BRENDAN GRAHAM
The Brightest Day,The Darkest Night

COPYRIGHT

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers 2005 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Brendan Graham 2005

This edition 2016

Fair-Haired Boy - Words and Music by Brendan Graham © Brendan Graham (world exc. Eire) / Peermusic (UK) Ltd. (Eire)

Praise to the Earth - Words and Music by Brendan Graham © Brendan Graham (world exc. Eire) / Peermusic (UK) Ltd. (Eire)

Ochón an Gorta Mór - Words and Music by Brendan Graham © Brendan Graham (world exc. Eire) / Peermusic (UK) Ltd. (Eire)

Sleepsong - Words: Brendan Graham; Music: Rolf Lovland © Peermusic (UK) Ltd.; Universal Music A/S

Crucán na bPáiste: Words & English Translation: Brendan Graham; Music Trad/Additional Music - Brendan Graham © Brendan Graham (world exc. Eire) / Peermusic (UK) Ltd. (Eire)

I Am The Sky: Poem by Brendan Graham

The Last Rose of Summer - Thomas Moore - A Selection of Irish Melodies, Vol 5 (1813)

Has Sorrow Thy Young Days Shaded - Thomas Moore - A Selection of Irish Melodies, Vol 6 (1815)

Brendan Graham asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Source ISBN: 9780006513971

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007387687

Version: 2016-01-19

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

DEDICATION

Mary

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

PROLOGUE

ELLEN

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

PATRICK

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

FORTY-ONE

FORTY-TWO

FORTY-THREE

FORTY-FOUR

FORTY-FIVE

FORTY-SIX

FORTY-SEVEN

FORTY-EIGHT

FORTY-NINE

FIFTY

FIFTY-ONE

FIFTY-TWO

FIFTY-THREE

FIFTY-FOUR

FIFTY-FIVE

FIFTY-SIX

FIFTY-SEVEN

FIFTY-EIGHT

LAVELLE

FIFTY-NINE

SIXTY

SIXTY-ONE

SIXTY-TWO

SIXTY-THREE

ELLEN

SIXTY-FOUR

SIXTY-FIVE

SIXTY-SIX

SIXTY-SEVEN

SIXTY-EIGHT

SIXTY-NINE

SEVENTY

SEVENTY-ONE

SEVENTY-TWO

SEVENTY-THREE

SEVENTY-FOUR

SEVENTY-FIVE

SEVENTY-SIX

SEVENTY-SEVEN

LAVELLE

SEVENTY-EIGHT

SEVENTY-NINE

EIGHTY

EIGHTY-ONE

EIGHTY-TWO

EIGHTY-THREE

EIGHTY-FOUR

EIGHTY-FIVE

ELLEN

EIGHTY-SIX

EIGHTY-SEVEN

EIGHTY-EIGHT

EIGHTY-NINE

NINETY

NINETY-ONE

NINETY-TWO

NINETY-THREE

NINETY-FOUR

NINETY-FIVE

NINETY-SIX

NINETY-SEVEN

NINETY-EIGHT

KEEP READING

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

AUTHOR’S NOTES

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PROLOGUE

Half Moon Place, Boston, 1861

Ellen O’Malley opened her eyes.

Blinked.

Raised her head.

Waited, watching for the sky.

Soon the sun would come creeping into the corners of Half Moon Place. ‘Like a broom,’ she thought. Sweeping out the dark.

When the sun brushed along the narrow alleyway towards where she sat, she opened her throat, and began singing,

‘Praise to the Earth and creation,

Praise to the dance of the morning sun.’

She sat atop a mound of rubbish, raised from the ground and the sordid effluents that backwashed the alleyway. The mane of red hair that fell from her head to her waist, her only garment. The sailors who frequented the basement dram-houses of Half Moon Place, had rough-handled her, taken her clothes for sport. But no more.

Ellen hadn’t even resisted. Instead, offered prayers for their wayward souls, which hurried them off.

The glasses she missed more. The alley children had stolen them, fascinated by the purplish hue that helped her eyes. Years in the cordwaining mills of Massachusetts had taken their toll. But she was blessed more than most. Without them she could still see the sun and the stars and the moon. The shoe-stitching she could no longer do. She couldn’t blame Fogarty then, the landlord’s middleman, when eventually he put her out for falling behind with the rent. He wasn’t the worst; had stretched himself as far as one of his kind could.

Even in her current situation, any passer-by would have still considered Ellen O’Malley a striking woman. Firm of countenance, fine of forehead and with remarkable eyes. ‘Speckled emeralds,’ she had once been told, ‘like islands in a lake.’ She smiled at the memory. Tall, she sat unbowed by the circumstances in which she now found herself. Her fortieth year to Heaven behind her, a casual onlooker might have placed Ellen O’Malley at not yet having reached the meridian of life. A flattery from which, once, she would not have demurred.

She had only been out the few nights now and the New England Fall had not been harsh. Biddy Earley, whose voice Ellen heard at night, driving a hard bargain with the men of the sea would, in the daylight hours bring her a cup of buttermilk and a step of bread for dipping in it. Part-proceeds of the previous night. Likewise, Blind Mary, all day on her stoop in nodding talk with herself, would bring her a scrap of this or that, or the offer of a ‘gill of gin’. Then, nod her way homewards again, scattering with her stick the street urchins who taunted her.

Still with her song, Ellen reflected on her state. She was, at last, stripped of everything – a perfection of poverty. No possessions, no desires. Life … and death came and went along the passageways of Half Moon Place with such a frequent regularity that her situation attracted scant attention. Nor did she seek it.

‘Into Thy hands Lord, I commend my Spirit.’

Nothing remained within her own hands, everything in His.

It was a wonderful liberation to at last hand over her life. Not forever seeking to keep the reins tightly gripped on it. Death, when it came, would hold no fears for her. Death was re-unification with the One who created her.

She looked down at her nakedness, unashamed by it, her body now shriven of sin, aglow with the light of Heaven. She had been beautiful once, had fallen from grace, and now, was beautiful again; if less so physically, then spiritually at least.

She thought of her children: Mary, her natural daughter; Louisa, her adopted daughter; Patrick, her son and then, Lavelle, her second husband. How she had betrayed them; her self-exile from their lives; her atonement; and finally, now her redemption.

She had been right all those years ago. To unhinge herself from their lives after her affair … keep them free of scandal. Because of her the girls, postulants then, would likely have been driven from the Convent of St Mary Magdalen. With words like ‘the very reason the vow of purity is so highly prized among the Sisters is that, in its absence, it is humanity’s fatal flaw.’ Ellen considered this a moment … how very true in her own case.

And clothes? Clothes were the outer manifestation of the inner flaw – something with which to cover it up. Down all the centuries since paradise lost. Now, her paradise regained, she had no earthly need of them.

‘I am clothed …’ she sang in her song, ‘… the sun, the moon and the stars – finer raiment than ever fell from the hands of man.’

Then she prayed.

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I give you my heart and my soul;

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, assist me in my last agony;

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, may I breathe forth my soul in peace with you. Amen.’

She followed with the Our Father – in the old tongue Ár n-Athair atá ar Neamh. Then finally, she raised to heaven the long-remembered prayers of childhood.

Afterwards she sang again. The songs she had sung to her own children – nonsensical, infant-dandling songs: aislingi, the beautiful sung vision-poems; and the suantraí, the ‘sleep-songs’ with which she once lullabyed them. Sang to the sun and the teetering tenements of Half Moon Place.

ELLEN

ONE

Convent of St Mary Magdalen, Boston, 1861

‘Half Moon Place …’ Sister Lazarus warned, ‘… is reeking with perils.’ The two younger nuns in her presence looked at each other. Ready for whatever perils the outside world might bring. It was not their first such outing into one of Boston’s less fortunate neighbourhoods. Still, Sister Lazarus considered it her bounden duty, as on every previous occasion, to remind them of the ‘reeking perils’ awaiting them.

‘Now, Sister Mary and Sister Veronica …’ the older woman continued, ‘… you must remain together at all times. Inseparable. The fallen … those women whom you will find there … if they are truly repentant … wanting of God’s grace … wanting to leave …’ She paused. ‘… wanting to leave behind their … previous lives … then you must bring them here to be in His keeping.’

‘Here,’ was the Convent of St Mary Magdalen, patron saint of the fallen of their gender. ‘Here’ the Sisters would care for those women, the leftovers of Boston life. Care for their temporal needs but primarily their spiritual ones.

Sister Lazarus – ‘Rise-from-the-Dead’ as the two younger nuns referred to her – reminded them again that their sacred mission in life was to ‘reclaim the thoughtless and melt the hardened’.

The older nun took in her two charges, still in their early twenties. Sister Mary, tall, serene as the Mother of God for whom she had been named. Blessed with uncommon natural beauty. Most of it now hidden, along with her gold-red tresses, under the winged, white headdress of the Magdalens. And not a semblance of pride in her beauty, Sister Lazarus thought. Oh, what novenas Sister Lazarus would have offered to have been blessed with Sister Mary’s eyes – those sparkling, jade-coloured eyes, ever modestly cast downwards – instead of the slate-coloured ones the Lord had seen fit to bless her with. The older nun corrected her indecorousness of thought. Envy was a terrible sin. She turned her attention to the other young nun before her.

Sister Veronica’s eyes were entirely a different matter.

Sister Veronica did not at all keep her attractive, hazel-brown eyes averted from the world, or anybody in it – including Sister Lazarus. Nor was Sister Veronica at all as demure in her general carriage as Sister Lazarus would have liked. Instead, carried herself with a disconcerting sweep of her long white Magdalen habit. Which always to Sister Lazarus, seemed to be trying to catch up with the younger nun. Unsuccessfully at that!

‘Impetuosity, Sister Veronica,’ the older nun had frequently admonished, ‘will be your undoing. You must guard against it!’

She saw them out the door, a smile momentarily relieving her face. If the hardened were indeed to be melted, these two were, for all such ‘meltings’, abundantly graced. Though Sister Lazarus would never tell them so. Praise, even if deserved, should always be generously reserved.

Praise could lead to pride.

‘There are so many fallen from God’s grace, Louisa,’ Sister Mary said when once out of earshot of the convent. She used the other nun’s former name, the one she had known her adopted sister by for more than a dozen years. Since first they had come out of Ireland.

‘God takes care of His own,’ Louisa replied.

‘And Mother?’ Mary asked, the question always on her mind.

Louisa took her sister’s arm.

‘Yes … and Mother too,’ Louisa answered. ‘We would surely have heard. Somebody would have brought news if something had happened’.

But something had happened.

Life had been good once. Their mother had made their way well in America, educating both herself and them. She had re-married – Lavelle – built up a small if successful business with him. Then it had seemed to all go wrong, the business failing. When a move from their home at 29 Pleasant Street to more straitened accommodation had been imminent, Mary and Louisa had both secretly decided to unburden the family of themselves. To follow the nudging, niggling voice they had been hearing.

‘It almost broke poor Mother’s heart,’ Mary said.

‘Then, do you remember, Louisa, once in the convent, everything silent – just like you?’

Louisa nodded, remembering. As a child she had been cast to the roads of a famine-ridden Ireland, her parents desperate in the hope she would fall on common charity and survive the black years of the blight. Six months later Louisa had returned to find them, huddled together; their bodies half eaten by dogs, likewise famished. She had gone silent then. All sound, it seemed, trapped beneath the bones that formed her chest. Nor did she retain a memory of any name they had called her by – not even their own names.

A year later Ellen had found her, taken her in. Though some early semblance of speech had returned in the intervening year, her silence had helped Louisa survive. Drawn forth whatever crumbs of charity a famished people could grant. So she had remained silent. Kept her secret. Afraid, lest once revealed, all kindness be cut off and she condemned, like the rest to claw at each other for survival. She had remained ‘the silent girl’ until they reached America and Ellen had christened her. After the place in which they had found her – Louisburgh, County Mayo – and the place to which they were then bound for, Boston, with its other Louisburgh … Square.

Gradually the trapped place beneath Louisa’s breast had freed itself. Then, in the safe sanctum of the cathedral at Franklin Street she had whispered out halting prayers of thanksgiving.

At the edge of Boston Common, they stood back to let a group of blue-clad militia double-quick by them. The young men all a-gawk at the wide-winged headdresses of the two nuns.

‘Angels from Heaven!’ a saucy Irish voice shouted.

‘Devils from Hell!’ another one piped.

Then they were gone, shuffling in their out-of-time fashion to be mustered for some battlefield in Virginia.

‘I pray God that this war between the States will be quickly done with,’ Mary said quietly.

‘Do you remember anything, Mary – anything at all?’ Louisa asked, returning to the topic that, like her sister, always occupied her mind.

‘Nothing … only, like you, that Mother had once called to the convent, leaving no message … and then those messages left by Lavelle and dear brother Patrick that they had not found her. I cannot imagine what … unless some fatal misfortune has … and I cannot bear to think that.’

Louisa’s mind went back over the times she and her adoptive mother had been alone. That time in the cathedral at Holy Cross when Ellen had tried to get her to speak. How troubled her mother had seemed. And the book, the one which Ellen had left on the piano. Louisa had opened it. Love Elegies … the sinful poetry of a stained English cleric – John Donne. It had shocked Louisa that her mother could read such things – and well-read the book had been.

‘Did you ever see a particular book – Love Elegies – with Mother?’ she asked Mary.

Mary thought for a moment.

‘No, I cannot say so, but then Mother was always reading. Why …?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, Mary, something … a nun’s intuition.’ Louisa laughed it off. Then, more brightly, gazing into her sister’s face, ‘You are so like her … so beautiful … her green-speckled eyes, her fiery hair …’

‘That’s if you could see it!’ Mary interjected.

‘Personally cropped by the stern shears of Sister Lazarus,’ she added. ‘That little furrow under Mother’s nose – you have it too!’

Louisa went to touch her sister’s face.

‘Oh, stop it, Louisa!’ Mary gently chided. ‘You are not behaving with the required decorum. If “Rise-from-the-Dead” could only see you!’

Louisa restrained herself. ‘I am sorry … you are right,’ she said, offering up a silent prayer for unbecoming conduct – and that the all-seeing eye of Sister Lazarus might not somehow be watching.

‘We are almost there,’ was all Mary answered with.

Half Moon Place held all the backwash of Boston life. As far removed from the counting houses of Hub City as was Heaven from Hell. It housed, in ramshackle rookeries, the furthest fringes of Boston society – indolent Irish, fly-by-nights and runaway slaves. None of which recoiled the two nuns. Nor the reeking stench that, long prior to entering them, announced such places. Since Sister Lazarus had first deemed them ‘morally sufficient’ for such undertakings, many the day had the older nun sent them forth on similar missions of rescue. Them returning always from places like this with some unfortunate in tow, to the Magdalen’s sheltering walls.

This was their work, their calling. To snatch from the jaws of iniquity young women who, by default or design, had strayed into them.

‘Reclaim the thoughtless and melt the hardened.’ Sister Lazarus’s words seemed to ring from the very portals of what lay facing them today. Half Moon Place indeed would be a fertile ground for redemption.

‘A Tower of Babel,’ Louisa said, stepping precariously under its archway into a rabble of tattered urchins who chased after some rotting evil.

‘Kick the Reb! Kill the Reb!’ they shouted, knocking into them with impunity.

A nodding woman, on her stoop, shook her stick after them.

‘I’ll scatter ye … ye little bastards! God blast ye! D’annoyin’ the head of a person, from sun-up to sundown!’

From a basement came the dull sound of a clanging pot colliding with a human skull. A screech of pain … a curse … it all just melting into the sounds that underlay the stench and woebegone sight of the place.

Further along, a woman singing. The snatches of sound attracted them. ‘The soul pining for God,’ Mary said, as the woman’s keening rose on the vapours of Half Moon Place … and was carried to meet them. They rounded the half-moon curve of the alleyway. The singing woman sat amidst a pile of rubbish as if, herself, discarded from life. The long tarnished hair draped over her shoulders her only modesty. But her face was raised to a place far above the teetering tenements, and her song transcended the wretchedness of her state.

‘If not in life we’ll be as one

Then, in death we’ll be,

And there will grow two hawthorn trees

Above my love and me,

And they will reach up to the sky –

Intertwined be …

And the hawthorn flower will bloom where lie

My fair-haired boy … and me.’

It was Louisa who reached her first, hemline abandoned, wildly careering the putrid corridor. Mary then, at her heels, the two of them scrabbling over the off-scourings and excrement. Then, in the miracle of Half Moon Place, breathless with hope, they reached her. As one, they clutched her to themselves.

Praising God. Cradling her nakedness. Wiping the grime and the lost years from her face.

‘Mother!’ they cried. ‘Oh, Mother!’

TWO

They huddled about her, calling out her name, their own names. Begging for her recognition.

‘Mother! Mother! It’s us … Mary and Louisa,’ Mary said, stroking her mother’s head. ‘You’ll be all right now. We’ll take you back with us.’

‘Mary? Louisa? It’s …’ Ellen began.

‘Her mind is altered,’ a voice rang out, interrupting. ‘Too much prayin’ and Blind Mary’s juniper juice,’ the voice continued.

‘We are her daughters,’ Mary said, turning to face the hard voice of Biddy Earley.

‘Daughters – ha!’ the woman laughed. ‘Well blow me down with a Bishop’s fart,’ she said, arms akimbo, calloused elbows visible under her rolled-up sleeves. ‘Oh, she was a close one, was our Ellie. Daughters? An’ us fooled into thinking she had neither chick nor child.’

‘What happened to her?’ Louisa asked.

‘The needle blindness … couldn’t do the stitchin’ no more. But she’s not as bad as she makes out … can see when she wants to!’ the woman answered disparagingly. ‘Fogarty, the landlord’s man, tumbled her out. Just like back home, ’ceptin’ now it’s your honest-to-God, Irish landlords here in America, ’stead of the relics of auld English decency. ’Twould put a longing on a person for the bad old days!’

Ellen, struggling to take it all in, again made to say something.

‘Sshh now, Mother,’ Louisa comforted. ‘Talk is for later. We have to get you inside,’ she said, looking at Biddy Earley.

Reluctantly, Biddy agreed, cautioning that the ‘widow-woman brought all the troubles on herself.’

Mary and Louisa, shepherding Ellen, followed Biddy down into the dank basement where the woman lived.

‘I’ve no clothes for her, mind – ’ceptin’ what’s on me own back,’ she called to them over her shoulder.

Mary would stay with Ellen, Louisa would make the journey back to the convent to get clothes. The Sisters, providential in every respect, always kept some plain homespun, diligently darned against a rainy day – or a novice leaving.

Mary then removed her own undergarment – long white pantaloons tied with a plain-ribboned bow at the ankle. These she pulled onto her mother. Similarly, and aware of the other woman’s stare, she removed as modestly as she could, the petticoat from under her habit, fastening it around Ellen. Biddy, for all her talk about ‘no clothes’, produced a shawl, even if it was threadbare.

‘Throw that over her a while,’ she ordered Mary.

Ellen again started to say something, prompting the woman to come to her and shake her vigorously.

‘Just look at you – full of gibberish … same as ever!’ she said roughly. ‘This is your own flesh and blood come for you, widow-woman! Will you whisht that jabberin’!’

To Mary’s amazement, Biddy Earley then drew back her hand and slapped Ellen full across the face.

‘You wasn’t so backward when you was accusatin’ me o’ stealin’ your book,’ she levelled at Ellen.

‘What book?’ Mary asked, shocked by the woman’s action and holding her mother protectively.

‘Some English filth she kept recitatin’ to herself. Ask Blind Mary – stuck sittin’ on that stoop of hers – about it. That and her niggerology! When, if Lincoln will have his way, the blacks’ll be swarmin’ all over us … and them savages no respecters o’ the likes of you neither, Sister!’ Biddy Earley added for good measure.

Mary didn’t know what to make of it all. All of her endless prayers answered and the joy, the unparalleled joy, of finding her mother alive after all these years. But yet, so dishevelled, and living in such a place.

Biddy Earley, settling a streelish curl beneath her headscarf, continued in similar vein. ‘Then looking down on the likes o’ me for going on me back to the sailors. Sure it’s no sin if it’s keeping body and soul together, is it, Sister?’ she asked boldly, uncaring of the reply. ‘No sin if you don’t enjoy it?’ she added, with a rasp of a laugh.

‘Why don’t you come with us?’ Mary asked the woman, thinking of Sister Lazarus’s words. But Biddy Earley, however hardened, was no candidate for ‘melting’ by nuns.

‘I ain’t no sinner, Sister – I don’t need no forgivin’,’ she retorted, unyieldingly. ‘Now sit quiet till t’other one comes back and then clear off out o’ here, the three o’ yis!’

Mary sat silently, offering thanks for the all-seeing hand that led herself and Louisa to this place. With her fingers, she stroked her mother’s hair, recalling the hundred brushstrokes of childhood each Sunday before Mass. As much as the dimness would allow, she studied her mother, hair all tangled and matted, its once rich lustre dulled. The fine face with that mild hauteur of bearing, now pin-tucked with want and neglect. How could her mother so terribly have fallen?

The woman’s term for Ellen – ‘widow-woman’ – what did it mean? And Ellen using her old, first-marriage name of O’Malley, as Mary had also learned from Biddy.

And Lavelle? What of Lavelle – Ellen’s husband now? Had he never found her … that time he had left the note at the convent … gone looking for her in California? The questions came tumbling one after the other through Mary’s mind.

She wished Louisa would hurry. It was all too much.

Then Ellen slept, face turned to Mary’s bosom, like a child. But it was not the secure sleep of childhood. It was fitful, erratic, full of demons. She awoke, frightened, clutching fretfully at Mary’s veil. Then, bolt upright, peered into the near dark.

‘Mary! Mary! Is that you Mary, a stor?’ Ellen said, falling into the old language.

Then, at the comforting answer, fell to weeping.

THREE

It was some hours before Louisa returned.

Ellen, startled by the commotion, awoke and feverishly embraced her. ‘Oh, my child! My dear child!’ Then she clutched the two of them to her so desperately, as though fearing imminent separation from them again.

Along with the clothing, Louisa had brought some bread and some milk. This they fed to her with their fingers, in small soggy lumps as one would an infant.

Ellen alternated between a near ecstatic state and tears, between sense and insensibility, regularly clasping them to herself.

When they had fed their mother, Mary and Louisa prepared to go, bestowing God’s blessing on Biddy for her kindness.

‘I don’t need no nun’s blessing,’ was Biddy’s response. ‘D’you think He ever looks down on me … down here in this hellhole? But the Devil takes care of his own,’ she threw after them, to send them on their way.

Out in the alleyway, they took Ellen, one on each side, arms encircling her. As they passed the old blind woman on the stoop, she called out to them. ‘Is that you, Ellie? And who’s that with you? Did the angels come at last … to stop that blasted singing?’

Ellen made them halt.

‘They did Blind Mary, they did – the angels came,’ she answered lucidly.

‘Bring them here to me till I see ’em!’ the woman ordered, with a cackle of a laugh.

They approached her.

‘Bend down close to me!’ the woman said in the same tone.

Mary first, leaned towards her and the woman felt for her face, her nose, the line of Mary’s lips.

‘She’s the spit of you, Ellie. And the hair …?’

‘What’s this? What’s this?’ the blind woman said, all agitated now as her fingers travelled higher, feeling the protective headdress on Mary’s face.

‘A nun?’ the woman exclaimed.

‘Yes!’ Mary replied. ‘I am Sister Mary.’

‘And the other one? Are you a nun too? Come here to me!’

Louisa approached her. ‘I am called Sister Veronica.’

Again the hands travelled over Louisa’s face, the crinkled fingers transmitting its contents to behind the blindness.

Louisa saw the old woman’s face furrow, felt the fingers retrace, as if the message had been broken.

‘Faith, if she’s one of yours, Ellie, then the Pope’s a nigger,’ Blind Mary declared with her wicked laugh.

Louisa flinched momentarily.

The old woman carried on talking, her head nodding vigorously all the while, but with no particular emphasis. ‘I’m supposin’ too, Ellie – that you never was a widow-woman neither?’

‘No, I wasn’t – and I’m sorry …’ Ellen began.

The woman interrupted her, excitedly shaking her stick. ‘I knew it! I knew it! Too good to be true! Too good to be true! That’s what my Dan said afore he left to jine the cavalry … for the war,’ she explained, still nodding, as if in disagreement with herself … or her Dan. ‘ What was you hiding from, down here, Ellie?’ she then asked.

This time however, Ellen made no answer.

It was a question that resounded time and again in Mary and Louisa’s minds, as they struggled homewards. Out under the arch they went, drawing away from Half Moon Place, the old woman’s cries, like the stench, following them.

‘The Irish is a perishing class that’s what!’ Blind Mary shouted after them. ‘A perishing class … and my poor Dan gone to fight for Lincoln and his niggerology. This war’ll be the death of us all.’

FOUR

By the time they had reached the door of the convent, Louisa and Mary were in a perfect quandary.

They could not reveal Ellen’s true identity, lest they all be banished. Acceptance into the convent as a novice implied a background and family beyond blemish. There could be no whiff of scandal attached to those who were to be Brides of Christ.

It would be held that they had known all along of their mother’s fallen state and engaged in the concealment of it.

‘It was not a deceit then but it is a deceit now,’ Mary said to Louisa, ‘to continue not to reveal her identity … whatever the consequence.’

‘It is a greater good not to reveal her,’ Louisa argued. ‘Mother is in dire need of corporeal salvation, if not indeed of spiritual salvation!’

‘That is the end justifying wrongful means,’ Mary argued back, torn between her natural instinct to follow Louisa’s reasoning, and the more empirical precepts of religious life.

‘We have been led to her for a purpose,’ Louisa countered. ‘It would not be natural justice to have her now thrown back on the streets. Natural justice supersedes the laws of the Church.’

Mary prayed for guidance. ‘Lord not my will, but Thine be done.’ Having passed the question of justice to that of a higher jurisdiction, Mary was somewhat more at ease with Louisa’s plan.

‘I don’t think “Rise-from-the-Dead” will recognise the likeness between you and Mother.’ Louisa gave voice to Mary’s own fear.

Mary looked at her mother’s sunken state. Sister Lazarus would have seen her only the once … and that many years ago. Still, little passed unnoticed with ‘Rise-from-the-Dead’.

They both impressed upon Ellen the importance of not revealing herself. She was a Penitent, rescued from the streets. Nothing more.

‘That I am,’ she echoed.

Sister Lazarus received them full of concern.

‘Oh, the poor wretch! Divine Providence! Divine Providence that you rescued her, from God knows what fate!’

Mary’s heart beat the easier as the older nun bustled them in without any hint of recognition.

‘A nice hot tub, then put her to bed in the Penitents’ Infirmary,’ Sister Lazarus directed. ‘You, Sisters, take turn to sit with her, lest she take fright at her unfamiliar surroundings.’

They stripped her then, Louisa supporting her in the tub, while Mary sponged from her mother’s body the caked history of Half Moon Place, both of them joyful beyond words at having been her salvation. She, who through famine and pestilence, had long been theirs.

When Louisa spoke, Ellen would turn to look at her, face spread wide in amazement. ‘I know, Mother,’ Louisa said. ‘I was “the silent girl”. All those years when you tried to get me to speak, I would not. Like your story, it is for another day.’

Ellen then turned her head from one to the other of her children, eyes brimming with delight, as if the angels of the Lord had come down from on high and tended her.

Shakily then, she pressed the thumb and forefinger of her right hand to her lips and leaned, first to Mary’s forehead, then to Louisa’s, crossing them in blessing, as she had done, down all the day-long years of childhood.

FIVE

Ellen slept in the Penitents’ Dormitory. About her were raised the fitful cries of other Penitents rescued from the jaws of death or, as the Sisters saw it, from a fate far worse – the jaws of Hell. For here were common nightwalkers, bedizened with sin; others sorely under the influence of the bewitching cup. Still others snatched from grace by the manifold snares of the world, the flesh and the devil. These, if truly penitent, the Sisters sought to reclaim to a life of devotion. But for now these tortured souls struggled. Redemption was not for everyone.

Penitents, those who desired it, could be regenerated. Eventually, shed of all worldly folly, their former names would be replaced by those of the saints. These restored Penitents would then be released back to secular society.

Some Penitents, drawn either by love of God, or fear of the Devil, remained, took vows, becoming Contemplatives. Continuing to lead lives of prayer and penance within the community of the Sisters.

Her own sleep no less turbulent than those around her, Ellen’s mind roved without bent or boundary. Before her, on a pale and dappled horse, paraded Lavelle. Loyal, handsome Lavelle, all gallant and smiling.

Smiling, as on the day she, with Patrick, Louisa and Mary in tow, had docked at the Long Wharf of Boston. Lavelle, with his golden hair, waiting in the sun, waving to them amid the baubled and bustling hordes on the shore. Patrick, curious about this stranger who would replace his father. Their mother’s ‘fancy man’ in America, as Patrick called Lavelle.

In the dream she saw herself laughing, this time at her doorway, talking with Lavelle. He asking a question, she saying ‘yes’ and then him high-kicking it, whistling through that first Christmas snow, down the street merrily. Then springtime … the wedding … she, taking ‘Lavelle’ for a name, relinquishing her dead husband’s name of O’Malley.

Out of the past then a nemesis – Stephen Joyce – who had delivered her first husband Michael to that early death.

Her dream changed colours then. Gone was the brightness of sun and snow … of music on merry streets. Now appeared a purpled bed. On it Stephen Joyce, book in hand reading to her. She, naked at the window, her body turned away from him. Singing to the darkly-plummed world outside … the night pulping against the window, its purple fruit oozing through the windowpane, over her body … staining her. Abruptly again, her dream had changed course. Now Stephen – dark, dangerous Stephen – he, too astride a horse, a coal-black horse, sword in hand and beckoning her. And Patrick – her dear child, Patrick – what was Patrick doing here? Giving her something … but beyond her reach. Mary and Louisa, white-winged, holding her back from going to him. Lavelle again, this time madly galloping towards them on the pale horse. Them cowering from its flashing hooves.

Frightened, she bolted upright in the bed, Louisa at her side restraining her, soothing her anxiety.

‘There, Mother, there – it’s just a bad dream, I’m with you now,’ Louisa said tenderly.

Fearfully, Ellen embraced her, afraid her adopted daughter might disappear back into the frightening dreamworld.

Louisa held her mother, until sleep finally took Ellen.

Through the New England winter began the long, slow restoration. First the temporal needs of the body. Not a surfeit of food but ‘little and often’ as Sister Lazarus advised, ‘and a decent dollop of buttermilk daily, combined with fruit – and young carrots’, for the recovery of Ellen’s eyes. ‘Common luxuries, which no doubt have not passed this poor soul’s lips since Our Saviour was a boy,’ Sister Lazarus opined.

Mary trimmed the long mane of Ellen’s hair, removing the frayed ends and straightening the raggle-taggle of knots that had accumulated there. Gradually, the pallor evaporated from Ellen’s face, a hint of rose-pink returning to her lips. Under the Sisters’ care, the physical contours of Ellen’s body began somewhat to re-establish themselves. It was not long before Louisa and Mary could both begin to see their mother re-emerge, as they had once remembered her.

‘It is the buttermilk,’ Lazarus was convinced, thankfully still showing no signs of recognition.

With Mary and Louisa’s help Ellen could now go to the Oratory for prayer and reflection. There they would leave her a while, to ponder alone. Never once did they ask about her missing years. She was grateful for that … was not yet ready to tell them. But that day would come. Perhaps early in the New Year.

Before Christmas, when she was stronger, and at Sister Lazarus’s insistence that ‘God and Reverend Mother will provide,’ Mary and Louisa took Ellen to an oculist. Years of making the Singer machines sing for Boston’s shoe bosses, had taken its toll on their mother’s eyes.

Dr Thackeray, a kindly, intent man – a Quaker, Ellen had decided, without knowing why – held his hand up at a distance from her, asking her to identify how many digits he had raised. Depending on her answer, he moved either further away or closer to her. At the end of it all he disappeared, returning at length with a stout brown bottle which he declared to contain ‘a soothing concoction’.

‘This to be poulticed on both eyes for a month of days; to be changed daily – only in darkness,’ he instructed. ‘Even then both eyes must remain fully shuttered.’ She would, he said, ‘see no human form until mine, when you return.’

He gave no indication of what improvement, if any, he expected after all of this.

During her month of darkness, Ellen’s general state of health continued to incline. She grew steadily stronger, the tone of her skin regained some former suppleness, and from Mary’s constant brushing, the once-fine texture of her hair had at last begun to return.

‘It is as much the nourishing joy at your presence, as anything Sister Lazarus’s buttermilk and young carrots might do,’ she said with delight to Mary and Louisa.

Ellen was thankful of Dr Thackeray’s poultice. That she would not have to fully face them when, at last, she told her daughters the truth; not have to look into their eyes, they into hers.

Blindness she had long been smitten with, before ever she had put first stitch into leather.

Stephen Joyce, who had ignited such debasing passions in her, was not to blame. Nor Lavelle … least of all, her ever-constant Lavelle. The blindness was solely hers – her own corroding influence on herself.

She worried about her dream and its recurrence – that by now she should have exorcised all the old devils about Stephen. Why had he appeared so threatening – sword aloft? Why the black horse and Lavelle the pale one? Good and Evil – and had they at last met? And Patrick – she unable to reach him?

Stephen first had appeared in her life in 1847. There were troubled times in Ireland – blight, starvation, evictions. Like a wraith he had come out of the night to meet with her husband Michael.

She had not interfered as rebellious plots against landlords were hatched but she had sensed tragedy. This dark man who could excite the hearts of other men to follow him, would she knew, one day bring grief under her cabin roof. And so it was. Not a moon had waned before her husband Michael, her beautiful Michael, lay stretched in the receiving clay of Crucán na bPáiste – the burial place high above the Maamtrasna Valley.

Evicted then, during the worst of the famine, and in desperation to save her starving children, she had been forced to enter a devilish pact. Her allegiance to the Big House was bought, her children given shelter. The price – her forced emigration from Ireland – and separation from them. Patrick aged ten years, Mary a mere eight. It was Stephen Joyce, the peasant agitator, scourge of the landlord class, who had come to her to guarantee their safety. Whilst she had blamed him for Michael’s death, she had, for the sake of her children, no choice but to accept his offer. Eventually, she had returned to reclaim them.

Now years later, here in America, her children had reclaimed her.

SIX

‘Sit still, Mother!’ Mary chided, as she unfettered Ellen’s eyes.

‘Mary … I have something …’ Ellen began, wanting at last to tell her.

Mary, remembering the tone her mother adopted when she had something to say to them, knew it was pointless resisting. She put the used poultices on the small table, fixed her attention on Ellen’s closed eyelids … and waited.

‘I … I have … something to confess to you … a grave wrong,’ Ellen began, falteringly.

‘Have you confessed it to God?’ Mary asked, simply.

‘Yes, Mary … many times … but, in His wisdom, He has directed that you and Louisa should find me – so that I should also confess it to you.’

Mary took her mother’s hands, bringing Ellen close to her. ‘If God has forgiven you, Mother, then who am I not to?’

‘I still must tell you, Mary,’ Ellen said, more steadily.

Faces now inclined towards each other, mother and child, priest and penitent, Ellen began. ‘I committed … the sin of Mary Magdalen … with … Stephen Joyce,’ she said quietly, her long hair forward about her face, shrouding their hands.

Mary uttered no word. Remained waiting, still holding her mother’s hands. Ellen, before she continued, opened her eyes and peered into Mary’s. Into her own eyes, it seemed.

‘I betrayed you all: Lavelle, a good man and a good husband; you, my dear child; Patrick … Louisa.’ Then, remembering Mary’s father, Michael: ‘Even those who have gone before!’

Ellen knew how the words now struggling out of her mouth would be at odds with everything for which Mary had held her always in such loving regard. She trembled, awaiting her child’s response.

‘Mother, you must keep your eyes closed … until it is time,’ Mary said, without pause, putting a finger to her mother’s eyes, blessing her darkness, protecting her from the world.

Mary then fell to anointing the fresh coverlets for Ellen’s eyes. She said nothing more while completing the dressing. Then, Mary left the room.

When she returned she pressed a set of rosary beads into Ellen’s hands.

‘One of the Sisters sculpted these from an old white oak,’ Mary explained. ‘Louisa and I were saving them for you until the bandages came off … but …’ She didn’t finish the sentence, starting instead a new one … ‘We’ll offer up the Rosary – the Five Sorrowful Mysteries.’

Ellen, in reply, said nothing until between them then, they exchanged the Five Mysteries of Christ’s Passion and Death.

The Agony in the Garden …

The Scourging at the Pillar …

The Crowning with Thorns …

The Carrying of the Cross …

The Crucifixion.

Passing over and back the Our Fathers …

‘… forgive us our trespasses … as we forgive those who trespass against us.’

And the Hail Marys, ‘… pray for us sinners …’ the words taking on the mantle of a continued conversation.

Like a shielding presence between them, Ellen counted out the freshly-hewn beads, reflecting upon the Fruits of the Mysteries – contrition for sin; mortification of the senses; death to the self.

Afterwards, in unison, they recited the Salve Regina. ‘To thee do we fly poor banished children of Eve, To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping … and after this, our exile … O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary! Pray for us … that we may be made worthy …’

When it was done they sat there, unspeaking. Ellen, the great weight partly uplifted from her; Mary, unfaltering in compassion at the enormity of what had passed between them.

‘I will tell Louisa myself, Mary,’ Ellen said. ‘Then I must find Patrick … and Lavelle.’

The younger woman stood up, made to go and stopped. Turning, she embraced the shoulders of the other woman, pulling her mother towards her, the fine head within her arms. Gently, she stroked the renewed folds of Ellen’s hair. As a mother would a damaged child.

SEVEN

The following evening Louisa came.

With mounting trepidation, Ellen heard the flap of Louisa’s habit, the whoosh of air that preceded her adopted daughter. Everything but flesh of flesh, Louisa was to her. How frightened the child must have been all those years to have so stoically maintained her silence. That, if she had spoken, she would again have been shunned. Left to the roads and the hungry grass.

Ellen awaited her moment and when Louisa had removed the poultices, caught her by the wrists.

‘Sit for a moment, Louisa!’

Slowly, agonisingly, Ellen fumbled for the words with which to tell Louisa. Almost as soon as she had begun, Louisa stopped her, putting a hand to Ellen’s lips.

‘Mother, dearest Mother, you needn’t suffer this … I already know,’ she said, causing Ellen to startle. ‘I suppose I’ve always known,’ Louisa continued. ‘You almost told me once … in word and look. That last time I played for you … the Bach … the loss of Heaven in your face …’ She paused. ‘… and then, the book.’

‘Oh, my dear Louisa … you never …’ Ellen began.

‘No, I never said anything.’ Louisa answered the unfinished question. She gave a little laugh. ‘In my silent state I didn’t have to!’

‘You never condemned me?’ Ellen asked.

‘Condemn you, Mother? You who saved me from certain death? Who loved me as her own?’ Louisa held her tightly. ‘Condemn you?’ she repeated. ‘I thank God every waking moment that He at last restored you to us.’

The Vespers bell tolled, calling the Sisters to evening prayer. Still embracing, Ellen and Louisa fell silent, each making her own prayer … for the other.

Ellen explained what she still must do regarding Patrick and Lavelle.

‘You must do as conscience directs,’ Louisa answered.

‘It would be my dearest wish to first remain here a while, with you and Mary,’ Ellen replied.

The prayer bell stopped. Louisa waited a moment for Ellen to continue.

‘What restrains me is that by remaining, it may reveal me and so force you and Mary to finish your work here. So, I have decided to take my leave quietly and avoid that possibility.’

‘How will you live, what will sustain you?’ Louisa worried.

‘The Lord will sustain me – as He has up to now.’

Next afternoon Sister Lazarus came to visit Ellen. She could not see how closely the nun studied her, as she complimented Ellen on her wellbeing. ‘Doing nicely, are we? Doing nicely! Thanks be to God and His Holy Mother.’

The following day Sister Lazarus again visited her, this time with Louisa and Mary in tow.

‘Mrs Lavelle, or Mrs O’Malley or whatever it is we are calling ourselves today …’ she began. ‘You and your daughters have practised a great deceit upon the Sisterhood of this house.’

Ellen started to speak, but to no avail.

Sister Lazarus, once risen, was not for lying down again. ‘It came to me at prayer – the occasion when some six years past you called to the door of this holy house. I would have uncovered you sooner but for your dilapidated state. But God is just. As He has restored you, so has He revealed you,’ she said, in the manner of those to whom God regularly reveals things.

She then gave the two younger nuns a dressing down for their concealment. They would first have to go to Reverend Mother, then prostrate themselves before the entire congregation and profess their wickedness.

‘You have betrayed the moral rectitude with which our work amongst the fallen is underpinned. Without moral rectitude we are nothing. Nothing but chaff in the wind.’

Sister Lazarus then ordered the young nuns to ‘fall on your knees in the Oratory.’ She forbade them to attend upon Ellen until ‘Reverend Mother shall make known her decision.’

Reverend Mother, a solemn, no-nonsense nun whose singsong Kerry accent long flattened by years in America, spelled it out clearly and succinctly.

Firstly to Ellen.

‘When your eyes have been given whatever restoration God may decree, you must leave here … and may God grant you forgiveness for in what jeopardy you have placed His holy work.’

A certain sadness creeping into her voice, Reverend Mother then addressed Mary and Louisa; ‘Sister Mary and Sister Veronica, you have broken trust with God and with your Sisterhood. That there can be no scandal attached to the work which we do here is the rock on which we are founded. Therefore, can neither of you remain here.’

She paused, letting the import of the banishment sink in. Then raising her Reverend Mother’s voice, pronounced the full edict of what this would entail.

‘There is now a great calamity upon this, your adopted country – a “Civil” War, they name it. For its duration, whatever length that be, I charge you to bind up the wounds of those fallen in battle. You will carry out your duties without fear or favour to either side. You will at all times remember that those who oppose each other, irrespective of uniform, are God’s creatures and created in His eternal likeness.’

Again she paused before making the final pronouncement.

‘You will be dispatched South to the battlefields and may God bestow upon you both the necessary fortitude for that work – a fortitude which, thus far, you have so inadequately failed to display.’

Ellen was bereft. What ignominy she had now visited on Mary and Louisa. To be banished. Better they had never found her, left her there to die on the dunghill of Half Moon Place. She could not speak.

They, for their part, stood beside her, heads bowed in shame, dutifully accepting their banishment.

‘Not my will but Thine,’ Ellen thought she heard Mary whisper.

The audience brought to a conclusion, Sister Lazarus ushered them out informing the young nuns that, ‘In charity, Reverend Mother has decided that you both may remain here until your mother’s treatment is complete. In the meantime you will be restricted to within convent walls and in waking hours to within the Oratory itself.’

Both Mary and Louisa nodded in silent assent, awaiting what yet further there was to come. Sister Lazarus did not hold them in suspense for long.

‘You will undertake penance and fasting as directed and converse with none other than myself, or Reverend Mother should she require it.’ Reverend Mother did not.

When Dr Thackeray’s ‘month of days’ had run its course, Ellen returned to the oculist, shepherded this time by Sister Lazarus. Little was exchanged by way of conversation between them. Sister Lazarus, Ellen guessed, no doubt praying for a miracle – that the blind might quickly see and be sent forth!

Indeed Sister Lazarus’s rigor mortis-like countenance seemed to considerably soften when Dr Thackeray, upon examination of Ellen, professed himself ‘cautiously pleased’ at her progress. Though her eyes were still impaired, she could now see more and at a greater distance, during each test through which he had put her.

‘These will improve you further,’ he said, producing a pair of spectacles of a more lightly-shaded hue than those previously stolen.

He re-dressed her eyes, advising her to ‘continue the poulticing for a further uninterrupted period of two weeks.’

Behind her, Ellen imagined Sister Lazarus’s lips move in supplication to the Almighty – that a more immediate miracle might occur.

On their homewards journey, Sister Lazarus solicitously guided Ellen, thus avoiding any mishap which might befall her … and longer extend her time at the convent.

‘God is good … God is good,’ Sister Lazarus regularly repeated to no one in particular. Ellen herself was unsure if this acclamation served purely to acknowledge the restorative powers of the Lord, or was a thanksgiving for her own resulting departure from the convent which the healing itself would precipitate.

Two weeks to the day of her visit to Dr Thackeray, Ellen, along with Mary and Louisa were quietly exited from the grounds of the Convent of St Mary Magdalen and led to Boston’s railroad station.

From there the two nuns would travel to Richmond, Virginia, and await further instructions.

At Mary and Louisa’s insistence, Ellen accompanied them, her newly constructed spectacles perched snugly on her nose. All the better with which to see the fatal tides of civil war on which they were now cast.

EIGHT

Union Army Military Field Hospital, Virginia, 1862

Manual of Military Surgery for the Surgeons of the Confederate States Army

‘… the rule in military surgery is absolute, viz: that the amputating knife should immediately follow the condemnation of the limb. These are operations of the battlefield and should be performed at the field infirmary. When this golden opportunity, before reaction, is lost, it can never be compensated for.’

Wearing Dr Thackeray’s spectacles, Ellen read carefully the surgery manual. The spectacles had been such a boon to her, not that she could overdo it, but a world previously closed had now again been opened.

She paused, thinking about her eyes before continuing. They had troubled her less than expected. Not that they were perfect. At times she found herself looking slightly to the right of people, as if they had imperceptibly shifted under her gaze.

Reading was problematic. She laughed to Mary about, ‘How childlike my reading skills have become.’ But, in general, she found the condition of her eyes to be of little hindrance to her work.

Dr Sawyer had been marvellous, procuring a continuation of Dr Thackeray’s soothing balm. He had also today located for her a pair of more recently developed shaded spectacles, an improvement on those given her in Boston.

‘Developed alongside those new-fangled rifle sights,’ he had told Ellen. He, Dr Shubael Sawyer, rather brusque of manner but an efficient practitioner of his profession, was the operating surgeon in the field hospital in which she, Louisa and Mary now found themselves.

‘Maybe this war, after all, will bring some benefit to humanity … though such benefits will weigh poorly enough when the balances are writ,’ Dr Sawyer had added.

These she now substituted for Dr Thackeray’s spectacles and continued with reading the manual …

‘Amputate with as little delay as possible after the receipt of the injury. In army practice, attempts to save a limb, which might be perfectly successful in civil life, cannot be made. Especially in the case of compound gunshot fractures of the thigh, bullet wounds of the knee joint and similar injuries to the leg, in which, at first sight, amputation may not seem necessary. Under such circumstances attempts to preserve the limb will be followed by extreme local and constitutional disturbance. Conservative surgery is here in error; in order to save life, the limb must be sacrificed.’

So there it was, in black and white. The saw saved lives.

In the time she had been here, Ellen had lain hands on everything she could read on medical practise. Not that there was much available. Good fortune had brought her current reading, The Confederate Manual of Surgery. A prize of war captured from the enemy. But there was a shortage of nurses for the many hospitals the war had occasioned. They had received some training from a Sister of Mercy who had then been moved to some duty elsewhere. She, like Mary and Louise, had had to learn quickly. It had been trial and error, mistakes made, while assisting at the regular stream of operations and mostly amputations.

‘Hips … I don’t like hips,’ Dr Sawyer said plainly to her later that afternoon. ‘Too near the trunk. We lose ninety per cent if we have to take the leg from the hip joint … and one hundred per cent if we don’t!’ It was Ellen’s first hip joint operation.

Three aides were required for such an operation. ‘Fetch the Sisters,’ Dr Sawyer ordered her. ‘The sight of blood holds no terrors for them.’

The soldier, a wan looking boy from Rhode Island, with freckled face and red hair had lost a lot of blood.

‘Pray, ladies,’ he said, when Mary and Louisa arrived, ‘that I’ll be one of the ten per cents! I ain’t seen much of life.’

They laid him out on the only available operating table – a diseased-looking church pew.

‘I hope it’s a good Catholic pew and not a Protestant one, Sister!’ the young soldier said to Mary, putting a brave face on it. She held his hand, making the Act of Contrition with him, something of which Mary was aware Dr Sawyer did not approve.

‘O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee … and I detest my sins … firmly resolve never more to offend … but to amend my life …’

When he had repeated the words firmly resolving to ‘sin no more’ Mary administered the chloroform by means of a dampened napkin. This she held cone-shaped over his mouth and nose, telling him to ‘inhale deeply’, ensuring that he also had an adequate supply of natural air while inhaling. Soon the young Rhode Islander was in a surgical sleep, though still exhibiting the ‘state of excitement’ they had come to expect in the early stages after administration of the anaesthetic.

‘Remove his uniform, Sister,’ Dr Sawyer ordered Louisa. Deftly, while Ellen restrained him, Louisa opened the top of the soldier’s tunic and with Mary’s help slipped it off. Then, she rolled up his flannel shirt to the chest. Next, Louisa unbuttoned his trousers, the left side peppered with shot and clotted with blood. She at one leg, Mary at the other, together pulled the trousers from him. The doctor waited while they addressed the matter of the boy’s undergarment. He noted that not once did either woman flinch from the indelicacy of her task.

‘Mrs Lavelle!’ was all Dr Sawyer then said.

Ellen had assisted him previously on other operations and knew what was required. Quickly, she swabbed away the matted blood from the boy’s shattered hip. She looked at the doctor for affirmation that his point of incision was now clearly visible. He nodded. Then Ellen slipped one of her hands under the boy’s buttock, the other one meeting it from the top. Her hands, stretched to their limit formed a human tourniquet. Her job, to stop all blood to the site of amputation. Thumbs meeting she pressed hard, clamping the thigh, praying to God for the strength to maintain the pressure. If everything went to plan it would be over in less than three minutes. Dr Sawyer was quick. Time being of the essence.

She closed her eyes thinking of nothing else but the exertion of her hands.

The technique the doctor would use was the oval method. This, though similar to the older, circular technique, lent itself better to amputation through the joint capsule – the cut made higher on one side of the limb than the other. Using the ebony-handled Lister amputation knife handed him by Louisa, Dr Sawyer made the incision in the Rhode Islander’s skin. Mary then retracted the skin to allow the muscle tissue to be cut. ‘An ample flap, Sister!’ the surgeon warned. An ‘ample flap’ of skin was critical after the operation, for recovering the heads of bones exposed by the saw.

‘Raspatory!’ Shubael Sawyer demanded the bone-scraper, which Louisa was about to hand him. The smashed bone, now exposed, was dissected back with this implement.

Meanwhile, Mary, checking the boy’s pulse found it had sunk too low and in a sure voice asked, ‘Ammonia?’ When the doctor nodded, she applied a quick whiff of liquor of ammonia to revive the patient. Louisa next handed the large rectangular-shaped Capital Saw to the fast-working surgeon.

Ellen turned her head away as the saw bit into the boy’s hip socket and then hacked its way through the bone.

‘Pressure, Mrs Lavelle! Pressure!’ Dr Sawyer rasped at Ellen, and she willed her thumbs and fingers to clamp even tighter around the boy’s thigh.

It was over in no time. With the tenaculum, Dr Sawyer then winkled out the main arteries, the blood dropletting from them. Ellen held on for dear life to stem its flow. Working quickly the doctor next ligated the blood vessels with surgical thread. In advance of the operation Ellen had already wound this silken thread around the tenaculum. Now Dr Sawyer slipped it from over the instrument onto each severed vessel, and tied. Only at his command to ‘release!’ did Ellen slowly uncoil her hands from what was now the remaining stump of the young soldier’s hip.

All eyes focused on the ligations – the full flow of blood now released against them. They held fast, no oozing apparent. Next was required the Gnawing Forceps to grind down the stump of bone to an acceptable smoothness. The flaps of skin, which Mary had previously retracted, she now folded back over what was left of the boy’s hip. Using curved suture needles, Shubael Sawyer knitted together the skin with surgical thread, but loosely, to allow for post-operative drainage of the severed thigh. Louisa then fanned the patient to purge his lungs of the chloroform and administered another whiff of liquor of ammonia, neither of which served to resuscitate him.

‘Brass monkey,’ the doctor ordered. Louisa never raised her eyes, immediately understanding the abbreviated form of the expression the men used to describe weather – ‘So cold it would freeze the balls off a brass monkey!’ She uncorked the chloroform and sprinkled it on the young man’s scrotum. The immediate reaction of cold caused a stir in him but not sufficient to bring him to consciousness. Louisa then administered a further, more generous sprinkling. This time the Rhode Island Red bolted upright.

‘My balls – they’re frozen!’ he shouted in disbelief. Then, remembering those present, groggily apologised, ‘I’m sorry, ladies … Ma’am,’ and made to cover his indecency. His severed limb, now on the floor parallel to the pew on which he sat, seemed to trouble him less greatly than his exposed and frozen manhood.

Later they learned that the Rhode Island Red had succumbed to his injuries.

Became one of the ninety per cent failure rate for such operations. Didn’t make the ten per cent.

NINE

By 1862, French physicist, Jean Bernard Foucault had made scientific history by measuring the speed of light using revolving mirrors. Foucault’s compatriot Victor Hugo, with his classic novel Les Miserables, was making a different kind of history. It was left to yet another Frenchman to change forever how Americans would kill Americans.

Captain Claude-Etienne Minié had supplied the world with his own particular brand of French artistry – the minié ball. This was a one-inch-long, leaden slug, the base of which, when fired from the newly-developed rifled musket would expand into the rifle’s grooves and spiral through the air as it was projected. The result was deadly accuracy at two hundred and fifty yards. And at half a mile the minié ball could still kill. The Frenchman’s invention could travel five times further than the bullet of any other weapon.

The first time Ellen saw Hercules O’Brien he had been struck by not just one minié ball but two. ‘Science will kill us all,’ he told her, ignoring his smashed arm and the furrowed groove which ran from front to back along the left side of his blocky skull.

‘What do you mean, Sergeant O’Brien?’ she asked.

‘Well, look how Science has lepped into action in this war.’

She waited till he continued.

‘Exploding mines that go in the ground, so a man, even if he is safe from battle, cannot take a walk to a leafy glade or a cooling brook for fear he step on one and be blown to smithereens.’

Ellen thought how cruel a mind had human science to invent such an inhuman device.

‘… and there isn’t a sharpshooter but has the new telescope lens. There’s no place safe left to hide … and the Gatlings, the repeating guns,’ he explained for her benefit, ‘cut a man in two, they would … leave his legs still walking and his body gone.

‘The generals are fighting with the old tactics while the men are cut to ribbons with the new weapons. General Meagher is still calling for bayonet charges. “Let them taste steel,” he says, but all we get is Rebel lead.’

‘Stop talking,’ she ordered, ‘while I bandage this head of yours!’

Hercules O’Brien paid no heed to her. ‘I’m telling you, missus, before the century is out, Science will be the master of mankind. Science will blow up the world!’

Whatever about ‘Science blowing up the world’, Ellen had already seen the devastating results of the minié ball.

The old round musket ball used early on by the Confederates, would pierce clothing and skin but would bounce off the deeper tissues. The conical minié ball however would bore through all tissue, usually resting near the opposite side of the body to which it had entered. If it did not exit entirely, it left a trail of destruction in its wake.

Now, his head at last bandaged, she gently pushed a probing finger into the sergeant’s other wound. The human finger still more sensitive than what Science could produce. And less likely to damage arteries and nervous tissues.

She kept looking at him, talking, feeling the tension rise within him; wondering how this pint-sized man had earned the name of Hercules?

‘I’m a great big man in a little man’s body,’ he said seriously. ‘Hercules lived in ancient times and he lifted the world on his back … and sure amn’t I carrying the whole Union army on mine!’

She looked at him. His visible eye, from where she had just bandaged him, was dancing with mirth. At last her fingertip found something hard and solid.

‘I’ve found it, Sergeant O’Brien!’ she said.

‘No matter that science will kill us all, you can’t beat the human touch.’ He winked at her, the eye still working overtime.

‘Well, I will need the forceps with which to get it out,’ she countered.

The thin Moses forceps with the sharp beak soon had her gingerly withdrawing the minié ball. He never complained and when she showed him the bloodied missile, he said, ‘Thank you, ma’am. I’d like to keep it as a souvenir ’case I collect no more of them!’

‘You were lucky, Sergeant O’Brien,’ she said. ‘No splintering … and that the second one skidded from your head, rather than collided with it.’

‘Would have made no differ ma’am,’ Hercules O’Brien answered, tapping his skull. ‘Not even the damned minié ball could get in there.’

Later, she came back, asked him if he’d come across a soldier named Lavelle O’Malley, thinking by now that both Patrick and Lavelle would have enlisted. Because it seemed as if all the rest of America had.

‘No, ma’am,’ he answered, watching her. ‘Three-quarters of America is out there … and half of Ireland. What brigade is he with?’

When she couldn’t tell him he enquired, ‘Is he your husband, ma’am?’

‘He was …’ she almost said, then corrected herself. ‘Yes.’

TEN

The hospital was one of many field hospitals dotted all over the countryside, wherever men might fall in battle. A once-schoolhouse, now it had rows of rough bunks lining each wall, an anteroom for amputations and an added-on storeroom for medical supplies and operating implements. A further room was used as a makeshift canteen – for those who could walk to it. A nearby cabin, abandoned to war, provided accommodation for Ellen, the two nuns, and occasionally for those who came temporarily to assist. Dr Sawyer had private accommodation some slight further distance away.

They could comfortably take one hundred patients – at times stretched to two hundred. Three nurses and a doctor were not sufficient … but it was all they had to make do with, most of the time.

Although officially a Union hospital for soldiers of the North, Mary and Louisa had impressed on Dr Sawyer that ‘all the fallen of whichever side, should fall under our care, if needed.’ It was not a philosophy to which the brusque doctor easily subscribed, even with Mary gently reminding him that, ‘if your own son were wounded near Confederate lines, you would wish some kind Sister to take him in – or a good Christian doctor, such as you, to save him.’

In the end he had little choice, the two nuns and Ellen gathering in whomsoever they found needing attention – Union Blue or Confederate Grey.

Regularly, Ellen enquired of those whom she tended from both North and South, of Patrick and Lavelle. But it was ever without success. Most were sympathetic, complimenting her on her son’s and husband’s valour in serving ‘the cause’ – whichever cause they considered it to be – and her own womanly duty to the wounded.

From a few, her enquiry evoked a different response – a gruff Georgian officer telling her, ‘Lady, chaos rules out there. Nobody knows nobody … no more. A quarter of my gallant lads were killed the first day, a quarter more the second. Moving men into battle is like shovelling fleas ’cross a farmyard – not half of them get there.’

She had begun to give up hope of ever seeing them again. This whole bloody business about ‘valour’ and ‘gallant lads’ was beginning to weary her. There seemed to be no end to the harvest of wounded and wasted who, day by day, were being shunted into the hospitals. Or the more deadly harvest … the hundreds and hundreds of young men being regularly flung two or three deep into earthen pits. A lonely thin board then scrawled with some illegible writing to mark their brief existence in this life. One such makeshift cross she had seen had stated only that: Here lyes 120 brave men who dyed for there contree. Not even the loved one’s name to comfort those who later would come searching for them.

‘Fleas across a farmyard.’ Word had come down that over a million men had begun the year massing for war. How in a million could she find but two – Patrick and Lavelle?

She never spoke to Mary or Louisa about her rapidly fading hopes. Nor did they enquire of her. She had asked Dr Sawyer and he had sought for her the list of the dead, wounded and missing from Union Headquarters. When it eventually came, he apologised for its incompleteness. ‘It changes hourly – they cannot write quickly enough to keep up with the dead.’

She raced through the names – O’Malley, Bartley; O’Malley, Thomas; O’Malley, John; O’Malley, Peter. She heaved a sigh of relief. No Patrick O’Malley. Nowhere either could she find the name Lavelle, making her think perhaps they had both sided with the South. It was some comfort, this not knowing – if only a crumb. Maybe Patrick had not become embroiled in this war madness after all? She prayed that if he had, he would be with Lavelle. Lavelle would shelter Patrick from harm, as if his own son, because he was hers.

Ellen thought she had witnessed everything in this demonic war but when Private Edward Long was smilingly delivered to her, she had to stop in disbelief.

‘How old are you?’ she asked the pint-sized patient.

‘Nine years, ma’am … but squarin’ up to ten!’ the private proudly replied.

‘Nine … years … of … age …?’ she drew out the words one by one. ‘Nine years of age?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ the child confirmed, as if there should be any doubt in her mind.

‘Private Edward Long – Illinois – at your service, ma’am,’ he added, looking up at her.

‘Yes!’ she said, ‘but what are you doing here?’

‘For to get mended … again,’ he said, with all the innocence of childhood. ‘I got clipped by a minié ball.’

‘Where?’ she asked, and saw him hesitate. There was no obvious sign of injury on him.

He threw his eyes down to the ground.

‘I’m not saying, ma’am … but another one went in front of me and shot my drum.’

Then she understood. He had been grazed by a bullet on his buttocks and manfully wasn’t about to reveal that fact to any female. She resisted the urge to pick him up, cradle him in her arms.

‘All right, soldier!’ she said, ‘follow me – we’ve a special private place here for the brave musicians who lead our boys into battle.’

Off she set, him falling in behind her, trying to keep pace, swinging his arms up and down, all four foot six of him.

‘Where’s your mother?’ she asked, when she got him down to the end of the ward.

‘At home!’ he said, matter-of-factly.

‘Does she know where you are?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he answered, ‘she sure does. Me and all my six brothers joined up to fight. Four is dead now. Just me and Jess and Billy-Bob left.’

She looked at him. ‘You should go home, Edward,’ she said gently, thinking of his mother.

‘Oh, but I will, ma’am, when I git my furlough. I’ll be going home for a month.’

‘Why not stay there … with your mother?’ she persevered.

‘I couldn’t do that, ma’am,’ he said, his baby blue eyes fixed on hers, ‘until we whip the Rebs and send them home!’

She gave up. He was the youngest she had seen. Most of the American boys were about eighteen, the foreign soldiers older. Many, though, of the homegrown farm boys who enlisted were much younger.

‘A hundred thousand fifteen-year-olds’, Dr Sawyer had told her, ‘barely out of knee-britches and learning to kill! The fresh flower of manhood, thus brutalised by an old man’s war.’

She had seen them come in, stretchered and corpsed, some as young as twelve. But never before a nine-year-old.

She heard Louisa calling her, squeezed both his arms. ‘Wait here, soldier, you need the doctor to fix you up,’ she said, to spare his blushes.

‘What about my drum?’ he asked. ‘Can he fix my drum too?’

‘I’m sure he can,’ she smiled, and hurried to where Louisa and the commotion of some new arrivals beckoned.

The little fellow had grit, real Illinois grit. She doubted there was much the matter with him. They’d see to his bum and his drum. Send him home to his mother. Maybe this time she’d keep her little drummer boy at home in Illinois. If she could afford to feed another mouth as good as the army could.

Later, she sat deep into the night, keeping the last vigil with some frightened soul admitted earlier and for whom nothing could be done. Nights such as these were the darkest hours, when her God would seem to have deserted her and she would pray instead to Science. That it would deliver its yet most infernal machine, and in one hellish blow strike down the massing millions of men. Be so terrible a holocaust that it would stop everything. Then, the pitying cry of some farm boy, or some veteran’s curse, demanding her to be present, would draw her back from the abyss.

One such night she could bear it no longer. Stole away from her watch, went into the night. The land was flat here on the plains of Virginia – some rolling hills to break the monotony, the misty Blue Ridge Mountains to the west, behind them. It was a rich land, far better than what she had known in Ireland. No bare acre here but gentle farmlands where wheat could be harvested, peaches plucked, a pig or a rooster raised. Until they were commandeered for hungry marching bellies, by one side or the other … or stolen by marauding men, cut adrift from their regiments and the mainstream of battle. She walked to the copse of trees, now bathed in the glimmering moonlight of her adopted land. Sad for all that had been visited upon it. There in the sheltering trees she found a horse, black as Hades, gashed above the foreleg, watching over its fallen master. The man, a captain, was beyond repair. She prayed over him, went deeper into the twining trees, the horse hobbling behind her. Ahead some snuffling sounds.

Following the sounds, her eyes made out the low shapes of hogs, feeding on the ungathered dead.

She ran at them, shouting, the night-horse her ally. Grudgingly they gave ground, snorting and bellowing their way further into the undergrowth.

She scrambled onto the horse’s back, fearful they would return before she had raised help. The horse bore her bravely, terrible images assailing her mind. Images of the famished dead back in her own land, Ireland … ravenous pigs and dogs. Her own neighbours, every last hope of food gone; the cabin pulled down around them, so no one would witness their last indignity; the dog whose head she had cracked as it defended its food. Somehow, it all – the spectre of famine back again and the Hades horse – decided her. No longer would she remain a spectator, waiting. She would rise herself, go out and find Lavelle and Patrick.

And she would go South. When the time was right.

ELEVEN

‘Niggerology! That’s what’s causing all the trouble!’ Jeremiah Finnegan roared. ‘That’s why all of yous in here is bent and broken. Niggerology!’ he roared again.

Ellen ran down the room to where the man was lying, head back, face to the ceiling.

‘If I’m going to die, I’m going to die roarin’!’ he yelled, before she could reach him.

‘Jeremiah! Jeremiah!’ she said sternly. ‘Stop that! You’re not helping any by shouting your head off.’

She caught him by his remaining arm.

‘But it’s true, Miss Ellie – it’s true! Look at me – all I’m fit for is to be roarin’!’

‘I know, Jeremiah, I know,’ she said more gently, looking at the half-man on the ramshackle cot; over one eye, a wad of cotton wool to cover the blank hole where his eye had been. Taken clean by a minié ball. Then his arm and his leg with cannon fire, as he fell.

‘I have only my roarin’ so that people can know me. I can’t see. I can’t walk. I can’t hold a lady to dance with. I’m eternally bollixed!’ he said defiantly.

She couldn’t but help smile at the man’s description of himself. With his one good eye he caught her smile – and kept going. ‘But I can ring the rafters of Heaven and Hell! Damn their heathen eyes – the niggers – and those what supports them!’

What could she say to him? ‘But you’re not eternally damned and neither are those “niggers”, as you call them,’ she whispered, rubbing her palm along his remaining arm.

‘Ticket’ Finnegan – as they called him back home in the County Monaghan hinterland, always wanting to be off, get his ticket to America … to anywhere out of the humpbacked hills of Monaghan – calmed to her touch.

‘I’m not afraid of dying, Miss Ellie,’ he said, still remonstrating with her. ‘But I won’t die easy, whimperin’ me way out like those Rebs over there. I came into the world roarin’ and I’m goin’ out of it the same way!’

‘I’m sure you are,’ she answered.

He was a fine block of a man; had a good few years on most of the boys that both armies had gobbled up. Now, like all around him, he had been cut down in his prime. It was a shame, a crying shame.

‘Is there anyone you want me to write to?’ she asked.

‘Divil a one – bar the Divil himself – to say I’m comin’!’ he said. ‘Just sit a while and talk the old language to me!’

She looked around the room. Everywhere, a chaos of bodies. Most of them incomplete. Most needing care and comforting – before or after the surgeon’s saw.

Ticket Finnegan hadn’t long left, probably less than most.

‘All right!’ she decided, and began to talk to him of the old times and the old places.

‘Tír gan teangan, tír gan anam – A land without a language is a land without a soul,’ he whispered as she spoke to him in the ancient soul-language of the Gael.

How true it was, and she thought of the ‘niggers’, as Ticket – and most of the Irish – called them. Most too, like him, believed the black people had no souls, were just ‘heathens’. So what then, if the heathens were also slaves?

Demonisation and colonisation.

The same thinking had demonised and colonised the Irish. Depicted them as baboons in the London papers; blaming the Almighty for sending down a death-dealing famine on them. When all He had sent was a blight on the potatoes. It was the English who had sent the famine. Stood by. Did nothing. Let a million Irish die. But what harm in that? Sure weren’t the Irish peasants only heathens … had no souls, only half human, somewhere between a chimpanzee and Homo sapiens … the missing link? Now she saw those self-same Irish peasants here being blown to Kingdom Come for Uncle Sam and they couldn’t see that it was the same old story all over again. Slavery had taken the black people’s language, their customs and traditions, their music. It had taken their country away from them – this new one – as well as those previously stolen from them. Slavery had tried to take their souls. Ellen O’Malley hoped it hadn’t.

Now she talked to this half a man, in the voice previously reserved for her children – a kind of suantraí or lullaby-talk. ‘I ain’t never been baptised!’ he said, surprising her. When she said she would send for a priest, he glared at her. ‘I don’t want no priest mouthin’ that Latin gibberish over me!’ Then his look softened. ‘Would you do it for me, Miss Ellie – you’d be as good as any of them … you and the Sisters?’

She called Mary and Louisa to be witnesses, and fetched a tin-cupful of water. Then, his head in her arm, like a new-born, she sprinkled on it a drop of the water. Having no oils with which then to anoint him, she moistened her thumb against her mouth. With it she made the Sign of the Cross on his forehead, his ears, over his good eye and on his lips saying, ‘I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghos … There now, you’re done … ready for any road.’

He was soothed now. His pain must have been intense. A miracle he had survived at all. Better he hadn’t. He shook free his hand from hers, reached over to where his other hand would have been. Forgetting.

‘I still feel it there, Ellie, but sure it’s only the ghost of it … only the ghost of it! If only I could wrap it round a lady’s waist,’ he said wistfully.

She took his hand again. ‘Will you pray with me, Jeremiah?’ she asked, still in Irish.

‘Sure isn’t what we’re doin’ prayin’?’ he replied, the good eye darting wickedly at her.

And she supposed it was.

‘I can feel the Divil comin’ for me, even after you sprinklin’ the water on me,’ he said, gripping her hand more tightly. ‘He took the one half of me and now the wee bollix is comin’ for the other half!’

He raised up his head, as if to see. ‘G’way off to fuck, ye wee bollix ye!’ he roared, startling her and the whole ward into silence. They were all well used to death by now – in its many guises. The sudden rap, the last rattle of breath, the gentle going – and those who roared!

She said nothing, just gripped his hand.

He raised his head again. ‘Who made the world?’ he shouted at them all.

‘Gawd did,’ a Southern voice called back.

‘Who made America?’

‘Paddy did!’ the Irish roared back, as Jeremiah Finnegan handed in his ticket. Leaving both God’s world and Paddy’s America behind him.

She waited a few moments. Disengaged her hand, shuttered close the one mad eye on him.

‘He died roarin’, ma’am,’ a gangrened youth in the next cot said.

‘That he did, son! That he did!’ she said, to the frightened boy.

TWELVE

Mary watched Ellen move among the men. The transformation in her mother since first she and Louisa had found her was nothing short of miraculous. Ellen’s hair tied back from her face, accentuating her finely chiselled features, seemed to strip away the years. Modesty prevented Mary from ever using a looking glass but now, involuntarily, she put a hand to her face, fingering the high cheekbones, the generous span of mouth, the furrow between lips and nostrils. Upon her own face, Mary found replicated every feature of her mother’s. She smiled as she watched Ellen go about her duties with an enthusiasm that further belied her years. In her plain blue calico dress – its only adornment a neat white collar – Mary’s mother had a word for everybody.

‘God never closes one door but He opens another,’ Mary said to Louisa, marvelling how, after their banishment from the convent, the three of them had found such a fulfilment in their work here on the battlefields. Such an all-enveloping joy at being together again after all those years.

‘Her heart still longs for Patrick and Lavelle,’ Louisa answered. ‘She will not remain here forever, Mary.’

‘Oh, I know, Louisa …’ Mary answered, ‘but whatever the future holds, I will always hold dear these memories, these beautiful moments, of Mother bending to comfort a departing soul, writing out a letter to a loved one … of just being restored to us. I would happily depart this world with such images graven forever on my heart.’

Louisa, too, had witnessed the change in Ellen, the re-blooming; the coming of joy. All of which was a source of similar joy to Louisa herself!

She could not love Ellen more. Their time together here had been restorative for each of them in its own way. It was a privilege to serve those fallen in battle, to bind up their wounds – a rich and rewarding privilege. So, that when word had come down, from the Surgeon-General’s office, through Dr Sawyer, asking her to accept the role of matron, Louisa had wholeheartedly accepted.

She now spoke to her sister. ‘Well, before you take your leave of us, Mary, we have a St Patrick’s Day celebration to organise!’

Not that St Patrick’s Day was anywhere near in the offing. Nor that this mattered to those Irish currently under the care of the Sisters. Now, in the midsummer of 1862, the Irish had decided that ‘this little skirmish’ here in America should not prevent them from celebrating the national saint’s feast day … even if some three months after the declared date of March 17.

‘To show these foreigners, North and South, how to have fun,’ Hercules O’Brien put forward to Louisa. ‘We had a great St Pat’s … beggin’ your pardon, Sister, St Patrick’s Day, during winter camp when there was no fighting … but that was only among ourselves … and sure it’s now we need a diversion.’

After repeated ‘spontaneous’ entreaties from a number of the men – carefully orchestrated by O’Brien – Louisa had acquiesced. As matron, she warned that any celebration would have to be both ‘orderly and circumspect’. She received every assurance it would … ‘be as quiet as a dormouse dancing’. Somehow, Louisa felt remarkably unassured by this assurance, as Jared Prudhomme’s blue eyes beckoned her to him, for the third time that day.

Jared Prudhomme, proud to be from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was ‘the man side of seventeen’, he told Louisa, when three weeks prior, he first came to them. He was tall, possessed of piercing blue eyes and with a beauty of countenance not normally bestowed on mortals. That he was dishevelled from battle, his blond hair unkempt about his face, did not in any sense diminish from his striking appearance. It was, Louisa had decided, because of some inner light of character which shone from the boy, and which was unquenchable.

She went to him. As on the two previous occasions today, she would be polite, not overstay with him, as she had when first he fell under her care. Then, though his shoulder wound had not been serious, due to a delay in getting him to hospital, he had lost a copious amount of blood. She had nursed him back, dressed his shoulder. One day, while leaning over him, their faces close, he had said, ‘You have the scent of the South on you … it reminds me of so much!’ She hadn’t answered him and then he was apologetic. ‘Did I embarrass you – I know you are not as other ladies?’ She had raised her head, looked at him, smiled. He had no guile. ‘Thank you,’ she had said and left it at that.

Then, one morning, she had arisen, found herself rushing her prayers. At first, she couldn’t quite fathom it but something about it bothered her. When she had reached his bedside, he had greeted her with his usual smile and she felt bathed in the light of his company. Leaving him, she realised that her earlier undue haste at prayers was not just to do her rounds but to get to him. When next she tended him, she was conscious of this feeling, her fingers betraying her as she peeled back the dressing from his bare shoulder.

‘I am unsettling you,’ he said in his quiet, direct way, ‘and I would rather fall to the enemy than cause any such emotion in you.’

This had discomfited her further.

‘Yes!’ she said, continuing her work. ‘It is an uncommon feeling …’ She paused, her words landing soft against his skin, her breath moistening the broken tissue.

Now, today, as she went to him, a faint tremor of apprehension came over her.

‘I wanted to ask you before everybody else … and maybe I am already too late,’ he began. ‘Would you dance with me tonight – for St Patrick?’ he added in quickly, upon seeing the look come over her face. ‘It is my last night, before going out again … and I would go more lightly having danced with you,’ he pleaded.

She looked at him, mended now, his face aglow at her. She had intended giving him a further talk about how ‘All must be included in a Sister’s love’ or that ‘Sisters, in spirit and in substance, must be faithful to their vows as a needle to the Pole.’

He looked so young, so fragile, his blue eyes entreating her, that she had not the heart. Before she had thought it out any further she had said ‘yes!’, the words of Sister Lazarus pounding in her brain … ‘Impetuosity, Sister, will be your undoing. You must guard against it!’

The rest of that day Louisa allowed no excuse to bring her within the company of Jared Prudhomme.

Somewhere, somehow, Mary, in her own quiet way, had managed to forage a few gills of whiskey, some for everyone in the hospital. Not that she was in favour of the pleasures – or dangers – of ‘the bewitching cup’, herself.

‘Blessings on ye, Sister – your mother never reared a jibber,’ or some other such well-meant phrase, greeted the dispensation of the whiskey. Some had to be helped drink it. One soldier, half his neck torn away, tried to gather up the precious fluid in his hands each time it seeped from his throat. Being a fruitless endeavour, he finally abandoned it. Instead cupping the amber-coloured liquid directly back into the gaping hole itself.

‘A shortcut, ma’am,’ he gasped to Mary, the rawness of the whiskey snatching the breath from him.

Another dashed it on the stump of his leg to ‘kill the hurtin’.’

Overall, Sister Mary’s whiskey produced a tizzy of excitement among the men. Americans, North and South toasted ‘the Irish, on whichever side they fight’, while the Irish toasted themselves, St Patrick, and the ‘good Sisters’, in that order.

The day, aided by the whiskey, invoked a kind of nostalgia in all of them. Some dreamed of the South – magnolia-scented days, fair ladies and the Mississippi. Some dreamed of the green lushness of the Shenandoah Valley. Others again sailed to further waters and valleys – the Rhine, the Severn, the Lowlands of Holland.

The Irish dreamed only of Ireland.

Ellen thought of the Reek, St Patrick’s holy mountain.

‘Do you remember how once we climbed it to look over the sea for a ship to America?’ she asked Louisa and Mary.

They both nodded.

‘I was afraid you wouldn’t take me with you,’ Louisa said. ‘That after finding me, you would leave me. I prayed so hard to St Patrick.’

Ellen remembered too when she had returned to Ireland to collect them. Her money had been running low, with staying in Westport, waiting for passage to America. She had herself, Patrick and Mary to look out for first. Rescuing the girl from the side of the road had been an impulsive charity, one she had already been beginning to regret. But a ship had come before she was forced to take a decision about ‘the silent girl’, before they had named her ‘Louisa’.

‘Little did any of us then know what lay before us in this far-off land,’ Mary reflected.

‘We’re still split apart from each other here,’ her mother answered, thinking of those not present. Only this time it wasn’t the famine, or ‘the curse of emigration’, or some other external force. This time it had been her own fault; her own fallibility that had scattered them. She was fortunate to have found again Mary and Louisa, or rather to have been found by them. But always her thoughts went to Patrick and Lavelle.

Of them there was no sign.

She knew they were out there somewhere, either with the Union Army of the Potomac, or with the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.

A chill crossed her. They would have seen combat by now. She looked around the room. She always looked when a new consignment – the flotsam and jetsam of each fresh battle – arrived. Each time she looked, dread was in her eyes and in the back of her throat, and in the petrified pit that was her stomach. Now, as her gaze took in the men about her – a torn-out throat, a hole through a nose, like a third, sunken eye, a lifeless sleeve or trouser leg – she would have been happy to see them there. At least know that they were alive.

In her care.

‘I know what you’re thinking, Mother.’ It was Mary. ‘Trust in the Lord!’

‘Oh, I do, Mary! Believe me, I do – but sometimes I just wish I could help Him a bit more!’

‘You are … by helping those whom He has put in your way to help,’ Mary answered.

‘Mrs Lavelle!’ – it was Dr Sawyer.

The mound of amputated limbs had grown so high outside the ‘saw-mill’ window that they now tumbled from the top and were strewn on the ground like disarrayed matchsticks. The doctor wanted some order – these scattered limbs retrieved and a second mound started beside the first one.

Three months prior she would have fallen faint at the prospect. Now, she never flinched, nor did Mary and Louisa, who came to help her.

Ellen began to gather the legs and the arms. She tried to avoid picking them up by the hand or the foot. Did not want to touch the fingers or toes, have that intimacy. This proved impossible.

At times there was only the bare, half-hand, or the foot, where the surgeon had tried to save most of the arm or leg.

Then she began to recognise them. Couldn’t help but remember the stout arm of Jeremiah Finnegan, or the worm-infested leg of that sweet young Iowa boy, now with gangrene set in. Somehow, it wasn’t so bad if the rest of the body was alive, back inside the hospital. From some of the limbs, fresh blood still oozed so that they were warm and living to the touch.

It wasn’t right. They shouldn’t be allowed to accumulate here like heapfuls of strange fruit, burning in the sun until the blowflies and maggots came. Those over which the maggots already crawled, she picked up with her apron, then shook off what worms remained on her, once she had deposited the putrid limb. Other limbs had corroded to the bone, caked by the sun, stripped clean by flesh-eating things.

To distract her mind she recited the Breastplate of St Patrick:

‘Christ with me,

Christ before me,

Christ behind me,

Christ within me,

Christ on my right hand,

Christ on my left hand,

Christ all around me,

Christ in the heart of all who think of me,

Christ in the mouth of all who speak of me,

Christ in every eye who looks at me,

Christ in every ear who listens to me.’

Even the words of the prayer seemed to take on an incongruity, far removed from their intended bidding.

‘Christ on my right foot,’ she prayed while handling a foot, pierced through like a stigmata. She remembered the poor wretch who had, in a state of fear, pulled the trigger of his rifle before raising it to the enemy and shot himself.

‘Christ on my left foot.’ She had it all out of kilter. But did it matter? She cast the stigmatic foot onto the mound, watched it slide down again in some crucified dance.

‘Christ with me,’ she intoned, invoking again the protection of the saint’s breastplate.

And the stench, the yellow dripping stench: powerful, unavoidable, permeating her clothes, her pores, the follicles of her hair. She thought she would drown in its noisome pool, it oozing over her whole body, closing out air and decency.

She redoubled her prayer but the drenching slime slid into her mouth, over her tongue and down her throat like the melt of Hell.

When they had finished she went straight to Dr Sawyer, gave him her mind about how ‘the great Abraham Lincoln couldn’t even run a decent abattoir, let alone this war or this country!’

That evening the regular cries for relief and ‘Sister! Oh Sister!’ were broken by a new sound. That of someone scratching out a tune on an asthmatic fiddle. Where the instrument came from nobody knew or, if they did, would not reveal.

Soon the fiddler, a Donny McLeod late of the Scottish Highlands, via East Tennessee, was madly flaking out the old mountain reels. For Ellen, the tunes recalled better days of sure-footed dancers, the men hob-nailing it out, striking splanks from the floor, while slender-waisted girls swung from their arms. Now, the magic of the wild fiddle music seemed to banish away forever the misfortunes of the waiting war.

It was Hercules O’Brien who started it.

Up he rose, arm in a sling – which he immediately cast off.

‘Head bandaged like a Turk, with only the ears out,’ as he described himself, he grabbed hold of the remaining arm of a grizzled old veteran.

‘C’mon, Alabarmy – let’s see if you can dance better than you fight!’ the little man challenged.

‘Well, I’ll be darned, O’Brien, if any o’ that Irish nigger-dancin’ will best ol’ Alabarmy,’ the Southron answered back.

And the two faced each other in the middle of the floor, Hercules O’Brien lashing it out heel to toe for all he was worth.

‘You’s sweatin’ like a hawg,’ Alabarmy goaded as the blood seeped out through his partner’s bandaged head. ‘Like a stuck hawg!’

A great roar of laughter arose at this goading of the Irishman.

Not to be outdone, Hercules O’Brien shouted back above the din, ‘And if you’d lost a leg ’stead of an arm, you’d be a better dancer,’ which raised another bout of laughter. Then the Irishman crooked his own good arm in Alabarmy’s one arm and swung him … and swung him in a dizzy circle with such a wicked delight. Until they all thought Alabarmy would leave this earth, courtesy of the buck-leppin’ O’Brien.

Next, another was up and then another, curtseying to prospective partners, the ‘ladies’ donning a strip of white bandage on whatever arm or leg they had left to distinguish themselves from the men.

‘Could I have the pleasure, Jennie Reb?’ Or ‘C’mon, Yankee, show us your nigger-jiggin’!’

Ellen stood watching them, the music reeling away the years. Back to the Maamtrasna crossroads, high above the two lakes – Lough Nafooey and Lough Mask. Them gathering in from every one of the four roads, the high bright moon lighting the way. Like souls summoned from sleep the dancers came, filtering out of the night to the gathering. There, under the moon and the great bejewelled sky they would merge out of shadow – a glance, a half-smile, then hand within hand, arm around waist, breath to breath. Then bodies in remembered rhythm would weave their spell, and they would rise above the ground, be lifted; the diamond sky now at their feet – a blanket of stars beneath them.

The priests were right – the devil was in the dancing, in the wicked reels; the way you danced out of your skin, out of yourself. ‘Going before themselves,’ the old women called it. Leaving sense and the imprisoned self behind. Being lost to the dance.

Remembering wasn’t good, Ellen reminded herself. A life could be lost to it … wasted, looking backwards. Looking forwards was as bad. She was of late looking too much backwards, and looking forwards, wondering where, if ever, she would find Lavelle and Patrick. Trapped between the future and the past, no control over either. Helplessly suspended in the now.

Ellen took in the scene in front of her. Was that all that mattered? All there was? The now of these broken men, momentarily lifted above the brutal earth to dance among the stars?

Across the room she saw Foots O’Reilly in conversation with Mary. Then she watched Mary bend, her arms encircling the man’s back, lifting him into a sitting position. He was from Cavan ‘and a mighty dancer,’ he had told Ellen, ‘could trip over the water of Lough Sheelin without dampening me toes.’ Hence, the nickname ‘Foots’. Then a Southern shell had ripped one dancing leg from under him.

‘That won’t hold Foots O’Reilly back none,’ he swore. Tomorrow he would undergo the surgeon’s saw to save the second leg, gangrened to the knee.

‘I could dance with the one, ma’am, but I can’t dance with the none. Now I’ll lose me name as well as me pegs. “Foots” with no foot at all to put under me.’ He had cried in her arms then.

Ellen watched Mary hoist the one-legged dancer, so that he half stood, half leaned against her, arms clasped to her, head draped over her shoulders. She dragged him out to the dancing square. The others witnessing it stopped, even the fiddle boy. Then Mary whispered into his ear, ‘Come on now, Mr O’Reilly. Dance with me … you show them!’

And she manoeuvred him slowly around in the silence, his gangrenous leg trailing behind them. Then again and again they turned, in grotesque pirouette, she in her white nun’s ballgown, he the mighty dancer, until Mary could support his dead weight no longer.

‘Thank you, Mr O’Reilly … Foots,’ Mary said to him. ‘I shall always remember this dance …’ and she sat him gently down again.

Then, all those who could were once more ‘footin’ it’: the wounded and the wasted, the stumped and the stunted. All flailed and flopped and picked themselves up again as the fiddler played his relentless reel. Then, suddenly, he changed into waltz-time.

‘I thought he’d kill the lot of them …’ Ellen said to Mary who had come beside her, ‘… but isn’t it wonderful to see?’

Mary smiled back at her.

As the young Tennessean, bow astride his fiddle, led them into the waltz, they watched Hercules O’Brien prop up Alabarmy in front of him, placing the Southerner’s shelled-out sleeve over his shoulder. Twins from Arkansas – a crutch apiece – hobbled around in a kind of teetering dance, Ellen ready to catch whichever one of them, who any minute must fall.

Then, someone bowing to Ellen … a deep bow. It was Herr Heidelberg, the Dutchman, as the men called the German soldier from the town of the same name. Like all who had come newly to America, Germans as well as the Irish, Poles and a host of other nations had joined in the fray to fight for their ‘new country’ – the North in Herr Heidelberg’s case.

‘I better likes dance mit de Frauen den de Herren,’ he said shyly.

What Ellen could see of Herr Heidelberg’s face was pink with both excitement and embarrassment. The German was the object of much ridicule from the rest of the men due to his manner of speaking, and now could risk further ridicule.

Ellen curtseyed to him.

‘Delighted, Herr Heidelberg!’ she replied.

It was the only name by which she knew him … and though denied his real name, the association with his hometown had always seemed to please him.

Herr Heidelberg swept her around like a Viennese princess, her dress spattered with the earlier work of the day, flouncing about her. The men made space for them, Ellen and her waltz king with half a face, clapping them on to twirl upon twirl, him counting to her under his breath.

‘Ein, zwei, drei, ein, zwei, drei.’ His bulk making her move like a turntable doll, just to keep pace with him. And all the while the young fiddler discoursing sweet music from his violin.

When they had finished, the others all clapped and cheered – and cheered again, more loudly; those who could not clap, clanking their crutches. He turned to her, flushed with delight.

‘Danke schön! Danke schön … I have not so very good time before in America,’ and she saw the tears form and spill down his bandaged cheek.

‘Thank you, Herr Heidelberg. You’re a brave dancer.’

He beamed at her and self-consciously retired away from her to the rear of the ward.

Finding herself beside the young fiddler Ellen enquired of him the tune. ‘It has no name … I picked it up from folk in the foothills.’ He smiled at her. ‘I could call it “The North and South Waltz”.’

‘More like “The Cripples’ Waltz”, ma’am, beggin’ your pardon,’ Hercules O’Brien chipped in, ‘’cos that’s what it was!’

‘If you was a gentleman, Sergeant O’Brien,’ the fiddler remonstrated, ‘you’d name it for the lady …“Mrs Lavelle’s”, or, with permission, ma’am, “Ellen’s Waltz”.’

‘Waltzes can be trouble …’ she said, remembering Stephen Joyce, and something about ‘the carnal pleasures of the waltz’.

‘I am honoured but perhaps there is a young lady in East Tennessee who more greatly deserves the honour,’ she said … and he struck up another waltz as if in answer.

All of a foam after her own decidedly non-carnal waltz with Herr Heidelberg, Ellen went to the open doorway for some cooling air. She stood there watching the sky, listening to the music, thinking of those whom she most dearly missed. The sky, the everlasting sky. Lavelle out there under it. Dead or alive. Maybe watching that same sky, thinking of her. An old poem-prayer – pagan or Christian, she didn’t know – formed on her lips. She had learned it at her father’s knee. All those nights of wonder long ago, under the sheltering stars. High on the Maamtrasna hill, above the Mask and Lough Nafooey. Above Finny’s singing river. Above the world.

‘I am the sky above Maamtrasna,

I am the deep pool of Lough Nafooey;

I am the song of the Finny river,

I am the silent Mask.

I am the low sound of cattle

And the bleating snipe;

I am the deer’s cry

And the cricket’s dance.

In the lover’s eye, am I;

In the beating heart;

I am the unlatched door;

I am the comforting breath.

Now and before, after and evermore,

I am the waiting shore.’

‘The waiting shore,’ she repeated, the great sky listening. ‘I am the waiting shore.’

Music, dancing, always seemed to start her thinking. Too much of it was bad. Thinking led to feelings. High, lonesome feelings like the fiddle-sound behind her. Still, these days she didn’t much give into herself. Just kept working with a kind of blind faith. That one day she’d find them, or they’d find her. Looking back on life was as bad as looking back on Ireland. She was done with all that, was now facing the new day – whatever that might bring … to wherever it might lead her. Like here … a pale ‘St Patrick’s night’ in Virginia – … Maryland … Carolina. She’d never thought of States as feminine. Then again, men were always naming a thing for their women, as if to protect – or to own – it. Louisiana … Georgia … the Southern States seemed to have the best of the gender divide. Louisiana – Louisa’s Land. Ellen thought of her adopted daughter.

Louise, in many respects, was more like herself than Mary was. If not in looks, then certainly in temperament. Ellen smiled. Louise had some inherent waywardness. Needed always to be holding herself in check; dampening down her natural high spirits. Her passion for this life sometimes out-balancing her preparation for the next.

Ellen looked back through the door, to catch a glimpse of Louisa. There she was, gaily dancing with that young Southern boy Jared Prudhomme. Ellen had noticed them talking together. She would speak to Louisa about it.

The one thing, Ellen knew, which held the Sisters high in the respect and affections of the men, was that they, unlike the lay nurses, divided their care equally among all the men. To move from this understanding would undermine the position of the Sisterhood – and re-instate all the barriers and prejudices they had worked so hard to remove. Louisa’s vocation, Ellen knew, was more difficult than Mary’s. Louisa would always be torn between the things of the world and her higher calling. More passionate, more reckless than Mary, Louisa went headlong at life. Not always a good thing. In moments left Louisa unguarded against herself. Much as Ellen herself had been.

Ellen looked again. Mary too was caught up with the celebrations. But it was different. This Earth, with all its hollow baubles, was merely a waiting place for Mary. Until she was borne away by an angel band to eternal glory. Even in that, Mary had an unsullied purity of thought. She did not seek everlasting life, as a thing in itself. With her, it was ever the higher ideal – to see His face, to continue her worship of Him in Heaven as she had on Earth. Mary was fallible humanity at its most beautiful. Mary was a saint.

The sound of a galloping horse startled Ellen. Some news of a battle? Surrender? Peace?

Her heart leaped at the thought.

The horse, pale against the rising moon had no rider. It galloped by her, so close she could smell the thick odour of its lathering skin. On it ran until she could hear its distant drumming but see it no more.

‘“Behold a pale horse, And his name that sat on him was Death; And Hell followed with him;” Revelations, Chapter Six, Verse eight,’ she said, after it.

She remembered the Hades horse in the woods – the memories it had evoked. Black horse, pale horse. It reminded her of something. Out there too champing for battle was the red horse of slaughter, the white horse of conquest. Four horses in all, ever present at the revelation of evil – the Apocalypse. She felt a tremor run over her body.

She walked out a piece into the night, following the sound of the retreating hooves, the horse bringing back her old dream. Lavelle, constant, loving Lavelle, true as the guiding moon. Out there somewhere beneath it. And Stephen, he, who had excited such a temporary madness in her, awaking every reckless passion. She lingered on thoughts of him, their times together, her skin alive with the remembering. Under what moon, what banner, was Stephen Joyce? She dared not think. She and Stephen Joyce could never meet again. She dismissed him from her mind, irritated by her lapse, thinking she long ago had.

When Ellen turned to come back, she saw two figures flit away from the din of the hospital into the glinting night and towards the woods. She hoped they would not arouse the interest of jittery-fingered pickets who lay at every pillar and post between them and the enemy. Especially, as he was a Southern boy.

She would need to speak to Louisa. Urgently.

THIRTEEN

Jared Prudhomme raised his hand to the winged headdress which Louisa wore.

‘I am afraid to remove it.’

‘As am I,’ she said simply.

Reverentially, the boy raised the starched white edifice above Louisa’s forehead. If he had been expecting her hair to fall, covering her face – it did not. She was cropped more closely than a boy. He touched her cheek. Her eyes never left his for a moment, as if nothing had been revealed. In the far distance, the odd shot loosed by an edgy picket punctured the night. In the near distance she heard a horse.

Tomorrow, she knew, he would return to it. Be out there in some bare, unsheltering plain, or in some fiery copse. Or moving through some ripening wheat field, his golden head … She shivered at the thought. Already he had some fixed premonition regarding tomorrow. She had seen it before in men. Invariably they were right, the death prophecy fulfilling itself. But its foretelling allowed them to prepare. Write the last letter; leave some memento; make final amends with their Maker. The grizzled older campaigners took it all in their stride. They had all ‘seen the elephant’ before. Death, to them was as inevitable as the sun rising. But he was just a boy – a golden boy – and a boy in love.

‘You are more beautiful …’ he began.

‘Sshh!’ she said. ‘Nothing is required.’

When she left him, returned past the silent, growing mounds of limbs, she crossed herself for the limbless and un-whole who, inside the rickety hospital, awaited her.

She considered her solemn vow of chastity not to have been broken.

FOURTEEN

Inside, the limbless continued dancing unabated, and the un-whole undeterred. Now, songs were interspersed to allow some respite to the dancers, most of the songs hurled insults at the opposite side. The ‘Southern Dixie’ answered by the ‘Union Dixie’.

Way down South in the land of traitors,

Rattlesnakes and alligators …

Or, another ‘Yankee Doodle’.

Yankee Doodle said he found,

By all the census figures,

That he could starve the rebels out,

If he could steal their niggers.

Answered by

We do not want your cotton,

We do not want your slaves,

But rather than divide the land,

We’ll fill your Southern graves.

Then ‘The Irish Volunteer’ of the North clashed with ‘The Bonnie Blue Flag’ of the South. Both, Ellen recognised, sung to the same air of ‘The Irish Jaunting Car’!

The dancing resumed and Ellen was aware that Louisa was back in the midst of things. Shortly thereafter Jared Prudhomme re-appeared and Alabarmy called on him.

‘Lad, if these Yankees can’t whup us with minié balls, they ain’t gonna whup us with songs … so give us one of yer best, boy!’

Jared Prudhomme stood tall, laughed and started to sing.

‘Her brow is like the snowdrift,

Her nape is like the swan,

And her face it is the fairest,

That ’ere the sun shone on.

‘… And for Bonnie Annie Laurie

I’d lay down my head and die.’

They all liked him Ellen knew, both North and South, as did she. He was truly beautiful, in so far as one could ascribe beauty to a youth. But for all his seventeen youthful years, he had a manly bearing. Looked all straight in the eye, neither seeking favour, nor giving it. Yet with that generosity of youth that the cynicism of older age – and war – had not yet destroyed.

He sang as he looked. Clear voiced. Uninhibited by those present. Sang to ‘Annie Laurie’, as if she were there in the very room listening to him. And she was, Ellen knew, casting a glance towards Louisa. The girl’s white-bonnetted head was fixed on the boy. He did not look at her. He had no need to. The spirit within the song left his lips irrevocably bound for no other place than her.

Ellen stood transfixed. The boy reminded her so much of herself. Before she lost the gift. The gift was not the singing itself – the mere outpouring of notes – but the thing within and above the singing. She could still sing – as a person might. But the gift was lost to her. The gift came with purity – purity of intent, purity of the art itself. Letting go of desire, of ambition for the voice – the instrument – to be admired, the singer to be praised. The voice was not the gift, but the gift could inhabit the voice … but not by right or by skill alone.

The boy had the gift. Though he sang for Louisa, he did not sing to her. Then he had stopped before he had started it seemed, leaving them there suspended in the moment. The song, at one level, having passed them by. At another, having entered within, transcending them into some knowledge undefined by words or melody alone.

The listeners came back before he did. Clapped loudly, recognising that they had been transported and were now returned. ‘Arisht,’ the Irish called. ‘One more, lad!’ both friend and foe alike, echoed.

The boy just smiled, looked at Louisa, dropped his head slightly to gather himself and then looked at her again. Almost imperceptibly, she motioned her consent, the slightest tilt of her head towards him.

‘With your permission, ladies, I will dedicate this song to you all who daily raise us up.’

Acclamation arose from all those assembled. Again he looked at the ground, waiting until the burr of noise had receded.

‘When I am down and, oh my soul, so weary;

When troubles come and my heart burdened be;

Then, I am still and wait here in the silence,

Until you come and sit awhile with me.’

At the refrain, this time he looked directly at Louisa. She held his gaze, letting his sung words seep into her.

‘You raise me up, so I can stand on mountains;

You raise me up, to walk on stormy seas;

I am strong, when I am on your shoulders;

You raise me up … to more than I can be.’

All were hushed as the boy drew breath.

‘You raise me up, so I can stand on mountains;

You raise me up to walk on stormy seas;’

This time they all joined in, raising their voices in the redemptive words. A chorus of broken angels but all fear lifted from them.

‘I am strong, when I am on your shoulders;

You raise me up … to more than I can be.’

At the final line his gaze never removed from Louisa, the rapture on her daughter’s face provoking the opposite emotion in Ellen. When he finished there was again the hiatus, no one wanting to break the moment, steal wonder away.

‘We’ll give you that – you can sing you Rebs!’ Hercules O’Brien eventually ventured, nodding his block of a head in approval at the boy. Then looking at Ellen he called for ‘A soothing Irish voice to calm the storms of battle’.

She resisted, didn’t want to follow the boy, break the spell he wove. Then the boy himself called her, ‘It would do us great honour. Mrs Lavelle – a parting song. A song some may not hear again … after tomorrow.’

All knew what he meant. Some did not look at her … shuffled uneasily. Those that could – those recovered by her healing hands who, tomorrow would go out again – she could not refuse them. For some reason the pale and riderless horse flashed by her mind.

She started falteringly, sang it to the boy. Her own favourite. Favourite of all whom she loved and who in turn had loved her.

‘Oh, my fair-haired boy, no more I’ll see,

You walk the meadows green;

Or hear your song run through the fields

Like yon mountain stream …’

She looked at the boy as she sang, something fiercely ominous in her, some darker shade of meaning she had not noticed before, now present in the words.

‘So take my hand and sing me now,

Just one last merry tune …’

His clear blue eyes never left hers as she sang her tune in answer to his.

‘Let no sad tear now stain your cheek,

As we kiss our last goodbye;

Think not upon when we might meet,

My love my fair-haired boy …’

They were all her fair-haired boys, all the crippled, the crutched, the maimed and the motherless. Some called her ‘Mother’ – and even when they didn’t, she knew she was their mother in-situ, the comforting words, the tender touch.

‘If not in life we’ll be as one,

Then, in death we’ll be …’

She did not mean to sadden them with thoughts of death but to comfort them. Death indeed would come to many here … maybe to Hercules O’Brien … maybe by the hand of Ol’ Alabarmy, his dancing partner. Perhaps death would dance with the shy Rhinelander. He had danced with her, as if it were the last waltz on this wounded earth. Or death could call time on the young fiddle player from East Tennessee. Or even, Ellen kept her eyes on the beautiful boy, to Jared Prudhomme, in love with her Louisa … and she with him.

How, Ellen wondered, could anything other than the boy’s death solve Louisa’s dilemma?

‘And there will grow two hawthorn trees,

Above my love and me,

And they will reach up to the sky Intertwined

be …’

She was singing not to death … but to hope. Hope that after death love might still survive, but hope none the same.

‘… And the hawthorn flower will bloom

where lie,

My fair-haired boy and me.’

The boy came to her, held her arms, looked deep into her eyes. ‘Thank you, Mrs Lavelle – Mother! Everything will be all right now – you’ll see!’

She didn’t know how to reply to him. Just squeezed his arms … let him go slowly, a certain sadness creeping over her. Maybe it was the song.

Then the Tennessee fiddle player called for a ‘last fling of dancing’ – ‘I Buried My Wife and Danced on Top of Her’.

Ellen was glad to be shaken out of her thoughts and as well didn’t want to send the men to sleep, morose about tomorrow. Though, even jigs and reels sometimes didn’t prevent that. She remembered Stephen Joyce wondering to her once about ‘how the Irish could be both happy and sad – at the same time!’

She entered joyfully into the spirit of the dance, lilting the tune, swinging and high-steppin’ it with her boys; Hercules O’Brien roaring at the top of his voice, reminding them all to ‘Dance, dance, dance all you can, Tomorrow you’ll be just half-a-man!’

Then a new sound – the stentorian voice of Dr Sawyer cutting through the din. ‘Stop it! Stop it at once!’

He looked the length of the hospital at them, withering them with his gaze, reducing them back to what they previously had been – men of rank, diseased and disabled.

‘It’s madness, sheer irresponsible madness! Sister,… you are in charge here?’

Louisa stepped forward: – ‘Yes, Doctor.’

‘These men, half of them at death’s door and look at them – lungeing about like lunatics … limbless lunatics.’

The men huddled back at his onslaught.

‘Feckless nuns and jiggers of whiskey – against my better judgement from the start. This won’t go unanswered!’ And he turned and marched out, killing all joy.

‘You won’t best us!’ Hercules O’Brien shouted after the retreating figure. ‘Even if it’s our lastest Paddy’s Night … it was the bestest.’ Then he turned, went down to where Ol’ one-armed Alabarmy now stood, all crumpled and defeated.

All watched as Hercules O’Brien bowed to his foe.

‘Thank you, sir, you’re a gallant soldier.’

Then Ellen, Louisa and Mary watched, the splendour rising in them, as each of the lame and the limbless, the Southron and the Northman, bowed to each other, offering gratitude for the frolics now finished and solicitude for whatever the morrow might bring.

In turn then the men thanked Ellen and the Sisters – especially Sister Mary for ‘The jiggers of whiskey and one helluva party for a nun!’

Those that could fight would want to be up and bandaged by five o’clock. That meant four for Ellen and the others. If they weren’t called on during the night and Ellen suspected they might well be. Dr Sawyer had been right … up to a point, and damaged limbs could only take so much. Still, they settled the men down as best they could and changed any dressings, oozing from the evening’s exertions.

And it was all worth it. The night’s fun was worth it.

The fiddling was furious, the band of fiddlers flaking it out. Ellen recognised them. There was Hercules O’Brien mummified for death. His head bandaged; blood plinking from his bow.

There too, was Ol’ Alabarmy thwacking his bow madly across his instrument. Where was his other hand? Grotesquely, the fiddle stuck out from Alabarmy’s neck, there being no other visible form of support. And Herr Heidelberg, atop a giant barrel. Like the others, he held a bow. To it was fixed a bayonet. When, each time, he drew his bow across the strings, it sliced a collop of flesh from his face. She cried out to him, but he seemed not to hear.

Ellen and the boy, Louisa’s boy, were in front of the fiddle band, dancing ‘The Cripples’ Waltz’ but the timing was wrong … all wrong. The fiddle band played one tune, they danced to a different one, the boy whispering loudly to her to ‘Listen! Listen, Mother! D’you hear it – in the floor – the skulls?’

She didn’t know what he was talking about. But he persisted at her to ‘Listen!’ Again calling her ‘Mother.’

Then, at last she could hear it. The amplified sound of their feet exploding on the floor, driving up her legs, shivering into her body.

‘It’s the skulls!’ he whispered, with a mad glee that she had at last understood him. ‘That’s what gives it the sound – the skulls, goat skulls and sheep skulls and … and … listen to the walls!’ he then demanded, pulling her close to the wall, pushing her face against it until she could feel the wild music entering the hollowed-out eyes and ears … and the slit of the nose. Coming back louder than when it went in. They did it in Ireland he told her. Buried the skulls of dead animals in the floors and the walls. To catch the sound of the wicked reels and the even wilder women who splanked the floor to them.

The music came thick and furious. She recognised the tunes – ‘I Buried My Wife and Danced on Top of Her’, then ‘Pull the Knife and Stick It’.

The only dancers were the boy and her. She wanted to ask him about Louisa … about … but he kept telling her to ‘listen!’, like she was the child. She obeyed him, the skull sound all the time rapping out its rhythm like a great rattling gun. It got louder and louder, until frightened, she looked at the floor. There, reaching up from beneath, were hands without arms and arms without hands.

If she could only dance fast enough, she could avoid them. Keep one step ahead. She shouted at the Cripple Band to play faster. But the faster they played the more Herr Heidelberg’s bayonet slashed his face, the more the bow of Hercules O’Brien splinked blood onto his face, his tunic, and his instrument. Ol’ Alabarmy smiled dreamily through it all.

The boy seemed not to notice, not to see. Only to hear. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’

She tried to fight him off – make him see. He must be blind, crippled as the rest of them. Now, he caught her roughly by the shoulder, again trying to face her towards the wall.

‘No!’ she shouted, trying to get away from him. Trying to keep dancing, keep ahead of the jiggling hands.

‘No! No!’ she shouted, more vehemently, trying to wrest her body free.

‘It’s time, Mother – four o’clock!’ Mary said, gently but firmly shaking her shoulder.

FIFTEEN

When Louisa awoke, the clarion calls of war were already summoning men to be ready for death. Before he would go out today, the boy had last night asked her to ‘Place my name, company and regiment on a piece of paper and pin it to my breast.’

She prayed, her daily prayers – the Sign of the Cross, the Morning Invocation of the Light, the Lord’s Prayer – for him. Not that death should pass him by, for that alone was the Lord’s domain, but that if it came, it should be quick and clean. Not lingering and painful, his youthfulness ebbing away, his beauty distorted.

Louisa knew he would be fearless, be raised in courage because of her. She smiled – boys to men do quickly grow. She rose, dressed, put on her headdress, remembering.

‘The White Bonnet Religion’, the soldiers called her faith. White bonnet, black bonnet, no bonnet, Louisa wondered what it was religion had to do with what would happen here today? Yet, the vast bulk of those who would line up to kill each other lived by some religious code. The politicians who, from afar, waged this war, also waged it with the absolute conviction that God was on their side. They had spoken with Him – and He had told them!

It had always seemed such an obscenity to her, lining up God in the ranks.

Beside her, Mary also prepared for the long day. In perfect prayer, Mary would be. Not distracted by the thoughts which flitted in and out of Louisa’s own head. She loved Mary so. Mary was her window to God. Amongst all the Sisters, all the doctors, the heroes of battle, Mary was the most perfect human being Louisa had ever known. A constant reservoir of love to all who came within her sphere. And Mary’s love was infinite.

‘I have no right not to dispense it freely,’ was how Mary saw it. ‘It is not mine not to give. I am His river.’

Mary looked at her adopted sister and smiled. Mary could see beneath, Louisa knew, into her very soul. That was the way with her. Louisa wondered what Mary would find there this morning? Whatever, there would be no judging of it.

Neither spoke. Nor was there need to.

SIXTEEN

The hospital was already alive with movement – an air of excitement. Those who could, mad for action. Mad to fight for America.

‘America!’ Hercules O’Brien began the day. ‘Wide open spaces and narrow minds. If it ain’t American it ain’t good! In ascending order, Irish, African, German, Jew.’

‘But cannon fodder is different, Hercules,’ ‘Souper’ Doyle, a Confederate from Co. Galway, answered. ‘The off-scourings of the world is good enough for American buck and ball. Didn’t you hear the officers colloguing with each other, how “Irish Catholics were a resource of fodder for enemy cannon that couldn’t be ignored?” Well it’s our America now, whether the Northern Yankees like it or not. We’re no longer lodgers in someone else’s home!’

Souper Doyle resented how his name had followed him here to America. What harm if his people had ‘taken the soup’, changed, for a while, to the ‘English religion’, for food to keep body and soul together during the worst of the Bad Times. Sure hadn’t they changed back again, when the winter of Black ’Forty-Seven was over! But the name had stuck … the Doyles were ‘soupers’. Thomas Patrick Doyle had hoped that when he left Godforsaken Galway behind, he would also leave there all references to soup. So he had taken a purseful of coin and the passage money to America from the recruiting officer who had come to Ireland, seeking ‘stout-hearted fighting men’. The man with the drawling accent had promised them ‘Glory’ … during the war, and a ‘grander life in a free America’ … after they had won it!

‘Souper!’

He winced now as Hercules O’Brien addressed him. Souper Doyle wondered, that if he ever got out of this hellish army in one piece, if he could find some place far out in the west where there was no damned Irish? Where he wouldn’t be known, and change his name? Hercules! Now there was a grand name … a grand, stout-hearted name.

‘Souper!’ the current owner of that name called out again.

‘You Rebs will need a flag of truce to get back to your lines.’ Then turning to the nuns asked, ‘Is there not a flidgin’ of white among the lot of you Sisters to make a truce flag for the Rebs?’

Louisa came to the rescue, running to their quarters and salvaging a well-washed winter petticoat from its out-of-season hibernation. It wasn’t white – a cream-coloured flannel – but it couldn’t be mistaken for what it was.

When he saw her return with it, Jared Prudhomme insisted he be the flagbearer. Vowing devotion to her faded thrown-off, he fixed it atop his bayonet.

‘May it and the Lord keep you safe,’ Louisa whispered to him.

Mary then gave the Rebel band her blessing, putting them, as Alabarmy pronounced it, ‘Under the one Sister’s protection and the other Sister’s petticoat!’

Out they went then, the small band of Johnny Rebs. The boy, good-as-new from his wound, proudly bearing Louisa’s petticoat aloft, led them. Then Ol’ Alabarmy, defiant as ever, proclaiming his one arm ‘good enough to pull a trigger on nigger-jiggin’ Yankees.’ With them, the Tennessee fiddle player, his asthmatic fiddle strapped to his knapsack – and Souper Doyle. ‘One of our own, misleadin’ himself,’ Hercules O’Brien bemoaned.

‘The mighty great man in a little man’s body’ as the men called the diminutive sergeant, should not yet have been ready enough for more action but he had seemed hell-bent on returning to the fray. Now he came to Ellen, awkward in his own way.

‘Blessings on you, ma’am, for the tender touch – and the mighty craic. I hope you find your husband!’

And he pressed into her hand a letter.

‘Read it after I’m gone,’ he said gravely, ‘and tell her I forgive her.’

She started to say something, saw a strong man’s tears well up in his eyes, fighting not to fall.

‘Better be dead than finished,’ he said, and went.

Ellen watched after him, knowing she would not see him again. Something about the small way he carried himself.

Like hedgehogs in March they went, sniffing out if the world had changed during the long sleep into spring.

They waved the Southerners off, the nurses … and the nursed who could walk. Then the Union soldiers, Hercules O’Brien among them, went out to their own side.

Two thoughts struck Ellen. The first that what she was witnessing seemed to deny the very essence of the work she was doing – healing. If it was just patching them up to go out again, have another chance at death, what was the weary point of it all?

Her second thought was that their leaving freed up some space. For the inevitable mangled fruit that would be harvested from today’s reeking plain.

She had taken no more than a dozen steps inside the hospital when she heard the gunfire. Just a small fusillade. Men jerked up in their beds.

‘It’s the Rebs!’ one whispered – and all knew. ‘Our boys got the Rebs!’

She ran to the door, Louisa already ahead of her, turning her head back, a stricken look upon her face. They careered across the short distance to where the crumpled group of grey-clad bodies lay. Ellen saw Louisa’s petticoat on the ground, tossed this way and that by the eddying breeze.

It was Louisa who reached them first, pulling his body from under the others. Holding his golden head on her lap, talking to him, calling him ‘Mr Prudhomme!’ Straining to hold back unSisterly tears. Frantic for any visible sign of life.

There was none.

She sat there. Stunned beyond words. Only, ‘Mr Prudhomme! Mr Prudhomme!’ Cradling his stilled youth. Then, bent to his ear, whispered words the world could not hear. Words, she hoped the heavens would.

Mary gathered Souper Doyle in her arms, the neck reefed from him, his chest punctured. She tried to stem the hole in his throat with her hand. It was to no avail. He had seemed such a lonely man, didn’t mix much with the others. She knew what they said about him. Had spoken quietly to a few of them. That it wasn’t Christian to call him that. To judge.

‘Thomas,’ she said, gently. ‘The Lord is waiting. He will not judge you.’

He tried to respond. Made some distressing gurgling sounds in his throat … and died.

Mary waited with him, praying for the eternal repose of his soul and asking forgiveness for those whom Souper Doyle could no longer forgive.

Likewise, Ol’ Alabarmy – ‘long gone’ – when Mary reached him was finally home.

The young fiddle player lay on his back, beneath him his instrument … smithereened into the last silence. He was still alive, barely. Ellen knelt beside the boy, lifting his head against her breast.

‘We’ll get you back inside, fiddle player,’ she said, more in desperation than in hope. He rolled his eyes up at her.

‘No, lady,’ he said quietly.

‘Rosin’ up my bow – I’ll be at the crossroads and I hope the Devil don’t take me the wrong way!’

‘The Devil shouldn’t have all the best music,’ she answered grimly and got him to listen as she said an Act of Contrition into his ear.

‘You never let up with the white bonnet religion?’ he smiled.

‘Nothing else makes any sense,’ she said. ‘Are you hurting?’

‘Not in that way,’ he answered.

‘What then?’ she asked, anxious of any final comfort she could bring him.

He didn’t answer her immediately. Then, in a moment, raised his head to her. ‘If my mother were here with your son …’ he said, forming the words so slowly, so deliberately, that she would not mistake them, ‘… she would surely kiss him.’

And he kept his eyes open, fixed on her face, as she leaned down and gave him the tenderest mother-kiss.

Ellen just sat with him then, rocking him to herself, thinking of her own son and a mother in East Tennessee.

Beyond her, Ellen saw Louisa still sheltering the golden head of Jared Prudhomme.

‘He is dead – the beautiful youth!’ she heard Louisa say, in a far off voice. ‘Dead!’

She watched, as Mary went to Louisa, knelt beside her sister, and made the Sign of the Cross on the boy’s forehead.

‘He is home, Louisa, death exalts his face,’ Ellen heard Mary say.

Mary then came to Ellen. ‘The Lord is good, He will receive them all,’ she comforted and gave thanks that the young fiddle player had died ‘in a mother’s arms’.

Where Mary saw hope Ellen saw only hopelessness.

‘No young man believes he shall ever die,’ she said to Mary.

America was losing its young to this war … and in losing its young was losing its old.

‘The young are beautiful,’ Mary answered. ‘He takes them first to himself.’

‘Yes …’ Ellen said, looking at her daughter. ‘The young are truly beautiful.’

She herself felt old, unbeautiful. War killed all that was beautiful. Plucked out singing youth from life. Silenced it. Diseased men’s hearts and minds, eating up what measure of goodness there once was there. Poxing the soul as well as the body. The land would wait till it was ready – nurturing below its terrible fruit until the sons of sons had forgotten. Then there would be rivers of blood, seasons of storms, Lucifer rising.

Then would the land wreak its revenge.

With the men, Ellen and the two nuns helped lever the dead bodies onto the rude planks that would be their coffins. Until they were upended again from them – returned to the land.

Louisa’s petticoat now lay where she had placed it, on the boy’s breast – a mocking testament to safe passage. Ellen put her arm around Louisa’s shoulder, trying to salve the frantic heart within.

‘God decrees,’ Ellen thought, but didn’t say it.

Inside, Dr Sawyer summoned them, addressing Louisa.

‘It was against my disposition, Sister, that I agreed to Confederate soldiers being sheltered here. Events have proven me correct. We cannot be responsible for any but our own. Let the Rebels gather up their dead and wounded – and we ours!’

Displaying no hint of her private emotions, Louisa answered him. ‘It is not the Christian way. All men are brothers. In war, in life … and in death. The Lord is neither North nor South. Who are we to dispute with the Lord, to say mercy to this one because he is in blue uniform … no mercy to this one because he is in grey?’

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