Kate had never thought of death as violent or bloody. She had imagined it to be peaceful, wreathed in its own private dignity. Now she was no longer a stranger to the faces of the dead and the agonies of their dying.
The Fitzgerald family had taken her as their own and seldom had a day passed when she was not in the company of one or other of the twins. But Una had begun to visit Keegan on her own and those journeys were becoming more and more frequent. The bond was forming just as Kate and Tom Keegan knew it would.
Robin was working all the hours that daylight gave him, tending the sick and the dying in the makeshift hospitals and the overcrowded workhouses. Kate offered to help. He did not hesitate and promptly recruited her as his own nursing orderly. It was then that she began her descent into the suffocating mire of death and despair. Every day she suffered the sight of bodies twisted in pain, mouths open in silent screams. Women were giving birth to babies so deformed from malnutrition that Robin needed the help of another man to pull them out of the wombs. It was the silence of the children that shocked her most. In the moment of their dying there was not a movement, not a cry, not a tear, just their unblinking eyes, condemning. They could not speak because starvation had weakened their bones and the slightest pressure on the jaw forced their tongue to the roof of their mouth. Hunger had silenced them.
Many did not look like children at all, bent and wrinkled, their skin taut and thin, like grey muslin. They had lost the hair on their heads and it grew instead on their foreheads and cheeks and even their chins. It was written that they resembled monkeys, which was how the cartoonists in the British newspapers depicted them. The ape-like Irish.
That morning, Kate saw a donkey carrying two dead children. They were stuffed into wicker baskets hanging either side of it, like a harvested crop off to market. A man, a walking skeleton, their father perhaps, led the donkey by its mane but there were no other mourners. No mother, no sisters, no brothers, no black cloth, no wailing keeners. Death was anonymous.
She watched until they reached the church. The man sat down. The donkey ate grass, and the two wicker coffins swung with the rhythm as it moved.
‘He will bury them where he can,’ Robin said. ‘If he has the strength. If he does not, he will do what so many do now and leave them by the church gate and hope someone stronger will do it for him. Did you ever think, Kate, even in your worst nightmares, that it would come to this?’
‘A year ago, I was hardly aware these people even existed,’ she said, ‘let alone have any sympathy for them.’
‘You can’t have sympathy for suffering you haven’t seen.’
‘You can be blamed for not knowing it exists.’
‘Why are the righteous so severe with themselves?’
‘Is that what I am, Robin? Righteous?’
‘No, Kate, you are not. Not righteous, but you must forgive yourself the past. You have left it behind.’
‘Have I?’ she asked. ‘Is it possible to become another person?’
‘Is that what you are?’
‘You wouldn’t have recognised me when I first arrived in Ireland. You wouldn’t have wanted to. I loathe what I was. I want to disown my past’.
‘The calamity has changed us all, Kate.’
She paused. ‘Do you suppose that underneath, deep down, I haven’t changed at all? That I’m still a spoilt little English lady simply infatuated by it all?’
He leant forward and held her arm. ‘That’s a silly word, Kate, and a silly thing to say. Nobody could drain an ulcer or dress a septic wound as you have done and call it infatuation. You are real, Kate. Why do you doubt it?’
‘It’s what I want to believe,’ she said.
‘You must believe it. You have changed, you know you have.’
‘But Robin, I don’t feel I have, at least not yet. I don’t feel I’ve crossed a boundary, like changing my religion or my country.’
‘You have changed, Kate. I’ve seen it myself and it has nothing to do with being English or Irish, papist or Prod. It’s about what’s decent and whether you care. And you do. You’ve declared yourself and everything you are doing proves it. You’ll not turn back now.’
Robin knew it to be true. For a month now she had been at his side, helping him, travelling with him, nursing his patients as best she could. Not once had she distanced herself from the suffering. Not once had she allowed herself to be overwhelmed by it. She could have retreated and he would have thought no less of her. But she had not. She had become more resolute every day, even as their work became more grotesque and unrelenting. How could she call it infatuation?
A man can be as brave as a legend but the day will come when the snap of a twig will alarm him. A woman can endure a lifetime of abuse and then, in the space of a moment, turn on the torturer and end it. So it was that day with Kate.
She and Robin had ridden south to Skibbereen. He had received reports that the suffering there was worse than ever. They rode for three days. Five miles from the town they came to a derelict tumbled village. It looked deserted but the sound of their horses’ hooves had woken someone. They heard a moan, like the lowing of a cow. They dismounted and Robin gave his reins to Kate.
‘Stay here. I’ll call out if I need help. Promise me you’ll not move unless I call.’
Kate nodded. He had been gone some minutes when she heard a cry behind her. She tied the horses to the stump of a tree and went to the nearest cottage. There was no roof, no door. It was an igloo of mud. She saw bundles wrapped in sacking on the floor. They were the small bodies of children. In the corner a woman lay half naked. Rats scampered at her feet. She looked at Kate, her lips moved but there was no sound. A bloated rat ran across her stomach.
Kate ran to her horse and was sick down its flanks. She called out to Robin but her voice was barely a whisper. As she held on to the saddle to steady herself, arms suddenly clutched her scarf, twisting it, choking her. She turned. A young woman was screaming at her, pushing a baby against her lips. The child’s body was suffocating her. She could taste its filth. She struggled but the woman’s arms were tight around her like a clamp. She could not turn one way or the other. Then her horse reared as Robin wrenched the woman and her baby away and they fell to the ground.
‘Help her, Robin,’ Kate pleaded. ‘For God’s sake, help her.’
He shook his head. ‘There is nothing I can do for her. I cannot save her. Nothing can save her now.’
The young woman pulled herself to her knees, picked up her baby and wandered away from them, her strength exhausted. They watched as she sat by the edge of a ditch, the child in her lap, talking to it, caressing it. She cupped its tiny face in the crook of her elbow and tried to feed it with a weed she had squeezed and rolled into a soft ball. She put it into its mouth and turned its chin with her fingers, trying to make it chew. The baby stared back, puzzled. Then it swallowed the ball, convulsed and was still. For a moment she held it tight to her. Then she dropped it between her knees and with her feet buried him in the mud.
They rode south towards Baltimore. The Quakers had established a depot there to distribute food and clothing sent from America. Within weeks a thousand hungry people had besieged the port. They brought their diseases with them. There were no doctors, the small hospital had closed its doors and the workhouse was full.
Robin halted their horses to rest at the cliff top. To the south he pointed to Sherkin Island and beyond that the outline of Oileán Chléire.
‘A simple bit of Irish for you, Kate. It means “Clear Island”, which is a bit of a misnomer because there are very few days in the year when it shows itself quite as well as this.’
The wind was high and the spray from the waves carried forty feet up. They sat behind the natural shelter of rock and ate their oatcakes. Kate took Robin’s hand and pointed.
‘Robin. Over there by the gorse. Do you see? It’s moving. What is it?’
He paused. ‘It looks like …’ He stood and went slowly towards the shrubs.
‘What is it, Robin?’
‘Don’t come, Kate. Stay where you are.’
She would not. She came close. She saw a mound covering the body of a girl that had not been buried deep enough. The soil around her head had been swept away and the wind had picked up her long black hair so it flowed like silken strands above the grass of her shallow grave. Dr Robin took Kate in his arms and guided her away.
He looked to the sky. ‘Dear God, hear me and do not blame us for what is happening here.’
Mary McMahon sat in the gloom at the bottom of Patch’s pit. Her baby suckled at her hanging breast but drew no milk from the bruised and sore nipple. Her three other children clung to her thighs under the filthy blanket on the bed of straw that smelled of urine and human waste. The baby boy, born only five months before, was no bigger than the day Robin Fitzgerald drew it from her womb.
‘And how could you be?’ she said out loud to him. ‘You teasing my breasts and knowing there isn’t milk there for you?’
At the sound of their mother’s voice, the children whimpered, drew closer and hugged her tighter. Their emaciated bodies were streaked with dried blood and pus where sores had broken.
‘There, there, my babies,’ she cooed. ‘Mother will find you something. I can only feed you with what God gives and what’s a mother to do when He deserts me? I’ve sold everything I had, my dears, even your father’s shoes and Sunday jacket, and I was so hoping to keep them for when he comes back to us.’
She had killed his dog and its meat had given them nearly a month’s food. He had been fond of it but she knew he would understand when he returned. He had been gone for so long but she never doubted he would come back, good husband that he was. There would come the day when she would hear him whistling and calling … ‘Mary, Mary, I’ve come to take you and the little ones on the big ship to America.’
There had been a time when she feared the peelers had killed him but someone brought her a message that he had been seen working on a road near to Enniskillen and that made her happy. It meant he was earning the money to buy the tickets for the big ship that would take them all away. Perhaps he would bring back some whiskey. She missed his liquor.
Her Patch had been a happy man, a good man and father. The children’s stomachs were never empty and their faces were always full of fun. He had never done anyone any harm with his whiskey-making and it had given them all a good living. She remembered the times when men climbed down into the pit and sat by the still as it bubbled over the peat fire, talking of their debts and doubtful dealings, of how they had been wronged by this man or that woman – and it was mostly women. Listening to them and their moaning, you would think the world was a poor place and they the most unfortunate devils in it. But after a cup or two of Patch’s brew, they would leave laughing and singing, different men altogether, full of spunk.
But then the shebeen owners in the county reckoned Patch was taking too much of their business away so they agreed that one of them would lead the excise men to Patch’s secret little place and put an end to it. Big Jim O’Rourke brought them and as the excise men were chasing after Patch, it was he who broke up the still and smashed the full bottles hidden in the ferns by the stream. It was big Jim O’Rourke who had then her in front of her children even as Patch was running from bullets in the hills above.
Quietly and carefully, she pulled the sleeping infant away from her, got up from the bed, placed him into the nest of straw with the others and drew the blanket over them. Then she draped her shawl over her head and shoulders, closed the cottage door behind her and wedged a large stone against it.
The ground was white with frost, the tall ferns like stiff and delicate filigree. The night was stark and clear with stars and a full moon lit up the icicles on the aspen tree. The track up the steep slope was slippery so she crawled on her hands and knees to the top and stood there for a while, waiting for her heart to stop pounding. She looked around her, surprised at how beautiful it was and how quickly she had forgotten it. The long, smooth stretch of hills swept down so casually to the sand and the sea and the great walls of rock that changed colours with the seasons were now towering white with the scattering of snow. She could hear the rumble and swish of surf breaking and, as she had often done, she looked towards the horizon, searching for the ship that was not there.
‘I must hurry.’ She spoke the words out loud to herself. ‘I must be back before Patch comes. He’ll not take the babes without me. Oh! Love … Oh! Love … Come for us. Come for us quickly.’
She hurried off, her bare feet crunching the carpet of frost, half running whenever she had the breath. Her shawl fell to her shoulders and her long black hair streamed behind her like a mass of silk.
She had a plan. She had thought about it for a week and now she had decided. She knew where there was food and she knew how she would get it. Then her babies would eat and when their bellies were full they would play and chatter as they had before. She would not let them die of hunger. God had given them to her and she would not give them back. They would stay safe and well until Patch came to take them away on the big ship to America.
It took her an hour to reach the walls of Cork. She waited in the shadows on Lavitt’s Quay. There were always people loitering long after the shops had closed, waiting patiently outside the butchers and bakers, hoping for a scrap to be thrown to them.
It was past eight o’clock. She had heard the bell on St Olave’s church. She pulled the shawl over her head and around her face.
‘Just as long as you’re careful, Mary,’ she whispered. ‘Just as long as you’re careful, no one will ever know.’
But another voice from an inner part of her mind whispered back, ‘And if you’re caught, Mary McMahon, they’ll send you to a prison ship and who’ll look after your babes then?’
She nodded to her other voice. ‘Don’t fret. Mary knows how to look after herself. Hasn’t she been doing just that since Patch went on his way? And won’t I still be doing it on the day he comes back for us?’
She watched as, one by one, the candles inside the shops were snuffed out, and the shopkeepers, content with their week’s profits, pulled on their heavy greatcoats, wrapped woollen scarves around their chubby necks and pulled their hats down tight. They rattled the steel mesh that covered their shop windows, making sure that they were locked, then double-bolted their front doors and, tapping their shop signs with their walking sticks, walked along the river bank towards the comfort of their warm and welcoming homes.
Mary waited until the shadow of the last of them had gone. She looked across the street to number eighteen and the sign above the window:
J. O’ROURKE. CORN MERCHANT AND GROCER
She knew him to be a bully, a rapist, a cold and cunning man. The rapidly rising price of imported American corn had made him prosperous and his new money had given him new ambition. With it, he was buying the favours of every merchant in the town and he was now their favourite to be Cork’s next mayor. She remembered the days when she was younger, when her hair was a shining raven-black, tied up with a strip of scarlet ribbon. O’Rourke would look long at her whenever his wife was not looking at him, his eyes wandering over her body, making her feel naked, and he would lick his lips as if he was feasting on her. She had been a handsome woman with a full bosom and full hips and she knew what men liked and she knew that they liked her. She could have had the pick of any of them but when she chose Patch she knew there would not be another man brave enough to take her from him. But still O’Rourke continued to eye her in his lecher’s way, violating her as he sat on his sacks of flour.
‘Yes!’ she whispered. ‘Tonight the dirty man will fill one of those sacks for me and my babes. He knows what he did to me, tearing me and making me bloody in front of my own. Now it’s time for him to pay the bill, some flour and perhaps a little something special.’
She looked out once more from her hiding place. There was no light in O’Rourke’s shop and slowly, step by step, she edged along the wall until she came to a narrow cobbled alley by the side of the shop. How bright it was, how close the moon was and how white. It might almost be day.
‘Oh, dear God! What if my babes wake thinking it morning? Will they cry out for me and come wandering out on a night as cold as this? Holy Mary,’ she pleaded, ‘put the moon away.’
She knew where O’Rourke kept the spare key for the side door. He had told her of it many times when he had tried to convince her to change beds. She crossed herself and reached up to the loose stones above the lintel, feeling for the key. Carefully, she slid it into the lock, turned it quietly and let herself in.
She stood still and breathed in the smells, the perfumes of food, the coffee, the spices, the tang of oranges and the heavenly scent of soap. To be clean, to feel her skin white and fresh again, her hair soft as silk, a scalp without lice, a body without sores. The moon lit the room as she tiptoed from counter to counter, from shelf to shelf, lightly touching all these things, like a child on Christmas morning circling the laden tree. Then her fingers dipped into a barrel of flour.
She worked quickly, scooping it into a sack. But how much? How heavy could she make it if she was to carry all the way back to the pit? She looked around at all the lovely foods she might have taken if only she had been stronger. She tied the head of the sack in a knot and went back to the door. As she turned to take her last breath of the scented shop, she saw a jar of molasses on the shelf above the weighing scales. Yes! She would take it to sweeten the cakes she would bake, what a treat for her babes. She reached up. The jar was inches from her fingers. She stretched on the tips of her toes but her arm failed her and the jar came crashing down and exploded on the marble counter.
She stood still, barely able to breathe.
‘Who’s there?’ She heard him coming down the stairs from the loft. She had thought he was at home in bed with his wife.
She waited. Should she run to the door? If she did he would chase her and catch her and beat her, bawling out for all of Cork to hear. Then he would give her to the peelers and then what of her babes?
The sack of flour was heavy but she dared not put it down. If she was quiet and still he would not see her and if he heard nothing more, he would think that he had been dreaming and sleep again.
But nowadays Jim O’Rourke seldom slept the night through. Like other merchants, he lived in fear of being burgled and having his shop set on fire by the mobs who crowded his door every day, ragged beggars banging on his window with their fists, demanding he gave them credit to buy his food when he knew there was not one among them who could ever pay him back. So he slept above his shop in a makeshift cot with a loaded shotgun on the floor beside it.
He came through the door holding it in one hand and a candle in the other.
‘Jesus! It’s you, Mary McMahon. All these years and in my shop alone at last. But thank God because I thought it was the mob come for me.’
He came closer and saw the broken jar and the molasses dripping from the counter. Then he saw the sack of flour in her hands.
‘You’re stealing from me. Is that it? That’s my flour you have there and you’ve smashed my molasses. What else have you hidden up your skirt?’
‘Nothing, O’Rourke. I’ve only a little flour for my babes. We have the hunger and I must feed them until Patch comes home.’
He laughed and then spat and wiped his mouth with the hem of his nightshirt. ‘Patch comes home, is it?’
He was menacing, blocking her way to the door. She could smell the sweat and whiskey on him.
He snatched the sack from her. ‘I’ll tell you what Mr Patch will find if ever he dares to come back. He’ll find his whore in prison and in irons.’
‘Give me back the flour, O’Rourke,’ she said defiantly. She came close and put her hand on his bare chest, the hair warm and wet. ‘Do what you like with me. Do what you did before and do it any way you like. I’ll not tell Patch. But give me back the flour. Don’t call the peelers.’
He was a large man but she was no longer afraid. He pushed her away. ‘Do what I like with you any way I like, is it? You bitch. If I rammed you now it would be with a marlin spike. You are a filthy woman inside and out and I wouldn’t touch you with any part of mine. My God! How I’ve lusted after you all these years and now you offer me this’.
He spat phlegm into her face but she did not move. He took her arm, twisted it behind her back and pushed her towards the door. ‘Come, you dirty hag. Get your filth out of my shop or I’ll raise such a commotion we’ll have the peelers here before a scream leaves those scabby lips of yours.’
She clawed at the counter but there was nothing to hold on to. She grabbed at the shelves. She clutched the weighing scales but they crashed to the floor. Furious, he hit her again and again.
Above her she saw a ham and by it, on the chopping block, a cleaver. She grabbed it and, closing her eyes, swung it in a wide arc until it stopped at his skull. He gasped and fell and she fell with him, still in his tight grip. There was a gurgling in his throat and she felt the warmth of his blood on her arms. He shivered, his body heaved and then with a sigh he was still. She unlocked his fingers, kicked his legs away and sat up. She had sliced off the back of his head and in the bright moonlight she saw the glistening white of his brain.
She stood by his body a few moments longer, then, slinging the sack over her shoulder and pulling her shawl over it, she left the shop and began her journey home.
They should have been asleep in the ditch, huddled together for warmth, man, woman, friend and stranger, body by body. The ditch ran along the wall of the city’s workhouse and the homeless and the hungry slept there, waiting for the gates to open at dawn. Then they would count the dead in the carts coming out and know, with some certainty, how much longer they would have to wait until it was their turn to be admitted. But tonight the moon kept them awake. Two women sat on the edge of the ditch, cuddling each other for warmth and a little conversation. In the bright light they saw a figure coming slowly down the road towards them.
‘It’s a cripple,’ said the first woman. ‘See how it walks.’
‘But out on the roads at this time of the night?’ said the other.
‘Maybe she’s come to join us.’
‘Then tell her she’ll be dead before she’s head of the queue.’
‘Look how bent she is. She’ll not squeeze into this ditch.’
‘She’s got a hump. D’you see? She’s a hunchback and that’s queer. Did you ever see one hereabouts? I never did.’
‘Have you ever seen half the bodies in this ditch?’
‘No. But I’d remember a hunchback.’
Their talk roused the others who sat up, curious, and watched the bent figure come closer. The deformity on her shoulder seemed to make her weary. She was almost level with them and about to turn onto the track that led up the hills and the sea beyond, when someone shouted. ‘Hunchback, is it? That’s no cripple. That’s Mary McMahon. And there’s blood on her.’
It was just as she had feared. The moon had waited for this moment of treachery. How much brighter it suddenly seemed and she was too well known to hide herself under her shawl or disguise herself with the sack of flour beneath it. And O’Rourke’s blood was still wet and glistening.
‘Hey, Mary,’ they shouted. ‘What’s that you have on your back? Is it another baby or a bag of gold? Or is it food you have? Christ alive! I do believe it’s food she has there.’
They ran towards her, fifteen or more of them, baying like hounds. She stood upright and faced them. She had killed for her prize and she was ready to kill again to keep it.
She snarled at them. ‘I’ve a knife and I’ll cut him apart, the first who touches me. I’ve done O’Rourke already tonight. Try and harm me and I’ll mix his blood with yours.’
But they did not stop. Mary McMahon was as brave as the bravest and as fierce as a fighting lion. They all said so afterwards.
It was quickly over. She was too weak to fight them off and she had no knife. When they had finished with her they took the sack of flour and fought among themselves for the biggest share. When they were full, they sank back into the chilled earth and slept.
It was an hour or more before Mary opened her eyes. She crawled a little way from them, her body torn and smeared with her own blood. She had fought and she had lost. She had killed and still her babes were waiting. Were they crying for her now? Was it them she could hear in the wind?
For an hour or more she crawled and stumbled her way along the track towards her pit, all the time listening for her children’s cries. She would hear them better if only the sea would stop its noise, if only the pebbles on the beach would be still.
As she wandered she spoke out loud.
‘I must walk faster to be home sooner, the poor dears, waiting for their supper. Haven’t I left them snug and warm by the peat fire and wouldn’t they be longing for their supper of potato broth and buttermilk?’
She pictured their little faces, playing their games among the ferns, splashing at the stream in the summer’s sun as she sat and suckled her baby boy, her full breasts making him big and strong.
She walked many miles over the hills that night in the bright light of the treacherous moon but she was not walking home. How could she know which way to go?
Exhausted, she sat by the cliff’s edge and watched the soft salmon glow of another dawn. She heard nothing now but the roar of the surf and the breaking of the waves on the rocks below. She did not hear the dogs. They circled around her like hyenas at their prey, snarling at each other, waiting for the first to leap on her. A hound took her by the neck and shook her until she was limp. Then they devoured her.
Patch McMahon came carefully, a few steps at a time, stopping, listening, and then a few steps more. His feet crushed the wild mint, heather scratched his bare legs. How good the moon had been to him. There could be no tricks: no ambush with such a light, no man could hide, no peelers could spring a trap in it. He looked up and nodded his thanks to the bright moon. He stopped to listen. He heard only the sea breeze stirring the grass like the incessant whisper of hidden men. He waited, like a hare on alert.
He came closer. He whispered, ‘Mary, Mary, it’s me come home, do you hear? It’s me, your Patch come to fetch you.’
Where was his dog? No one in the old days could come into Patch’s pit without a warning from his scruffy mongrel sentinel.
He saw the cottage below and the white-feathered ferns and the black hole where he had kept his secret store of poteen. The stream was running as fast and clean as ever.
He called again. ‘Mary! For Jesus’ sake, wake up and get yourself ready. I’ve come for you and the babes.’
He came to the front door. He pushed aside the small boulder and opened it a little. It was too black for him to see but he knew the smell. He kicked the door wide open and stood back to let in the moonlight. It shone directly onto the bed. There was no movement under the blanket.
‘Mary,’ he whispered. ‘Is that you? Are my babies here?’
He knelt and drew back the blanket and the dead eyes of his children stared back at him.
It did not take him long. He wrapped their little bodies in rags and pushed them into a wide crevice in the rock. Then he heaped stones into it until they were safely wedged together in their grave. No fox, no rats, nothing would ever touch them again. He sat down and rested his head against their gravestones. He took off his cap. Inside the rim were five yellow tickets with the name ‘S.S. SARA JANE’ printed in large letters. The sailing time was noon in ten days’ time. He dropped them between his feet and ground them into the earth with his heels until they were gone. Then he looked up at the moon and howled, a long and tortured primaeval howl.
By his side were the scattered bits and pieces of his whiskey still and fragments of the bottles O’Rourke had smashed the night he brought the excise men. He leant forward and picked up a long, thin shard of green glass. He held it up, sharp and sparkling. How beautiful it was. A precious, lethal emerald.
The moon moved slowly across the pit and the last of its light shone bright and glistening on the blood oozing from the suicide’s wrists.