The Missing Will

The cold had teeth that morning. Fiona loaded the last of the crates into the van at half six, her breath clouding under the single lamp above the shop’s back door. December had come in hard across Connemara, a cold that crept through stone walls and settled in the bones of old houses, and the forecast on RTÉ the night before had promised worse. She pulled her fleece tighter, tucked the delivery list into her coat pocket, and climbed into the driver’s seat. The engine coughed twice before it caught. The heater rattled out a thin stream of warmth that smelled, as always, of bread and paraffin.

She reversed onto Harbour Street. Duncarragh was still dark, the streetlights pooling orange on wet flagstones, the harbour below a black absence broken only by the riding lights of two trawlers at their moorings. No one was about. Even the gulls were quiet, hunched along the quay wall like old men waiting for a bus. Fiona turned the van up the hill road and headed for the farms.

The rural delivery run was a thing she had started about four years ago, after old Mrs Whelan couldn’t get down to the village any more. What began as a favour to one woman had grown into a proper loop of twelve stops on a good week, sometimes fifteen, threading the single-track lanes above Dunmore Bay and out through the Kilbeg district where the land climbed and the hedgerows closed in. She carried bread, milk, tinned goods, newspapers, the odd prescription collected from the chemist in Clifden, and whatever else the farms needed that couldn’t wait for a trip to town. It kept her connected to the people she’d known all her life, the ones who’d bought from her father and her grandfather before him. And it got her out of the shop for a morning, which was worth something in the short, dark days of winter.

The first three stops were quick. Colm Kelleher’s dairy farm on the ridge, two loaves and a litre of milk. He kept sixty Friesians but wouldn’t drink his own, a quirk Fiona had stopped questioning years ago. A copy of the Connacht Tribune as well. Marie Kelleher waved from the kitchen window. At Peggy Nolan’s cottage beyond the crossroads, Fiona left a box of groceries on the step and knocked twice, because Peggy was slow to the door in the mornings and didn’t like to be rushed. At the Gallaghers’ place, where the lane narrowed to a cattle track and the hedgerows scraped the sides of the van, she handed over three bags and a tin of biscuits and accepted a cup of tea she didn’t have time for but drank anyway, because Mattie Gallagher was eighty-three and lived alone and the tea was the point.

By half eight the sky had lightened to a flat, pewter grey. The bay was visible below, a sheet of dull steel stretching to the Twelve Bens on the far side, their peaks lost in cloud. Sleet blew in from the west, not heavy, just persistent, the kind that found every gap in a collar and every crack in a windscreen seal. Fiona turned the wipers on and headed for the headland road.

Bridget Mannion’s house stood at the end of a boreen that branched off the coast road about two miles above the village, on a shoulder of land facing the open Atlantic. It was a substantial place, a two-storey farmhouse built of cut stone, with good windows, a slated roof, and a walled garden on the south side where Bridget grew runner beans and sweet peas in summer. The farm ran to seventy acres of grazing land above the bay, rough ground but well-fenced, with a newer shed and a hay barn that Bridget’s late husband, Peadar, had put up in the 1980s. Peadar had been dead nearly thirty years now, and Bridget had managed on her own for most of them, leasing the grazing to a neighbouring farmer and keeping the house and garden in an order that spoke of pride and habit and a refusal to let things slip.

Fiona parked in the yard and collected the last crate from the back of the van. A sliced pan, a carton of eggs, a tin of Barry’s tea, two tins of soup, a bag of porridge oats, and the Irish Independent. Bridget’s regular order, unchanged in three years. She carried it to the back door and knocked.

Nobody came.

She knocked again, louder. The kitchen window was dark. No light in the hall. Fiona set the crate down on the step and tried the handle. The door opened, because doors were rarely locked out here, not during the day.

“Bridget?” she called into the hallway. “It’s Fiona.”

The house was cold. Not the ordinary cold of a December morning before the range got going, but a deeper, settled cold, the kind that meant no fire had been lit since the night before. Fiona stepped inside, her boots loud on the flagstones, and walked through the narrow hall to the kitchen.

Assumpta Devane was sitting at the kitchen table with her coat still on and her hands wrapped around a mug of tea that had gone cold. Her eyes were red, her face blotched and raw from crying. She looked up at Fiona and said nothing for a moment. Then she said, very quietly, “She’s gone, Fiona.”

Fiona stood in the doorway. “Bridget?”

“In the night. In her chair by the fire.” Assumpta’s voice was steady but thin, as if she were holding it in place by effort. “I came up this morning to get her breakfast and she was sitting there. I thought she was asleep.” She pressed her lips together. “She looked peaceful. She looked like herself.”

Fiona set the crate of groceries on the floor, pulled out the chair opposite Assumpta, and sat down. The kitchen was dim. The range had gone out hours ago, the ashes cold and grey in the grate. Through the window, the yard and the fields beyond were colourless in the December light. A magpie landed on the wall outside, bobbed once, and flew off.

“Have you called anyone?” Fiona asked.

“Dr Meehan. He’s on his way. And I rang Father Keane.” Assumpta looked down at her cold tea. “I didn’t know who else to ring. She had no one, Fiona. Not close.”

It was true, and it wasn’t. Bridget Mannion had plenty of people in her life, in the way that a woman who had lived in the same parish for eighty-odd years always did. She had neighbours and cousins and people who owed her favours and people she owed favours to, and she had the steady commerce of village life, the shop and the church and the post office and the mart. But close family, the kind who came when you died, she had very little of. Peadar’s people were scattered. There were nephews and cousins at varying degrees of remove, some in Dublin, some further, and none of them had been regular visitors. Bridget herself had been an only child. No children of her own. No obvious heir.

The village would want to know who got the house. Fiona knew it, and felt a small, unworthy flicker of irritation at knowing it, because Bridget’s body was still warm in the next room and already the arithmetic of inheritance was forming in the back of her mind, unbidden but there. That was how it worked in a place like Duncarragh. A death without an obvious successor was a question the parish couldn’t leave alone, because land and property were the grammar of everything, the way people measured themselves and one another, the way they marked what mattered.

“I’ll stay until the doctor comes,” Fiona said.

Assumpta nodded. “Would you sit with her? I can’t. Not again.”

Fiona went through to the front room.

Bridget was in the armchair by the fireplace, the one with the worn arms and the crocheted blanket folded over the back. She was leaning slightly to one side, her head resting against the wing of the chair, her hands in her lap. Her eyes were closed. She wore her good cardigan, the blue one, over a blouse, and her reading glasses were on the side table next to a cup of tea and a book turned face-down to hold the page. She looked, as Assumpta had said, like herself. Like a woman who had fallen asleep by the fire and simply not woken up.

Fiona stood by the door for a moment, then crossed the room and sat in the chair opposite. The fire had burned down to ash. The room was very still. Outside, the sleet tapped against the window in irregular bursts, driven by a wind that came and went.

She had known Bridget Mannion for as long as she could remember. As a child, Fiona had come up here with her father on deliveries, back when Dermot ran the shop and the van was older and louder and the headland road was barely paved. Bridget had been middle-aged then, brisk and upright, a woman who kept a clean house and a sharp tongue and didn’t suffer fools. She paid her bills on time, ordered the same things every week, and never once asked for credit. She had opinions about the weather, about the government, about the state of the roads, and she expressed them with a directness that could strip paint. But she was generous in the quiet, unannounced way of the place. She left bags of vegetables on neighbours’ doorsteps. She lent money to people she knew couldn’t pay it back and never mentioned it again. She kept a biscuit tin by the back door for the children who passed on their way home from school.

She had been failing this past year, slowly and stubbornly. Assumpta had been coming in daily for the last four years, first for a few hours, then for most of the day, cooking meals, managing medications, keeping the house warm. Bridget tolerated it, barely. She didn’t like to be minded. But her legs were bad, and her breathing was worse, and the hill up from the back garden to the house had defeated her sometime in the spring. She hadn’t left the property since June.

And now she was gone, and the room was cold, and the book on the side table would never be finished, and the cup of tea beside it had a pale brown ring where it had evaporated in the night.

Fiona sat with her for twenty minutes, not speaking, not praying, just present. She thought about her own father, who had sat in a chair not unlike this one in the flat above the shop and died on a Tuesday afternoon in September, seven years before everything began. Dermot Byrne, who had collected paper the way other men collected tools or fishing tackle. Parish records, council minutes, old maps, correspondence, receipts, deeds, all of it filed in the big cabinet behind the counter with his own careful labels. PROPERTY. PEOPLE. PARISH. OTHER. She had never cleared it out. It sat there still, a monument to his quiet conviction that paper mattered, that the written record outlived the people who wrote it and held them to account long after they were gone.

She wondered if Bridget had left papers. She must have. A woman who owned seventy acres and a house like this would have a will, a solicitor, documents in order. Bridget was that kind of person. Careful. Deliberate. The sort who wrote things down.

Dr Meehan arrived at quarter past nine, a stooped man in a waxed jacket who had been Bridget’s doctor for thirty years and looked like the morning had aged him another five. Fiona let him in and he went through to the front room, his bag in his hand, though they both knew there was nothing in it that could help now. She heard him speak to Assumpta in the hallway, low and kind. After a few minutes he came back and confirmed what everyone already knew. Natural causes. Heart, most likely. He would sign the certificate. Had the family been notified?

Assumpta said she had a number for a nephew in Dublin. Cormac, she thought his name was. Cormac Naughton. Bridget’s late husband’s sister’s boy. He was the one who came at Christmas, some years. Not every year.

“He’ll need to be told,” Dr Meehan said. “And the solicitor. Standún’s, I think. On Bridge Street.”

Assumpta nodded. She looked hollowed out, a woman whose purpose had ended in the night along with the person who needed her.

Fiona touched her arm. “I’ll come back later, Assumpta. Or tomorrow. Whatever you need.”

“Thank you, Fiona.” Assumpta paused. She opened her mouth as if to say something else, then stopped. Then started again. “She was getting her affairs in order, you know. This past while. She told me she wanted things settled. That’s what she said. ‘I want things settled, Assumpta. Before it’s too late.’”

Fiona waited, but Assumpta shook her head and looked away, and whatever else she might have said retreated behind the grief.

❦

The drive back to Duncarragh took fifteen minutes, the van labouring down the headland road with the sleet coming in sideways off the Atlantic. The wipers beat a dull rhythm. The heater coughed warm air that smelled of damp wool and diesel. Fiona drove carefully, because the road was narrow and the verges were soft, and because her mind was elsewhere and she knew it.

She thought about Bridget saying she wanted things settled. It was a phrase old people used when they knew the end was close, a practical statement, not a dramatic one. Wills, deeds, bank accounts. The paperwork of a life, gathered and tidied for whoever came after. But Assumpta’s face when she said it had carried something more than grief. Something unsettled.

She parked behind the shop and came in through the back door. The storeroom was dark and cold, the concrete floor gritty underfoot. She switched on the lights, hung up her coat, filled the kettle, and stood waiting for it to boil. The shop didn’t open until nine, and there was nothing to do until then but stand in the quiet and let the morning settle around her.

At nine she turned the sign, unlocked the front door, and switched on the three banks of fluorescents that ran the length of the ceiling. Byrne’s General Stores came to life in its usual, unhurried way, the tinned goods catching the light on the shelves, the newspaper stand by the till still carrying yesterday’s papers, today’s delayed on the road by the weather, the cooler humming behind the counter with its rows of milk and yoghurt. The shop was small and old-fashioned and hadn’t changed its layout since her grandfather’s time, and there were mornings when that steadiness felt like an anchor and mornings when it felt like a weight, and today it felt like both.