by Rose Doyle
'Come with me, Beezy,' I came up behind her, 'there's nothing to be gained…'
'I'm as entitled under God to have my say as this blackhearted divil is,' Beezy, shaking off my hand and staring into the priest's bulging eyes, was too brave by half. Either that or she was too foolish.
I would never have defied those eyes myself. They were half mad with hatred and rage. The other half was filled with a disbelief that he was being defied, and by a woman.
'God will not be mocked in these streets,' the priest spoke slowly, each word ringing out, 'and nor will He be denied.' He turned to the growing crowd. 'You see in this woman the devil come among you to do his work . . .'
'You're more of a divil than I'll ever be,' Beezy's folded arms held her scarlet shawl across her chest. The crowd, mostly men, took a breath.
Beezy's head was high and her back straight. With her hair piled high, washed in rainwater the day before and in shining coils on top of her head, she was almost as tall as the priest. The scar on her face twitched but she was magnificent anyway, brave beyond anything bestowed by the brandy.
'I've met your kind before,' Beezy went on, 'I've had them in my own bed and seen them panting around the girls who worked for me. The single difference between your kind and other men is that your kind are the greater liars. Ye're even the greater hypocrites . . .'
The priest lunged. With a huge hand he grabbed most of Beezy's hair, twisting and pulling at it until he threw her to her knees where she screamed at him in the name of God to stop. Holding hard on to her hair he brought the whip down across her shoulders. When the shawl fell away he stopped long enough to tear away the dress too. Then he grabbed her hair again and resumed his work with the whip on her bared flesh.
It all happened with a speed that froze my heart and stopped me where I was.
'Foul harlot,' the priest was hoarse and gasping, 'you will not defile these streets again,' he danced on his toes, the whip came down faster and faster, 'whore . . . you will take God's punishment for your moral depravity.' He was a great and frenzied black crow, with a fiery head and frothing beak. He was wheezing now too; nothing stopped him. 'You will be cast out. I will cast you out. . . whore . . . whore . . .' Beezy's blood spurted on to his prancing boots.
'In the name of God let me be,' Beezy's cry, as she tried to catch the flailing whip, was thin and pleading, not at all like herself. Still the priest didn't stop. There was a low moan from the crowd but no one stepped forward.
I pitched myself at the priest and grasped at the arm with the whip. I held on when, with an oath, he would have shaken me off.
'You'll kill her,' I screamed.
He turned the whip on me then. My arm felt as if it had been sliced as the leather cut across it, two, then three times. I let go. I heard a cry in the distance that sounded like my name. I didn't look round. My arm was numb and I wanted to go to Beezy.
She had begun to stagger to her feet, but the priest wasn't finished with her yet. As she dropped her hands to the ground and attempted to push herself upright he grabbed her hair again. Pulling on it cruelly he cast aside the whip and produced a pair of scissors from his pocket.
'God will be served,' there was a ferocious calm about him as he knelt in the mud in front of Beezy. And a righteousness. He brandished the scissors. 'I have come prepared to do God's work. You must know His punishment for the shameless,' the scissors cut through Beezy's hair, 'how He would want the wanton to be chastened . . .'
I was afraid to throw myself at him again, to even draw his attention on me. I didn't know what else he might do to Beezy with the scissors if I provoked him.
Beezy's hair, in all its glorious redness and curl, he threw into the mud of the street behind him. It landed at the feet of some of the men in the crowd. They didn't look down.
He stood then and looked at Beezy, a pitiful, shorn bundle at his feet. Almost casually he picked up the whip and poked her. He still held the scissors in his other hand.
'You won't come back here,' he said, 'and you will have respect for the priests of the Church from now on.' He nudged her again with the toe of his boot. 'Get up out of there and be on your…'
I moved then. I couldn't stay still any longer. But I was not alone. Daniel Casey's arm went about my shoulder at the same time that he seized the scissors from the priest's hand and slipped them into his pocket.
'In God's name, man,' he said, 'what have you done?'
The suddenness of the movement and of Daniel's appearance confused the priest. But only for a moment.
'I have carried out God's work,' he drew himself up. 'He has been well served here today.' He looked around the swollen crowd. 'Get a cart to take her out of here.'
A small man separated himself from his fellow citizens and ran, sideways like a crab, down the street to where a common cart and horse stood tethered to a post. He untied the animal and began to lead it and the cart back towards us.
'You call this God's work?' Daniel said.
His fingers had found the cuts made by the whip in my frock. He turned me gently and looked at the damage to the exposed skin. Then he turned me again so that I was facing him. He was white as a bed sheet, his eyes flint-cold. But he was very, very controlled and he had command. The crowd shifted and gave a mutter or two but didn't interfere. The priest glared at them but was silent. I'd no doubt everyone knew Daniel was a doctor; this was a small town and Daniel's landlady would have been talking.
'You'll be all right,' he said to me, I’ll look after you. Beezy too. I'll see to it that justice will be served,' he jerked his head in the direction of the priest, for what has happened here.'
Dropping to his knees beside Beezy, he lifted her so that she half sat, half fell across him. With her head lolling on his shoulder he examined the torn flesh of her back, then her head for damage where the hair had been shorn. Beezy, while he did this, was utterly silent.
I gathered her hair from the mud and bundled it deep into my pocket.
'God's work?' Daniel asked the question quietly as he stood and lifted Beezy with him. I helped him support her as the cart trundled to a halt at the outskirts of the crowd.
'God is served in many ways, doctor,' the priest said over his shoulder as he headed for his horse, 'and we must each do what we are ordained to do. You, sir, must look to man's temporal body. I will tend to his soul.'
'You call the merciless beating of women looking after the soul?' Daniel's voice, in the dreadful silence, carried after the priest. 'You think a Christ who preached love and forgiveness would condone this?' He held up a hand red with Beezy's blood. 'It's you and your kind who are damned, not this unfortunate woman. You are no Christian, sir, and should look to your own soul, if you have one, and beg your God's forgiveness.'
The priest, who had reached his horse, stood with his back to Daniel, listening. He put a foot into a stirrup and spun himself elegantly into the saddle before turning the animal and staring coldly down at Daniel.
'She defied me and she is a whore,' he stated as he jabbed the whip in Beezy's direction, 'it's for the good of all that I was able to cut short her visit to the town. Let today be a lesson to the vultures she lives with on the Curragh, a warning to them to stay out of the streets of Kildare.' He pointed the whip at me. 'Keep your own whore out of this town too, doctor. None are welcome.'
'You will burn in hell.' Daniel's quiet ferocity shook even the priest. 'But before that happens I'll see you're dealt with by whatever justice there is in this world.'
I helped him lift Beezy into the cart and we sat on either side of her as it rattled out of town. The driver, who had refused to help with Beezy, said nothing and drove fast. When I looked back before turning out of the street the crowd had broken up. Smaller groups of twos and threes looked after us and there was an air of gloom about them, as well there might have been, and maybe even a hint of remorse. Or I may be giving them credit for more humanity than existed in that miserable town.
'Slow down,' Daniel said as we bump
ed in and out of potholes, 'or, by God, I'll hold you responsible if this woman bleeds to death.'
We stopped at Daniel's lodgings for his medical bag and a blanket for Beezy. The landlady was unhappy about the blanket but Daniel assured her he would pay for it. This didn't greatly improve her humour but Daniel took choice, and the blanket, out of there with a sharp word to the driver.
He did what he could with Beezy's wounds while we moved along. Between us we made her as comfortable as possible. I held her while he dabbed my own gash with iodine.
'Thank you,' I said and we sat without another word and watched the green of the Curragh pass on either side. It was easier than looking at Beezy, with her shorn head and blanched face. I wanted to take her lovely hair from my pocket and show it to her but couldn't.
'I didn't think you believed in hell's fire? Or in God?' I said when the silence became unbearable.
'There are times . . .’ Daniel didn't finish and I didn't press him. There are times too when explanations are a waste of that time.
It started to rain as we came up to the village. The driver refused to wait for Daniel, who paid him and told him to get to hell back where he came from. Nance Reilly said Sarah and James could have Lizzie Early's bed for the night, so leaving room in nest number eleven for Daniel and me to lay Beezy Ryan on her stomach in her own bed while we bathed her back with borax in warm water. When we were sure it was thoroughly clean I tore strips from a petticoat and soaked them in salt water. We laid the cloths carefully over the wounds.
'They'll need to be replaced every few hours until healing begins,' Daniel said as he prepared and gave Beezy laudanum.
The cut to my own back was nothing much. My dress had been torn and the skin beneath broken but the result was no more than a deepish scratch. Daniel bathed it with the borax in water and covered it with another strip of soaked petticoat. It would cure within days and never give me any trouble.
Though Beezy's beating was a bad one she seemed more affected by the loss of her hair.
'Give me a drink, for God's sake,' were her first words when she broke her silence.
Her first action was to cover her head with her hands.
'I should never have left my house that night,' she said as tears coursed down her face. I had never seen, or thought to see, Beezy Ryan weep. 'It was the most foolish thing I've ever done in my life and I'll pay the price forever, and wherever I go. There would have been no fire and Mary Adams and Lizzie Early would be alive still if I hadn't fled . . .' she stared sightlessly, rocking back and forth where she sat. 'The priest is right. What happened today is God's judgement.'
'Your hair will grow again, Beezy,' I said, 'I've ribbons and a scarf that'll make something of it while it's short.'
'You can keep your ribbons and scarf,' Beezy said, but not unkindly, 'it's of no interest to me whether it grows back or not. I won't be needing long hair where I'm going.'
Daniel Casey and I stayed the night with her. We held hands for most of the time and we talked, very low, about a great many things. We kissed, once, a short kiss but warm.
Beezy slept fitfully. She didn't speak again.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Allie
Beezy refused to get well. What happened to her was as simple as that. The day after her whipping at the hands of Father Mangan (the wrens knew immediately who her torturer had been; it wasn't the first time Father Henry Mangan had used a pair of scissors on a wren), she objected to having her wounds dressed afresh.
Daniel would have none of it. With the help of Clara Hyland and myself he held her down while he examined her back and put on clean cloths. She had surprising strength for a sick woman. Her will had always been iron.
She found a way of imposing that will on the situation. She asked Nance Reilly to bring her whiskey from the camp. Nance, as well as being Beezy's friend, was the longest living in the village and had ways and means of doing and getting things. She brought Beezy the whiskey. Three bottles of it. She said there would be as much available as Beezy wanted.
I knew then that Beezy had money hidden somewhere and was paying her.
By the end of the second day after her beating Beezy was drunk and obstreperous and absolutely refusing to allow the wounds to be treated.
'Your back will turn septic,' Daniel warned, 'your blood could become poisoned. You're endangering your life.'
'Endangering my life, am I?' Beezy, sitting propped against
the inside wall of Nance Reilly's nest, into which she'd insisted on moving, was mocking. She tried and failed to focus on Daniel's face. 'It could be, Dr Casey, that I'm not all that fond of my life, or of life itself, any more. Or it could be that I know full well you're wasting your time and that my time on earth's running out anyway.' She shifted and winced and said, in a quieter voice, 'I'm not going to get better from this. I know that I'm not. You might as well stop wasting your time and what's left to me of my time,' she made a dismissive gesture with an almost empty bottle. 'Get out of here and leave me be. I didn't ask for your help.'
Beezy had decided to die.
I knew this because she wouldn't move from Nance Reilly's nest and, after one long talk with Sarah, turned away even from her when she came with James to sit and watch over her. She wouldn't even greet James, whom she'd loved and cherished since the day he was born.
Sarah was distraught. 'We can't let her do this to herself,' she held and shook me when I crawled from Nance Reilly's nest after another attempt to look at Beezy's wounds. 'She's in pain, Allie. It's in her eyes, not even the drink can kill it. She's sick and she's sore and she's full of a noxious portent about her death.'
'All true,' I said, 'and it's the last that's making it impossible to cure her. She talked with you so tell me - why is she so sure she's going to die?'
'I couldn't make much sense of it. Her mother died when she was twenty-eight years old, the age Beezy is now. Beezy was three years old then and the nuns took her in and reared her until she was eighteen. They wanted her to stay on in the convent but she left them. She says now that the shearing of her hair is what would have happened to her if she'd become a postulant and that it's God's wrath on her. She chose another path and failed those in her care, Lizzie Early and Bernie and the rest of them. She's not right in her head, Allie. The Curragh's done it to her.'
Drink had a lot to do with it too but I didn't say this. There was no point in us fighting.
Beezy's wounds got worse. On the third day, when she fell
unconscious with drink, Daniel and myself were able to have a look at the swelling and terrible redness spreading out and beyond the weals. She was feverish too, and weak, and Daniel and I knew, as well as Beezy herself must have known, how quickly the horrors of poison and rot could follow. We did what we could but the next day it was worse. When I began to think that Beezy had a knowledge about her time on earth that the rest of us didn't I told myself the Curragh was getting to me too.
And on top of all this it rained for most of every day and all of the nights. The space between the nests and the common ground we all shared became mucky and oozing. The nests remained dry enough inside but we spent our time trying to dry out clothes. Tempers grew short under the relentlessly low and pouring grey sky.
'It was like this last winter.' Moll, sensing change in the air and terrified we were all going to leave her, was full of assurances, 'but it got dry again quickly. The village is built solid enough.'
'Of course it is,’ I held her against me and kissed the top of her black curls, 'and you're right that it can't rain forever.'
'It does get cold though,' she admitted, looking worried.
'So why don't you add a layer to the furze of your nest? Better to do something than live in dread.'
But she went on looking worried. Like all of us she regretted the life of the summer falling apart. In her case though it opened up a void; she had no idea what would happen to herself and her mother in the months ahead.
I worried about Moll. I a
lso worked hard at putting out of my mind the fact that I would have to leave her.
Daniel came every evening and stayed until early night. The rest of the time he campaigned for justice.
'That malignant cleric will go to court for what he did,' he'd sworn quietly during the night we sat with Beezy after the attack, 'I'll see to it myself. He'll never do to another woman what he did in that street today.'
'You've great faith in the system of justice,' I said.
'I don't know that I have. It's more that I believe the facts, being so horrendous, will win the case when presented.'
'You believe right will win the day then?'
He paused. 'In this instance, yes, I do.' He looked down at the fretful, silent Beezy. 'We have the evidence.'
'You'll be depending on witnesses. I wouldn't rely too much on any of those citizens who were there coming forward.'
'Given the law of averages there's bound to be some decent folk among them. In any event, you're a witness too.'
'I'm a wren. The court's not going to take my word for anything.
'They'll be obliged to,' he was tight-lipped, 'in any event we have other evidence.' From his pocket he produced the scissors used to cut Beezy's hair. 'I've got these and you've got the hair itself.' He lightly touched my back where the whip had opened the skin. 'We'll see him punished,' he said.
'I hope you're right,' I said.
Since then, whenever he wasn't in the village, he was dividing his time between a lawyer and four people from the crowd he'd somehow found and persuaded to speak in court. The witnesses, two men and two women, needed encouraging and coaxing; the women said they'd been fearful of being whipped themselves if they'd stepped forward on the day. The lawyer, Tim Kilgallen, was from Naas and starting out in his career. He was decent, and opinionated. He also believed that a notorious case would do him no harm.