The Fall of Light by Niall Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

joining them. He bowed his head and stayed working, clucking the horse
     and leading the mower down the long lawns of the estate, trimming the hedges and tending the perfect gardens of Lord Edward
     James Fitzroy
of
the county of Essex.
    Emer was by then almost contented. She was the mother of four boys. She tried to teach them classes in the Latin and Greek
     her father had taught her, but Tomas was impatient to be with his father and the twins rolled and knocked each other about
     and showed little interest. Only Teige sat and listened. His hair was first blond and then fair brown, and he had a way of
     sitting in close attention that was serene and knowing. His mother told him he would be a master. She ruffled his hair and
     touched his face with floury fingers.
    But trouble was already gathering. Francis had no garden of his own and tended another man’s instead, clipping the laurel
     bushes that the lord himself never saw, grooming them into globes of green in case the lord should visit this year, and bringing
     home the clippings to addto the stew of their dinner. He planted potatoes, dug carrots and turnips and parsnips that were marshalled in such straight
     lines that they mocked the crooked stonewalled boundaries of the fields outside the garden. His hands grew black with earth.
     When the old angers rose in his chest, he reached down and tore at the weeds with fury. And shortly he was noticed by the
     head gardener, Harrington, for none rooted at the ground like him or pulled up the stumps of dead trees or turned over the
     soil with the same fury.
    The garden was a kind of paradise. It was made to defy the typical view of that country in the drawing rooms of London. From
     there, the neighboring island was a place unruly and wild where everything rioted in nature and a straight line was not to
     be seen. But in that garden was a proof of empire, a living evidence that in the hands of the educated and well-bred even
     the most inauspicious place, the damp, dreary ground of that estate, could become transformed into an elegant country residence
     that would not offend a visiting lord. It would both reflect and inspire. It would show the natives the advantages of dominion,
     of what could be done, mirroring in its majesty the glory of its owner while subduing them to it at the same time.
    Within it, Francis worked silently from grey dawn until the gloaming. The years ran into his hands and lined his skin like
     the knots in trees. The lord never came. The house was prepared several times, fires lit, woodsmoke hanging in the trees,
     and every plant and bush in the garden balanced on the instant of its best display. Rain was prayed away. Maids ran about
     in black dresses with white aprons and caps and polished the dishes that had never been used. The world waited and was disappointed
     once more.
    It was the evening after one of those false visits, when all day eyes had watched the avenue for His Lordship’s arrival and
     the gardeners had looked at their garden as though it were the painting
of
a garden, a masterpiece in which every detail had been painted just so, that Francis Foley came home angrily to Emer. He
     sat at the table and placed upon it his hands brown with mud.
    “What are we doing?” he said to her.
    “We are living our life. Get yourself cleaned,” she told him.
    “We have nothing.”
    “Stop. Don’t. I know what you are going to say and I don’t want tohear it, Francis,” she said, and went to get the food for the dinner. The boys stood about and watched silently to see calamity
     coming. But that evening it did not.
    Later that night Francis left the cottage in the falling darkness and broke into the big house. He felt he had been scorned
     by the lord and that this was only the latest of all those assaults life had made on his dreams. He opened a window and stepped
     inside that mute and perfect world. He walked through its ordered elegance, down the polished oak floors that reflected