Rita had escaped! The news had spread like wildfire among the Maggies. It had been at least two years since anyone had managed to break free of the laundry. Two of the orphans had made a half-hearted attempt the previous June and had been brought back by the guards, but, knowing Rita, she would not be careless enough to be caught. She had pretended to sleep all night in her bed and in reality hidden somewhere down near the laundry. Sister Josepha had locked up, not realizing that Rita was still inside. They’d found one of the tall narrow windows in the steam room slightly open and surmised she must have wriggled through it and somehow climbed the yard wall. Sisters Gabriel and Vincent were behaving
like Nazi storm troopers, searching the dormitories and every nook and cranny of the convent and laundry, even checking the outhouses, for the runaway and the possibility that one of the other penitents had aided and abetted her. The women were frightened by the nuns’ behaviour, but poor Sister Jo-Jo bore the brunt of Gabriel’s anger. The gardener had found a high wooden stool abandoned in the thorny pyracantha bushes near the wall, which made it far more likely that Rita had escaped.
The women ate their breakfast in suppressed silence, feigning interest in the thick gloopy porridge and stale brown bread. Esther prayed silently that Rita had actually managed to break free and get out of this prison to which they’d all been abandoned.
“They’ll bring her back,” murmured Maura. “They always do!”
“She’s not a prisoner!” Esther protested. “None of us are. They can’t force her to stay.”
“But she’s run off with a fellah!” guffawed Sheila. “Old Gabriel will just love that!”
Rumours and stories circulated all morning and Sister Jo-Jo kept slipping in and out of the laundry to go up to the office. By midday a further piece of information had been added to the story: a baby was missing from the orphanage. There were rumours of a nun or a fancily dressed woman lifting it in her arms and walking straight out of the gates with it. “She stole a babby!” whispered the three Marys.
“She took her own baby,” said Maura tersely.
“She took baby Patrick!” declared Sheila triumphantly. “Herself and the baby have got away!”
No wonder Rita had kept on refusing to sign the papers to let Patrick be fostered, thought Esther. She must have been planning her escape for ages.
Saranne Madden was called to Sister Gabriel’s office. She had started to shake the minute she was summoned. Esther had suspected that she might be involved.
“The nuns’ll beat it out of her!” warned Maura.
They all pitied Saranne: like the rest of the orphans, her life so far had been nothing but misery. She had never known a home or family life, or had someone to care about her. Rita had turned her head, flattered her, returned her craving for attention and affection. Saranne did not return for an hour, her thin face swollen with crying.
“Did she hurt you, lovey?” enquired Sheila.
“She strapped me!” whined sixteen-year-old Saranne, holding out her livid red hands; wide welts of bruised torn skin covered her palms. They were too sore for her to bend or use. “She slapped me too. I did nothing! Honest! Rita kept asking me about the orphanage, what it was like growing up there. I thought she were interested in me, not just the babies and the nursery.”
“Rita’s a bitch, a selfish bitch!” Bernice spat out vehemently to the group of them. “She could have taken me with her. We could have got my Stephen too, but no, Miss bloody Rita Whatever-her-real-name-is didn’t give a damn about anybody but herself, wasn’t interested in me or my baby!”
“Ber! Shut up! There’s enough trouble as there is
without you bringing Sister Jo-Jo down on us all.”
“I thought she was my friend!” sobbed the distraught Bernice. “Why didn’t she take me with her? Now I’ll never get out of here. There’s no-one in my bloody family going to come looking for me or my baby. I’ll be left to rot here and never get out!”
Esther had to steel herself to keep her sanity in the days following the breakout. The Mother Superior, Mother Benedict, had introduced stricter disciplinary measures in both the orphanage and the laundry.
The platter-faced head nun talked to them all in the refectory. “The matter of a woman absconding with a child is not one that I or my fellow-sisters take lightly. Think of that poor child, taken from the care of nuns who are devoted to their small charges, his young life ruined. Mrs. Byrne the social worker and myself had high hopes for that baby. As we speak there is a heartbroken couple who were chosen to be his parents. They were willing to raise him and educate him and consider him as their own son, despite his low background. I had the unpleasant task of informing them of this situation. Now they will have to rejoin the waiting list, along with hundreds of other good couples. What of this child? He is reunited with his mother. What will happen to this innocent babe if she returns to her fallen ways? Who will look after him then?”
The question hung heavy in the air, the women silent, not daring to reply.
Sister Gabriel blamed Sister Josepha’s easygoing ways, and was determined to come down hard on the penitents. They
deserved no trust or understanding. She had a vindictive streak, and had Saranne’s hair shorn close to her scalp, making an example of her. Saranne looked like a small scared skeleton, her bruised hands constantly touching her almost bare skull.
“Wait till you see, lovey!” promised Sheila. “Your hair will grow back thicker and glossier than before, honest!”
In the laundry they now had to work in almost complete silence, and at night each dormitory was locked. The women, nervous, had complained about it.
“What if there’s a fire, Sister, how will we manage to get out?”
“The window.” That was all the old battleaxe had said. Obviously she considered their lives, their discomfort, nothing in her scheme of things.
The slight trust that had existed between the Maggies and the nuns, their “guardians,” totally disappeared.
“We’re like bloody slaves out in Rome or Africa!” jeered Bernice.
At all times the whereabouts of the women were to be known and there was to be no break from routine. Break-times were supervised, and even visits to the toilet had to be accompanied, Sister Vincent arriving unannounced in the laundry a few times a day to check on them all.
“They’ll want to put us in chains next, the old bitches!” spat Sheila, her face livid with temper. “A fecking chain gang!”
Esther was glad at least to be working in the kitchen, where Ina was in some ways kind to her. She helped with the washing-up, the table-setting, and clearing the plates when the others finished eating. Scraping nuns’ leftovers
into the big tin buckets for collection by Joe, the pig farmer from Rathfarnham, Esther occasionally managed to retrieve a choice piece of meat or a nice soft bread roll, even a slice of unwanted fruit cake which she could share with the others later or savour herself. The last few weeks she always seemed to be starving, and was glad that Ina turned a blind eye, knowing well that scavenging food was one of the few perks of kitchen duty.
There was still no trace of Rita. Ina reckoned she’d gone to England on the mailboat.
“She’s away in Liverpool,” confided Jim Murray over his usual mug of tea at the kitchen door. “That Paul fellow helped her. They were always scheming, more luck to them!”
“I knew that pair were up to something, she was always making eyes at him,” grunted Ina. “She were probably having it off with him!”
Esther blazed, hoping that they wouldn’t look over in her direction. Rita would have had no idea of the trouble she’d brought on the rest of them by escaping.
“Joe Reilly went up by his digs yesterday. They were meant to be going to a football match together. His landlady said that he’d just upped and left, didn’t even bother giving her notice or nothing.”
“Do you think they’ve run off together, Jim?”
“Maybe!”
“Of course, when they hear, all the rest of them’ll want to escape too,” muttered Ina. “‘Tis always the way. One goes and they all get notions. Sure, where would the like
of the poor craters here be going? Who’d have them!”
Esther attended to her work, washing about a hundred mugs, clinking them together in the Belfast sink in temper, Jim Murray looking over at her, bemused. Business they had discussing the women and girls, belittling them! Everyone looked down on the Maggies, it wasn’t fair!
As the days of her confinement grew closer, Esther felt like a prisoner sentenced for a crime she did not commit, like an animal trapped in a tunnel. She knew that the imminent birth of her baby was all that mattered. Her body was more than ready to be rid of its burden, and she herself yearned to finally see and hold her baby. Soon she would be a mother without ever having been a bride or wife. Romance and sexual pleasure, that’s what had brought her to this, and yet somehow she had to believe that God intended for this child to be born, and for her to carry it.