A STRANGE STILLNESS HAD DESCENDED ON THE TOWN OF SKIBBEREEN. The sick and starved sat listlessly on the ground and in doorways, the streets otherwise quiet.
Honora Barry barely spoke to Mary when she delivered her work. The dressmaker looked ill, with a sickly yellow pallor to her skin.
‘I should have moved away, Mary, while I could,’ she pronounced as she paid her. ‘Death stalks this town, and no lock or key can stop him from entering every door.’
Mary felt a fear rise in her.
‘Don’t dawdle here,’ Miss Barry warned, as she gave her the lengths of calico and linen she needed. ‘Away home to your family.’
Mary had intended to take the soup but, seeing so many in such a bad state, decided to ignore her hunger pains. Instead, she made her purchases quickly and decided to call briefly to her sister before returning home.
Her nose wrinkled at the putrid odours that dominated the lanes of Bridgetown. As she neared Kathleen’s cottage, she was surprised to see little Sarah and Jude, both sitting on the step.
‘Is your mammy gone out?’
‘She’s inside,’ Sarah replied quietly, her head down, barely looking at her aunt.
‘She’s as cold as stone,’ sniffed Jude.
Alarmed that Kathleen had fallen ill, Mary pushed in the door. The room was gloomy and she wondered how Kathleen could be so foolish as to let the turf fire go out. In the poor light, she could make out the form of her sister, lying curled up on the settle bed.
‘Kathleen, are you sick?’ she asked, trying to keep the fear from her voice.
Kathleen said nothing. Perhaps she was asleep or too ill to talk.
A noise reached Mary’s ears and she saw some movement under her sister’s filthy blanket.
‘Kathleen.’
She bent forward to rouse her, but was greeted with a flash of squirming and screeching. With horror, she saw the eyes and hunched backs and tails of three – no, four – rats that ran over her sister’s body, their sharp teeth busy gnawing at her flesh.
‘Get off!’ she screamed in the near darkness. ‘Get out of it!’
Grabbing the nearby broom, she frantically beat the teeming rats away from her sister.
‘Get off her!’ she cried over and over, belting and chasing them as they scurried and jumped all around her.
‘Kitty!’ she yelled, agonized. ‘For God’s sake, Kitty, wake up!’
But Kathleen did not stir or move.
‘Wake up!’ she sobbed again, stretching out her hand to touch her sister, whose skin was ice cold.
She levelled one last whack at a furtive rat that had burrowed under her sister’s skirt. As she gently turned Kathleen over, she discovered little Lizzie, curled up and hidden protectively in her mother’s arms. Both dead … Both gone from the world.
Shock overcame her as she took in the damaged face and left eye of her beautiful sister, and the myriad bites that covered her neck, torso and left arm.
Bile cascaded from her mouth as she retched on to the earth floor again and again, despite her empty stomach. The only mercy was that Kathleen had been dead when the rats had attacked her.
Wiping her mouth with her handkerchief, she stood, shocked and shaking, as she considered what to do. As she battled to regain her composure, she pushed out the door to the waiting children.
‘Is Mammy really sick, Auntie Mary?’
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak for a minute.
‘Your mammy is gone to heaven,’ she said eventually, hunkering down beside them, ‘along with little Lizzie.’
‘They’ve been sick these past few days.’ Sarah sobbed quietly. ‘Mam told us yesterday that we were to stay outside so we wouldn’t get sick too.’
‘Your mammy loves you both very much and always wanted the best for you,’ she explained. ‘She is at peace now.’
The children looked miserable, dirty and half-starved. And now they were motherless.
‘Where is your da?’
‘He never came home these past five days,’ whispered Sarah. ‘Mam was fierce worried for him. She searched the town and kept asking for him, but no one has seen him.’
‘Maybe Da went looking for work,’ argued Jude defensively.
‘I must go to the dispensary straight away,’ Mary said gently, ‘and tell them about your mam and sister’s deaths.’
Sarah’s scrawny body was racked with crying and Mary took her niece protectively in her arms.
‘Hush, pet … Hush,’ she soothed, realizing that the children were in no state to be left alone. ‘We’ll go together.’
Mary went as fast as she could to the dispensary, where a kind man dutifully took down Kathleen and Lizzie’s names and their address, and details of how they had been sick with fever.
‘The cart will collect them in an hour or two,’ he told her. ‘There are a few stops to be made in Bridgetown before they go to Abbeystrewery for burial.’
‘It is better you two stay outside,’ she told her niece and nephew on their return to the cottage, for she did not want them to see their mother the way she was.
‘That’s what Mammy told us to do,’ acknowledged Jude, wiping his tears with his raggedy sleeve as he sat back down on the stone step.
Mary swept the room noisily to rid it of any bold vermin that might have returned in her absence, before taking some linen from her pack. Carefully, she wrapped a length of it around Kathleen and Lizzie’s bodies, before taking her needle and thread to stitch the shroud, so that they would be buried together.
Finding a little turf, she blew the ashes in the grate and relit the fire. She set the pot to boil before bringing the children inside. She would make a little gruel for them with some of her oats.
‘What will happen to us, Auntie Mary?’ asked Sarah nervously.
‘Will we have to go back to the workhouse again?’
‘Jude, what do you mean?’ Mary countered.
‘Mammy took us there on Sunday to look for my da,’ Sarah explained. ‘She told them that she and Lizzie were both sick, but they said that the workhouse was full.’
‘Mam got angry with them, told them that our da helped build the workhouse, and said they must have space for us,’ Jude continued.
‘They could see Mam was sick,’ Sarah finished bitterly, ‘but they told her to go home.’
‘There will be no workhouse,’ promised Mary.
She made up her mind there and then that somehow she would take on minding her niece and young nephew. It was what Kathleen would have wanted – for her children to be raised with their own.
It was midday by the time the death cart came to collect the bodies. Two men with cloths wrapped around their noses and mouths lifted Kathleen and Lizzie with little gentleness on to the mounting pile. A few neighbours looked on from their doorways and Mary told them that she was taking the children with her, in case Joe reappeared, looking for them.
Along with a few other Bridgetown residents, Mary and the children followed the cart slowly across the river to the nearby graveyard where the large pit lay open to receive the dead. It was hard to believe that it was where her beloved sister would be laid to rest – a crowded grave with other poor souls from the town. Kathleen, with her green eyes that would crinkle with laughter, her red-gold hair and a smile that could charm the hardest heart, buried like a pauper.
They watched from a little way back as the men unloaded the bodies, one at a time, into the hinged coffin, which was carried to the pit and lowered before being lifted up to be used again. She made the children close their eyes, for she did not want them to witness such a terrible thing.
‘Your mam and Lizzie’s souls have gone straight to heaven,’ Mary assured Sarah and Jude once the men had left.
Her niece broke down in sobs while Jude stood silent and red-eyed, staring at his mother and young sister’s last resting place. There had been no priest to say a few words so she wrapped her arms around both children and said a few prayers herself.
The breeze blew in from the water and across the Ilen as she did so, and the reeds whispered a lonely song.
The trio walked back to Creagh almost in silence, all lost in their own thoughts. Mary had no idea how John would take the news that there would be two more hungry mouths to feed, but she would not see Jude and Sarah put in the workhouse. As far as she was concerned, they were in her care now until their father returned.