BRENDAN GRAHAM
The Element of Fire

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers The News Building 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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This edition 2016

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers 2001

Copyright © Brendan Graham 2001

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

Although this work is partly based on real historical events, the main characters portrayed therein are entirely the work of the author’s imagination.

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

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Source ISBN: 9780006513964

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007401109

Version: 2016-01-19

DEDICATION

Dedicated to the memory of

‘The Coot’,

Fr. Henry Flanagan O.P., Newbridge College

(1918–1992)

Sculptor, musician, teacher, friend

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

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Keep Reading

Recommended Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

‘The element of fire is quite put out;

The sun is lost, and th’ earth …’

‘An Anatomy of the World’

JOHN DONNE (1572–1631)

1

1848 – Ireland

It was a grand day for a funeral.

A grand August day, Faherty thought.

The coachman, a thin, normally talkative fellow, with a tic in his left eye, held back now. Cap in hand, he waited, a respectful distance from the graveside.

He had brought them here, deep into the mountains and lakes of this remote Maamtrasna valley. The red-haired woman, her twin daughters, one dead, one alive; the son, and the orphan waif, silent as a prayer, beside him.

The silent one was a mystery to him. A week ago – the first time he had brought the woman back here from the ship at Westport – the girl had appeared out of nowhere and attached herself to them, running near naked alongside his carriage for miles. Not a word out of her mouth, not even begging.

He wouldn’t have stopped if it hadn’t been for the woman. She had taken pity on the girl, saved her from almost certain death. Since then, all through the last few days, she had been like a shadow to the woman, quiet as a nun. God knows, he decided, seeing the woman kneeling over the grave – settling into it the tiny white flowers of the potato plant – someone would want to watch over her. It was surely a strange thing to do – potato flowers on a grave. The way she ran down from the hillock here. Ran, barefooted to the bare-acred field, on past the tumbled cabins and, like that, snatched up a fistful of the flowers from the derelict potato beds. Before that the child’s shawl – ‘Annie’s shawl’, she called it – must be another one she lost – twined it round the hands of the little dead one, like rosary beads.

Now her fine, emerald-green American dress was ruined with kneeling in the clay, but she didn’t seem to notice. Just kept repeating the child’s name over and over: ‘Katie! Katie! Oh, Katie a stór!’ Faherty wondered what she had been doing beyond in America, with her three children here? Not knowing whether they were dead or alive. He watched the shape of her stretch backwards. She was hardly the thirty years out – a fine woman. He turned his head slightly, so as not to be watching her that way.

Out of the corner of his good right eye, he glanced back along the curl of the valley, with its lake of green glistening islands. There wasn’t much here for her – a few patches of hungry grass. Not a beast in a field. Hard to get a morsel of food out of a place like this – even before the potato rot. Nothing but rocks and stones and water everywhere, as Faherty saw it.

The sun was bothering him, causing his left eye to jump even more.

Hard on her though, sailing all this way to find them, and then one of them up and dying, just when she thought she had them safe. Hard on the little one left too – she must be only the nine or ten years, same as the other little one they were burying. A split pair they were – one taken, one left behind, the two of them the spit of the mother, hair like it was spun out of hers.

The boy was a biteen older, maybe two or three years. Distant from the mother – for leaving them, Faherty supposed. Didn’t look like her either, dark, must have taken after the father. But then, what else could the woman have done? Her husband already put into this spot and their cabin thrown down. What had she left here, only the gossoors and no way of supporting them? The boy would understand in time – give him a few years, and a few knocks in life. He’d understand all right. Still, it must have been hard.

The woman was straightening, dusting down her dress, wiping the earth from her feet, readying to go. She was tall, for a woman. His eye, practised for horse flesh, put her at seventeen hands, maybe even the seventeen and a half. A hand or two above his own five feet four inches. A fine ainnir of a woman. She wouldn’t wait a widow long, Faherty thought. He crossed himself, slid on his cap again, fell in behind the silent girl as they descended the burial place, the same as they’d come up, in single file, the boy leading. Next, the living twin, followed by the mother, then the girl and himself.

It was a strange thing the way, when they had set out on the journey here … the way she had carried the child, not letting on at first that she was dead at all, just bad with the fever. He supposed the woman had her reasons. In case they’d take the girl from her, throw her into the lime pit, maybe. Faherty didn’t know what in God’s name she wanted to be hauling all the way out here for, to this wild place, making a thing of it. Sure, weren’t people dying like flies on every side, on account of the Famine, half of them getting no right burial at all. Faherty was well used to death by now. When you were dead, you were dead. She could have buried the child back in Westport, in the Rocky, and saved them all this trouble. The Rocky, if it was a quarry, was consecrated to take the fevered dead. Sure, wasn’t half the countryside already flung into it!

He picked his way down the Crucán, the sweep of the Maamtrasna valley unnoticed before him.

Nell had strayed from where he’d left her, snaffling the sweet grass of the long acre which bordered the mountain pass road. The horse was tired from all the travelling. He patted her neck, relieved she hadn’t wandered too far. Back here, in the valleys, a wandering horse wouldn’t last long.

‘I’m sorry, Nell …’ he whispered into the animal’s ear, so the woman wouldn’t hear him, ‘… dragging you all the way out here where they’d eat you, quick as look at you.’

As they rounded the bend, skirting the edge of the lake, Ellen held the three of them into her: Patrick crooked in her right arm, Mary in the near reach of her left, half-lying across her, half-smothered in the lap of her dress. The girl then beyond Mary, but within the circle of what remained of the family. Ellen watched the back of Faherty’s head, rolling from side to side as it did when he spoke. Now, he was saying nothing, unless talking to himself.

She looked out at the Mask, probably seeing the lake for the last time, not caring if she never saw it again. Nor the valley, hanging there around it, so green, so empty, so full of death, the sun spilling over it as if nothing in the world was wrong. As if it were the Plains of Heaven.

Faherty’s head stopped lolling for a moment. She watched it half-turn towards her.

‘It was a grand day …’

She hardly heard him, her attention drawn to his jumping eyelid. It must be a nervous thing. He was probably nervous as a child, she thought.

‘… a grand day for a funeral, ma’am!’ he said, meaning it.

2

For the rest of the journey around the lake she never spoke. Faherty too was silent.

He never heard her even weep. It was all too much for her, he thought. Sorrow and guilt – a bad mixture. If she keened it out of herself, got shut of the grief, it would be better for her. But after this, it would be easier. Beyond in America with only the two to care for – and the silent one, if she took her with them? At least they had a chance, somewhere to go to, out of this God-forsaken place. Not like the poor devils here, wandering the roads scouring for scraps, arms and legs stuck out of them like scarecrows. Eyes burned into the sockets with fever. No sound. Only the bit of a breeze rattling through bared ribs. Wherever they were headed it didn’t matter, they’d get nothing, neither food nor sympathy. It was the same all over – a land full of nothing. The only hope a quick leaving of this life and Paradise in the next, if they were lucky.

Faherty wondered about Paradise, the Garden of Eden. Was it like the big houses once were? Hanging gardens; carpets of flowers; servants at every turn; fruit on every tree. And long rows of lazy beds, the fat lumper potatoes tumbling out of them, begging to be eaten. He wanted to ask her was America like that.

Mairteen Tom Anthony, a big bodalach of a fellow from the foot of the Reek, once told him how the buildings were so tall in New York, that when he first went out there the roof of his mouth got sunburnt from standing all of a gám looking up at them. Faherty wasn’t sure if Mairteen was tricking him or not. America turned people into tricksters – even an amadán like Mairteen Tom.

Leave her be, he decided.

It was still light when Nell edged them past the conical-shaped reek of Croagh Patrick, so she made Faherty bring them straight to Westport Quay. As they passed the workhouse gates hundreds clamoured, seeking admittance. Hundreds more, near naked and starving, sought to clamber over the top of these, calling for ‘relief tickets’ that would grant them soup; sole sustenance for one more day.

‘There must be three thousand inside, if there’s a soul,’ Faherty opined, ‘and as many more outside wanting in.’

They sloped down Boffin Street, past the boatmen’s houses and the gaunt Custom House still, in the reign of Victoria, designated the ‘King’s Stores’. Here, fuelled by hunger, six hundred in rags milled in desperate hope, battened back by militiamen. Nearby, cart-followers, employed to protect the grain when being transported to the town’s merchants, waited, slinking on the margins of the famished until called to their cold duty.

Another angry crowd sent up cries of dismay as a ship from Marseille discharged its cargo of wheat, beans and chestnuts, while behind a clipper of Constantinople lay by, bursting with corn from New Orleans, and flanked by Her Majesty’s revenue cruisers. Behind the ships were the island drumlins of Clew Bay – giant hump-backed whales, silhouetted against the purple and crimson of the dying day. Ellen leapt from Faherty’s carriage. One of the ships must be Atlantic-bound.

Westport Quay throbbed with all the mixed ingredients of quay life. Pampered gentry and a starving commonality jostled equally with tidewaiters and landwaiters, while elbow to shoulder with the herring- and oystermen of Clew Bay, shipping agents of indifferent character plied their raucous trade.

‘Passage to Amerikay!’ they called, thrusting beckoning circulars into the hands of all who would snatch them from the surrounding chaos. She took one.

At WESTPORT For PHILADELPHIA To sail about 10th October The splendid first-class Copper-fastened, British-built ship GREAT BRITAIN.

She pushed it back against the agent’s hand. ‘Today … these ships … America?’ she shouted above the din. The agent, a puffy little fellow in an important hat, gave her the once-over.

‘Yes ma’am, to the exotic city of New Orleans,’ – as if he’d ever been there – face creasing into a red-veined smile. A well-heeled mark, this one – a bit soiled about the hem, but had the wherewithal for passage, he’d wager, unlike most of them here.

‘No … Boston, I want Boston!’ she impressed on him, impatient that he didn’t already know.

‘Boston, New Orleans, Philadelphia – it’s all America!’ he expounded – what did the woman care? ‘Four to a berth, splendid provisions and a quart o’ water a day. Is it just yourself, ma’am?’

She left the sound of him puffing away behind her, and through the pandemonium eventually made her way to the offices of John Reid, Jun. & Co., Ship Agents.

Mr John Reid, Jun., an affable-looking man in his fifties, had ‘no intelligence, in the coming weeks, of any ship Boston-bound. But we are sometimes surprised by what the tide brings in,’ he informed her, helpfully. Her only course of action, he advised, was to keep daily watch at the quay and enquire of him regularly. He could promise her ‘a ship fitted with every attention to the comfort of passengers for Québec, before three weeks was out’, adding, ‘Québec being but a tolerable land journey from Boston’.

She was dismayed. Here she was, her two remaining children secure, and no way out of Ireland. She wondered about Québec, about taking a chance, but feared for the ship Mr Reid had described as ‘fitted with every attention to the comfort of passengers’. She had seen these ‘comfort of passengers’ ships before. ‘Coffin ships’ and rightly named so. Then to land on Québec’s quarantine island – Grosse île, with its seeping fever sheds. She could not subject them to that, she told him, so declining his suggestion.

3

‘Ne’er mind, ma’am, something will crop up,’ Faherty tried to console her with, when she found them again. ‘I’ll take you to The Inn on the North Mall,’ he offered. ‘You can rest up there a while.’ He imagined a lady like her wouldn’t be shy the tally for the innkeeper, his second cousin. ‘It’s for ever full with agents and customs men. I’ll put word with the owner, a dacent man,’ he said, without naming him, ‘to keep an ear out on their talk.’

Again Nell carted them, this time up against the slope of Boffin Street, through the town’s Octagon and past the Market House, a fine, ashlar-built, two-storey, with pediment roof and louvred bell cote.

It reminded her of Faneuil Hall, in Boston’s Quincy Market. But Boston was a city much advanced on Westport. In turn the Octagon, with its imposing Doric column, oddly at variance with the inched-out life of those below it.

She felt the children dig in closer to her as they passed the stench of the Shambles where the butchers of James Street rendered carcasses. Faherty yanked Nell to the right, away from the gated entrance to Westport House, home to Lord Sligo, and took them instead along the North Mall.

On this tree-lined boulevard, with its leafy riverside, the poor huddled, congregating outside the place to which Nell delivered them. Faherty nudged the horse forward, shouting at those who blocked their progress, ‘Get back there! Let the lady through! She’s had a sore loss this day!’

Ellen, aware of the pitiful, near-death state in which most of his listeners were, and embarrassed by Faherty’s words, bowed her head. It didn’t seem to bother Faherty, who skipped down from his perch, tied Nell to the hitching-post and then helped her and the children alight.

The near-dead gaped at them, shuffling out a space through which they could pass. Some made the sign of the cross as she approached, respectful of her loss.

Faherty gentled her in under the limestone porch, solicitous for her well-being, and bade her wait while he sought the keeper.

Inside was a sprinkling of red-faced jobbers, stout sticks in their paw-like hands, the stain of dung on their boots. Beef-men in this ‘town of the beeves’ – Cathair na Mart – as she knew it by name. She wondered who it was bought their beef, in these straitened times? Merchants with money, she supposed. Some of the beeves would end up in the Shambles they had just passed. Some would go out on the hoof, heifered over in ships to help drive those who drove the hungry machines of England’s great industrial towns. Not a morsel would find its way to the empty mouths of those outside.

The tug at her arm recalled her from England’s mill towns. It was Mary. ‘Patrick’s not here!’

Ellen spun around. The boy was nowhere to be seen. She bade Mary and the silent girl wait and rushed for the crowds outside, impervious to everything except that she must not lose him now. Down the Mall she saw him some twenty paces away, on his knees in company with a ragged boy, scarce older than himself. She ran to him, ever fearful of … something – she didn’t know what.

She reached him, relieved to see he was not harmed. ‘Patrick, what …?’

‘I was only helping him,’ Patrick said, defensively.

The other boy, a tattered urchin with vacant stare, backed away, afraid of what this frantic and well-dressed lady might do to him. ‘Tá brón orm, ma’am’ – ‘I’m sorry, ma’am’ – he said, fearfully, in a mixture of Irish and his only other word of English apart from ‘sir’.

She spoke to him in Irish. This seemed to help him be less cowed. Nevertheless, he kept his eyes thrown down as he told his story.

They lived five miles out on the Louisburgh road. His parents, both stricken with Famine fever, had hunted him and his two younger brothers, eight and six years, ‘to Westport for the soup-tickets’. So the three had set off, he in charge. At the workhouse, he was too small to make headway against the clamouring crowds. Instead, he had followed the flayed carcass of an ass, bound for human consumption, and stolen some off-cuts, which he and his brothers had eaten. After sleeping in one of the town’s side alleys, he had awoken, planning to come here to The Inn, the headquarters of the Relief Works’ engineer, ‘looking for work, to get the soup that way, ma’am’, he explained.

Unable to arouse his two younger brothers, he thought they still slept, ‘sickened by the ass-meat’, eventually realizing they lay dead beside him. Then he had stolen a sack, put their bodies inside and carried it over his shoulder ‘to get them buried with prayers’. At the Catholic church on the opposite South Mall, he had sneaked in the doors on the tail of a funeral: ‘for a respectable woman like yourself, ma’am – she was in a coffin’. But, while the church-bell tolled the passing of the ‘respectable woman’, he had been ejected on to the streets with his uncoffined brothers. Again, he had carried his sack back to The Inn, hoping against hope to get food. Food that would give him enough strength to find a burial place for his dead siblings, ‘till I fell in a heap with the hunger!’

That was what Patrick had seen – the boy collapsing, the sack flung open on the road, from within it the two small bodies revealed. Not that he hadn’t seen plenty dead from want before. It had to do with Katie, Ellen knew.

She made to approach the boy. He, still afraid that he had caused some bother to her, backed away. She halted, hunkered down, then called to him. Slowly, he approached, head down, arms crossed in front, a hang-dog look on him as if waiting to be beaten. She reached out and enfolded him.

‘You’re a brave little maneen,’ she said, feeling his skin and bone, his frightened heart, within her arms. ‘We’ll get them buried. And we’ll get some soup for you,’ she comforted, wondering as she spoke, what in Heaven’s name she would do with him then.

After a few moments, she released him and went to Patrick. ‘You did right, Patrick, to go and help him,’ she said, and held her son against her. ‘I was so afraid I’d lost you again.’

Patrick made no reply, neither accepting nor denying her embrace. She was a long way yet from his forgiveness.

Grabbing the sack, she twisted the neck of it closed, not bearing to look inside. The weight of the corpses within resisted her, each tumbling for its own space, not wanting to be carcassed together in death. She didn’t know how the boy had managed to carry it for so long.

Then Faherty was beside her. ‘Ma’am, are you all right?’ he panted, all of a flap, seeing her struggle with the sack.

‘We need your services again, Mr Faherty,’ she said grimly.

Puzzled, he looked at her, looked from Patrick to the boy, then to the sack, finally back to her, his eye jumping furiously all the time. She saw the realization dawn on his face, the ferret-like look he darted her way.

‘You’ll be paid, of course!’ she answered his unspoken question.

‘Right, ma’am, I’ll fetch Nell.’ He made to go, all concern for her well-being now abated. Money was to be made. He turned. ‘And what about him, ma’am?’ He nodded towards the boy beside her: ‘You can’t save all of ’em.’

‘I know, Mr Faherty. I know!’ she said resignedly. Of course she couldn’t take the boy with her. She would have to release him again on to the streets, to take his slim chances. How long it would be before he, too, joined his brothers, either coffined or uncoffined, she didn’t know.

Later, in the bathroom down the hall, she filled the big glazed tub with buckets of steaming water. She dipped her elbow in. Maybe it was too hot. She waited until it was barely tolerable then went for Patrick, scuttling him along the corridor in case some dung-stained jobber got in ahead of them. She undressed him and bustled him into the tub, all the while Patrick protesting strongly at this forced intimacy between them and her all too obvious intentions.

‘I’m clean enough! I don’t need you to wash me!’ elicited no sympathy. She was taking no chances after the episode with the boy and his dead brothers – who knew what they carried? She rolled up her sleeves and scrubbed him to within an inch of his life, until his skin was red-raw. He thrashed about in the water trying to get away from her but to no avail. She did not relent until she was satisfied he was ‘clean’, until she had found every nook and cranny of his body. Then, lugging him by each earlobe in turn, she stuck long sudsy fingers into his ears, to ‘rinse’ them. When she had finished he was like a skinned tomato. Sullen, jiggling his shoulders so as not to allow her to dry him with the towelling cloth. She gave up, threw her coat over his shoulders and led him back to the room. ‘Dry yourself, then,’ she ordered him.

The two girls she put together into the tub. She was not so worried about them. But even from Katie they might have taken something; and much as she didn’t want to think of it, she had to be careful about that too. Disease passed from person to person, even from the dead to the living. Ellen thought the girl would be shy about letting her touch her. This proved not to be the case. Mary, though, seemed to recoil from the girl, not wanting their arms and legs to touch, get entangled. Maybe it was a mistake putting them in the bath together, so soon after Katie. She was as gentle as she could be with Mary, kept talking to her.

‘Katie is with the angels in Heaven, with the baby Jesus … with –’ She paused, thinking of Michael, the hot steam of the tub in her eyes. ‘I was too late … too late a stór … but they’re looking down on us now … it was hard, Mary, I know … and on Patrick … and Katie too, with your poor father laid down on the Crucán and me fled to Australia. What must have been going through your little minds?’ Maybe it would have been better if she had taken Annie and with the three of them, crawled into some ditch till the hunger took them instead of her splitting from them. But how could she have watched them waste away beside her, picked at by ravens, their little minds going strange with the want of a few boiled nettles, or the flesh of a dog. She thought of the boy and his brothers – or any poor manged beast that would stray their way. She had had to go, it was no choice in the end – leave them and they had some chance of living, stay and they all would surely die.

Mary, head bent, said nothing, her hair streaming down into the water, red, lifeless ribbons. What could she say to the child? She pulled back Mary’s hair, wrung it out, plaited it behind her head.

‘God must have smiled … when He took Katie. He must have wanted her awful badly …’

Mary turned her face. ‘Then why did He leave me?’ she asked limply, boiling it all down to the crucial question.

‘I don’t know, Mary,’ she answered. ‘There were times when I prayed He’d take all of us. He must have some great plan for you in this life,’ she added, without any great conviction.

How could the child understand, when she couldn’t understand it herself – the cruelty of it – snatching Katie from them at the last moment. She fumbled in her pocket, drew out the rosary beads.

‘The only thing is to pray, Mary; when nothing makes sense the only thing is to pray, Mary,’ she repeated.

Already on her knees, arms resting on the bath, Ellen blessed herself.

‘The First Joyful Mystery, the … the Annunciation,’ she began.

They had to have hope in their hearts. The sorrow would never leave, she knew, and maybe there would never be full joy in this life. But they had to have hope, keep the Christ-child in their hearts.

She and Mary passed the Mysteries back and forth between themselves, each leading the first part of the Our Father, the Hail Marys and the Glory be to the Father as it was their turn. Once, before the Famine, there were five of them – a Mystery each.

The silent girl gave no hint that she had ever previously partaken of such family devotion, merely exhibiting a curious respectfulness as the prayers went between Ellen and Mary through the veil of bath-vapour – the mists of Heaven. Ellen’s clothes were sodden, her face bathed in steam, the small hard beads perspiring in her hands. The great thing about prayer was that you didn’t have to talk to a person while you prayed with them. Yet souls were joined talking to each other, while they talked to God. She beaded the last of the fifty Hail Marys. There was only so much time for prayers and she whooshed the two out of the tub before they could get cold.

Afterwards, she boiled all of the clothes they had worn, along with her own, before at last climbing into the tub herself. It was a blessed relief. When she had finished rinsing out her hair she lay there, head back on the rim of the tub, her eyes closed. Everyone and everything done for. A little snatch of time to be on her own. Just her and Katie.

The memories flooded back to her. How when she’d send Katie and Mary to the side of the hill for water, they would become distracted, forget. Instead, would lie face-down on the cooling slab of the spring well, watching each other’s reflections in the clear water. Then, when she called them they would scamper down the hill to her, pulling the bucket this way and that until half its contents was left behind them. The times when she did the Lessons, teaching them at her knee what she had learned at her father’s knee, passing it on. While Mary would reflect on what she had learned, Katie just couldn’t. Always bursting with questions, one tumbling out after the other, mad to know only about Grace O’Malley, the pirate queen of Clew Bay, or Cromwell and his slaughtering Roundheads. God, how Katie had tried her patience at times! The evenings, when as a family they would kneel to say the rosary, Katie’s elbowing of Mary every time the name of the Mother of God was mentioned, which was often! At Samhain once when the spirits of the dead came back to the valley, Katie had thrown one of the bonfire’s burning embers into the sky. No amount of argument could shake her belief but that she had hit an ‘evil spirit’ with it.

That was Katie, a firebrand herself, filled to the brim with life. But she had the other side too; like the time she had dashed to the steep edge of the mountain as they crossed down to Finny for Mass. It had put the heart crossways in Ellen. But Katie had returned safely and clutching a fistful of purple and yellow wildflowers, a gift for her mother.

Her fondest memory of Katie was of the time when Annie was born. Katie had crept to her side, to be the first one to see ‘my new little sister’. Like an angel touching starlight, one tentative finger had stretched out to touch Annie’s cheek. How Ellen herself had cried at the beauty of the moment, then laughed at her own foolishness. Katie, as always, asking the ever-pertinent question. ‘A Mhamaí, why are you crying when you’re laughing?’ And she couldn’t answer her. They had lain there together, she and Katie and Annie, into the gathering dawn; touching, whispering, rapt in wonder until the others came. Both of them now snatched from her, Annie in far-off Australia, Katie on her own doorstep.

‘You in there!’ The loud rap at the door startled Ellen. ‘You’ve been there all night, we have others waiting!’ The gruff voice of Faherty’s cousin was matched by further rapping.

‘I’m sorry,’ she called back, clambering out of the tub, ‘I’m coming.’

She was relieved when she opened the door to find he had gone downstairs. Briskly she padded along the corridor, marking it with her wet footprints, the only sound ringing in her ears, not that of the gruff innkeeper but a child’s question.

‘Can we make wonder last, a Mhamaí?’

And her answer, those two and a half years ago. ‘Yes, Katie, we can.’

Back in the room, Patrick, Mary and the girl were already asleep. She dried herself freely, nevertheless, keeping at a discreet distance from the window in The Inn’s west wing. The window looked out across the Carrowbeg river. Directly opposite she could see St Mary’s Church, with its imposing parapet. The thought of the boy with the sack being evicted from the House of God because of his wretched condition angered her. Why had she felt responsible for the boy – as she had for the silent girl? Why for some and not for others, when thousands were dying? Faherty had told her thirty-nine poor souls had received the last sacraments in that day alone.

‘And it’s the same every day, ma’am. Monday to Sunday. They say there’s thirty thousand of the destitute getting outdoor relief around here – they’ll be joining with them soon enough.’

She could well believe it. Thirty thousand in one small area. She wondered if there was any hope for the country at all. But why didn’t she feel as bad about these, about the nameless hordes, as she did about the boy? She had never asked his name. That way, he was just a boy, any boy. But she was ridden with guilt when after giving him some food and a few coins with which to send him off, he had thanked her saying, ‘I’ll pray for you, ma’am.’ Faherty was right, she couldn’t save them all. But what would the child do, where would he go? For how long would he survive?

The limestone façade of St Mary’s looked back white-faced at her from the South Mall. Nothing much had changed since she had left Ireland. If you had money you lived proper and you died proper, as Faherty might have put it. You had the Church behind you. Otherwise it was a pauper’s life and a pauper’s grave.

This thought reminded her she needed to be careful with the money. She had depleted what she had carefully squirrelled away over many months in Boston, by coming to Ireland. Now, with The Inn, and who knew for how long, and the extra cost to Faherty for the two coffins, she had eaten further into her reserves. The silent girl could only come with them because Katie wasn’t. If they had long to wait in Westport, Ellen might not even be able to afford that passage. She would be forced to leave the girl behind. At one stage, she had almost decided to disentangle herself from the girl and give her to the nuns, if they’d take her.

The waif, who watched and shadowed her everywhere, seemed to be a manifestation of the past dogging her, a spectre of loss, separation, Famine. It unnerved her the way the girl never asked anything of her, just was there like a conscience. But, given a little time, she might make a companion for Mary. Not that anybody could replace Katie; it wasn’t that. But maybe Mary might find some echo of her own unvoiced loss in the silence of the mute girl, some small consolation in her companionship on the long journey across the Atlantic.

Now, Ellen prayed across the waters of the Carrowbeg to the House of God that she would not have to change that decision. She closed her mind from even having to think about it. Instead, she tried to recall what it was Faherty had said about the church opposite. About the inscription from the Bible that its foundation stone carried?

‘This is an awful place. The House of God.’

Faherty knew all these things.

4

The days dragged by. Each day she trudged with the children to the quayside and scanned out along Clew Bay for the tell-tale line against the sky. Each day they returned dispirited, almost as much by what they had witnessed on the way, as by the lack of a ship. Was there to be no let up in the calamity? The scenes of despair and deprivation seemed to her to have worsened. Droop-limbed skeletons of men – and women – hauled turf on their backs through the streets, once work only for beasts of burden. When she mentioned this at The Inn, they laughed at her naïveté.

‘There’s not an ass left in Westport that hasn’t been first flayed for the eightpence its pelt will bring, then its hindquarters eaten,’ a well-cushioned jobber jibed. ‘Now the peasants who sold them have to make asses of themselves!’

She was shocked at the indifference of the commercial classes to the plight of ‘the peasants’.

Nervous of everything, she kept the children close by and was cross with them if they wandered, terrified that she’d lose them. That they’d be swallowed in the hordes of the famished who filled the streets with the smell of death and the excrement of bodies forced to feed inwardly upon themselves.

Once she traipsed them with her to Croagh Patrick. They climbed to where they could look across the dotted archipelago of the bay, out past the Clare Island lighthouse. She could see no tall ships, only boats far out, maybe tobacco smugglers, or those ferrying the contraband Geneva, an alcoholic liquor flavoured with juniper and available from under the counter – if asked for – at The Inn.

They climbed higher for better vantage, Ellen straining her eyes against the gold and green of sun and sea. Here, on this age-old mountain, St Patrick had fasted for forty days and forty nights. ‘Those who worship the Sun shall go in misery … but we who worship Christ, the true Sun, will never perish.’ In the writing of his Confession the saint had denounced the sun and its worshippers. Now she prayed to the sun to bring them a ship. Sun-up or sun-down, it didn’t matter, as long as it came. To the west her eye caught a rib of white stone rising heavenwards against the bulk of the mountain. A ‘Famine wall’ going nowhere, built on the Relief Works to exact moral recompense from the starving stone-carriers. They in turn given ‘relief’; a few pence in pay, a handful of soup-tickets.

She remembered how on the last Sunday of summer, Reek Sunday, as it was widely known, the Clogdubh – the Black Bell of St Patrick – was brought there for weary pilgrims to kiss, for a penny. Black from the holy man pelting it at devils, they said. She had never kissed it. For tuppence, those afflicted with rheumatism might pass it three times around the body, for relief. Another superstition of the shackling kind that bred paupers to pay priests. Like the legends about the reek itself. Legends, she guessed, grown to feed misery and repentance, to keep the people out of the sun.

She thought of ascending the whole way – making the old pilgrimage, beseeching the high place where the tip of the mountain disappeared into the lower heavens, to send a ship. But what was it, anyway? Only a heap of piled-up rocks, only a mountain. And what could a mountain do? Still, she called the children and followed the path to the First Station. Seven times they shambled around the cairn of stones intoning seven Our Fathers, seven Hail Marys and one Creed. She wondered why once of everything wasn’t enough, why it had to be seven times.

Then she turned her back on St Patrick’s mountain, angry, yet disquieted by her rejection of it, and dragged them down the miles with her to Westport. Westport, relic of the anglicization of Ireland. A Plantation town of well-mannered malls, the canalized Carrowbeg outpouring the grief and suffering of its hapless inhabitants.

St Patrick and the Protestant Planters could have it between them.

5

Whether her anger had moved the sullen mountain, or whether it was merely favourable winds, the next morning produced a miracle. A ship out of Londonderry – the Jeanie Goodnight – had rounded Achill Island under cover of darkness and now sat at the quay: and she was Boston-bound. Word of the ship’s arrival had spread like wildfire, igniting all of Westport into frenzied quay-life once again. The Inn emptied.

Ellen left the children behind her in the room, admonishing them not to leave it. Wild with excitement, she threw off her shoes and ran bare-stockinged all the way to the office of Mr John Reid, Jun., the dress hiked up behind her like a billowing sail and with every stride storming Heaven that she wasn’t too late.

The quay was teeming with people. Would-be travellers clutched carpetbags to their breasts – food and their entire earthly possessions within. Many were young, single women, who vied for ground with barking agents and anxious excise men. While late-arriving jobbers had their own solution, jabbing at obstructive buttocks with their knob-handled cattle-sticks.

Already the ship agent’s door was mobbed, cries of ‘Amerikay!’ ascending at every turn. Call the damned at the Gates of Hell. Like it was their last hope.

It was her last hope. If they didn’t embark on this ship, who knew when another would come. She and her children would be fated to stay in Ireland. Her money would run out, and in time they would sink lower and lower, until they, too, ended up on scraps of pity and charity and the off-cuts of ass-meat. She lunged into the crowd, all thought of her gender put aside. Nor did the opposite gender give ground to her, unless she took it. Pushing and elbowing, she scrimmaged her way forward until she reached the front.

‘Mr Reid! Mr Reid!’ she shouted, money in her fist, shaking it above her head. ‘Passage for four to Boston!’ she beseeched.

At last he beckoned her forward, she banged down the money onto his desk.

Fifteen minutes later she left, four sailing tickets to Boston clenched like a prayer between her two hands.

Their passage was secured.

The children were overjoyed, Mary more restrained than the others, at the thought of leaving Katie behind. Ellen wondered if the silent girl really understood what all the excitement was about. Sometimes, you just didn’t know with her. But the girl clapped her hands, looking from one to the other of them, her hazel-brown eyes shining, her pert little nose twitching with delight.

Thrice daily, morning, noon, and at eventide, Ellen went to check on the Jeanie Goodnight lest the ship slip out again unexpectedly, just as she had ghosted into the western seaboard town.

Three days later they were headed out into the bay, Westport behind them in the mist, like a shaken shroud. She hated the place. Its workhouse which had taken Michael; the hordes of its hungry, clawing to get aboard the ship ahead of her, the lucky ones, their passage paid by land-clearing landlords.

Once aboard, she had changed her clothes, shaking the stench of Ireland out of them, then boiled them. As the Jeanie Goodnight threaded its way through the drumlin-humped islands, she was aware of the Reek to her left, the cursed mountain always looking down on them, whichever way you went, by land or by sea; watching, judging. She wouldn’t look at it directly. It was part of the Ireland of the past drawing away behind them. An Ireland of Famine; of vacant faces and outstretched hands – an island of beggars, no place for her and her children.

There they had been, she, Michael, all of them, back there in the mountains, waiting, year in year out, for the potatoes to grow. Beating their way down the road to the priest to give thanks, prostrating themselves, when they did grow; beating their breasts in contrition for imagined sins when they didn’t. Then, trudging over and back to Pakenham’s place to pay the rent, hoping he wouldn’t raise it on them when they had it, grovelling for clemency, citing ‘the better times to come’ when they hadn’t.

Always on their knees, giving thanks or pleading. They were to be pitied, the whole hopeless lot of them. It wasn’t the mountains of Maamtrasna that imprisoned them, or the watery arms of the Mask that landlocked them. It wasn’t even, she knew, the landlords and the priests. It was themselves. Going round in circles, beholden to the present and beholden to the past, with its old seafóideach customs, handed down from generation to generation. Tradition, woven around their lives from before they were born, like some giant web. She wanted to strip it all away from her now, never return. If it wasn’t for Michael and Katie back there on its bare-acred mountain, in its useless soil.

‘A Mhamaí …’ The tug at her sleeve startled her.

It was Mary. The child’s eyes, though dry, were blotched from rubbing. Mary would try to hide it from her that she still cried over Katie. That was her way. In the days they had waited for the ship, Ellen had talked to her and Patrick about the need to be strong; the child now beside her looked anything but. Though her first instinct was to take Mary in her arms, Ellen instead led her to the bow of the ship.

‘See, Mary! See out there beyond the horizon – the place where the sea meets the sky?’

Mary nodded.

‘Well, out there is America

‘Is it like Ireland?’ Mary interrupted.

‘No, Mary, it isn’t. America is a big and rich country not like Ireland at all.’

Mary fell silent. Ellen, sensing the child’s disappointment, pressed on. ‘It will be better than Ireland, Mary, I promise you it will be better. But we are going to have to be Americans. We must forget we are Irish. Leave all … all that behind us.’

Mary turned from looking out ahead, trying to see this land where they would be different people. ‘But, a Mhamaí –’

Ellen stopped her, gently. ‘Mary … you mustn’t call me that – “ a Mhamaí ” – any more. We are going to be Americans now. People don’t say that in America. From now on you must call me “Mother”!’

The child said nothing – only looked at her.

‘It’s all right,’ Ellen said, taking her by the shoulders. ‘Nothing’s changed. We’re still the same between us in English as in Irish,’ she smiled. ‘Do you understand?’

Mary once more looked out between the deepening sky and the widening ocean, trying to see beyond where they met. Out to this place, this America.

‘Yes … Mother,’ she answered, giving voice to the strange-sounding word – the wind from America holding it back in her throat, so that Ellen could scarcely catch it.

Out they tacked, past the Clare Island lighthouse, tall and solid-walled. Its white-painted watchtower, lofted heavenwards two hundred feet, would see them safely past Achill Sound. ‘A graveyard for ships,’ Lavelle had told her before she had left Boston. It was his place, Achill. This island, cut off from Ireland’s most westerly shore. ‘Achill – wanting to be in America,’ he always joked.

She hadn’t yet broached the subject of Lavelle with the children, except in a general fashion, like she had mentioned Peabody; both as people in Boston with whom she conducted business dealings. She would have to tell them more about Lavelle – that they were partners, but in business matters only. Albeit that she was fully conscious of his affection for her, and in turn regarded him highly, it was her intention never to remarry. She would be true to Michael to the grave. If, thereby, she was denying herself the tender comforts of marriage life, and a father’s guiding hand for her children, then so be it. That was the price to be paid of her troth to Michael.

An eddy of breeze swirling up from Achill Sound made her shiver slightly. She loosened then re-knotted the blue-green scarf Lavelle had given her at Christmas. She had four long weeks at sea in which to reaffirm her intentions.

The Jeanie Goodnight, a triple-masted emigrant barque, with burthen eight hundred tons, and a master and crew of nineteen, was constructed of the best oak and pine Canadian woods could yield. On her arrival at Westport she had disgorged four hundred tons of Indian corn, twelve hundred bags of the dreaded yellow meal; flour, Canadian timber and East Coast American potatoes. There had been a riot, the poor seeking to seize what supplies arrived with the ship. It was the only way they would get food, by taking it.

When Patrick raised the question of inferior food being shipped into the country crossing with superior food being shipped out, all she could say was, ‘It doesn’t make any more sense to me, Patrick, than it does to you. I don’t understand these things.’ It really didn’t matter what food there was, good or bad. The famished had scarcely a penny between them with which to buy it anyway.

Soon they had sailed beyond the reach of Achill Sound, leaving behind her last view of Ireland – disused lazy beds climbing towards the sky over Clew Bay.

The voyage was a good one, the elements favouring them so that the copper-fastened Jeanie Goodnight sat steady and proud in Atlantic waters. Ellen kept themselves to themselves. Their fellow passengers were a mixed lot. Above deck were the commercial Catholic classes – shopkeepers, grocers, middlemen – and those called ‘strong farmers’, taking what possessions they had, fleeing the sinking ship that was Ireland. There was too a good sprinkling of voyagers from Londonderry and the northern counties.

It surprised her to hear these talk in their brittle way of ‘the calamity biting deep in Ulster’. She found it hard to reconcile the notion that those who called on the Hand of Providence to strike down the ‘lazy Irish Catholics’, should also be stricken by the same levelling Hand.

‘Planters’, or ‘Scots Irish’, as Lavelle called them; Irish, but not Irish. And they were different. More sober in dress and demeanour than the boisterous middlemen from the southern counties. Two hundred years previously, they had been brought in from the Scottish lowlands, and given Catholic land. In return, they were to ‘reform’ Ireland and the Irish. This zeal had never left them. She had seen them in Boston. Hard work and privilege had kept them where they were – looking down on the ‘other’ Irish, every bit as much as the ‘other’ Irish – her Irish – despised them.

These Scots Irish on board the Jeanie Goodnight already spoke of Boston as if it were theirs, naming out to each other the congregations where they would gather to worship; giving no sense that they were leaving anywhere, only of arriving somewhere else.

Below deck, sober demeanour counted for nothing. Nightly the scratch of fiddles and the thud of reel-sets staccatoed the timbers, as the peasant Irish ceilidhed their way to ‘Amerikay’.

The ‘cleared’, passage-paid by landlords happy to see the back of them, at first rejoiced openly at their leaving. Then, inhabitors of neither shore, they floundered in a mid-ocean of conflicting emotions, fuelled by dangerous grog and the more dangerous fiddle music.

Along with the ‘cleared’ a large body of those below deck were single women from sixteen to thirty years, those Ellen had noticed at the quayside. ‘Erin’s daughters’, fleeing Famine and repression. Most would find their way into the homes of affluent Boston as domestic servants to become ‘Bridgets’. Others would sit behind the wheels of the new-fangled sewing machines in the flourishing clothing and cordwaining shops of the Bay Colony. Others still would become ‘mill girls’, in the Massachusetts mill towns of Lawrence and Lowell. There, their fresh young bodies would make the machines sing and the bosses happy, their spirits thirsting for the fields of home and a cooling valley breeze.

In Boston, the agents of those same factory bosses would be waiting on the piers, to corral the fittest and strongest of these young women, to put shoes on the feet of America, clothes on American backs. She had seen it so many times on the Long Wharf when the ships came in.

And she had seen the jaded ‘Bridgets’ traipse down to Boston Common with their silver-spoon charges, glad of an outing and a few mouthfuls of fresh air. And the threadbare needlewomen, bodies like ‘S’ hooks from fifteen hours a day, every day, shaped over their machines.

America indeed promised much. But it took much in return.

Each evening those below were allowed on deck for an hour to cook what little they had on the open stove before being driven below again. Once uncaged, they tore at their carpetbags like ravenous dogs, until the meagre contents contained within, spilled over the timbers. A few praties, a bag of the hard yellow meal – ‘Peel’s Brimstone’, after the British Prime Minister who sought to feed the starving Irish with it, until it sat like marbles, pyramided in their bellies. Sometimes she saw a side of pig or the hindquarter of an ass, smoked or salted for preservation. Finally, the carpetbags carried a drop of castor oil for the bowels – to clear out Peel’s yellow marbles.

Once, horrified, she watched as a young lad, no older than Patrick, was flung from the carpetbag mêlée by a much older man, his father. The boy careered against the tripod supporting the cooking cauldron. But his screams, as his arms and upper body were scalded, served to distract none but his mother from the frenzy taking place. Ellen ran to summon the ship’s doctor but the boy’s frailty was unable to sustain his sufferings and he expired before relief could be administered.

She noticed, the following evening, that the tragedy stayed no hand from the continuing brawls for carpetbag rations.

Again, Ellen kept the children close to her, having found the silent girl one evening to have disappeared and crept amongst the carpetbaggers, peering into their faces, searching out a spark of recognition between any and herself. Ellen could still get nothing from her, nor did the girl speak to either Mary or Patrick.

At first the strangeness of being on the ship had seemed to frighten the girl – as it did Ellen’s own two children. Then, she became fascinated by it. Looking out on every side, running quickly from windward to leeward, watching the land slide away behind them. Or, facing mizzenward, almost, it seemed to Ellen, listening to the flap of the wind in the masts. Other times she would find the girl staring for hours into the deep, ever-changing waters, finding some kinship there, amidst the white spume, the dark silent depths. What was ever to become of her, Ellen wondered. She would have to give her a name. She couldn’t be just the ‘silent girl’, for ever.

The thirty days at sea, whilst giving Ellen time to regain herself, had done nothing to restore her with regard to Patrick.

He still resented her for deserting them and didn’t seek much to conceal it either. Ellen had decided to let things take their own course between them, not to rush him. But Boston wasn’t far away – and Lavelle. If Patrick didn’t show some sign in the next week or so of coming around, then she would have to sit him down anyway and tell him about Lavelle. Already, when she had returned to Ireland to retrieve the children, her changed appearance and failure to return sooner had caused Patrick to accuse her of having a ‘fancy man’ in America.

6

Three days out of Boston, she spoke to them of Lavelle. ‘I want to tell you about Boston …’ she began. ‘There are a lot of houses. Big, big houses and a lot of streets. Not like our little street in the village, but long, long streets and every one of them crowded with people,’ she explained.

‘Like Westport?’ Mary ventured.

‘Like twenty Westports all pulled together,’ she answered, ‘and the sea on one side of Boston and the rest of America on its other side.’

Mary’s eyes opened wide at the idea. Patrick stayed silent.

‘And Boston Common, itself as big as all Maamtrasna. Where people walk and children play in the Frog Pond and skate in the snow. And,’ she drew in close to them, ‘a giant tree where they used to hang witches! And,’ she moved on, seeing the frightened look on Mary’s face, ‘horses that pull tram carts – you’ll love going in them.’

‘When we get there you’ll be going to school to learn all about Boston and America, and lots of other things besides,’ she went on, wondering what she would do for the silent girl in this regard.

‘Will you not be doing the Lessons with us any more, a –’ Mary started to ask and corrected herself, ‘Mother?’

‘Well, Mary, I think you and Patrick are too grown up for me to be still teaching you at home. The best schools in the whole, wide world are in Boston. It will be very exciting for you both with American children … English and German children … children from everywhere,’ she told them.

‘Will they be like us?’ Patrick spoke for the first time.

Ellen, not sure of what he meant, replied, ‘Yes, of course they will. They’ll all be of an age with yourselves, bright and eager to get on,’ she said, thinking she had answered him.

‘No, but like us – Irish?’ he countered.

She had to think for a minute. ‘Yes, yes, of course there will be children like you, who have come from Ireland. Did I not say that?’

Patrick pressed his point. ‘And what about those?’ he pointed to the deckfloor, ‘those below there?’

‘Well I’m sure they’ll all be wanting education,’ she half-answered. The way Patrick looked at her told her he knew she had tried to skirt his question. She decided to plunge straight on, into the deeper end of things. ‘Now, as well as the schools, you’ll meet some people in Boston … who – who have helped me …’ She slowed, picking out the words. ‘A Mr Peabody, a merchant who owns shops …’

Patrick watched her intently, searching out any flicker or falter that would betray her.

‘Mr Peabody helped me to get started in business and a Mr Lavelle, a friend …’ she could feel Patrick’s eyes burning into her, ‘… who saved my life and helped me escape Australia to get back to you. Mr Lavelle works with me in the business.’

There, she had gotten it all out and in one blurt. It was so silly of her to be nervous of telling them, her own children.

Neither of them had any questions, Mary’s face lighting up at the news that Mr Lavelle had saved her mother’s life.

‘Oh, he must be a good man, this Mr Lavelle, to do that … a good man like Daddy was!’ she added.

‘He is,’ Ellen said, more shaken by the innocence of Mary’s statement than by any hard question Patrick might have asked. It was what she had wanted to avoid at all costs – any notion that Lavelle was stepping into their father’s shoes. He wasn’t. God knows, he wasn’t.

Soon they were within sight of America, evidenced by increased activity in every quarter of the Jeanie Goodnight. Ellen still had not resolved the problem of naming the silent girl. Calling her by no name seemed to be so soulless. How well she had come on since Ellen had first found her. Or rather since the girl had first found them, on the road towards Louisburgh. Now, if only she’d speak – tell them what her name was. Ellen determined to try again with her.

To her horror she found the girl part way up the rigging, seeking a better view of America. Petrified that she’d fall, Ellen anxiously beckoned for her to come down.

The girl jumped on to the deck, smiling at Ellen. Tall and dark-haired, her frame now filled out the skimpy dress that, a month past, had hung so shapelessly on her. Still looked scrawny but at least she was on the way.

‘What’s your name, child, and where did you come from?’ Ellen asked. The girl, eyes still alight with the rigging fun, just looked back at her – happy, forlorn, smiling, such a mixture, Ellen thought. She must have her own pinings and no one to share them with.

The one and only time the girl had spoken, at Katie’s burial, it had been in Irish. She probably had no English. Ellen tried again asking her name, this time in Irish. English or Irish, the silent girl made no response. Ellen was sure the girl heard her, understood her even, but, for whatever reason, could not, or would not, reply.

‘We have to get you a name, child,’ she said, touching the girl’s face. ‘A name to go with those hazel-brown eyes and that pert little nose of yours. A name for America.’

The deck was now getting crowded with sea-weary travellers, jubilant at the sight of land before them. Before she could progress things further with the girl, Mary ran at her all of a tizzy.

‘Is that it, is that Boston?’ she burst out, more like Katie than anything, unable to hold back the excitement the sight before them evoked. Patrick too arrived, his forehead dark and intense with interest, but not wanting them to see it.

Ellen felt her own spirits quicken. Momentarily forgetting her quest for a name, she began pointing out places to them. ‘Look at all the ships! Remember, I told you. And all the islands, let’s see if I still have names for them?’

Mary laughed at the strange-sounding names as Ellen tried to get them right.

‘Noodles Island, Spectacles Island, Apple Island and Pudding Point!’ she rattled off, pleased with herself.

‘No shortage of food here in America then,’ Patrick cut in, trying to deny them the moment.

Ellen ignored him. ‘And that’s Deer Island! We’ll have to stop there for … for the people below, for quarantine … that they have no diseases,’ she hurried to explain.

And their eyes were agape at the size and splendour of America, with its tall spires distantly spiking the heavens.

‘There’s the harbour way ahead,’ she pointed out, trying to distinguish the Long Wharf, ‘where we’ll dock. Beyond that is the State House and Quincy Market.’ They heard the quiver of recognition in her voice as she tumbled out the names, all foreign, all strange to them. ‘Further up is Boston Common – I’ll take you there.’ She hugged the three of them, this time leaving out the witches. ‘On the higher ground at the back – you can’t see it clearly from this far – is Beacon Hill, where once were lit the warning lights for the city if it was going to be attacked.’ She gabbled on, childlike, dispensing all she knew to them. ‘And there’s a place up there called Louisburgh Square – like Louisburgh back home – where we found –’ She stopped, looking at the silent girl in front of her. ‘Louisburgh – that’s it! That’s it!’ She laughed excitedly. ‘We’ll call her after the place where she was found, and the place she is coming to! Louisburgh – we’ll call her “Louisa”.’

Ellen looked from one to the other of them. Mary smiled, nodding her head up and down. Patrick signalled neither assent nor dissent. ‘“Louisa” – it’s a good name, a grand name,’ Ellen went on. How easy it had been in the end – naming the girl. ‘It’ll suit her well! Oh, everything is working out fine! I knew it would once we came to America!’

The silent girl, who had drifted a few paces off from them, sensing the commotion turned from looking at her new home, the place she was now being named for.

‘Louisa!’ Ellen took the girl by the arms, dancing them up and down with delight – like a girl herself. ‘Louisa – welcome to America!’

The girl just looked at her, before turning her attention back to the sight of her adopted home, indifferent in the extreme to her new appellation.

‘It’s not even an Irish name,’ Patrick mumbled, more to himself than anybody.

Ellen, nevertheless, heard him. ‘You’re right, Patrick … it’s not,’ she said sharply, fed up with his surliness.

‘It’s American!’

7

Lavelle was waiting on the Long Wharf for them. As they disembarked he waved, a big smile creasing his weathered face. It was easy to pick him out on the thronged jetty, his well-built frame setting him apart as much as the casual colours he favoured – a russet-coloured jacket; a wheaten homespun shirt – colours of the season. But he wouldn’t have thought of that, she knew, watching the bob of his head – like summer corn in the autumn sun. He never looked Irish, the way Michael did – ‘Black Irish’ with the Spanish blood. Lavelle always looked Australian, reminding her of the bushland, the baked earth, the wide-open spaces. She was pleased to see him, but nervous, none the less, about how the children might regard him. Of her own reaction to him she was clear. He was her business partner, her good companion. She would reinstate that particular relationship from today and that relationship only.

He was restrained when he moved to greet them through the milling crowds, but shook her hand warmly.

‘Ellen, it’s good to see you again! You’re welcome back! And who are these fine young ladies and gentleman?’ he went on, unsure of how to deal with her return.

She saw him stop for a moment as he took in Mary, looked for the missing Katie, then at Louisa, it not making sense to him.

‘This is Patrick,’ she intervened. ‘Patrick, this is Mr Lavelle of whom I spoke … and this is Mary,’ Ellen introduced the nine-year-old image of herself. ‘And this is …’ she paused as Lavelle’s gaze transferred to the silent girl, ‘… this is Louisa, who has come with us to Boston.’ She saw the question still remain in his eyes. ‘We had to leave Katie behind … with Michael.’

He caught her arm, understanding at once. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Ellen. So sorry – you’ve had so much of trouble … after everything else to …’ he faltered, unable to find the words.

‘Well, we’re here,’ she said simply. ‘At last, we’re here.’

‘And how is it in Ireland?’ Lavelle moved on the conversation.

They would talk later of Katie and this girl Louisa who, when he made to greet her, seemed not to notice. him. She was deficient of hearing, or speech, or both, he thought.

‘Ireland is poorly,’ Ellen answered him, ‘Ireland is lost entirely.’

‘And what of the Insurrection – the Young Irelanders – we read something of it in the Pilot?’ he said, referring to the Archdiocese of Boston’s weekly newspaper.

‘The Insurrection failed – I brought you some newspapers, The Nation,’ she answered. ‘There was much talk of it in Ireland and aboard ship. I have little interest in it. Now we are here and Ireland is …’ she turned her head seawards, ‘… there.’

He heard the weariness in her voice. God only knows what she had gone through to redeem her two remaining children.

‘Mr Peabody enquires after you frequently,’ he said, in an effort to brighten her up, knowing how much she enjoyed her dealings with the Jewish merchant.

‘Oh! And is he well himself, and the business – how is it?’ she asked.

‘Both Mr Peabody and the business continue to thrive,’ he told her with a certain amount of satisfaction, she noticed. Things must have gone better between him and Peabody, in her absence, than she had hoped for.

The children were agog at Boston’s Long Wharf, stretching, as Mary put it, ‘from the middle of the sea, to the middle of the town’.

‘City,’ corrected Patrick, showing he was a man of the world, not like his sister who knew nothing. ‘It’s a city!’

If Westport Quay swirled with all the varied elements of quayside life, then here, in Boston, it was as if the mixed ingredients of the whole world had collided together. Tea-ships, ice-ships, spice-ships. Syphilitic sailors, back from the South Seas, poxed and partially blind, bringing home with them ‘the ladies’ fever’ and the stale stench of flensed whales. In their midst stood sinless and sober-suited Bostonians cut from the finest old Puritan stock; anxious for merchandise, disgusted by this new influx of paupers and the sanitary evils accompanying them.

The hiring agents of the mill bosses sized up this fresh supply of factory fodder. ‘Labour!’ they hollered, to the sea of ‘green hands’. ‘Labour!’ they called, winking and smiling at the wide-eyed Irish girls. Seeking to seduce with smiles, as much as with dollars, those they considered ‘sober of habit, sound of limb and with good strong backs’ – as they had been instructed. One man’s ‘sanitary evil’, it seemed in America, was another’s ‘strong back’.

The children’s heads turned at every step, gawking at this and that, each new sight and sound of Boston a greater wonder to them than the one before. Like the gaudily bedecked sailors of various hue, reeking of spices and perfumes from the far reaches of the Orient, chattering in unintelligible tongues. Or a few freed slaves from the South silently bullocking the heavy cargo. She had to prevent them from staring.

‘But that man … he’s all black, what happened to him?’ Mary couldn’t contain herself.

‘He’s a Negro – from Africa,’ Ellen hushed her.

‘But will it rub off?’ Mary persisted.

‘Only if you shake hands with him, Mary,’ Lavelle cut in solemnly.

Mary’s eyes opened even wider, craning her neck to see this man who would change colour at a touch.

‘Mr Lavelle should have more sense, Mary, ignore him!’ Ellen rejoined. ‘Some people have a different skin to ours, that’s all – and it doesn’t rub off!’ she stated emphatically, more to Lavelle than to Mary. Nothing she had told them about America had ever prepared them for this, for Boston’s Long Wharf.

And the Irish. Everywhere the Irish; shouting, laughing, crying, mobbed by relatives who had crossed the Atlantic before them. Others, solitary young girls clinging to their carpetbags – no one to meet them in this throbbing kaleidoscope, this frightening place. Like motherless calf-whales they were, these daughters of Erin floundering unprotected in the great ocean of America. Easy prey to the welcoming smile, the outstretched hand, the familiar lilt; to their own, the Irish crimpers and ‘harpies’, who would flense them of everything.

‘I can see that Boston is as busy and bustling as ever,’ she said to Lavelle, full of being back in the place.

‘And bursting at the seams – thousands have arrived these past months – mostly Irish,’ he replied. ‘The bosses are happy; “green hands” from Ireland mean cheap labour,’ he continued, ‘but the City Fathers are not, thinking pauperism and Popery both will sink Boston!’

She didn’t care much about either bosses or Brahmins. Boston, bursting or not, was such a far cry from what she had left; the tumbled villages, a famished land; silence – no hope. Here there was hope. To her, the city with its crowded chaos, its cacophonous quay-life, rang out with the very music of hope.

‘Stop, Lavelle! Stop here!’ she called out of a sudden, almost forgetting. ‘I want them to see it!’

Lavelle ‘whoaupped’ the big bay mare he had hired for the day and had scarcely pulled them to a halt, when gathering up her skirts she leapt from the trap-cart.

‘Come on, come on!’ she beckoned to the children, shepherding them across the mouth of the busy wharf.

Lavelle stayed where he was. She was as impetuous as ever, he thought, watching the long straight back of her weave through the crowds. He smiled to himself – the factory bosses would be glad of a back like that! Three months since she had left and he had thought about her every day, wondering what awaited her in Ireland. Wondering when, if ever, she would return. Then, these past few weeks, scouring the pages of the Pilot for shipping intelligence and hoping for a fair wind to bring her back.

She looked a bit racked, he thought. Her face, the way she didn’t smile as big as he remembered. The furrow above her lips – the one he could never help watching, fascinated at how its fine fold rose and fell with the cadence of her speech. It didn’t fall and rise so much now, as if she was holding it back, keeping it in check. Still, it was a wonder at all that she looked as well as she did. She must have been too late to save them both, whatever had happened. That must have near killed her, would eat away at her for ever, he knew. This one, Mary, with the dos of wild red hair on her – how like Ellen she looked. Going to be tall like her too. He could see it now, as together they rounded the corner of the building away from him. The girl was quieter, less impetuous, more of a thinker. But maybe that was down to the foreignness of the place and him being present. And all that had happened.

The boy had made strange with him. With his unruly black head and sallow skin, he looked more like he’d come off a ship from the Spanish Americas, than Ireland. He was unlike her in every feature. Lavelle wondered about the boy’s father, her husband. It was her strong attachment to his memory that was holding back her affections. He had been hoping that when she stepped down from the ship, she would be wearing the scarf he had given her. But she wasn’t. He wondered what she had told the children. Or, if she’d thought much on him at all these past three months?

And the girl – the one who said nothing, only taking you in with those big brown eyes. Where had she appeared from? Maybe she was a neighbour’s child, orphaned by famine. Nearly more orphanages than groggeries in Boston too, so fast were they springing up. She’d probably put the girl into one of those – run by the Sisters. He ‘gee’d’ the horse, threading it gingerly after them, glad that he’d painted the sign. It would be a surprise for her. She was standing in front of it, her finger outstretched, reading aloud the strange-sounding words to the children. She turned, hearing the clip-clop of the horse.

‘Mr Lavelle’s been busy painting, I can see,’ she said to them. But it was meant for him, he knew. ‘“The New England Wine Company”,’ she read out the larger letters again, then the smaller ones underneath, ‘“Importers of fine wines, ports and liqueurs”. That’s us!’ she said to them with a little laugh. Even Patrick seemed impressed, looking at her, then at the sign over the warehouse, then back at Lavelle, trying to piece it all together.

‘You’re a merchant, Mother!’ Mary said, flushed with pride in her, yet seeming not in the least bit surprised.

‘I … I suppose I am,’ Ellen replied, never having thought of herself in that way.

They went inside, Louisa remaining close by her, Mary and Patrick going from rack to rack examining the cradled bottles and the labels with the unusual writing wrapped round them.

‘Fron-teen-nyac, pair ay fees’ – Frontignac, Père et Fils – she tried to explain, ‘the people we get the wine from in Canada. Frontignac, Father and Son,’ she went on, watching them watch her as if she was some stranger. And in truth she was. Their memories of her were as far removed from the woman now before them, explaining French wines, as Massachusetts was from the Maamtrasna valley. An ocean in the heart’s geography. It would take time.

‘Bore-dough,’ she pointed to a ruby rich red, ‘the place the wine comes from in France.’

It was a strange thing, Patrick thought, for her to know about, her and the ‘fancy man’ that kept watching him and kept smiling at his mother.

Ellen was well pleased at what she saw. Lavelle had kept the warehouse solidly stocked against the coming season and the winter closing of the St Lawrence river. Furthermore, he had secured her new accommodation.

‘In Washington Street between Milk and Water Streets, near the Old Corner Bookstore,’ he told her. ‘I know you like to be at the centre of things, and it’s bigger, more suitable now with the children.’ She had surrendered her old lodgings, not knowing how long she would be away. Her belongings Lavelle had stored in the warehouse, and more recently moved to the new address, paying the rent to secure it against her return. He himself continued to live where he previously had, in the North End, though it was ‘now being over-run with the poorest of our own’.

The Long Wharf led them into State Street, New England’s financial heart, its temples of commerce close to the city’s importing and exporting lifeline – the wharves. Lavelle took them left at the Old State House, down along Washington Street, its patchwork of buildings, filled with apothecaries, engravers, instrument-makers and ‘Newspaper Row’. Signs and hoardings jutted everywhere, higgledy-piggledy, while canvas awnings over the footwalks provided shelter from the rain, shade from the sun, for those with dollars to spend.

Four flights of stairs they climbed of the high-shouldered building, which itself stretched upwards above the world of commerce below. The effort was repaid in full when arriving in their rooms she saw, across from them on the corner of Milk Street, the nestled campaniles of the Old South Meeting House; how they ascended like a pinnacled prayer to the steepled sky.

She knew she would love it here ‘on top of the world’, as she said to Lavelle. They had three rooms. One large, with two windows, for living in, and above that, two smaller rooms, each lighted by dormers, for sleeping. The larger one for herself and the girls, the smaller for Patrick. She had considered giving the three children the larger one, her taking the lesser room. But Patrick was of an age now.

It was close to everywhere. The Wharf and their warehouse, the Common, shops, churches, schools. The Old Corner Bookstore – which she had commenced frequenting before she left – now only a hen’s footstep away. Beneath their roost, on the next floor down, were commercial offices. Below that again, suppliers of mathematical instruments, while a sewing shop for ladies’ garments and a dye house occupied the street level of the premises.

She was grateful to Lavelle. He had gone to some trouble to find this place, knowing how much she preferred the rattle and hum of city life above the quiet of some numbing suburb. The frantic commercial life of ‘Hub City’, as Bostonians liked to call it, was rapidly devouring all available space here at its centre. She wondered how long it would be before trade and commerce would drive further out the dwindling number of inhabitants, like themselves. Where they now stood would soon enough fall into use as an instrument-maker’s den, or a sewing sweatshop. But while ever they could remain here, she knew she would be happy.

When she had thanked him again, Lavelle left and she began to settle them into their new home, high above the world of clarion calls and the street noise of Boston, far from the hushed valleys they had known.

8

Jacob Peabody made an exaggerated fuss of her when, the following week, she came to visit him at his premises on South Market Street across from Faneuil Hall. On top of the Hall’s domed cupola, its weathervane – a copper grasshopper – spun from side to side, busily welcoming her back.

Now Peabody, white-domed and wrinkle-faced, grass-hopped from behind his counter to welcome her, rubbing his hands on the white apron he kept on a peg, but which she had never seen him wear. ‘Ellen! Ellen Rua!’ he exclaimed, both arms outstretched, a bleak shaft of October sun diagonally lighting one eye and a flop of his white hair, vesting him with a kind of manic enthusiasm. He clasped her to him. He not being quite the match of her in height, her head ended up over the shoulder of his well-seasoned cardigan. In its wool the smell of salted hams, spices from the East, tobacco from the Deep South, all indiscriminately buried there.

‘Jacob, I’m going to reek of pork and spices just like you,’ she laughed. ‘Let go of me! Anyway, I thought it forbidden by your beliefs to sell certain things,’ she added, unable to resist poking fun at him. He laughed with her, held her back from him, the snow-white eyebrows arched, the canny eyes taking her in.

‘Ah, Ellen, you are as beautiful as ever. Weary from your travels, I can tell …?’ He paused. ‘And beyond that a certain sorrow …’ He had never changed, could tell everything and then never hesitated in its saying. ‘But underneath,’ he went on, ‘your spirit has not changed. Look at you, the first minute you are here flinging the beliefs of an old man in his face. It’s good to have you back – back home in Boston,’ he beamed. And he clasped her to him again in his pork and spice way.

It felt good to her to be back. And Boston was home. The sounds, the smells, the bustle of Quincy Market, the air spiced with possibility instead of the pall of oppression which hung over Ireland. And good old reliable but mischievous Jacob. He had been a tower of strength before she had left on her journey to Ireland.

He made her tea, Indian, from the Assam Valley, closed his door against the world and bade her sit. ‘I want to hear every word, Ellen,’ he emphasized. ‘I’ve missed the music of your voice – the Boston drawl has little music to it – as flat and as cold as the Quincy marble that built the place!’

Whatever about missing her, Jacob still didn’t miss any chance to snipe at his adopted city. Some day she’d ask him about that and Papa Peabody, as he called his father, and the change of name from something Jewish to Peabody. Whatever his origins, Jacob had built up a commodious store on South Market Street. It was frequented alike by well-heeled clientele from Beacon Hill, the literati of Louisburgh Square and Boston’s rising middle class. Always well stocked with the exotic and the oriental and anything in between, pickled gherkins to spiced Virginia hams, ‘Peabody’s’ did a thriving business.

When she and Lavelle had first arrived in Boston, they had decided that rather than she go to the factory gates and Lavelle to ‘build railroads to build America’, they would invest in some business. The wine had been her idea, after Australia – being all that she knew apart from potato picking in Ireland. She had written to Father McGauran, the chaplain she had befriended in Grosse Ile, with the idea that she could import French wine from French Canada. Through the old Seigneurie connections of the Catholic Church in Québec’s province, Father McGauran had found them Frontignac, Père et Fils, Wine Merchants, importers of vin supérieur de France.

Soon the deliveries came. Crates of full-bodied reds and clean-on-the-palate whites, from the châteaux of Bordeaux and Burgundy. Sparkling mousselet from the chilly hills and chalk caverns of Champagne. Darker – liqueured aromas too, matured in oaken barriques; coveted by angels in the deep cellars of Cognac. All signed with the flourished quill of Jean Baptiste Frontignac, their quality guaranteed with the red waxen seal of the French cockerel. At first, she had approached the Old English-style merchants of Boston – the Pendletons and Endecotts. Politely but firmly they had turned her away, astounded at her nerve, she only ‘jumped-up Irish and selling French wines!’

Finally, she had happened upon Peabody’s place. Although at the time uncertain of his motives – the way he had taken her hand, lingered over it – Jacob had taken a chance on her, when no one else would.

She too had taken a chance on Peabody, devising an ‘at cost’ agreement with the merchant. The terms by which it operated guaranteed that she and Lavelle would deliver him the finest of wines and brandies, at cost, taking no profit. Peabody, when he had sold their wines, would then split the profits with them. Further, she had convinced Peabody to give their wines a separate display from the rest, near the entrance, on shelves specially constructed by Lavelle. It had been a risk but it had worked and Jacob had opened a second such store.

As the story of her journey to Ireland unfolded, Jacob Peabody again held on to her hands, rubbing them underneath in the fleshy part, but not in the suggestive, wicked way that was normally his wont, but of which she took little notice. Now, he comforted her, his sharp eyes on her face watching, understanding.

It surprised her how much she opened herself up to Jacob. Not nearly so much had she to Lavelle. To this Jewman, who had changed his name to survive in Nativist Boston – a city as zealous in attitude to Jews as it was towards ‘papist Celts’ – but had closed his shop to listen to her story. When she had finished, it was as though a great weight had lifted from her.

Peabody waited before speaking. She had suffered much, more than most who had found their way here to the Bay Colony. But she had an indomitable spirit. Time and America would heal her loss, if she let them. She was angry now at the ‘Old Country’ and all it had inflicted on her. But that would pass. He hoped that, on its passing, it would not be replaced by the misbegotten love for their native land, so often the fruitful cause of insanity among the Irish here.

At last he spoke. ‘Ireland is behind you now, Ellen,’ he said tenderly, still stroking her hand, like a father. ‘A new life in the New World beckons. Try, not to forget, but to remember less. It works, Ellen, believe me, it works.’

‘Thank you, Jacob … for listening … for everything.’ She leaned over and kissed his cheek. How wise he was. What he had told her was like something her father – the Máistir – would have said. ‘Try, not to forget, but to remember less.’ It was good advice.

She could never forget; that would be a betrayal. But she could remember less, without letting Ireland and its Famine gnaw at her insides, eat up her capacity for life.

They sat for a while, exiles both. Trade had been good for Jacob and things had gone well between him and Lavelle – ‘her young helper’, as Peabody insisted on calling him. She didn’t correct him this time, just thanked him again, with the promise she would be back within the week to talk about ‘clarets for Christmas and champagnes for the New Year’.

As she walked back from Peabody’s, Boston, with its busy streets, its banks and fine tall buildings, seemed indeed to be the hub of the universe. The buildings that, when first she came there with Lavelle, crowded in on top of her, taking patches out of the sky, now signified something else – progress, getting ahead. Looking upwards instead of downwards.

She wanted to be part of all that now, instead of on her hands and knees clawing at lazy beds for the odd lumper missed by the harvesters, up to her eyes in muck. What good were grand mountains and sparkling lakes, when you had to crawl, belly to the ground, in order to fill it? An empty craw sees no beauty.

Faneuil Hall, the spiralling Old South Meeting House, the Grecian pilasters of the State Street buildings, Beacon Hill – these would be her new mountains. The harbour with its wharves and docks, its busy commerce – her new lakes. It was all here. Everything Ireland wasn’t, this place was.

‘Try, not to forget, but to remember less,’ she repeated to herself.

9

In her efforts to ‘remember less’, Ellen in the following weeks threw herself with abandon into her new life in Boston. Lavelle had indeed done well while she was away. He had kept Jacob’s two stores fully stocked and the merchant reasonably happy, despite Peabody’s frequent mutterings about it not being the same ‘since Mrs O’Malley deserted me and sailed for Ireland’.

Lavelle had also secured a new outlet for the New England Wine Company, in the developing suburb of West Roxbury, far enough away not to damage Peabody’s business.

‘What he doesn’t know won’t bother him!’ was Lavelle’s dictum. Ellen wasn’t so sure.

‘It’s a bit underhand – Jacob’s been a good friend to us and our business,’ she said to Lavelle, resolving to tell Peabody herself at the right moment.

The children seemed to take up so much of her time, but she was happy ‘doing for them’, busying herself more with domestic matters than business. In this she was forced to rely, to a greater degree than she thought fair, on Lavelle. If during the daylight hours she did not manage to get to the warehouse, then at evening Lavelle would call on her to discuss matters of business, bringing various documentation of invoices and receipts. Because of the nature of their arrangement with Peabody, resources had to be prudently managed – something to which she had always applied herself vigorously. She looked forward to these evening visits, finding some time for titivating herself in advance of them – between household chores and the children. This total reliance on Lavelle would, she knew, be but a temporary measure, until she had settled them into suitable schools.

Situated in the ‘Little Britain of Boston’ – the non-Irish end, of the North End – the Eliot School was one of Boston’s better public schools for boys. Nominally non-denominational, pupils nevertheless sang from the same hymn sheet – the Protestant one. Too, the official school bible was the King James version. However, Eliot School had the best spoken English in Boston, fashioned no doubt from that bible of the city’s non-chattering classes, Peter Piper’s Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation.

Ellen wasn’t unduly worried about the Protestant ethos prevalent in Boston’s public schools – the ‘little red school houses’ as the Boston Irish called them. Patrick would receive a more liberal education at Eliot than in the narrow Catholic schools, the ‘little green school houses’. She, herself, would see to his spiritual needs outside of school. At first Patrick resisted her choice of schooling for him, but finding Eliot School populated with a good sprinkling of other Irish Catholic boys, his resistance diminished.

Mary’s future, Ellen decided, would be best served by placing her with the nuns. She saw no contradiction in this, relative to her plans for Patrick. Boston, in terms of schooling for girls, particularly young Irish and Catholic girls, far surpassed that available to its young men, mainly due to the influence of the ‘Sisters of Service’. Mostly Irish or the American-born daughters of the Irish, the nuns were a group of free-spirited and independent-minded young women who had eschewed marriage in favour of the economic, social and intellectual independence the Sisterhood offered. What Ellen liked about them was that having liberated themselves, they had a more liberal view of other women’s roles in society. Orders like the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, where she would send Mary, sought not to prepare young immigrant women solely for marriage, but to lead lives of independence and dignity. This would provide the pathway to spirituality, rather than that followed by most young Irish women – the bridal path.

The nuns would be good for Mary.

With regard to Louisa, Ellen had much with which to occupy her mind. She had grown a great fondness for the girl but still wondered about her – where had she come from? Her family, if any?

The Pilot ran regular columns of the ‘lost’ and ‘missing’ Irish – those who had become separated en route to the New World, or who had moved deeper into the American heartland before family had arrived from Ireland to join them.

Each week Ellen read the ‘lost’ notices, relaxing only when nowhere among them could she find a description to match that of Louisa. She agonized for weeks as to whether she herself should put in a notice, seeking any family of the girl who might be in America. Reluctantly, she came to the conclusion that it was ‘the right and proper thing to do’, as she explained to Patrick and Mary, ‘and pray that we don’t find anybody!’ she added.

For a month she had inserted the notice, hoping it would go unanswered.

Female child – of about twelve or thirteen years, unspoken. Tall, with dark brown hair and hazelwood eyes – found among the famished near Louisburgh Co. Mayo 20th day of August 1848. Now living in Boston. Seeking to be reunited with any members of family who may have escaped the Calamity to the United States.

To her despair, she had been flooded with respondents. With each one her heart sank lower, fearing that this would be the one to claim Louisa, lifting again with relief when it was not. In turn, she was filled with guilt at her own selfishness, then sorrow at the disappointment carved out on the faces of those who came with so much hope but left again, empty-handed. Faint-heartedly they would apologize with a ‘Sorry for troubling you, ma’am!’ or ‘I was hoping ’twould be her,’ some would say, awkward for having come in the wrong.

One young woman from near Louisburgh arrived brimful of hope. She had, she said, been told that her young sister ‘had been taken pity on by a red-haired woman, rescued from the famished and brought over to Amerikay’. She had searched high and low, doggedly traipsing each mill town. At nights waiting outside until, disgorged in their thousands, the mill girls poured out into the streets. Ever afraid her sister had been among them and that she had missed her in the crowds.

‘Was it to Boston she came?’ Ellen enquired, wondering if the young woman’s task was fruitless from the start.

‘To Amerikay, anyway!’ she replied, as if ‘Amerikay’ were no vaster than the townland of her home village. ‘She has to be here somewhere, if it’s true what they say!’ she added, defiant with faith. The girl had no idea where her sister was, would spend a lifetime looking for her in ‘Amerikay’. Probably never to find her – in this life at least, Ellen knew.

‘You have to keep looking,’ was all she could limply offer the girl.

‘I do – them that’s still alive back home are always asking for news of her – she was the youngest … but I’ll find her yet, I will!’

Ellen’s heart had gone out to the young woman, her hopes dashed once again, yet still full of faith, still resolved to finding her sister.

‘Thanks, ma’am – this one is very like her,’ she said of Louisa, ‘but it’s not her. She’s a fine child, God bless her, I hope you find her people.’

She spoke to Lavelle about it. ‘There are thousands upon thousands of them still searching for their lost ones, still hoping to find some trace. It’s heartbreaking.’

‘They’ve done a right good job, the Westminster government,’ he replied, scathingly, ‘scattering the Celts to the four corners of the globe. Keeping us on the move, wandering, like a divided army trying to find itself. One day that army will regroup –’

‘Oh, Lavelle!’ she had chided him. ‘I’m not talking about armies or the British Empire. You should’ve seen the look on that poor girl’s face – she will search all of America, search till the day she dies. Louisburgh, and all that’s in it, will have long since disappeared before she finds her sister.’

As the months passed the number of enquiries about Louisa, originally from Boston and the greater Massachusetts area, reduced. Then a trickle from the further-flung regions of New York, Montana, Wisconsin and even Louisiana, found their way to her door clutching old issues of the Pilot, clinging on to even older hopes. Eventually the stream of people calling dried up completely. Only then did Ellen allow herself to be fully at ease, previously having measured out to herself only small, fragile rations of relief as each month had slipped by.

Louisa herself bore all of this with apparent equanimity, Ellen having assured her in advance that this course of action was not an attempt to get rid of her. Again reassuring her, each time someone called, of how much both she and the others loved her. Some callers took just one look at her, knowing immediately she wasn’t the girl they sought. Others inspected her more intently, peering into her face, asking questions: ‘Does she ever utter a sound at all?’ or ‘What name has she?’

Always, Ellen had the feeling that Louisa understood. Once or twice she had faced her, asking, ‘Louisa, can you hear me – tell me if you can hear me?’

The girl had just looked at her lips as she spoke, so that Ellen didn’t know whether she was avoiding looking directly at her, or merely trying to understand in that manner. Either way she got no response, only the killing smile.

Although Louisa did not converse with anybody she was yet such a part of their lives; always there, soaking up everything. If not, indeed, through her ears, then through her eyes, and, in some strange way Ellen couldn’t define, just through her presence. She resolved to take Louisa to a doctor.

‘I can find no physical defect in the child, Mrs O’Malley,’ Doctor Hazlett confided in her after examining Louisa. ‘It may be that the abject circumstances in which you found her have locked a portion of her mind, a portion in which she still remains,’ he offered, referring to their pre-examination discussion.

‘What am I to do, Doctor?’ she asked.

‘The answer lies not with me,’ he replied, ‘but the answer, if anywhere to be found, will be found in Boston – the cradle of the sciences. I propose sending you to Professor Hitchborn for further consultation.’

‘What kind of professor?’ Ellen worried.

‘Professor Hitchborn is a doctor of medicine – a graduate of the Harvard School, but shall we say he deals more with what the eye cannot see and the ear cannot hear, rather than with what they can.’ With this conundrum still ringing in her ears, he bade her ‘Good-day!’

Professor Hitchborn failed to elicit any utterance from Louisa after four visits. Ellen hated going back to ‘the old stiff-neck’, as she called him, but continued to do so for Louisa’s sake. Always, Ellen seemed to leave these visits with the feeling that she herself was somehow to blame. That her own motives in first saving, then adopting Louisa, were not morally pure, thus causing Louisa’s condition. It troubled her. If Louisa felt that she was a burden on them, they had only held on to her out of guilt and a sense of duty and not out of love, then maybe Louisa’s silence was fear. Fear that if she was found to be able to hear and speak, to be not so dependent on them, she would be packed off again, to an orphanage, or worse, to the streets.

Finally, it was Mary who decided for Ellen what to do regarding Louisa. ‘Send Louisa to school with me, I’ll look after her!’ she appealed to her mother. Ellen had at first been doubtful of this solution and considered keeping Louisa at home, giving of her own time to the girl’s education. It would be difficult, but somehow she would manage. Mary’s entreaties of ‘Please let her come – I can help her!’ won the day. After consultation with the Mother Superior, it was agreed the two would be put side by side in the classroom at the Notre Dame de Namur School for Girls.

Ellen delivered them on Louisa’s first day, both girls bursting with a mixture of excitement and nervousness. Ellen herself was every bit on edge as they were, the day being for her not without its tinge of sadness, too.

‘The last leaving the nest,’ she said to Lavelle when he called to see her that evening.

He perked her up, telling of his escapades as a young scholar, and asking about her own schooldays.

‘They were spent in timeless wonder with my teacher – my father,’ she told him, falling into ‘remembering’ for once.

Mostly though, she was ‘forgetting’. She read with an appetite Lavelle found hard to understand. Newspapers, periodicals, handbills, anything from which she could glean more information for herself and her children about Boston and ‘America-life’.

Though he could still raise a smile, even a laugh from her, Lavelle thought she had gone into herself a bit since returning to Boston. It was to be expected, he supposed, added to by the preoccupation with getting the children settled into their new environs.

At times, she teased him about Boston’s belles, and while there were many among them who Hashed their eyes at the handsome Mr Lavelle, none caught his in return, as he expected she knew.

Lavelle, since she had left, had been busy in more ways than one. His geniality and easy manner had led him to form acquaintances with some of Boston’s more go-ahead Irish community. He prevailed upon her to visit the gathering places with him, thinking she had ‘rarefied herself from all things Irish’. This she had agreed to on occasion but only for his company. She couldn’t say she enjoyed hearing the endless stories of ‘Old Ireland’ – and in the old language. Steadfastly she refused to sing the times when song and dancing broke out, even when Lavelle himself, armed with his fiddle, hurtled the bow across its strings. At the first of such gatherings, he had introduced her as ‘Ellen Rua’. Afterwards, she had corrected him.

‘It’s just “Ellen”, Lavelle, plain “Ellen”!’

‘Why?’ he challenged.

‘It just is. “Ellen Rua” is in the past,’ she answered.

‘I understand your wish to forget the past,’ he said, ‘but this is something more than that.’

‘What is it then, Lavelle?’

‘It’s a denial of who you are,’ he stated matter-of-factly. ‘You’ve been known since a child as “Ellen Rua”, your parents … Michael … your neighbours …’

‘Well, they are all of them gone now and so is “Ellen Rua”,’ she insisted. But he would not be put off.

‘You’re also denying your Irishness, the language, everything … Since the moment you set foot back here, you don’t want any part of it.’ he accused.

‘Would you blame me?’ she retorted. ‘And you, Lavelle, what do you want?’ she challenged in return. ‘Only your notion of a red-haired Irish colleen – a Kathleen Ní Houlihan – who you can hold on to as your dream of Ireland?’

‘An Ireland that’s dead and gone …’ she continued, the blue-green eyes firing up. He watched, saw the furrow between her lips and nostrils rise and fall like he remembered. Deepening its well, swelling its narrow ridges. ‘… and in the Famine grave. An Ireland that all of you are trying to hang on to, filled with mist and grog and dewy-eyed comeallyes. Living for the day when you’ll all rise up and send an army home to rout “the auld enemy”!’

‘And why shouldn’t we?’ he answered calmly, taking no small delight at seeing her in such an impassioned state. ‘Isn’t it the English that have us the way we are?’ he added, giving as good as he got.

10

With the children now settled in their respective schools, she had, as she had hoped for, more time to devote to the business of the New England Wine Company, so taking some of the load from Lavelle’s shoulders.

Coming up to Christmas was their busiest time; Peabody was demanding and irritable, wanting stocks early, pressing for replacement stock immediately, arguing that with the large volumes he was now taking for two stores, rather than one, she should be ‘beating down the French with their high prices’. Lavelle made extra shelving to try and appease him. He looked after all activities related to shipping, warehousing and deliveries. She saw to the ordering, the banking and the documentation, being, as Lavelle put it, ‘better able to hurl the pen’ than he was.

Twice weekly she called on Peabody at Quincy Market, soothing his irascibility, he wanting to hold her hand at every turn, still referring to Lavelle as ‘that young helper of yours, not much between the ears’. Mockingly he asked her to ‘make an old man happy this Christmas and marry me, Ellen!’

She, in turn, telling him, ‘Don’t be exciting yourself, Jacob, with all that talk or you’ll get a heart attack and never see the Christmas. I’ll be neither an old man’s sweetheart, nor a young man’s slave.’

Jacob feigned hurt, ‘rejected again’… then laughter … ‘Ah Ellen, what would I do without you to brighten the day?’

What was it about men, she wondered, that they were distracted so easily? If they had a few children to bear and rear, it would soon soften their coughs. Always thinking about their ‘scythe-stones’! She’d heard the valley women, when they huddled to talk, often laugh that – ‘It’s the last thing to die in a man – the scythe-stone – if it was ever any good for anything but sharpening a blade in the first place!’

She loved the way that in the Gaelic you could talk ‘round’ a thing, with everybody still knowing what you meant. Say it without saying it. The Americans never talked in the ‘roundabout talk’ – she missed that, much and all as she tried to distance herself from her previous life.

Despite everything, getting the children settled, easing once again into the business, she hadn’t really fitted back into Boston life as she would have hoped. She didn’t know what it was. She still grieved for Katie, guilt always suffusing the grief. Once started her thoughts would then run to Annie and Michael, until she would have to go and hide in the dark of Holy Cross Cathedral, or slip away to sit in the cold of the Common under the Great Elm. No matter how busy she was, how she was furthering their lives, there was always the void, the big aching void, always waiting to claim her.

Lavelle had been her one constant, steadfast in everything. He laughed and poked fun at how she worried over things, her single-mindedness. Kept at her, forcing her not to take herself too seriously. At first this irritated her, but he didn’t stand for that either, and she found it hard to sustain any measure of annoyance with him, such was his enthusiasm for ‘life to be lived’. And the children liked him. Even Patrick, though he’d never say it, had softened towards Lavelle.

They had all gone on 5 November – ‘Pope’s Night’ – to see the Orange Parades, with their Kick-the-Pope bands. Patrick was agog at the display of anti-Catholic paraphernalia and the aggressive clatter-thump of the lambeg drums, the manic drummers facing each other ‘hoop to hoop’, malacca canes banging out deafening military tattoos.

‘But … they’re Irish too!’ Patrick protested, as Lavelle tried to explain the sashes, hard hats and anti-Irish slogans.

‘They are and they aren’t, Patrick!’ Lavelle responded. ‘Their feet are on the same island as us at home,’ and he laughed, ‘they’ve even stolen some of our jigs and reels and fifed them into marches, though they’ll never admit to that. But their hearts are for ever in England.’

That was the moment, Ellen knew, when Patrick had begun to change towards her ‘fancy man’, as he once called Lavelle. The boy identified with Lavelle’s antipathy towards the Orangemen and their bitter, threatening music. To his credit, Lavelle did not encourage Patrick, make a thing of it, as he could have done. And she noticed it had gone on like that, in little fits and starts that bonded them, without any great scheme being behind it.

Without any great scheme, either – certainly on her part – things had settled into a comfortable pattern between herself and Lavelle. He was as much a part of the neighbourhood of her new life as the Old South Meeting House, spiking the sky across from where she lived, or the Long Wharf, spiking the sea. Like these boundaries of heaven and ocean, always there, securing this exciting New World of hers, so too was Lavelle. Not that she was unaware of his physical attractiveness, the way he sometimes collided with her, would catch her arm, steady her up, and give that grin of his, causing her a momentary embarrassment. Once or twice he held her longer than necessary, startled her by his nearness, said something like ‘Boston life hasn’t softened you yet, you’re still a fine woman,’ then laughed and let go of her just as suddenly again.

At Christmas, after he had dined with them, tramped in the snow, laden with presents for the children and her, she wasn’t totally unprepared when he asked her.

She had gone down the flights of stairs ahead of him, held the door, looking out into the abandoned stillness of Washington Street. No hawkers’ cries, no noise of commerce, the Old South Meeting House cribbed in white. No sound at the Hub of the Universe, only his voice, clear and as impudent as you please, passing her, going out into the dampening snows.

‘You know, Ellen, we should get married after Lent!’

She never answered him at first. Giddy in the moment, she drew back, waited until he was outside, half-turned for home.

‘You know, Lavelle,’ she said, mocking his impudence and laughing, ‘I had the same notion myself!’ And, despite all of her previous resolve, it was out before she knew it.

She watched after him, his boots crunching the snow, the flakes haloed on his head, whistling his way down Washington Street – some old jig-time tune she half-remembered.

In the New Year, little doubts had begun to raise themselves about whether or not she was doing the right thing. She hadn’t remained steadfast for long. Getting married again was against everything she once held; against ‘being true to the grave’. But that was just it – that was part of the old ways. Here in Boston, it was different. After a suitable period of mourning a man and, to a lesser degree, a woman might marry again. Still, it was only three years.

Not that she ever forgot Michael. Not for one single day, nor would she, ever. But she had great ease with Lavelle. He had no fixed notions like some of the other men about where women fitted – mostly in front of a baking oven. Maybe it was his time in Australia, where women tamed the harsh bush as much as the men did. Whatever, there was ease and comfort between them, and she liked his off-the-cuff manner. He granted her respect, but not too much. Even the way he had asked her – going out the door – as if not caring if she had said ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Herself and Lavelle would be a good match.

She had told the children on the following day, St Stephen’s, when she herself was more composed. Mary, she thought, took it well. Patrick less so, but without the level of opposition from him, which she had expected. The excitement somehow catching her, Louisa too joined in, running to kiss her as Mary had done.

By early Lent, she had cast her doubts aside. She had made her bed, now she must lie in it. At times, even, the thought of lying in Lavelle’s bed caused her a shiver of expectation.

Spring saw her preparing for the rites of marriage as precepted by the ever-expanding Archdiocese of Boston. Purity in thought and action,

The Inviolata to the Blessed Virgin …

Inviolata, integra et casta es, Maria … Stainless, inviolate, and chaste art thou, O Mary … Nostra ut pura pectora sint et corpora … That pure our minds and hearts may be …

Nobody ‘forbade the banns’ – read out on three consecutive Sundays at Holy Cross. Each week she sat through their reading, mortified lest somebody would shout out objecting to her intended marriage. Worse still that without her knowing it, some prudish biddy would slink around to the sacristy after Mass and coat the ear of the priest with poisoned whisperings about her. Then she would be quietly summoned, the reading of the banns suspended, she and her children shamed.

When the day finally came, the wedding was grander than anything she could have had back home. Much grander – and in a hotel too. While she was against wasting too much money on frippery, there was a sense of statement, as Lavelle had put it, ‘That we’re not paupers any more. That we’re no longer the Famine Irish!’

So she had relented, rigging the children in new outfits, had cut for herself a dress from a foulard of silk, thin and soft and cream in colour. Lavelle too, hatted, cravatted, looked every inch the fine Boston gentleman. The day itself was a great success and seemed to spin out for ever. As indeed it did – into the next morning. ‘It’s in danger of turning into a wake …’ she whispered to Lavelle, in a private moment, ‘… if it goes on any longer!’

And she had sung, especially for him, ‘Úna Bhán – ‘Fair-haired Úna’, one of the great love songs, not as she should have, she felt. She hadn’t spoken a syllable of Irish for eight months. Now the words felt clumsy in her mouth so she trimmed the song from its forty-odd verses down to a dozen or so.

Peabody, whom they’d invited but didn’t think would attend, to her delight, if not wholly to Lavelle’s, presented himself for the after-wedding festivities.

‘I might as well close up shop completely if I was observed entering a Roman church,’ he confided to her jokingly. ‘It reminds me, Ellen – it reminds me …’ He started to tell her something after she’d sung, then changed course. ‘That song – what does it say?’ he instead asked.

‘It’s a song from Connemara, two hundred years old,’ she explained, ‘composed for the woman Úna, whose father would not let her marry beneath herself. Being kept from her beloved, she died. He seeing her laid out, remembers her beauty – like the music of the harp always on the road before him. His love for her so great that it had come between him and God. There, that’s all forty verses of it in Irish, in one in English!’ she laughed.

Peabody, after he had thought for a moment, remarked, ‘Isn’t it a strange song to sing on your wedding-day, Ellen – a song about death?’

‘Oh no, Jacob! That’s the beauty of the song – it’s not of death, it’s of great love. He would lose God for her,’ she answered, impassioned.

Peabody looked away from her into the revelry beyond. ‘I suppose a life without great love is like that – a losing of God,’ he said. He was speaking of his own life; she waited, silent. ‘The tenacity of true passion is terrible; it will stand against the hosts of Heaven, rather than surrender its aim, and must be crushed, sent to the lowest pit, before it will ever succumb – something I heard once,’ he mumbled, by way of explanation.

‘Jacob – were you ever …?’ she started, wanting to ask him.

‘It’s something I have observed, Ellen,’ he interrupted, deflecting her, ‘about the Irish. How at once happiness and sadness can co-exist. Your wakes are laced with merriment, your weddings with lament. It is a peculiar twist of character. Little wonder the English find you a disconcerting race to govern.’ Peabody laughed a little.

‘We’re no different from any other peoples,’ she said gently, thinking of him, rather than the Irish or the English.

‘Oh, but you are, Ellen!’ he said, rising to the argument. ‘There’s a blackness within your race, a perversity. Nothing is allowed to be as it is. Love must be death. Death must be love. Everything turned on itself.’

‘Jacob, come along. This is most unlike you to be so dark, on such a day.’

He apologized, and she was drawn back into the merriment, sorry she had started it all by explaining the song to him.

She had some difficulty pulling the children away from all the excitement and settling them down across the hall from where she and Lavelle would spend their wedding-night. Later, as she undressed, thinking about the day, waiting for Lavelle, the song came back to her. ‘Úna, wasn’t it you that went between me and God?’ What a thing for a person to live with! It was unimaginable to her – throwing over God for love.

She hiked up her nightdress, knelt by the bedside. She’d shorten the prayers a bit tonight, didn’t want to be still out of bed when Lavelle came up.

Besides, Boston in springtime had yet quite a nip to it.

11

The very next day they moved into the new quarters Lavelle had found for them in Pleasant Street. They had decided they should rent, until they were better fitted to buy a place of their own. The fear always being with them both, that if overstretched with borrowings, things took a turn, the banks would then tumble them out of the house, evict them. She and the children already carried that scar. It was something she’d never put them through again. With the rent it was less of a risk. They’d still have a bit aside to tide them over, if a reversal of fortune came about.

She had hated leaving Washington Street, thinking how in the end it was marriage, not commerce snapping up every parcel of space which had forced them out.

The Pleasant Street house was in a neat terrace, with its own hall-door and a shiny letterbox low down – while Washington Street was never her own hall-door. A slab of granite stone stepped up to this one, which Mary thought ‘very grand’. Louisa meanwhile was fascinated by the brass lettering, running her finger around the welcoming curvature of the number that would be her new home, 29.

Inside there was a short hallway, a kitchen, a parlour and a ‘good room’, as Ellen regarded it. Upstairs three bedrooms, two commodious, one less so. ‘That one’s for you, Patrick,’ Mary couldn’t resist teasing. Out back was a small yard and a cabbage patch. It was all perfectly adequate. She could do a lot with it, and at least they wouldn’t be crowded in on top of each other.

They were hardly in the door, solid and black apart from the two light-giving panels of frosted glass, when it resounded to a vigorous knocking. On the step outside, Mrs Harriet Brophy fixed the tilt of her snug hat, pushed back an unbiddable wisp of hair and waited to present herself to her new neighbours. A trim dart of a woman from the Donegal-Derry border, she had already espied them.

‘Newlyweds,’ she had heard, ‘with three grown-up children,’ she had exclaimed to ‘himself’, hand to her mouth. ‘What’s the Christian world coming to at all, Hector?’ ‘Himself’ wasn’t much interested. ‘Bringing down the neighbourhood, that’s what. What have we got to leave our children, if not a decent neighbourhood?’

‘I’d just like to welcome you all.’ Harriet Brophy beamed as Ellen opened the door. ‘I’m your neighbour – a few doors up.’ Ellen bade in the woman, who sparrow-hopped over the threshold. She had a paper with her, something wrapped inside. ‘For luck,’ she said, ‘for the house.’ Ellen opened it. ‘A piece of anthracite to keep winters warm,’ the woman said. ‘A handful of salt, to keep the table laden.’ And in a small bluish bottle, ‘A sup of holy water to sanctify the home.’

Ellen thanked her, moved by the woman’s thought-fulness, but Harriet Brophy wouldn’t hear of it.

‘Och, for nothing at all – I think the custom came from Scotland first, except it was a sod of turf then, instead of the anthracite, and probably whiskey instead of the water!’

She had thin bony hands, Ellen noticed, which she fluttered like wings when she spoke, and a waist like a wasp. The smallest bitteen of a woman, Ellen thought, that she had ever seen. But she insisted they come with her to her house for tea.

‘Himself is out and won’t bother us!’

Ellen looked at Lavelle.

‘You and the children go, I’ll take care of things here,’ he smiled.

At tea, Mrs Brophy, as Ellen knew she would, filled her in on Pleasant Street life. ‘Nice neighbourhood, Americans and the likes of you and me,’ she confided, ‘hardworking people, none of the other Irish, you know what I mean … from the ships.’ Then, stretching her thin scrogall of a neck and leaning forward. ‘And no blacks, Mrs Lavelle.’ Harriet Brophy pursed her lips, narrowed her eyes and gave a knowing nod to Ellen. ‘You’ll be all right here, Mrs Lavelle, nice neighbours to look out for you here!’

And so it was, with Ellen settling into an ordered continuum of life with her new husband, two children and ‘the fosterling’, as Mrs Brophy referred to Louisa.

By the summer of 1849, the number of Irish in Boston had swollen to a quarter of the population, the weight by which they were arriving almost suffocating the city. Each one bringing his or her own story of the distressful state of Ireland.

Half of all the city’s paupers were Irish. Many having left the workhouses of Connacht, found only in Massachusetts the State Lunatic Asylum – alcohol and the tug of home combining to make sanity elusive. Half of the male Irish who did manage to find work were labourers. Of the females, two-thirds of all cooks, housekeepers and laundresses in Boston were Irish. Ellen marvelled at the resoluteness of her people. There was no going back and the Irish would work at anything. Boston bosses welcomed the increasing supply of green-hand drudge horses, who would work for next to nothing, $1.25 a day or less. How they kept body and soul together for this – labouring a twelve-or thirteen-hour day – she didn’t know, except it was an everyday miracle.

The Pilot carried regular letters detailing the trials and tribulations of the new arrivals:

For the promise of $2.00 a day, I was carted halfway across America. When we got there, they said it was a mistake, the most they could give was a dollar a day, with 5 cents a day gone for the first month for the cost of getting us here.

A couple of Tipperary lads and me started complaining about what they had promised first when the ganger from Clare says, ‘Well Paddy, start walking!’, and he pointed his finger to the east. ‘You should get there by Christmas!’

It was only June then, so we stayed.

She used it with the children. ‘Life in America is not all honey and gold. Keep to your books, it’s the only way for us Irish to “up” ourselves!’

She herself didn’t come much into contact with the masses of Irish who polluted the neighbourhoods of the North End and Fort Hill, though it was hard to avoid them, the way they spilled over like treacle into the areas around the docks. New vessels, holds bursting with more Irish peasantry, arrived with worrying regularity.

‘The city is swamped with them!’ she said to Lavelle.

‘We’ll all be over-run by the Famine, as much here as at home,’ was his comment. ‘It would never have been let happen in Devon or Cornwall, only in John Bull’s Irish province,’ he added caustically.

She was still careful of the children, and kept them in as much as possible lest they came into contact with the other Irish from the ships, be diseased by these new arrivals. Things had gone well for them and she wanted nothing to go wrong now.

The French wines and brandies supplied to them by Frontignac, Père et Fils, Montréal, found their way steadily off the shelves of Peabody’s two stores – and likewise from the shelves of their newest customer, Higgins of West Roxbury – and on to the finer tables of Boston. There to be frequently served by the swelling number of ‘Bridgets’, who arrived almost daily to inhabit the plush parlours of Roxbury and Beacon Hill.

Once, when visiting Peabody, the merchant had introduced her to one such of his customers. This gentleman, having disposed of the normal courtesies, confided in her: ‘We have one of your countrywomen amongst us – “Bridget” – excellent girl, clean and no trouble; the children adore her.’ Ellen was pleased for him. The gentleman sallied on. ‘She’s the very best “Bridget” in all of Chestnut Street, my wife assures me!’ he said, smiling at her.

‘Really?’ she smiled back.

He, mistaking this for interest, continued. ‘Every home in Boston should have a “Bridget”. They require some training, but are so genial by nature. We hear so much of the turbulence of the Irish character. Perhaps geniality is more particular to Irish womanhood?’ he said, thinking he complimented her.

‘So, they have become nameless?’ she replied brusquely.

He looked at her, surprised at her obvious lack of geniality.

‘If they are all to be called “Bridget”, then they are all without identity,’ she stated, with little patience.

‘Oh, not all, madam!’ the gentleman from Chestnut Street assured her. ‘Our “Bridget” is a Mary, and next door’s is an Ellen; they are all named with their own names, eh, before becoming “Bridgets”,’ he explained, wondering at her slowness, and why on earth Peabody had ever introduced them in the first place.

Whatever about the turmoils Boston was experiencing with Bridgets or otherwise, she and Lavelle settled into a happy and tranquil state. ‘A pool of contentment’, was how Mrs Brophy (‘Wasp-waist’ to Lavelle) described it. Harriet Brophy had an opinion on most things in life – and most people. Furthermore she was not one bit backward about coming forward with these opinions – in whatever company she might find herself.

‘He, Mr Lavelle, is such a dashing man, always good-humoured. It was made in Heaven … made in Heaven, Mrs Lavelle, as my own and …’ she added quickly, ‘… all good marriages most surely are,’ she informed Ellen.

Ellen, was careful not to reveal too much of anything to Harriet Brophy, for by the following Sunday after Mass the whole parish would have it. But ‘Wasp-waist’ was right about her and Lavelle. They were ‘a pool of contentment’. Lavelle was everything the woman described him as and more, being as well an industrious worker and a good father to her children and ‘the fosterling’. Ellen knew he would have liked a child of his own and she was full in her desire to grant him that wish. But so far they had not been blessed.

Lavelle never asked, but every month or so he would look at her. When she said nothing, she would see the hope dashed from his eyes. But it never lasted with him, nor did he ever attach any blame to her, saying only she was the ‘plenty of all happiness’ in his life.

Once she had told him that for the six years before Annie was born, she had been barren.

‘She must have been born hard,’ was all he said, ‘taken a lot out of you.’

Sometimes of an evening he spoke of Australia, its vast bushland, its sounds, its redness. She neither naysayed nor encouraged him in this. Australia had been a dark experience for both of them. But it had, after all, been where she had first met him.

‘You miss it,’ she stated, during one such reminiscing.

‘I suppose I do, Ellen,’ he told her. ‘I grew up on an island, wild as winter. Australia always reminded me of that wildness, though it was hot and red instead of wet and green. I miss the wide-open spaces, the smell of the gum trees – the silence. This Boston’s a noisy place.’

‘It is that,’ she replied.

‘Would you ever return?’ he asked, turning the question on her.

‘No …’ she said, ‘… to neither. Australia is a far country and Ireland even farther in my mind. I’ll do with being buried in America.’

12

Whatever about dying in America, living in America was an excitement that barely disguised itself. There was always something happening, some new discovery. She followed the newspaper reports of how life was progressing in her adopted homeland as assiduously as ever.

‘See, Lavelle, all we need is a chance! A chance to prove ourselves. We can be as good as the rest!’ she said, reading of how the electric telegraph, developed by two County Monaghan brothers, had carried a message from President Polk throughout the United States. ‘They have five thousand Irish employed and are as well building a railroad across Panama to join the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans!’

Lavelle was not so impressed. ‘And why wouldn’t they, at a dollar a day on the broken backs of their countrymen?’

‘Lavelle, why do you always down your own, those who have advanced in America?’ She was annoyed with him.

‘Because if we don’t say how America was built – at what cost – then it will all soon be forgotten,’ he answered. ‘Forgotten that Paddy’s shovel filled the coffers of this Commonwealth, the same way that Paddy’s green fields filled the granaries of the British Commonwealth. Everything has a price.’

‘At least the Paddies here have a chance, a chance to be part of this Commonwealth,’ she answered him.

‘Commonwealth me arse!’ he said, forgetting himself.

She ignored his outburst. ‘You’re still caught up in the wrongs of Ireland, and all of that … all of what we’ve left behind us,’ she said, calmly.

‘But have we left it behind us, Ellen?’

‘Well, I have,’ she said, more firmly.

Her assiduousness in gleaning every scrap of new information from the periodicals and magazines led her to a most unexpected bounty – Mr Horace Mann, an educator of high standing.

She read how Mann, following travels in Europe, had published a report on a new departure in the education of deaf-mutes, a sort of ‘silent talking’, advocating it be introduced to the schools in America. Her hopes were raised for Louisa and she pursued this new avenue whereby in Germany ‘the deaf can now read on the lips, the words of those who address them, and in turn use vocal speech’.

When, all of an excitement with this news, she sat them down and through Mary tried to explain it to Louisa, she was met with total indifference. Not the hazelnut eyes sparkling with hope as Ellen had expected. Not the joy such news must surely bring. Louisa, it seemed, did not want to be liberated from her affliction. Almost as if she wanted to remain locked away in her own silent world, Mary to be the sole key-holder.

It perplexed Ellen. She tackled Mary on the matter.

‘I think she’s afraid of something,’ Mary told her.

‘But what, Mary? It can only be to her benefit.’

‘I don’t know, Mother. She wouldn’t tell. Maybe she likes being the way she is … not part of everything.’

That night, she tucked Louisa into bed, prayed with her as always, whispering the prayers up close to the girl’s face, so that Louisa could at least see the shape of their sounds, feel them, if nothing else. The child, hands angelically clasped, lay there, eyes fixed on her adoptive mother’s lips, until the final breath of blessing. Then Ellen folded Louisa’s arms across her bosom in the shape of a diagonal cross, pulled the bedclothes up about her neck, and pressed her lips to Louisa’s forehead. She sat with her longer than usual, caressing the girl’s brow, soothing her to sleep, with touch and talk.

‘It’s all right, Louisa dear, you won’t have to do it any more. Sleep now, and don’t be fretting yourself. I only wanted what I thought was best, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe, after all, I was wrong.’ She put her face next to Louisa’s, fingered the hair back from her far temple. ‘My little fosterling.’

She remained until Louisa had fallen away from the world and its noise.

Despite the huge influx of paupers, these years were Boston’s golden years and the city continued to grow and prosper in every direction. At the Massachusetts General Hospital, an ether anaesthetic had been used on the operating table for the first time. It was the start of a new era in surgical medicine. Where previously brandy and even opium had been used, now ether – the ‘Death of Pain’, as Bostonians proudly proclaimed, had arrived.

The ether of the Irish – alcohol – continued to provide the ‘death of pain’ of deprivation, disease and displacement, suffered by the city’s immigrant population. This, despite the fact that Ireland’s Temperance priest, Father Mathew, had visited the city to admonish the frequenters of Boston’s twelve hundred taverns about ‘the evils of the bewitching glass’. But nothing, it seemed, not even the ethered Irish, could hold back the city’s progress.

Added to its horse-drawn streetcars, on which one could travel for a nickel, Boston now had eight railroads, bringing twenty thousand people daily into the city. She vowed that one day she would travel every single one of its new iron roads.

The Cochituate Water System had already opened to meet the increasing demands of a swelling population and much to the delight of Boston’s children, the Frog Pond on the Common was now regularly filled with water from Lake Cochituate. She had taken the children there when first it opened and Mayor Josiah Quincy had ordered a column of water to rise eighty feet above the Pond – immortalizing himself in water with a sky-high statement that Boston’s citizens would never again be short of it.

There was nothing, it seemed, Boston and its citizenry could not achieve. The city filled her with a breathlessness as much for herself as for what it opened up for her children. Regularly, she brought them to the Frog Pond, to skate and tumble and laugh on its winter ice, to wade in its cooling waters in the summer, often taking one of the horse-drawn trams to make it a special treat. The Long Path, which diagonally traversed Boston Common, was her favourite stroll, a walk long favoured by those in love. She explained its tradition to them.

‘A young man, too timid, perhaps, to directly propose to his Boston beauty, would ask, “Would you take the Long Path with me?” If she said “Yes” it meant she would marry him. They would never part. But,‘ Ellen paused, ‘if she stopped to rest – here perhaps, under this gingko tree, it meant she didn’t love him.’

‘Oh …’ said Mary, looking around for the ghosts of lost love, ‘that’s so sad – but at least she’d not said “No!”.’

‘That was it!’ Ellen explained. ‘The young man was spared that embarrassment. So ladies, if any young beau asks to walk the Long Path with you, consider carefully if you should rest along the way,’ adding, ‘I’m sure no young lady of Patrick’s choice would ever rest!’

Patrick, however, was not impressed and though he regularly accompanied them to the Common, at fourteen was less interested in marriage-making than in watching the haymaking, a custom that still persisted. Unless, of course, she recounted stories of Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty, and the military history of the Common, long a mustering-ground for armies of every flag and allegiance.

The Great Elm commanded attention from every element of the family, even boys. The giant tree, whose protective branches offered one hundred feet of shade, stretched heavenwards for seventy or eighty feet. But if Heaven was its aspiration, Hell was its application, for the Great Elm was once a place of executions. Witches, martyrs, adulterers alike, all swung from its gallowed limbs. United in fascination, all three would close in around her, fearing its embrace, wanting none the less to hear its dark history retold yet again. Tales of ‘the Puritans’, or of ‘the Reverend Cotton Mather’, who stalked the condemned, seeking to save their souls from a fate worse than death – eternal damnation!

‘Tell us Mary Dyer!’ Mary asked, though by now they knew the story well.

The Quaker girl had left the early colony, protesting the banishment of another young woman dissenter. On her return she was imprisoned and saved only from the tree by her son. Instead of her life she was banished for ever from the Bay Colony.

‘Mary came back again,’ Ellen told them in hushed tones, ‘to fight for her freedom. But the death sentence previously given had not been lifted. Mary still refused to repent, because she had done no wrong.’ Ellen paused, looked into the branches above them, before delivering the final verdict. ‘So the Great Elm took Mary Dyer.’

‘And her ashes were scattered on the ground here,’ the young Mary O’Malley put forward, fearfully.

‘Yes, we should be careful where we tread,’ Ellen told them, herself almost frightened by the notion of it.

The Great Elm where the dead and the living came together had a sobering impact on all of them. Yet, time and again, Ellen was drawn back to it. Sometimes, she would sit alone there, waiting for them while they played. It reminded her of the Reek – strange, silent, overshadowing. More than its trunk and limbs was the Great Elm, just as the Reek was more than its rocks and steep crags. Tree and mountain, both seemed to her to be warnings posted on the path of life. Grim, penitential listening places, for the strayed and the wayward. While the Long Path had its whisperings of love, the Great Elm had other darker intimations. Of love betrayed. Murmurings too of the terrible consequences its infamous gibbet had wreaked on the necks of those betrayers. She had yet not told them those stories, lest, in innocence, they should have sympathy for adulterers.

13

It took her into the following spring ‘to put a shape’ on No. 29. But she was not foolhardy, hunting down bargains – crockery ware on Washington Street, ‘sensible’ curtains from the Old Feather Store, a thick-in-the-hand, good-wearing Turkish counterpane for the floor of the good room; sturdy chairs, slightly shop-soiled, a chip or two gone from them but still perfectly good for sitting upon.

Lavelle did the heavy work – painted and decorated and put a snas on the backyard. Then Patrick wanted to ‘get at’ the gone-to-seed cabbages, but at her request left it. She decked the front and back borders of the cabbage patch with small yellow flowers – a Latin name, ending in ‘ium’ – she couldn’t remember when Mary had asked her. Peabody had told her when he’d given her the seeds, but she’d forgotten. The other two sides she left open, so she could ‘pluck the new cabbages, when they grew’, she hoped.

Eventually, the house was the way she wanted it; for the moment, at least. She had one other idea for the good room, but that could wait a while.

Lavelle, who had always maintained close links with those Boston Irish interested in the ‘Irish Cause’, had recently begun to attend meetings for the repeal of the Union of Ireland with England. She would have preferred he didn’t, that he’d leave ‘the past to the past’. Lavelle’s view was that ‘the past never goes away – the past is a road – always coming from somewhere and leading somewhere else’. She couldn’t win with him, so she gave up trying. She did once remark that with his increasingly frequent absences on ‘matters of Ireland’, ‘Now that the house is settled here, I have a mind to move back to Washington Street – and you could pay court to me every evening, as before!’

He knew she wasn’t serious, grabbed her and kissed her, laughing as he exited the door.

She read, instead, sitting at the rosewood bureau he had restored, her book on the baize-covered writing surface, vanishing her away from the world.

Her visits to the Old Corner Bookstore had been less frequent since they moved here, yet more precious. So that when she did go there she lingered over its store of treasures, lovingly fingering the gold-lettered spines, imprinting into memory the works and the lives within. The English poets: Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience – the two contrary states of the human soul – Byron and Donne. These were her favourites, opening her eyes to an England, pastoral, passionate, spiritually provocative, different from the ‘perfidious Albion’, she had known, an England of Cromwell and Queen Victoria, ‘The Famine Queen’.

At Christmas, Lavelle had presented her with Legends of New England, in Verse and Prose, by the Massachusetts-born John Greenleaf Whittier – ‘to wean you away from old England’. And she was much interested in New England writing. Emerson with his spiritual vision, his belief that all souls shared in the higher, Over-Soul, that nature is spirit, rang with a resonance close to her own, one which the organized pulpitry of the Catholic Church could never achieve for her. The women writers of New England, she also sought out, as much for their ‘Bloomerist’ agenda as for anything. However, the Old Corner Bookstore, Lavelle’s ‘Repeal’ meetings, and even the aggrandizement of No. 29 were only the trimmings of life in Boston. The education of her children, the steady growth of the business, and the unerring stability of life in general was what mattered, what she had always craved. What now was within her keeping.

The children all were flourishing. Patrick at the Eliot School, Mary, and even Louisa, with a little additional schooling from Mary, at Notre Dame de Namur. Peabody had now opened yet a further store, his third, in the affluent suburb of West Roxbury. And she had settled more easily than she had expected into the marriage life, seldom a cross word between them, Lavelle, unlike many, remaining sober in manner. Mrs Brophy’s ‘pool of contentment’ continued to surround them, if not indeed deepen.

She thought that maybe the time was now right to try again some of Boston’s better establishments which had once refused her, given that they themselves were better consolidated now. But upsetting the arrangement with Peabody worried her.

‘We are too much in his hands already,’ was Lavelle’s view. ‘I wouldn’t put it past Peabody to go directly to Frontignac himself. What’s stopping him – except you?’ he added, teasingly.

She swiped at him with her apron. ‘You might be right, Lavelle,’ she teased back, ‘but underneath everything, Jacob is all business,’ adding more seriously, ‘he is at no risk financially. That is what’s stopping him. He doesn’t pay until he sells. Nobody else affords him that arrangement.’ She paused. ‘But if we are to give the same terms to enter business with others, then what little reserves we have will be strained. We will need to approach the banks – or R.G. Dun, the credit agents!’

‘Well we didn’t give it to Higgins …’ Lavelle started, referring to the customer he had secured while she was in Ireland; a steady, but not startling account. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t …’ he corrected himself, so as not to appear critical of her arrangement with Peabody. ‘The city is bursting at the seams. It cannot develop quickly enough. There is such wealth here that we can scarce go wrong by expansion, and without having to extend excessive credit,’ was Lavelle’s final word.

She told Peabody of their plan, reassuring him that they would not supply anybody within a certain radius of his own stores.

‘I wondered how long it would take you. Of course, you must expand – God forbid anything should happen to me!’ was all he said. ‘Come, sit now a while and we will discuss life, instead of business – all only business with you Irish,’ he mocked.

She was relieved at his generous response. There were times when Jacob seemed more interested in philosophy than profit, and she did love these discussions with him. He seemed to know so much, quoted freely from poem and psalm alike and had such seeming wisdom. How like her father he was in that respect. Yet, unlike the Máistir, Jacob never revealed much about himself; his defence to veer off into being flirtatious with her, if she probed too deeply. Not that he needed much excuse for that either.

Jacob, how did you come to know so much … of everything?’ She had decided to try some probing of her own. ‘Was it from your father or through schooling?’

‘Neither,’ he quipped, ‘but from gazing into the eyes of beauty. Much wisdom is to be found there.’ Then he turned it around, asking questions of her. ‘That song at your wedding – I was reminded of it again recently,’ he began. ‘The “Úna” in your song intrigues me. Love beyond death? Death in love? Which is it?’

She laughed; he always did this. ‘It is both … it depends,’ she answered vaguely.

‘On what?’

‘On the love, the lovers – you know that, Jacob!’

‘And is this love a common thing, do you think, or only in songs?’ he pressed.

‘It is uncommon. If it were common, it would not be written about.’ She tried to bring the discussion back within the framework of the song but Peabody was having none of it.

‘So, there is love and there is love. One, the common kind for the many and the other – great, tragic love – for the few. Is that it?’

She knew where this would lead. He could be wicked, Peabody, the way he forced her to uncompromise her thinking.

‘Yes … I suppose so, Jacob,’ she parried.

‘What begets the difference, Ellen Rua?’

It was the first time he had called her that since she had spoken of it to him on her return to Boston – about how she had shortened her name, dropped the ‘Rua’.

‘I don’t know, Jacob, and don’t call me by that name.’ She stamped out the words at him.

‘Do you know the Four Elements of the Ancient World, Ellen … Rua?’ he repeated provocatively.

‘Of course I do!’ she said, angry that he still persisted with her old name. ‘Earth, wind, water, fire,’ she reeled them off.

He held up his hand. ‘Fire – that is it, the Element of Fire. That is what begets the difference, Ellen Rua.’

Sometimes he was hard to follow, the way his mind twisted and darted.

‘The Element of Fire? What on earth are you talking about, Jacob?’ she asked. ‘And I told you – it’s Ellen!’

He ignored her reprimand. ‘That is the difference between love for the many and love for the few – the Element of Fire,’ he answered, as if it were all self-evident. Then, seeing the look on her face, he continued, ‘Fire smoulders, it burns, it rages, it purges and purifies, it engenders great passion … and it destroys.’ He paused, took her hand as if passing some irredeemable sentence on her.

‘You were named for fire, Ellen … Rua.’

The talk with Peabody had unsettled her. What was he at with such a statement? That she was named for fire, the element that destroys! Jacob was trying to bait her, to stir something in her. Maybe some tilt at Lavelle and herself? But why? While Peabody was dismissive about Lavelle, he was hardly suggesting that she didn’t love him, that it was merely a marriage of convenience? You never knew with Jacob. Sometimes she felt that if she were to encourage him, he would be quite willing to draw down the shutters, pull her into the storeroom, and fling her on to the nearest flour sack, or chest of tea from the Assam Valley.

He was capable too. More than once when he embraced her, he had pushed in close to her, so that even through her underskirt she could feel his ‘scythe-stone’. Whatever about Jacob’s ‘scythe-stone’, his mind was sharp and dangerous, always trying to cut through her thoughts, to lay them bare.

She didn’t speak to Lavelle about her discussion with Peabody except to say, ‘My fears were unfounded, Jacob was most generous at the news.’

‘I don’t trust him, Ellen; and neither should you,’ was Lavelle’s response.

‘He has always been upright in his dealings, give him some credit,’ she defended Jacob with.

‘It’s not in their nature, the Jews.’ Lavelle would give no ground to her argument. ‘While there’s money to be made, they’re trustworthy. When more is to be made elsewhere, then see how far their trustworthiness stretches,’ he challenged.

‘Lavelle, you can’t say that. They’re not all the same, no more than all the Irish are fighters and drunkards,’ she retorted.

But Lavelle was not for turning. ‘History teaches us – didn’t they betray the Saviour for thirty pieces of silver?’

‘That was just one, Judas,’ she responded.

‘Yes … His friend,’ Lavelle retorted. ‘Kissed Him and betrayed Him, and the rest – all Jews – stood by while it happened. How well the like of Peabody got started here. The wandering Jew will get in anywhere.’

‘Jacob was our saviour when –’ she started to protest, but he cut her short.

‘I know you and Peabody have talks, and I know, too, that at the start, he was our saviour, but he is too familiar in his talk with you, and,’ he added, ‘how he looks at you!’

So that was it. How could Lavelle possibly think that Jacob was a rival for his affections? Nevertheless, this side to him pleased her somewhat, and brought a small flush to her neck. She went to him, embraced him.

‘Oh! Lavelle, please stop it!’ she chided. ‘You know he looks at every woman under fifty years of age like that, it’s just his way. Jacob has never made any indecent approaches to me – yet,’ she teased.

He laughed with her, kissing her fiercely. ‘All I say is, beware the Judas kiss,’ was his final word.

Later, on her own, she raked over what had passed between them. She hated it when Lavelle got like this about Jacob and the Jews, as if he never saw the parallels with the wandering Irish, or the Irish who betrayed their own for the Queen’s shilling. She did remember her father telling her about the Jews, condemned to wander the world for ever because they had crucified the Son of God. How they were buried standing up, not like other people, laid out flat. Whatever was the reason for that? She had never doubted the Máistir’s teachings before. All those years growing up, all those years after his death, his voice had come to her, guided her like a beacon in times of trouble. Strange how here, under the shadow of Beacon Hill, he hardly ever spoke to her now. Had he deserted her?

Or, she wondered, had she deserted him?

She encountered the same problem as before with the Pendletons, Endecotts and the others – ‘the wine Whigs of Boston, old world Sassenachs’, as she described the merchants to Lavelle. Polite but definite ‘no thank yous’. They still wouldn’t deal with her because she was Irish; by definition, a Catholic. It must change, she thought. Some day, surely it must change. But it didn’t help her now in their hunt for new customers. She continued to search, now looking among their own – the coming Irish. Those who had ‘upped themselves’ out of the North End and into the South End, in the process forcing the second-generation Yankees to move onwards.

The palates of these burgeoning Irish middle-class now sought a little more refinement than Boston’s one thousand groggeries once supplied them with and still did to their less elevated countrymen. So, on a train journey to Dorchester, she found ‘Cornelius Ryan’s Emporium’, boasting ‘wines, whiskies and refined liquors’.

Ryan, a sly but affable Tipperary man – or ‘Tipp’rary’, as he pronounced it, had come to America before the exodus caused by the Great Famine. Like many he had started his first enterprise in the corner of a tenement basement. Things had obviously gone well for him.

He rolled his ‘r’s like the Scots and gave her an order for ‘half a crate of the “Bordelaux”’, putting back into that region the syllable previously denied to Tipp’rary. She thought it a peculiar twist of his speaking but didn’t correct him. ‘Till I see how it goes … and half of the white too – you can put them all in the one box,’ he added.

Riding back to the city to the sound of steel on steel, she wondered why she wasn’t more excited about finding this new outlet. When she and Lavelle had first started she would have been beside herself to have found a new customer, any customer. Now it didn’t seem to matter an awful lot to her. But it should have. She let her thoughts wander far from Tipp’rary and Cornelius Ryan.

What she loved on such journeys was the way you could lose yourself in the sway of the train. Fix your gaze on everything, your mind on nothing; let the world swirl by. It was a wondrous thing, the way the trains were going everywhere, pushing out further and further, finding out America. Far from trains she grew up – many’s the day barefooted, going over the bent mountainy roads and back again – twice or three times the length of these train journeys in and out of Boston – it not even bothering her.

Everything was so easy here, once you got a foot on the ladder. Neither she, nor the children, wanted for a thing. No mountain roads, no bare feet. Theirs was a secure and comfortable existence and showed every sign of remaining so. Strange how everything had worked out well in the end, if she could call it that – without Michael and Katie and Annie – but it had. It surely had.

She was no longer one of the potato Irish; nor would her children be singled out as such. What harm if in Boston’s public schools her son had to recite the Protestant Ten Commandments and the Protestant Our Father? Or read the King James Bible that he was made to bring home for the ‘edification of your family’, as the Headmaster of Eliot School had so delicately put it. It was all much of a muchness to her. ‘Bishop John’, as the Catholic prelate of Boston was familiarly called, could rant and rail against Anti-Popery all he liked. In the end it didn’t make one ‘Amen’ of difference. She had always maintained it was ‘how you came into the world and how you went out of it’ that mattered. Even to be born hard and bred hard, if, in the end, you died easy – in the grace of God – wasn’t that it? And it was the same, she thought, for black, as for white, for heathen, as for Christian, for Sassenach, as for Jew. The main thing was to see that her children got a good education, Catholic or Protestant. To ready them for this life – and the next.

One evening while reading, waiting for Lavelle to come in from one of his Repeal meetings, she heard a noise outside. Thinking it was him, she looked up. There, darkly framed in the window, were the head and shoulders of a woman. Gaunt, sunken-eyed, a rag of a headscarf about her, the woman scratched at the windowpane, her withered finger bent against the glass. The sight of her startled Ellen. But when she opened the door the old woman was gone.

The woman was so frail of limb, that she reminded Ellen of those poor souls ravaged by Famine that she had once seen along the Doolough Pass Road between Westport and Delphi. That day the wind had whipped up along the Pass, swirling the wafer-thin phantoms to a watery grave in the Black Lake. The memory sent a shiver over her and she crossed herself. ‘No use thinking of all that now, is there?’ she said to herself, before closing the door and running upstairs to the children. Probably just some poor old beggarwoman looking for a crust of bread. Then, maybe got frightened and took off.

‘Too much reading, agitating the mind,’ Lavelle had brushed it off with when he had come in later.

14

Whatever about frightened beggarwomen or imaginary phantoms from the past, she knew him the minute she opened the door.

He didn’t recognize her as instantly. Then the surprise in her face, her intake of breath, alerted him. He looked at her hair. The long-maned tumble of it, that he would have known, was long gone. Instead, a much shorter tangle of curls was rather severely nested to the back of her head and securely pinned above the high-necked collar of the dress she wore.

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