” Etain’s voice has taken on a sigh of exasperation.

“Our ... Faerie Ring?” I ask, “The one you found yesterday at the bottom of our back yard, overgrown and hidden among the fallen trees and impenetrable brambles?”

“Of course, now where else would we be dancing at all?” She starts to turn slowly, stiffly to face me.

“We?”

“We. My sisters and I was dancing and...” she was fully turned by now and looking at me under hooded eyes, her head bowed slightly as if she wasn’t going to tell me the full story, so I silently let her continue. A small smile forms on her lips as she no doubt recalls her love of this fresh indulgence in dance. “ ... well, Richard, brambles and fallen branches be naught at all when witches are wont to dance in the moonlight, such barriers melt away by magic, by becoming a temporary part of the Otherworld, returning to leave no trace of us after we’re done with the dance.”

“So, both your sisters came to visit through the Faerie Ring and dance with you?”

“All of my sisters came, and they came only after I summoned them to come.”

“All your sisters?”

“All six came, because seven witches is a perfect number for dancing in the moonlight, a most magical dance it was, too, our first with all seven sisters together. It was ... it was lovely. I wish you had seen it yourself.”

“You were wearing my worn out old tee in your dance?” I say, “I imagine it must’ve been quite a sight?”

“Ah. Comfortable old tees, particularly one smelling sweetly of the man in my life, becomes a wondrously diaphanous gown during a witch’s dance, Richard.”

“You ... I ... we ... er ... am I the man in your life, Etain?”

“Aye, of course you are, the only man in my life. It is the reason I am here, in this place, in this house ... in this bed. I love you, Richard, and one day, I hope, you will ... love me in return,” she looks fully at me now, her lovely face aglow in the moonlight, “in time.”

Ah, awkward or what? Reply to her with my feelings? Do I even know what they are? Really? I have loved and lost, can I, even love again? My confusion? My hopes and fears? The Irish have the perfect retort to such questions, ‘Feck that!’ Certainly for now, in bed together, such a response is impossible. Change the subject? Yes. Safety first works.

“I thought one of your sisters died when she was just a small child?”

“Aye, so did I.” Etain smiles broadly, “I now know that even witches, especially a young one like I was back in those days, can have her mind fogged by one with more power than I to fool me.”

“By your mother?”

“No, my father, well, my step-father. I never knew who my father was at all, well. I, didn’t know, not then.”

‘Not then? What now?’ I think, but then nothing surprises me in conversations with Etain any more, I am in a reality dream. Besides, seven witches dancing in the moonlight, that was interesting and I find my imagination running wild.

“Look, Richard, can we go downstairs to the kitchen and talk about this over a cup of tea? I’m thirsty after my dancing and I need to look in your eyes in the light when we talk about this.”

‘Oh oh,’ I think, ‘this is serious. What is she up to now?’

“All right, we’ll go down for no more than an hour,” I say, getting out of bed. “Monday’s a work day for and a school day for Caoimhe, so I need to be up to get her breakfast, packed lunch and delivered to school.”

I usually sleep naked in the summer, even though the evenings are now starting to draw in, the house is well insulated but it’s still noticeably colder than being snuggled up under the comforter. Yes, we do conform to the bedroom conventions of the European maritime climate and we have a duck-down duvet, but I can’t help but call it a ‘comforter’ out of habit.

With a young daughter at home to care for on my own, I do have a pair of pyjama bottoms in the bottom drawer of the night stand, for emergencies, she still has nightmares which wake us both from time to time and when she was a baby I did all the night feeds and diaper changes or stayed up with her half the night with colds, flu, or fevers, the usual child ailments that we have to go through.

I already had a tee and boxers on this evening, having shared the bed with a nubile female for the first time in ten years. So I pull on the PJs and feel acclimatised by then to the night temperatures to consider that the dressing gown that I use for the winter months isn’t necessary.

“I’ll put the kettle on, while you get dressed,” I say quickly and depart as Etain gets out her side of the bed and stretches her long slim arms, making the tee shirt ride up her shapely thighs.

The kettle boils and I make the tea from the leaves from the little caddy that Etain has left on the side, two spoonfuls and one for the pot. I rarely drink tea at home. We do keep a few bags in as some of the moms of Caoimhe’s school friends, who help with the school runs when I have to leave early or come back late from visiting customers, prefer tea and sometimes they stop off for a cuppa and a chat when dropping their girls off for sleepovers and such.

Even though Irish moms have just as busy lives as moms do back home, they seem to like to make time to talk about things going on in their lives, your lives and pass on the general gossip over a pot of tea.

Etain pours when the tea has brewed and we sit at our little kitchen table to talk.

“So you danced with all your sisters?” I open.

“Aye, it was brilliant,” she laughs, “joyous it was, we’d never all danced together before. One or two I hadn’t seen since I was a wean and one or two more I had never ever seen before. It was such fun and so much joy and love that Caoimhe finally joined in. She really couldn’t help herself by then, she was hopping about as we danced, I released Dubheasa’s hand and we both held out our hands so she could join the ring.”