Silent D’Arcy and the Nautical Charting Parlour Where His Bearing Slipped

A slow hush occupies D’Arcy House, densest in the abandoned charting parlour where Cormac Eamon D’Arcy, born 1871 near Kilkee, once plotted safe passages for small merchants and fishermen. The broken bearing on his final route sheet lingers like a confession withheld at the threshold of speech. Tools rest precisely where his hand left them—as if he had stepped away only for a moment, then never returned.

A Bearing Threaded Through the Navigator’s Deliberate Hours

Cormac learned soundings and celestial fixes from his elder brother Seamus D’Arcy, a mariner whose cracked spyglass still lies on a woven stool near the cold hearth. Each morning he calibrated compasses, warmed stiff parchment over a low stove, and sharpened graphite to a needle point. His order remains tangible—distance ropes coiled in perfect spirals, protractors stacked by radius, and a tin of wick trimmings beside a lopsided lantern. The scuffed patch on the floorboards shows where he anchored his heel whenever charting long lines, breath steady as he coaxed each bearing into clarity.

A Quiet Strain That Pulled His Craft Off Its Course

Quiet murmurs suggested that Cormac’s most recent commission—a delicate replotting of a known shoal path—revealed drift in several soundings, prompting private questions among those who trusted his steady work. In the interior corridor, Seamus’s spyglass pouch lies torn at the clasp. A coil of plotting twine has unravelled into wavering loops across the boards. A revision sheet rests beneath a narrow table, its updated bearings overwritten in tremulous strokes. A faint scatter of graphite dust marks one stair tread, as though shaken loose from a hurried grip. None of these hints prove miscalculation, yet each leans toward a private weight he kept contained behind calm, patient silence.

Only the fading bearing on his final chart endures—an unfinished reckoning suspended in muted air. Whatever halted Cormac’s practiced hand remains unresolved.

D’Arcy House remains abandoned still.