Friends Indeed

by Rose Doyle

  'One of the men has come forward because he has a grievance against the priest,' Daniel said, 'but we'll deal with that when the time comes. The other's a good man, truthful but timid.'

  'And the priest?' I said, 'will he allow his parishioners to speak against him?'

  We were walking along the road, a good twenty minutes away from the village. Since starting his campaign against the priest Daniel was finding it hard to hire horsecars and came to the village on foot. I'd taken to walking part of the way with him when he went back to Kildare each evening.

  His landlady hadn't yet thrown him out, probably because he'd paid his rent to the end of the month.

  'Mangan will make it hard for them to speak against him,' Daniel admitted. 'He's not liked but has great power and denounces people from the pulpit at a whim. His zeal against prostitutes is infamous.'

  'Notorious, more like,' I said, 'Ellen Neary's told me stories . . .'

  'All true, I'm sure.' Daniel didn't like to be interrupted; his own zeal for justice and the cause he'd taken up had him taut as a cat ready to spring. 'She'll probably have told you that a few years ago he got help from the army to burn down shelters a group of women had built against Newbridge barracks wall?'

  'She told me that,' I said impatiently. I didn't like being cut short myself. 'She told me too that he's already shorn the hair of four wrens and from at least two other women.'

  'But did she tell you about Mangan's earlier court appearance?' Daniel caught my arm and turned me to face him. His passion for what he saw as his cause was so boyish that I hadn't the heart to continue being annoyed at him.

  'No . . .' I shook my head and he moved us on, talking and walking quickly.

  'Mangan was taken to court by the soldier husband of a woman he chastised and struck. It happened late one night in a street in Newbridge and the priest claimed he mistook her for a prostitute. The Petty Sessions fined him a pound and costs. It caused a great scandal at the time and Mangan's been more cautious with his whip and scissors since. Until he met Beezy, that is. She was more than he could tolerate and the long restraint boiled over.' He put an arm round my shoulder and slowed us down. 'He's sick in the head, not rational.'

  'He doesn't have to be rational,' I said, 'he's a man of God.'

  Ellen Neary thought Daniel mad. 'He'll be lucky if he's not attacked in the street worse than Beezy was,' she said as she helped me make Beezy comfortable later that night. 'I hear he's been spat at more than once. He didn't tell you that, did he?'

  'No. He didn't.'

  'There's plenty in that town share the priest's hatred of wrens. Your doctor is a stranger, not one of themselves. That alone is enough to provoke them. You can be sure too that the priest is whipping them up.' She paused, remembering. 'Not that they need encouraging, the Cornelius Cumminses and others of them.'

  She pulled a brush gently through Beezy's short hair. It had settled into a halo around her head. When I'd told her this earlier she'd smiled. If it hadn't been for the pain etched into it her face, with the short curls framing it, would have been girlish-looking. As it was she was flushed, almost unconscious from drink and looking about sixty years old.

  'Your doctor had better keep an eye to his back.' Ellen, as we turned Beezy on to her side, was doleful. 'He'd be well advised to stay out of the streets of Kildare after dark.'

  The pus I'd dreaded had begun to fester in the weals on Beezy's back. Though she'd become increasingly feeble about resisting the cleaning and dressing of her wounds, nothing seemed to halt the worsening infection. The swelling had spread and filled with pus well beyond the marks of the whip. There was a smell too, like rotting meat. These effects, known as corruption by physicians, meant Beezy's blood was poisoned. There was nothing I could do for her. It was up to Daniel now, and a miracle.

  Sarah sat with Beezy through that night. It tore at her heart, seeing Beezy the way she was, but Sarah couldn't seem to keep away from her. She was rarely absent from Beezy's side and would sit talking to her for hours. Beezy's replies, whenever I stopped to listen, were either monosyllabic or a matter of two or three words. Sarah's talk was mostly of Henrietta Street and the streets around it, about people they both knew and tales of their lives.

  She was homesick and she was sick with worry about Beezy. She was worried too about Jimmy Vance who would be free of his punishment and able to see her at the end of the week.

  Daniel arrived early, and on foot, the next morning.

  He drew off as much of the pus as possible and spread fresh gauze and boracic ointment over Beezy's back.

  'If I was a praying man . . .' he shrugged.

  'The women are praying,' I said, 'some of them.'

  'Tell them to pray harder,' Daniel said.

  He didn't tell me about the threats. I might never have found out about them if it hadn't been for Clara Hyland arriving at our nest as Sarah made tea for the three of us. Frost had replaced the rain and the grass underfoot was a crunchy white where the sun hadn't yet caught it.

  'There's a lot of talk going around about your war with the priest,' she was bleary-eyed and white-faced. She'd been on the hunt the night before and would usually have been in bed at that hour.

  'Good,' said Daniel, 'we need all the support we can get.'

  'They're not behind you in that town. They're against you and you know it,' Clara narrowed her eyes at him, 'and the talk is about harming you and getting rid of you. Sending you back where you came from in a box was how two brave lads out sporting in the night put it.'

  'Talk is cheap,' Daniel said.

  'There's more than talk going on, by all accounts,' Clara said.

  'Tell me,' I commanded when Daniel, with a dismissive wave of his hand, would have changed the subject.

  'There was a poster nailed to the door of our hero's lodgings.' Clara rubbed her nose with the back of her hand and sniffed. 'It warned him to go back to Dublin if he didn't want to be buried in Kildare. It said the diseased birds on the Curragh would suffer along with him if he didn't go.' She shrugged. 'It's one thing to risk himself. It's something else entirely when he puts all of us here in danger. We've enough to contend with.'

  'I'm with him,' Sarah looked from Clara to Daniel and then at the wrens gathering round. 'There's a time when a stand has to be made to have a wrong put right. Beezy would agree, if she was in her right mind.'

  'In her right or in her wrong mind Beezy Ryan wouldn't want anyone hurt on her account,' Clara said, and this was true.

  But Beezy was ill, maybe dying, and not in her right mind. There was no point Daniel dying too.

  'You must delay things,' I said, 'we'll be leaving here soon enough, in a week or two perhaps. You can fight Mangan from Dublin. You'll be safer there.'

  'It's too late for that. If we back away now we've lost,' said Daniel, 'I've Kilgallen prepared and the witnesses are firm. It's to be heard in the next sitting of the Petty Sessions.'

  It was too late for a lot of things.

  The night was cold and starry when Daniel arrived back in the village that night. He'd gone to Newbridge, to call on the lawyer Kilgallen, and come back to find his bags on the doorstep of his lodgings. Mrs O'Neill, in a state of hysterics behind the door, would neither open it to him nor listen to what he had to say.

  'She'd had a visit from some of the town's stalwarts,' Daniel said as he sat on the bag containing his belongings and held his hands to the fire. 'Emissaries from Father Mangan, by the sound of it. She said she couldn't risk her children and her home by having me go on staying there.' He was apologetic and smiling but didn't seem to me all that worried. 'I'll be fine here by the fire for the night. I'll keep the blaze going and it'll be cheerful enough.'

  'You won't be saying that by three or four in the morning.' Sarah was impatient. 'You'd best squeeze yourself into Beezy's old corner.' She grinned. 'James and myself will be chaperones to Allie for the night.'

  'I'll have a look at Beezy first,' Daniel took his medical bag and left.

 
I waited for him, walking in a circle around the nest; he wasn't gone long. There was nothing to be done but keep putting the soaked cloths on Beezy's wounds. He didn't say how she was. He didn't need to.

  'I gave her some laudanum,' was all he told me as he crawled after me into the nest and made himself comfortable as he could where Beezy used lie.

  Having him there didn't seem in any way strange. We were all of us behaving as if life had been suspended and we were in a time of waiting — for Sarah to marry, for Beezy, by some miracle, to get well, for the court case against Father Mangan to be over. When all these things happened life would become normal and we would begin living again.

  In the meantime, and in the circumstances, Daniel sleeping between us in the nest seemed neither strange nor improper.

  The righteous and the good of Kildare town didn't think so. They arrived for him at two in the morning, when the village was asleep. A wind had come up and the moon and stars had been obscured by heavy rain clouds. The rabble came across the Curragh with blazing torches, about a dozen of them. We heard them coming and were out of the nest long before they came crashing and roaring into the village. So was Daniel, in spite of pleadings and warnings on the part of myself and Sarah. The mob bellowed its way past the first few nests and stopped not far from Clara Hyland's. I thanked God for our place at the far end of the village, and the fact that we weren't revealed by the torchlight.

  'Give us the renegade doctor and we'll be out of here,' Cornelius Cummins, who appeared to be their spokesman, demanded, 'we know ye're hiding him. There's nowhere else would give shelter to his kind.'

  'Save yourselves,' said a fat man with no teeth, 'we'll have no choice but to burn him out if ye don't hand him over.'

  They were a vision from hell. Between them they were holding high a half-dozen torches, great orange-red fires that lit up the sky and showed us the enemy we faced. They'd worn their heavy boots, hobnailed most of them, for their trip across the plains. Some carried sticks. There were no women but every age of man was represented, from a boy of about sixteen years to a looming, white-whiskered fellow of seventy or so. From the leery, wild expressions on their faces it was clear every last one of them had drink taken. My guess was that their breaths alone would have kept the torches burning.

  All of the wrens were out of their nests now, all of the children with pale, frightened faces holding their mothers' petticoat skirts. The smaller ones cried. The women themselves looked no less terrified, some of the younger ones clinging together and whimpering.

  'You're a brave lot of men,' Daniel moved forward quickly into the light. There was nothing I could have done to stop him. 'It takes courage to come into a community of women with sticks and burning torches. You could have spoken to me, any one of you or all of you, in the streets of Kildare in daylight.'

  'Daylight and civility's too good for the likes of you,' the fat man shook a stick and moved several steps closer to Daniel, 'and by God we'll do with you what should have been done with you the first day ever you came to Kildare town.'

  'And what might that be?' I heard my own voice before I knew I'd spoken. 'Would you have taken a scissors and whip to him as your…'

  'Stay out of this, Allie,' Daniel, turning his head, was furious. He waved at me to get back. 'Stay with Sarah and the baby. The police will take care of this when we get to Kildare.' He faced the mob again. 'I'm ready to go with you. There's no need for you to terrorise these women.'

  'Women!' A voice from the mob spat the word and guffawed. 'These are not women. The harlots you live among aren't fit to walk the same earth, let alone inhabit the same parish, as decent women. There's no place for them in Kildare. They should be driven off the plains. They've made a disgrace and laughing stock of the county.'

  This speech was greeted with a harsh chorus of agreement and a clashing of sticks in the air.

  'You filthy coward!' Daniel's voice was loud with a cold fury. 'It's not enough that you come in the night! You have to hide yourself too in the belly of your fellow spineless curs to hurl abuse. Come out of there and face these women with your insults.' He took a step forward. 'Come out or I'll pull you out myself.'

  'It's your own skin you should be worrying about,' Cornelius Cummins held a silencing hand over his followers. 'It's you is the cause of us being here. You'd better come with us now and take your punishment.'

  'Punishment for what?' Daniel walked towards him.

  'The whore was dealt with no worse than she deserved,' Cummins was shouting, 'you've no business questioning the just chastisement of a priest of the church.'

  'You'll be dealt with yourself now . . .'

  'Our priest will stand in no court.'

  'You were warned . . .'

  The men surged forward and the women screamed. I ran to Daniel and clutched at his arm but he turned on me, white-faced and full of that cold fury. 'Get away from me, Allie,' he said, 'this is my battle and I don't want you near me.'

  'It's my battle too.' I hung on to him.

  'They're drunk and they're mindless and you're a fool if you think they'll have regard for your womanhood. Get away from me.' He pulled his arm violently from my grasp.

  The mob were all around us. I could feel the heat from their torches and their rank, whiskey breaths and stinking body odours. There was an animal howl from them as hard hands took hold of my shoulders and threw me to the side, many feet away from Daniel and the sticks battering down upon him.

  I screamed. Still screaming I got to my feet. Standing, I saw Clara Hyland and Nancy Reilly throw themselves at the mob of men, begin tearing at their backs and necks and arms, anywhere they could lay hold of.

  A man, more sober than the rest and so less anaesthetised, snarled in pain and rage as Clara drew her nails down the side of his face. She scratched him again as he turned on her. That was when I saw Daniel again, on his feet and flailing with a blackthorn stick he'd somehow got hold of. He flailed in a circle about him with a desperation, and courage, fuelled by the need to survive that was more powerful and concentrated than the drunken viciousness around him.

  'Get him! Any of yis, one of yis!' Cornelius Cummins stabbed the air with his torch. 'Don't let the devil have his way . . .'

  'The devil is everywhere, within us and around us!' The white-whiskered man's shriek was demented. 'He's not just in the doctor. The bushwomen are sheltering him! He's here, in their hovels!'

  Whirling and dancing like a lunatic, a stick in one hand and burning torch in the other, he made for the nearest nest which, as it happened, was Ellen Neary's. When he was still six feet away he lunged madly with the torch, travelling with the blazing weapon until it was embedded in the roof of the nest. The furze was ablaze in seconds.

  Daniel broke loose from the shocked, and momentarily transfixed, mob. He reached the nest and began a frenzied beating of the flames.

  'You'll not protect him, by God you'll not!' the whiskery man roared, all reason lost. 'You'll not protect Lucifer and you'll not protect the whores either. You'll burn with him!' Dancing and screaming he threw himself at Daniel, 'into hell's fires with you!'

  The first drops of rain began to fall as Daniel, turning too late, was caught on the side of the head by the madman's stick. He looked surprised. Then he toppled backwards and I couldn't see his face any more as the flames lapped about him and he collapsed with the roof into the inferno that had been Ellen Neary's nest.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Allie

  Daniel looked as he always had when he was laid out in Naas Hospital. Not broken, not mutilated or burned at all. He seemed younger to me, more like a boy than a man, with a boy's thin body and untidy red hair. His face wore its usual, thoughtful expression and his lips looked ready to speak. But they were cold and dead as he was and would never move again.

  The pain was like a blade in my chest as I sat uselessly waiting, knowing that no matter how loudly now I told him I loved him, how often I said I was sorry to have been the cause of his death, he woul
d not hear me. Ever again.

  I turned and stared at the window where the sun shone. He would have been pleased at how rational I was.

  He would have been less pleased at the short time it lasted. Being rational didn't ease the searing pain in my chest, the numbing desolation in every other part of my body. Being rational didn't make any less bearable the fact that the one, the only good man I'd ever known was gone from me, and from a world that had needed him and that he'd wanted so much to make better.

  And what, in the end, had his good life amounted to? The filth and poverty and disease he'd worked so hard to alleviate would go on. And how was it that Daniel was dead when men like Cornelius Cummins and Maurice McDermott were still alive? I would have choked on bitterness if I hadn't been

  so forlorn and aching, aching for him to move and touch me, for a smile to lighten his still, cold face. I wanted to weep but couldn't.

  I turned again to look at him. I thought about gathering his beloved body against me until, by some miracle, the life that was mine might pass to him and he might breathe again. But I couldn't do this either so I touched his hands instead, where they'd been crossed on his chest by the hospital priest. The atheist in him would have hated the pose but rigor mortis had set in and there was nothing I could do about it. I would not break Daniel's bones.

  I traced the outline of his mouth with my finger. I touched and tidied his hair back from his forehead. He'd have liked me to do such things when he was alive. I never had.

  I closed my eyes, tightly, against the unbearable sight of him. In the shining black behind the lids I imagined him beside me, lying warm and alive, imagined the way we could have been if I hadn't been so blind and so arrogant for so long. I would pay, for the rest of my life, for that arrogance. But pain was a thing to be borne. I'd learned that much at least from the wrens. There was no good running from it. It had to be embraced.

  I did then what I had to do for myself, if not for Daniel. I climbed into the bed and lay with him, my heart breaking. Holding him as I never had in life, I wept at last and told him all that I would always feel for him, whispering to him that he was my one and true love. Cradling his poor head, his hair wet with my tears, I lay with him for a long time.