Tommy pulled Maura to him. ‘No one was closer to our Kitty than Nellie, that’s for sure. She will be missing Kitty badly, so she will. Ye can’t worry about everyone, Maura. Once our Kitty is home and Nellie has her friend once more, they will both be back to normal.’
Within seconds Tommy had fallen into a deep sleep, but Maura lay awake into the small hours, worrying about everyone and everything but most of all about Kitty, whose secret baby was to be delivered at the Abbey mother-and-baby home in Galway. Almost no one, other than those closest to her, knew.
No one on the four streets, not even nosy Peggy next door, had suspected what had really happened to Kitty, or why.
‘I’m grand, thank you, Auntie Maura,’ Nellie had replied without her usual bright smile. ‘Would you like a cuppa tea?’
‘Aye, put the kettle on, Nellie,’ said Kathleen as she slapped the big round potato-bread onto a tray and slid it into the range oven at the side of the fire. Every woman on the four streets baked in the morning, using the roaring heat of the first fire of the day, before they began to simmer the stock.
‘Any news?’ Maura asked Nana Kathleen as she pulled a chair out from under the table.
Kathleen knew exactly what she was talking about. Both women had been waiting for some kind of fallout since the night Jerry’s wife had left him for his workmate and neighbour, Sean. But Jerry had barely reacted at all. The emotional tempest anticipated by the women had never arrived.
‘No, not a dickie bird. I have to say this about our Jer, I’ve never seen a man recover from a broken heart as fast as he has, so I haven’t. Seven days they have been gone and this morning, he didn’t even mention her. Nothing like when Bernadette died and he was beyond any consolation that I, or anyone else, could give him.’
‘What about little Joseph?’ Maura whispered, so as not to wake him.
‘Well now, that’s different altogether. He’s asleep now because he’s been awake all night. The poor child has no idea what is going on. When he is in my arms, he pulls me to the kitchen window and I know he is looking down the backyard for his mammy. Maura, what can I do? I cannot even say her name, so I can’t, or I will risk setting him off. Thanks be to God for our Nellie. She can really distract him now, much better than me, can’t you, Nellie?’
Nellie looked across at them from the range and nodded. Maura noted that she looked sad-eyed, as though carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders.
‘And what about poor Brigid?’ said Maura.
Maura was referring to Sean’s wife: the wronged woman, deserted without the slightest inkling that anything had been amiss and left with a house full of little red-haired daughters to keep and care for. A woman who was both extremely house-proud and very much in love with her husband and her perfect family. Perfect, that is, until the moment on the night before Christmas Eve when she had opened a note she found propped on the mantelshelf, informing her that Sean, the husband she had devoted her life to, had run away to America with Alice, the wife of her friend Jerry.
That was the moment when everything had altered. When her love had turned to hate. In one tick of the clock, her life had gone from light to dark. All she believed was true in their world had washed away before her, in a river of tears.
‘We should call in and see her this morning,’ said Kathleen. ‘The poor woman is distraught.’
Nellie was pouring boiling water into the tin teapot when she saw Bill from the pub burst through the gate, run down the yard and in through the back door.
‘Maura,’ he panted. ‘Maura, ye have to get to the pub now, yer relative from home, Rosie, she will be calling back in thirty minutes. She says to tell ye she is phoning from Mrs Doyle’s in Bangornevin. She needs to speak to ye as well, Kathleen. She said I have to take ye both together ’cause she won’t have the chance to call back again, she needs to speak to ye both and that I had to make sure of that.’
With that, Bill ran back down the yard to the pub where the draymen were in the middle of a delivery. But that mattered not a jot. News from home was the most important kind and not to be kept waiting.
Kathleen, Maura and Nellie looked at each other, but no one spoke until Nellie whispered into the silence, ‘Can Kitty have had the baby?’
She put down the kettle and moved closer to the others. They were in their own home and no one could possibly overhear them, but they were the only females in Liverpool who knew why Kitty was in Ireland. She had slipped across the water, in the dead of night, with Kathleen and Nellie for company.
The baby growing in her belly had been put there by Father James, and Tommy had ensured he paid for it. A priest’s murder, dismembered of his langer, coinciding with a child’s pregnancy would surely have guaranteed that Tommy would have been hanged once the police realized he had been defending his daughter’s honour. The connection was too obvious.
Kitty had awaited the birth in Galway, hiding in a convent and working in a laundry. Waiting out her pregnancy and delivery.
Sister Evangelista and Kitty’s school friends believed that Kitty was visiting Maura’s sister who was poorly and needed help, but on the four streets only three women – Maura, who was Kitty’s mother, and her closest friends, Kathleen and her granddaughter, Nellie – knew the truth. Or so they had thought.
‘She’s not due for three more weeks, but it is possible,’ said Maura.
‘If it’s Rosie wants to speak to ye, then that baby has been born and if Rosie is at Mrs Doyle’s, it’s her way of letting us know Kitty is at Maeve’s farmhouse and safe,’ said Kathleen.
Maura was already standing at the back door, holding it open and waiting impatiently whilst Kathleen tied her headscarf and fastened her coat, ready to run to the pub and reach the phone to hear news of her daughter. She had counted the days, one by one, since Kitty had been dropped off at the Abbey. Thoughts of her daughter were the first to enter her mind as she woke in the morning and the last as she closed her damp eyes at night. The pain of missing Kitty was almost more than she had been able to bear.
But Maura knew that the existence of Kitty’s baby would have provided the police with a motive and a direct line to the murdered priest.
The only way Maura had been able to maintain any degree of normality, after she returned with Kathleen from Ireland, was to believe that Kitty was happy and being well looked after. That she would have made friends with the other girls, and that the nuns would not have made her work too long, or too hard, in the laundry as her pregnancy progressed. These thoughts had sustained her throughout the months of missing her daughter.
‘As God is true, I have been counting the days to this news, Kathleen,’ Maura said as they ran down the entry together.
‘I know, Maura. Jeez, can we stop a minute. I’m pulling for tugs here.’
Maura stood and waited for the older woman to catch her breath. Kathleen, red in the face and panting, reached into her pocket for her cigarettes. ‘It helps me breathing,’ she said to Maura, offering her the packet to take one.
The phone rang just as they pushed through the wooden doors and Bill smiled as he waved them over.
‘Aye, they are both coming through the door right away. Ye can speak now…’
His words trailed off, as Maura grabbed the phone from his hand.
‘Rosie, have ye any news?’ Maura hissed, her heart beating wildly.
Rosie was a relative by marriage and a midwife. She had been due to deliver Kitty’s baby at the convent, in the middle of January.
‘Is she at Maeve and Liam’s? Shall we come to fetch her?’
There was silence at the end of the telephone.
Kathleen didn’t want Bill to hear the conversation between Maura and Rosie. There had been too many people interested in one another’s business since the murder of the priest, and then there had been poor Molly Barrett, bludgeoned to death in her own outhouse. That one had stumped even Kathleen.
She knew who had murdered the priest all right but Molly Barrett, that wa
s a mystery, which had perturbed them all.
‘It’s freezing out there, Bill,’ said Kathleen. ‘Any chance of a couple of ports before we run back? Not often we get news from home in a phone call.’
‘It’s more often than not a birth and sometimes a death, Kathleen. Has your Liam got Maeve with a babby on the way, then?’ said Bill, grinning as he took a bottle out from underneath the bar and began pouring the ruby-red liquid into two glasses.
Kathleen grinned back uneasily and, taking the glass of port, used all her willpower not to down it in one.
‘Ye have been through a bit of bad luck, with Alice and all that business there over Christmas,’ said Bill to Kathleen, leaning on the bar.
‘Rosie, can ye hear me?’ said Maura, her voice louder this time.
‘Aye, Maura,’ came the reply down the crackling line. ‘I have just asked Mrs Doyle if I could speak in private and had to wait while she moved into the back of the post office.’
Maura could visualize the hovering Mrs Doyle, who looked as much like a crone as anyone who hadn’t met her could possibly imagine and a crone with more than her fair share of rotting teeth.
Rosie’s voice crackled down the line again.
‘Kitty has had the baby, Maura, but I’m afraid I was not in attendance. The snow brought the Abbey telephone lines down and they couldn’t get through to me, until yesterday morning.’
‘Oh, Holy Mother of God, is she all right?’
Maura’s eyes filled with tears. The longing to be at her daughter’s side clutched at her heart, robbing her of breath and dragging her down, till she was bent double over the counter with her free hand involuntarily clutching her abdomen.
‘The baby was born on Christmas morning. It was a boy and his adoption to an American couple was arranged even before he had filled his first nappy, so it was. I got her to Maeve’s as quickly as God allowed me. I have news, Maura…’
The line crackled and hissed as Rosie’s voice faded.
‘Rosie, Rosie, are ye there?’
The line was totally dead. The crackling had stopped.
Maura cared nothing now of what Bill could hear. Rosie had just said that Kitty had had the baby and then – nothing.
‘Rosie!’ she yelled down the line.
‘Is everything all right, Maura?’ asked Kathleen, concerned.
‘I don’t know. She said she had news and then she disappeared.’
With her hand outstretched and shaking, Maura handed the receiver to Kathleen.
‘Hello, hello, hello!’ Kathleen said loudly, and then she heard Rosie’ s return.
‘Kathleen, thank God you are there.’
3
IT WAS TWO days after Christmas. Within a second of her opening her Dublin office door with her Yale key, the black Bakelite phone on Rosie O’Grady’s desk rang. It was as though it had been patiently waiting for the first familiar sound of her return following the long Christmas break.
‘Oh, Holy Father, would you believe it,’ Rosie muttered to herself. ‘I’m not even through the door yet and it’s started already.’
The previous evening Rosie had doubted that she would even make it into work after a sudden and very heavy Christmas snowfall, which had covered Ireland from coast to coast. The roads in Roscommon, where Rosie lived, had been impassable in places, but she was relieved to see that, in Dublin at least, some effort had been made to clear the main roads.
Rosie had not missed a day of work in her entire life and there was no way she would allow the weather to defeat her now, despite the ploughed walls of snow on the roadside standing as high as six feet in places. As the head midwife at Dublin’s maternity hospital, senior midwife tutor and the chair of the Eire midwifery council, Rosie took her responsibilities, as well as her reputation for high standards and reliability, very seriously indeed.
The midwifery block was reached via four red sandstone steps that led up to an imposing, semicircular entrance hall, complete with parquet floor, whose windows overlooked the car park. The administration office doors flanked a wooden arch beyond which lay the wards and the main hospital. Rosie occupied the most impressive office, in accordance with her status, for she also had responsibility for the training school from which she proudly turned out twenty well-trained midwives each year. The majority of Dublin’s babies were delivered at home, but a growing number of women were choosing to give birth in hospital, especially those who were likely to have complications.
‘Morning, Mrs O’Grady.’
As Rosie passed through the revolving glass doors into the hospital foyer, Tom, the head hospital porter, greeted her from behind his high, glossy, dark-wood desk, tipping the brim of his cap as a mark of respect. She stamped the snow from her boots on a large coconut-hair mat before stepping onto the freshly polished wooden floor.
The hospital caretaker had taken advantage of the Christmas lull to buff every floor in the hospital. Rosie stood for a moment as she removed her headscarf and shook the last of the snowflakes onto the mat, inhaling deeply the familiar smell of fresh lavender floor wax. It had a calming effect on her.
‘I said if anyone makes it in today, it would be you, with you having travelled the furthest an’ all. On ward three, there’s a midwife not turned in for her shift yet and she only lives across the river. You have put her to shame, so you have, struggling all the way in from Roscommon.’
‘Well, it wasn’t easy, Tom,’ Rosie replied as she searched in her handbag for her office keys. ‘It took the help of a tractor and a very good husband to see me onto the Dublin road, or I would indeed still be stuck in Roscommon. We had all our animals down on the lower fields to make it easier over Christmas, so it hasn’t been too bad for us. I could at least commandeer the tractor without too much guilt, now. But that didn’t stop yer man grumbling, and, sure, being as he’s a farmer, he doesn’t usually need much of an excuse, now, does he?’
Tom laughed out loud, feeling sorry for any man who tried to cross Matron O’Grady.
‘Aye, well, you have still made it in and that is to your credit. We can complain all we like but to wake up on Christmas morning to a white Ireland, that was a miracle, was it not?’
Rosie smiled at Tom. It had been very special indeed. The fields and the church had looked magnificent. Even the old prison walls became magical and romantic.
‘Aye, Tom, it was a miracle. Deep snow on Christmas Day, who would have thought it?’
‘Shall I ring the kitchen, shall I? And ask Besmina to bring up your tea?’
‘Oh God, wouldn’t that just be grand. I’m parched,’ Rosie replied. ‘You can always rely on Besmina.’
‘You can, that. She will always be grateful to you for the job you gave her. You have a loyal employee for life there, Matron, and that’s for sure.’
Rosie’s husband had done everything possible that morning, to try to persuade her not to travel to Dublin.
‘Are ye mad?’ he had said when she had asked him to tow her car out onto the main Dublin road, using his farm tractor. ‘Phone lines are down all over the place. No one is driving anywhere. I will be halfway to Dublin by the time I find a decent stretch of road to leave you on, and then how in God’s name would I know ye had made it in? And tonight, how will ye travel back if it freezes over? It’s a Hillman Hunter ye drive, not a bloody tank.’
‘Aye, I know that,’ Rosie had replied. ‘Calm down for goodness’ sake. I don’t expect you to take me all the way to Dublin. Just leave me on the first clear stretch and I will manage the rest of the way.’
It didn’t matter how much he remonstrated with her, no one could alter Rosie’s mind about anything when it was made up. Once she had set herself on a course of action, she was unstoppable.
‘Jeez, the mule is less stubborn,’ her husband had grumbled as he set about moving the tractor out of the barn.
As she opened the office door to the ringing telephone, Rosie hastily dropped her bag onto the floor and pulled off her leather driving gloves with her teet
h. She noted that at least the hospital phones were working. Having removed the second glove, she just had time to lift the receiver to her ear before the caller hung up.
‘Good morning, Rosie O’Grady, matron midwife,’ she trilled down the line, cheered after her long and cold journey by the knowledge that tea was on its way to her office to warm her.
She secretly hoped that the office kitchen maid, Besmina, would pop a slice of thick, white, hot buttered toast onto the tray, as she often did. It had been over three hours since Rosie had left home to set off for the hospital and the loud rumblings from her stomach were letting her know as much.
The crackling phone line was poor, which wasn’t surprising, given the weather, but Rosie could just make out the voice on the other end as that of the Reverend Mother at the Abbey convent and laundry out in the windy west, near Galway.
She had been dreading this call.
Her heart dropped into her boots. There was only one reason why the Reverend Mother would be telephoning her now. Rosie was very careful to keep her distance from any of the laundries or the mother and baby homes run by the sisters. Their very existence made her uncomfortable.
For many years the Irish government had made use of the laundries to imprison women and hide them away. Rosie knew that girls were sent to the abbeys and convents by the authorities, for the most spurious of reasons, and would remain incarcerated there for their entire lives. Many were not, nor had ever been, pregnant. Some were sent for being nothing more than a pretty orphan, assigned to the Abbey for her own protection, away from the lure of temptation and sinful ways.
These girls, known as penitents, were transferred to the Abbey straight from the industrial schools, run by the nuns and brothers. Many were country girls from the village farms, victims of incest and rape, or just a girl carried away at a dance, or a fair. Those who found themselves pregnant outside of wedlock would be deposited abruptly at the Abbey’s doors by their parents or by the local priest. In their imprisonment, some went mad from grief and despair.
The Four Streets Saga Page 66