The tide of human distress was now in full flood. Ireland was emptying. The Irish were leaving their doomed land in droves, like refugees escaping war. Thousands filled the roads to the ports of Dublin, Limerick and Cork and the smaller harbours of Baltimore, Ballina and Tralee. Those who could walk no further watched the procession of the stronger move on without them and waited to die. There was no pity.
The landlords accelerated the mass evacuation. It was the quickest, cheapest way for them to clear their estates of unwanted, unproductive human weight. They hired the ships and paid the fares on vessels already condemned as unfit for the Atlantic crossing. Timbers were rotten, seams uncaulked, sails shredded and their masters lied about the ration of food and water aboard. They were called the ‘coffin ships’. The port inspectors took their bribes and said nothing. There was much money to be made from misery.
The first ship to sail from Westport in County Mayo was grossly overloaded. Over four hundred emigrants were crowded into the hold. Despite a calm sea, the ship foundered on rocks and sank within sight of the land it had just left. All aboard were drowned, watched by those onshore who, only an hour before, had bid them farewell.
America was the dreamt-of destination, but only the fit and healthy were allowed to disembark there. Congress quickly passed emergency laws to bar the sick and diseased. Boston even refused entry into its harbour to all ships from Ireland and the New York harbour authorities demanded a bond of one thousand dollars from captains for every sick passenger aboard their ships. Ship owners refused to pay, and, after the suffering of the Atlantic crossing, shiploads of sick and starving immigrants were forced to sail north to Canada and the St Lawrence River. Grosse Island at the mouth of the river became their landing station and for many, many thousands, their burial ground.
Lord Palmerston, the future British Prime Minister, paid the entire costs of nine ships to sail from Sligo carrying two thousand of his tenants. Those who boarded the Aeolus, bound for Canada, were packed like herrings in a barrel. Over one hundred died during the crossing from typhus fever and dysentery. The survivors were put into the quarantined sheds on Grosse Island off Quebec as soon they landed. Many were too weak to walk off the ship.
For the first time, emigration across the Atlantic continued throughout the winter and this was the most severe in living memory. When another of Palmerston’s ships, the Richard Watson, arrived, the master reported that nearly half of his passengers had died en route and were thrown overboard. The survivors disembarked near-naked in a snow blizzard and there was ice on the St Lawrence River. Palmerston’s agents had promised every family money and an acre of land to help them resettle. The immigrants discovered there was no money and no land and Palmerston denied all knowledge of it.
Trevelyan appeared unmoved by the reports he read. But then, emigration was saving him money. The more Irish who left at the landlords’ expense, the fewer there were to gorge on English aid, and fewer still to fill the workhouses. He was also reassured by a letter sent to him by Earl Grey, Secretary of State for the Colonies.
The desire to reach America is so exceedingly strong among the Irish emigrants that they are content to submit to very great hardships during the voyage.
How many thousands sailed with new hope to the New World only to perish in the coffin ships will never be known. But it was written at the time that a road of drowned skeletons drifted back and forth with the tide, from the shores of Ireland to the coasts on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean.
There was a quicker, cheaper, less hazardous way to escape Ireland. Many more thousands went east across the Irish Sea to England, Scotland and Wales. A crossing that would take not months but hours.
The steamer Faugh a Ballagh was packed on its twice-weekly journey from Drogheda to Liverpool, a journey that cost only five shillings. Other shipping companies on the Mersey joined the lucrative business and emigrants were soon arriving at the rate of a thousand a day. By midsummer 1847, over three hundred thousand Irish had settled in Liverpool, a city with a population only a little over half that number. There were not enough police to cope and twenty thousand civilians had to be rapidly sworn in as special constables. A battalion of infantry was hurriedly garrisoned at the docks.
Ships sailing from Cardiff and Swansea, carrying coal from the Welsh valleys to Cork and Dublin, no longer returned to their home port empty. Their owners filled the coal dust holds with paupers at two shillings each for the one-way crossing. Some were given free passage as human ballast. There was a regular ferry service from Belfast and Londonderry to Glasgow and there were sometimes queues of people half a mile long waiting for a space.
Once they had landed, the Irish poor knew they would no longer be hungry. Britain’s Poor Laws would provide for them. In return, they brought with them the diseases of famine and within months, as they spread out across the country, they carried typhus and dysentery with them. The British people would now pay in kind for their government’s indifference.
William Smith O’Brien was a handsome man who lived on his brother’s estate at Dromoland Castle in County Clare. He was a Protestant, a member of the Westminster Parliament and an active participant in the Catholic Association, dedicated to the repeal of the Union with England. Whatever the political contradictions, he was first and foremost an Irishman.
He was known as a benign and benevolent landlord and was serious in his politics. He passionately believed that only by political negotiation could peace and Irish independence ever be achieved. Violence would hinder change rather than hastening it. He believed that whatever new freedoms the Irish might enjoy, they were only England’s to give.
He changed his mind one day in his ancestral town of Cashel. The square was packed. It was a political meeting, the first for many years. Such meetings were prohibited but there was not a Redcoat nor a peeler to be seen. Two men stood astride a statue of a saint. One was a tall, well-built young man with auburn hair that all but touched his shoulders. The second man was a priest. Draped around the statue was a string of green flags.
O’Brien was curious. He was not in town for politics. Wheat and its weekly price were his business that day. It was the voice that held him. A gentle coaxing voice that made men move closer and cup their ears to hear it better. A voice with sudden strength that rose loud with such venom and anger that men clenched their fists and tightened their jaws. They had not heard its like since Daniel O’Connell, the Great Liberator himself. The crowd pushed nearer. They cheered loudly as the man paused and were silent again as he spoke. But these were not O’Connell’s words. The young man with the bright eyes had a different manifesto. His was a call to arms.
‘We have been conquered not once but many times. Our lands confiscated, our churches razed, our people brought to the very verge of extinction. We were once beautiful people, our men famous for their strength, our women for their beauty. Our land was a beacon of learning, our poets, bards and music known and loved here and beyond. Our monasteries were the hubs of learning, full of light and culture. Look at us now. Our earth and our people exist for English profit. Only when they rid this land of us will they be content. The English sent fifty thousand pounds to help the starving Irish. They’ve sent twenty million pounds for the Negro slaves in the West Indies. Such are our masters’ priorities.
‘I defy anyone to exaggerate the misery of our people. Look at yourselves. You are like famished sheep. Will you let your Ireland perish like a lamb? Or will she turn as a baited lion turns? Let us unmuzzle the wolf dogs! They are here throughout the land fit to be untied and they become more savage every day they are kept caged. Let us together push the English back into the sea. Curse the tyrants that suck our blood. Fight! Fight for Ireland. Let our blood flow. Fight for liberty!’
That day, an Irishman was preaching rebellion, insurrection and revolution for all to hear in the streets of Cashel. It fired a passion in O’Brien, descendant of the king who had defeated the Vikings. The eight-hundred-year-old bloodline was suddenly rekindled. He resolved that hour to seek out the tall man with the auburn hair, the one called Daniel Coburn.
‘He does not ride with women, Miss Kathryn. He is very selective. He has to be. I think you are a very doubtful recruit.’
They sat facing each other at the end of a long oak table in the hall of O’Brien’s castle at Dromoland. He had placed a tall candelabrum midway along it and a platform of light walled off the far end of the room. Kate had not seen a servant or any person since she had arrived. O’Brien provided bread and a round of cheese and filled two mugs from a jug of porter. He passed one to her.
‘Mind you,’ he said. ‘We could make splendid capital out of it. Just think. The daughter of a knight of the realm, the former Relief Commissioner himself, creating havoc and gallivanting around the country with a ragged band of Irish revolutionaries. What wonderful propaganda!’
‘Why do you mock me?’ Kate said. ‘I am already disgraced and my father is no longer anyone’s favourite except his enemies’. I’ve come to you for help. I cannot go to anyone else. If they find me I shall be sent to England. I don’t think I could bear that.’
‘So you want to help Ireland?’
‘I want to help the Irish who are suffering.’
‘There are good Irish ladies already doing that. Why don’t you join them? Anna Parnell of the Ladies’ Land League will find you a place, I’ve no doubt.’
‘My father will drag me from them. I can only bring them harm.’
‘Then what help can you be to us?’ O’Brien asked.
‘Whatever help you need.’
‘To cook and sew? Woman’s work?’
‘Whatever you want me to do, I will do.’
‘Are you fit to do it?’
‘I am fit.’
‘This is men’s work.’
‘And I am a woman.’
‘Yes, and you are untried in what we do.’
‘Then you will teach me.’
‘You are very cocksure of yourself, sitting here comfortably, eating my cheese. But life would be very different once you rode with us, very different indeed.’
‘I’ll bear that difference. That’s why I am here.’
There was the sudden sound of a chair scraping the floor and movement at the far end of the room. A voice said, ‘Would you steal? Would you kill?’
Daniel Coburn entered the pool of light and sat on the edge of the table close to her. How often, despite herself, had she conjured up a face to match the eyes she remembered from that evening by the river at Fivemilebridge, when he had ridden away with Moran? How often had she dreamt of it since he had fired his pistol and saved her from the hands of the mob on that day riding with Una? Now he was so close she could feel his breath on her forehead. His nearness was suffocating. It frightened her. It intoxicated her. She trembled as he spoke.
‘Tell me, Miss Kathryn, if you came with us, would you select the role you’d want to play? Pick and choose according to the time of day? Whether the sun was out or not, whether it was warm or cold? Would you wear gloves to protect your dainty English hands so that guilt did not stain them?’
‘I would not wear gloves,’ she said. ‘You mock me too.’
Coburn laughed as another man moved from out of the dark. A priest stepped forward.
‘Don’t, Daniel. We know who she is and what she has done.’
He held out his hand to Kate. ‘I’m Father Kenyon from Tipperary. Silly people call me the Patriot Priest.’
He turned to Coburn. ‘She has done much for our people, we know that well enough. If we cannot enlist her, the least we can do is show her some gratitude and good manners.’
He reached over the table and drank porter from O’Brien’s jug.
‘Miss Macaulay…’ Coburn said.
‘I am Kate,’ she interrupted. ‘I have no other name.’
‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘Indeed I do. I have read Sir Robert’s letter and it makes sad reading. But then Ireland is brimming with sad stories, enough I think to sink her. Yours is just one of a million.’
‘How much did Sir Robert tell?’
‘That you have mongrel blood.’
‘Enough of that,’ said Father Kenyon. ‘Stop your blather, Daniel. It wouldn’t do for any one of us to inspect our pedigree too closely. Now stop it!’
‘Sorry, Father,’ said Coburn. He was still smiling. ‘And sorry to you too, Kate. I’m not used to company of your sort nowadays. But I do seem to remember that it was you who was prickly the last time we met.’
‘It was a very frightening time. You must forgive me.’
‘I forgive you. I do, really. In his letter, Sir Robert says you have crossed sides.’
‘I had no choice. I am my mother’s child.’
‘But I think you turned long before your father put you out.’
‘Why do you think that?’
‘Can I guess when it was? And where?’
She waited. She did not answer.
‘Was it Limerick?’ he asked. ‘When you said goodbye to the Keegans?’
‘How did you know?’
‘I was there. Only yards from you.’
‘You followed me?’
‘Not exactly. I had other business there that day. But I knew you’d be coming. You have become a friend of our people and I wanted to see you again. I think we owe you something, Kate. You have your story. One day I will tell you mine. All of us here have things to tell. Our stories explain everything. What we are and why we are here. They are our credentials.’
‘Will you take me?’ she asked.
‘What are your credentials, Kate?’
‘Only my story and you know it now.’
‘We mean to change things, Kate. Change Ireland. Kick the English out. Your own people. You will join us in that. Fight with us against the English?
‘They are not my people. How many times must I say that to convince you? My people are not the English nor the Irish. They are the people who are suffering so dreadfully.’
‘What you have seen restores your pity?’
‘I am not wanting in pity. I ask you again. Will you take me?’
For some minutes Coburn said nothing. The priest emptied O’Brien’s jug of porter, refilled it and cut himself a slice of cheese.
Coburn came and sat beside her. He did not look at O’Brien or Father Kenyon. He looked directly into her eyes. Then he took her right hand and shook it.
‘Yes! You can ride with us. All the way to the gallows. Ride with us, Kate, and you and I will hang together.’
‘Do not tempt the Lord,’ said the Patriot Priest. ‘He is aggravated enough already. But may luck ride with you both.’
He kissed his fingers, crossed himself and touched their heads. It was his blessing.
She rode with them as hard and as long as any man among them. She asked no favours. None were offered. If two of the more prominent Young Irelanders were suspicious of her, it did not last. In the months that followed her introduction, Thomas Meagher, son of the Mayor of Waterford, and Gavan Duffy, a grocer’s son from Monaghan, tried many times in many ways to test her. She did not fail.
When the snows came early that November, she had ridden with them to all but a few of Ireland’s counties. From Donegal north to Bantry south, from Wicklow in the east to Mayo in the west. It was there, in the shadow of the Connemara Mountains, that Coburn took Kate to the place where he was born.
It was desolate country, a narrow corridor of camouflaged greens and browns, dividing the two vast loughs of Mask to the north and Corrib to the south. The towering Maamtrasna Mountain, its plateau mostly hidden in mist, sloped down to flooded plains and there was not a tree to be seen from Cornamona to Clonbur. It was as if all living things had fled from the place. Or that life had never come to it. Coburn stood by the water’s edge.
‘This was my home, Kate. The stones you see scattered here were once my family’s home. I was one of many, nine of us, maybe more. The cottage was always full of children coming and going from other families, so I never did know how many were ours. My mother was always carrying, every year there was another baby. Some died soon after they were born and were buried at night so we wouldn’t know.’ He pointed towards the foot of the mountain.
‘They’re out there somewhere, along with the others.’
Kate followed his gaze.
‘What others, Daniel? Who else is buried there?’
‘I don’t know them all, Kate. Only a few of them belong to us. There was so much dying then. You’ve only seen this famine but it was almost as bad then, twenty years ago. Many went down, starved to death, frozen to death, black and bloated with the fever.’
‘It’s hard for me to think of it that way when we stand here,’ Kate said. ‘There’s a grand beauty about it, as if it has never been touched.’
‘Maybe it’s been given new life by the blood of the dead.’
‘It’s horrible to say that.’
‘I think of it no other way. I never stop thinking about it.’
He paused. ‘We shouldn’t have come here, Kate. Not to this place. I have been many times before but I should not have brought you now. All my good memories have long been drenched by bad ones.’
‘I asked you to bring me here’ she said. ‘You promised. It’s a part of you I wanted to see.’
‘There is nothing to see, Kate. Only the mountains and the loughs and they are no longer mine. They’re nobody’s now. Do you see the ripples along the slope of the mountain? You might think them the scrapings of a glacier sliding its way down the valley all those millions of years ago. A stranger might think them nature’s own work. But they are the potato beds, dug by man and woman, husband and wife, child and child, generations of them, year on year for hundreds of years. How much work is that, Kate? And for what? Twenty years ago the potato failed them as it has failed again and they died of hunger just as we are dying now.’
‘There was no other way?’
‘No, Kate. We knew no other way. There was no other way. See that pile of stones just beyond the stream? My ancestors carried them down from the mountain, one by one, to build their home. Now the mountain has taken them back. For centuries, my people worked this land and they wanted nothing more. In all his sixty years, my father barely travelled beyond Cornamona, a few miles to the west or eastwards to Cong. Can you believe that? My mother never ever left the plot. She never wanted to. She wouldn’t have known how to. They were simple people asking for very little, always ready to welcome a neighbour or give a bowl of broth to any traveller who happened to wander off his path.’
‘Were there many families here?’ she asked.
‘There must have been a few dozen hereabouts but I can only remember some of the names. The Philbins, the O’Sullivans, Joyce, the O’Donnells. We all kept our distance but if there was a fight between them, we’d all join in, even if we didn’t know what it was all about. But if a family was in trouble they hadn’t to wait long for help and a bit of comfort.’
‘What did you do with yourself?’
‘I spent my time mostly alone. Sometimes days away just wandering and no one missed me. The best of it was on top of Maamtrasna, up on that plateau. There’s a lake up there – Nafooey it’s called – and it was mine. I’d spend days there, swimming, living on tiny fish and birds’ eggs. It was grand place to be for a little boy, on top of the world. On top of Ireland.’
He splashed the shallow water between the reeds.
‘I had a friend called Murdoc. He was a wild one, always making mischief, but a grand fisherman. He would go out onto the loughs with his curragh and nets and poach for trout and sometimes salmon. He sold them as far away as Ballinrobe and Clifden. I would dig worms for him and he would cut off a couple of fish heads and mother would make a soup that lasted all of us a week or more. I remember how we had to make for the boat quickly because of the thunderflies.’
‘Thunderflies?’
‘Biting midges that could make your life a hell. And the mosquitoes too. We called them buzzers because of the sound they made. But it was grand once we were out there on the water. I remember the evenings best, at dusk, the whir of bats, the drumming of the snipe, the curlew and the clack of the ducks being chased by otters.’
‘You must have been a happy little boy.’
‘I don’t think we knew what happiness was, Kate. Not that I’ve ever really known it. We wanted very little from life, but we were content, hard-working, shying away from violence and deceit. All we asked for was enough to eat at the end of the day, some pennies for father’s tobacco and decent put-ons for the children’s Sunday best. It was our lot until somebody bettered it.’
‘Where are they now, Daniel? Your family?’
Clouds quickly hindered the sun and the bright greens of the valley became sullen grey. A cold breeze came off the Corrib and she felt its sharpness on her face and hands.
‘Where are all my dead now?’ he answered. ‘Where are their plots? There are none. They have no graves, Kate, no tidy mounds of earth, no settled peat, no headstones above the heather. You ask me where my dead are. They are hereabouts, hiding themselves. On every rock there sits a ghost who nods its head and whispers quietly as I pass.’
He walked away and turned his back to her.
She wanted to go to him, to touch him, to mourn with him. He stood by a scattering of stones that had been his home. She watched him pace the spaces between them. He stopped and knelt and stroked them as he would the neck of his horse. Then he stood and faced her.
‘Why, Kate?’ He was shouting. ‘What had they done to finish this way? Were they not good Catholics? Did they not keep the faith? Didn’t they bow their heads and give thanks to their invisible God morning, noon and night? And when they lay shrivelled and filthy and dying here among these stones, did they not ask themselves why? Why us? Maybe they did ask but they were never given an answer.’
He went away slowly towards the mountain. She did not follow. They were still too far apart.
She had become Coburn’s constant companion, at his side at every rally, with him at every speech. The crowds that came to hear him were fired by his passion but it was not his words alone that gave them hope and new resolve. It was the young woman with him, the Englishman’s daughter who had deserted her own to become part of them. With her shining black hair, tied up with green ribbons, she had become a legend of their own making. The one they called the ‘Dark Rosaleen’.
British newspapers eagerly grasped at it. The Young Irelanders rarely featured in their coverage but this was something extraordinary and they made it more so in the exaggerated fashion of their trade. It was magnified so that Kate, not the rebels and their aspirations, became the story. Cartoons in The London Times and the Illustrated London News caricatured her with fire in her eyes and snakes, not ribbons, streaking from her hair, like Medusa. She was held responsible for acts of violence they had not committed, attacks on landlords where there had been none. She was reported to have been seen in Kerry on a white stallion at the head of a hundred armed riders. In another report from Wicklow, she had charged and trampled under hoof an entire platoon of carabineers. The newspaper proprietors and their editors knew well enough the value of the story and the insatiable appetite their readers had for drama.
How easily fiction became fact. How quickly truth was absorbed by lies, the lies themselves becoming accepted truths. The make-believe in print began to assume such substance that the government was obliged to take notice. A proclamation soon appeared in the London Gazette, stating that Kathryn Macaulay, daughter of Sir William Macaulay, formerly Commissariat General for Irish Relief, was indicted for treason. A reward of five thousand pounds would be paid for information leading to her arrest.
Since his disgrace and departure from Ireland, Sir William had lived the life of an exile in his house in the Lincolnshire fens. Except for his two manservants, he saw no one and nobody wished to see him. It is said that memories serve old men well, that their lives are given extra spice in retrieved fond and loving reminiscences. But all that had been good and dear in Sir William’s life had been erased by the tragedy that was Ireland. So he spent his days sitting alone and filled the vacuum with whiskey and brandy.
News of the proclamation was posted to him from London. It was brought to his bedroom with his early morning coffee. When his manservants later returned to help him dress, they found him still in bed. He would not talk. They thought he could not. He lay perfectly still, looking at the ceiling, his eyes unblinking, unmoving, and they thought him paralysed. They called the doctor but he could not rouse him. He would not move. He would not eat his broth nor drink his medicines. On the seventh day his servants heard him shouting. As they entered his bedroom they saw him convulse, raise himself from his pillows and call out a woman’s name. Then his heart stopped beating. As he fell back, the air gushed from his lungs and he called out her name again for the last time.
The servants closed his eyes, pulled the bedcover over him and went for the undertaker. The name their master had uttered in his last breath meant nothing to them. They had never known his wife.
It was Moran who told Kate of her father’s death. Sir William had been in the ground a fortnight, buried within the family enclosure of St Botolph’s church in Boston. The vicar was the only one to witness the disgraced knight’s departure and three lines in the obituary column of The London Times were all that marked a half century of devoted public service.
Kate sat with Moran in the refectory at Dromoland. He had ridden that night from Tipperary with the news. He said people were rejoicing at it.
‘It grieves me, Miss Kathryn, to tell you of this. He should not be dishonoured this way. He was a good man, forced to do dreadful things.’
‘Tell me, Moran. How should I mourn?’
‘I cannot answer you, Miss Kathryn.’
‘I disgraced him’.
‘That is not for me to say’.
‘There was no one at his grave?’
‘So it was written in the newspapers.’
‘I would have gone if I had known.’
‘You would not have come back, Miss Kathryn. We know they had agents at Fishguard and Swansea in case you did cross the sea. In Boston too. They’d have caught and hanged you. Better he was buried alone.’
He could not help her. He wanted to comfort her but he could not touch even her hand. She was of them now, a rebel, an outlaw, but in her company he would always be her butler.
Late that afternoon Coburn took her to Clenagh, a half hour’s ride south of Dromoland. He knew it well. He had walked its beaches many times. He knew of the ancient ruin of a tower there that would serve as a chapel where she could mourn the memory of a father she had loved and barely known. He knew too that she would take her rosary with her, a symbol of the faith that had finally broken them apart.
Coburn sat at the foot of the tower and listened to her prayers. How often had he done the same? A young man mourning those he had lost, those who had had no burial, no grave, no cross, no evidence of having lived at all.
She came and sat by him. Across the Shannon, in the evening light, they could just see the blurred outlines of Coney Island and Inishmore and the promontory of Rineanna Point. A sea mist was slowly snaking its way up river. Soon it would cover the sands and creep up the headland and before long all of Clare would lay damp and hidden under it. Coburn pointed.
‘Look, Kate. Over there to the left. Another one off to the promised land.’
A three-master edged its way into view, the wind on its beam, its sails stiff and full. They watched in silence as it moved slowly down river until it too was swallowed up in the blanket of mist. The hundreds aboard had glimpsed their last of the land they would never see again.
‘I blame them, Kate, and yet I envy them too,’ said Coburn.
‘You read my thoughts, Daniel.’
‘I think I often do.’
‘If you envy those who leave, you must have thought of it yourself.’
‘Many times. But to think is not to do. I could never leave. There is something too deep inside me, call it what you will.’
‘I think it’s called love, Daniel. There must be many kinds of love and to love what you have been born to might be the strongest.’
‘Then you must love England still.’
‘Yes! You would think so. Perhaps I did once. But not now and it’s not England’s fault. But you will never change, Daniel.’
‘I love Ireland. Indeed I do. But I wonder if there is a stronger love.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I have never loved. I have never been loved.’
He stood up. ‘Maybe there’s a way of not knowing love but feeling it. If it comes as a stranger you might not recognise it. Then you might lose what you might have loved.’
She watched him walk slowly to the edge of the cliff. It was as if he was ending their talk, as if there was nothing left for them to say, when she felt there was so much more. She did not want an ending. She had been with him, ridden at his side for over a year and yet he had never spoken this way to her before. She waited. He turned and beckoned.
‘Kate, will you come to me?’
‘Must we leave, Daniel?’
He shook his head.
‘No! But read my mind, Kate. Read it and tell me what you see. Tell me what I feel.’
‘Daniel, I cannot.’
‘Try, Kate. Let me hold your hands. Put them in mine. What do you feel?’
‘I feel your pulse, your heart beating. It’s very strong.’
‘Kate, have you never really loved?’
‘No, never.’
‘And no one has ever loved you?’
‘No.’
He held her hands tight and brought them to his chest.
‘I think I love you, Kate. I have never known it but what I feel for you must be love. It is stronger than anything I have ever felt. You must know it too. You felt my heart pounding.’
‘Is it stronger than your love of Ireland?’
‘I do believe it is.’
He smiled and kissed the palms of her hands. She leant up to him and kissed him lightly on the lips. Then she kissed him again. He picked her up in his arms and walked back slowly towards the tower. He put her down in the soft ferns that ringed its walls and lay beside her. The air was still warm. The first wisps of sea mist circled above them. The only sounds were the soft rattle of waves along the sands below and the call of a distant curlew.
‘Let me woo you with your own poem, Kate. The one they’ve named you after.’
She rested her head against his shoulder and felt his warm breath on her face. She closed her eyes as he spoke.
I could scale the blue air, I could plough the high hills.
I could kneel all night in prayer to heal your ills.
One smile from you would float like light
Between my toils and me,
My own, my true, my Dark Rosaleen.
‘A little boy from Kinsale taught me that,’ she said. ‘A million years ago.’
‘What was his name?’
‘I knew him only as Eugene.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Buried only a short walk from where he was born. That was as much as he knew of this world and he had such a yearning to learn more. I was so proud of him, he might have been my own child. He lost his family in the first year of the famine.’
‘I was that same little boy,’ Daniel said. ‘One of thousands of children left to survive as best as they could on their own.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I was eleven years old, but so small and thin that people thought I was six. It was just another year of many hungers but the worst of it was in my own Mayo. It takes three months to starve to death. Did you know that? That’s a long time for a little boy to watch that much suffering. And to think that only a month before we had flowering potatoes with stems as thick as that little boy’s wrists.
‘One morning, we woke and knew we had lost them just by the smell. Father had seen it all before. He knew there was nothing to do but sit and wait for the bailiffs and the tumbling gangs. So he went off to the whiskey dens and never came back. I looked for him and my sisters and brothers searched too. But mother knew he was gone.
‘I tried to feed them. I stole turnip tops and at night I milked the udder of a rich man’s cow. Sometimes I would cut a vein in its neck and draw out the blood and mix it with the milk. But everyone was doing it and men sold their cows before they were bled to death. I searched the beaches for dead crabs and rotten fish and when a storm fetched up seaweed we ate that too. Once I found a cockle but I never found another. Do you know that there wasn’t a bird flying, not a frog or a snail to be found anywhere? The land had been scoured clean of life.
‘So we sat by the peat fire and ate blind herring. Do you know what that is, Kate? It’s a fish that isn’t there except in your mind. We sat eating fish that wasn’t there and we wasted away. They died, slowly, one after the other. It must have been the fever.
‘So the little boy sat, not knowing what to do, not having the strength to bury them on his own. So he set fire to the hovel he had called home. I buried them in fire, Kate. My flesh. My blood. All of them. Remember that day in Connemara? You asked me where they were buried and I didn’t answer? They were under the stones, Kate. That little square of stones I walked around. That was their grave. All my family, together.’
She wrapped her arms around him and began a story of her own. Of another boy she had seen one night in the fire of her Lincolnshire home. A child encircled by flames, his small face cursed by innocence, wondering who was to blame for the pain of dying so young and forgotten. His image had scorched her with a scar as vivid as any wound from a firebrand.
She told of how often that boy had entered her dreams, of the night when she was in the final throes of her fever and how he had held out his hands and saved her.
‘Am I that little boy, Kate?’
She did not answer. She pulled him tight towards her and kissed him again many times and, cloaked within the soft warm mist, they were joined.