“I’m bored.”
Now that Will was feeling a little better, he was chafing more at being confined to the house.
“You were very, very sick,” Elizabeth reminded him. “And you’re not completely better yet.”
Outside, the sky had let loose with a steady rain that was forecasted to last for a few days, bringing an unseasonable chill to the air for mid-June.
Elizabeth was opening cupboard doors and checking the pantry as the children ate breakfast. “I hadn’t realized how low we are on everything,” she said. “Tell you what, if you two will stay here and keep each other entertained, I’ll bring you each back a surprise.”
Will brightened at that. Conn nodded, understanding “keep each other entertained” to mean that she was to keep Will entertained.
“Under no circumstances are you to go out in this rain, young man,” Elizabeth warned as she donned a raincoat and gathered her purse and car keys. “All we need is for you to get sick again.”
As the Nomad splashed away through the muddy puddles in the drive, Conn turned to Will and said, “How about a ghost story?”
Will nodded, looking equal parts scared and excited. Conn collected a flashlight from a kitchen drawer, and together, she and Will spread a couple of sheets over the dining room table so that they hung down to the floor, enclosing them in a tent.
“Now,” said Conn in a dramatic whisper, the flashlight illuminating them from below and casting spooky shadows over their features, “once upon a time, two sisters lived with their family in Ireland…”
By the time Elizabeth got home, Will was completely engrossed in Conn’s story of Caitríona and Orla.
“Mom!” he shouted as they heard her enter the kitchen. He scrambled out from their tent.
“What in the world have you two been doing?” Elizabeth laughed as she saw what they had done to her dining room.
“Telling ghost stories!” Will said excitedly. “Conn’s been telling me more about Caitríona Ní Faolain and her sister.”
Elizabeth glanced curiously at her daughter as she set a box of groceries on the kitchen counter. “Like what?”
“Like how their dad sold them and how they almost died on the boat,” blurted Will.
“And how do you know these things?” Elizabeth asked, turning back to her groceries.
Conn shrugged. “I guess I dreamed them,” she said nonchalantly. “I’ll get the rest of the groceries,” she volunteered as Will launched into a recap of his sister’s tale.
When she came back in, letting the screen door slap shut behind her, Elizabeth was still listening to Will. She turned and looked at Conn with a curious expression, and Conn knew that the stories were stirring something deep within her mother’s memory.
“What’s our surprise?” Will asked, interrupting the moment.
Elizabeth blinked. “Oh yes, your surprise.” She pulled a new Hardy Boys mystery out of the box and handed it to Will. “Here you go,” she said. “This might be a little hard for you to read, but I think you’ll enjoy it.” Then she turned to Conn and held out a book with a plain black cover. “I know you like to read,” she said, “but I thought you might like to start keeping a journal.”
“Hey,” said Will, “just like Caitríona.”
Conn had been thinking the exact same thing, remembering the journal Eilish had given to her younger daughter. As she accepted the journal from her mother, lifting it to smell the leather, she felt a sense of continuity and suddenly wondered if Caitríona’s journal still existed.
They whiled away the remainder of the dreary, rainy day – Will lost in his Hardy Boys adventure, Conn up in her bedroom writing in her journal. At first, she had stared at the empty pages, not sure what to write, but then she thought about the day the Marines came to the house, and it seemed her pencil could not move fast enough to keep up with her thoughts.
She glanced up as her mother knocked on her bedroom door and peeked in. Conn quickly closed her journal and sat up on her bed.
Elizabeth smiled. “You don’t have to worry. Journals are meant to be private. I would never read yours without your permission.”
Conn nodded.
“You’ve been up here all day,” Elizabeth said. “Hungry?”
Conn realized her stomach was rumbling. “I’m starving,” she said. She hopped off her bed and accompanied her mother downstairs. “What have you been doing?”
“Oh, catching up on letters, reading a little. It seemed like a good day for that sort of thing.”
Conn sniffed as she followed Elizabeth into the kitchen. “Boy, that smells good. What is it?”
“Johnny cake and beans,” Elizabeth said, stirring a large pot of beans on the stove. “Nana used to make this. I’d forgotten, but I found an old cookbook with some of her recipes. It sounded good today.”
A short while later, she laughed as Conn reached for a third piece of Johnny cake and spooned a generous helping of beans over it. Even Will had had seconds.
“Well, I guess we’ll be having this for dinner more often. But I have a feeling,” she said with a wry expression, “that within about twelve hours, you’re going to be very glad we have an indoor bathroom.”
§§§
Winter came to the plantation with leaden skies and many days of cold, dreary rain. The upper floors of the house were kept clean and ready for the master, but no fires were lit in the bedrooms. Unfortunately, this meant that by the time Orla and Caitríona got up to their room at night, it was freezing. The tiny coal stove in their room eventually made it tolerable, but the girls learned quickly to heat water in the kitchen and fill glazed crocks to take upstairs at bedtime to use as bedwarmers.
“One good thing about having six of us in a bed,” Caitríona said one night, her teeth chattering, “was we kept each other warm.”
Orla sighed. “Oh, all right then. Come on over.”
Caitríona quickly padded over to her sister’s bed and slipped under the covers.
“Your feet are like ice!” Orla yelped.
Caitríona’s shivers gradually calmed as she warmed up. She startled Orla with a sharp intake of breath. “Orla, do you know what day this is?”
“Of course I do. It’s Monday,” Orla said groggily.
“No, silly.” Caitríona slipped back out of bed and lit a candle which she placed in the window. “It’s Christmas Eve.”
She crawled back under the covers. “Nollaig Shona Duit, Orla,” she said softly.
“Nollaig Shona Duit, Caitríona.”
Caitríona’s candle was the plantation’s only acknowledgement of Christmas. Work continued unceasingly through the short, dark days. Most afternoons, Caitríona slipped away for an hour to meet Hannah and continue her reading lessons. With the master and Batterston both gone, Caitríona had felt brazen enough to borrow books from the house’s library.
“They’ll never miss one book at a time,” she insisted when Orla warned her not to do it.
The library’s selections were somewhat limited, with mostly dry histories and accounts of military campaigns, but there were a few volumes of Milton, Chaucer and Shakespeare. Hannah could not yet read these by herself, but Caitríona read aloud to her, sitting up in one of the stable’s lofts, huddled together with a horse blanket wrapped around their shoulders.
“If anyone finds out, we’ll both be in trouble,” Hannah reminded her often, but Caitríona didn’t care. The hours she spent with Hannah were the happiest she’d been since leaving home.
One day, a wagon rattled toward the plantation in the midst of a fierce wind blowing from the north. The horses pulled with lowered heads while the driver sat shivering on his high seat, wrapped to his eyes with heavy wool throws. Burley rushed out to meet him and help unload the sugar, flour and salt he had brought.
The driver gratefully accepted Burley’s invitation to unhitch the horses for the night and come into the kitchen for some hot food and drink.
“The river and canal are iced over,” the driver told them as he shoveled some of Dolly’s chicken and dumplings into his mouth. “Most like, won’t be no more traffic till spring. Oh,” he added, reaching toward his coat and pulling out an envelope from an inside pocket. “I near forgot.”
Burley took the envelope, and then, in surprise, handed it to Orla. It was addressed simply, “Orla & Caitríona Ní Faolain, Lord Playfair Plantation, America,” in rather scratchy handwriting.
As mail was such a rare thing, Orla was surrounded in the kitchen as she broke open the seal, which looked like plain candle wax.
“It’s from Colm,” she said, frowning. She read aloud, “Dear Orla and Caitríona, I hope and pray this letter gets to you. I am writing to tell you the sad news that Mam and the new baby died…” Orla’s voice caught as her hand flew to her mouth.
Caitríona gently pulled the letter from her sister’s shaking hand. “… died 3rd September. Da is drinking worse than ever. Mary and I have been trying to take care of the wee ones, but I may have to leave soon to find work as we have no money and no food.” Her voice also faltered.
“Oh, my poor dears,” Ellie said, near tears herself. Everyone else in the kitchen was silent. She wrapped a matronly arm around Orla’s shoulders. “How old are the other children?”
Orla brushed tears from her cheeks. “Colm is twelve and Mary is eleven. And there are four younger,” she said.
“Oh dear, oh dear,” Ellie said.
Caitríona stood abruptly. “I’m going to cut more kindling for the fire.”
“Leave that,” Burley tried to object as she pulled a heavy wool cloak off a hook near the door, but as she yanked the door open, she heard Orla say to him, “Let her go.”
Orla found her nearly an hour later, out in the bitterly cold wind, still trying to cut wood with hands so numb they could barely hold the axe.
Gently, Orla pulled the axe handle from her sister’s frigid fingers and led her into the wood shed. Orla’s eyes were red from weeping, but Caitríona’s were dry. They sat on a stack of split wood, and Orla waited.
“He sold us for land he’s not even working!” Caitríona exploded at last.
“Maybe he will, now,” said Orla calmly. “He’s just grieving for Mam.”
“He’s no time to grieve,” Caitríona said angrily. “He’s got six living children to feed.”
They sat in silence for a while, until Caitríona moaned, “If they’re going hungry, if they end up in the poorhouse after everything, what was the bloody point of it all?”
§§§
Elizabeth rushed into Conn’s dark bedroom, having been awakened by the sound of her daughter crying.
“Hey, hey,” she said soothingly, brushing Conn’s hair off her sweaty forehead and trying to wake her from her nightmare.
Conn sat up, sobbing, and clung to her mother, still crying.
“It’s okay,” Elizabeth murmured. “Whatever it was, it’s not real. It was just a dream.”
She held Conn, rocking her and humming until her crying stopped. She laid Conn back on her pillow, brushing her face again.
“What was it?”
Conn rubbed her red eyes, sniffing. “I dreamed… I dreamed someone told me you were dead,” she said.
“Oh, honey,” Elizabeth said, softly. She leaned forward and kissed Conn’s forehead. “I’m right here. I’ll always be here.”