by Rose Doyle
'I'm leaving, Beezy,' I knelt and touched her burning forehead and put a damp cloth across it.
'You're right to go,' Beezy twisted restlessly on the straw pallet, 'but you'd be a fool to wait in Dublin for that bastard of a soldier you married. He's gone, Sarah. He gave the child his name and that's as much as you'll get from him.'
No point in asking where she'd heard about Jimmy Vance's departure. The village had a lightning-fast telegraph system.
'If you know so much then you know I got money from him too,' I said, 'not a lot but when I add it to what you owe me I'll have enough to get to America.'
She was silent for so long after this I thought for a while she hadn't heard me and then that she'd slipped into a waking coma of some sort. When she spoke at last her voice was flat.
'I always wanted to go to America,' she said.
'I know that, Beezy,' I said, 'but hospital's the place you should be right now. You'll get well there and when I'm set up in America you can come and join me.' This would never happen and both of us knew it.
'I know what I have to do,' Beezy said, 'and it might as well be now as in a week's time. I won't waste my money on any hospital. I'll go to the workhouse.'
'The workhouse!'
'Listen to me, Sarah.' Beezy, suddenly fierce and with a strength I'd never have thought left in her, sat and clutched my hand. 'I'll be damned if I'll waste any of the money I earned hard on a hospital and doctors that can't cure me,' she laughed, 'I'll be damned anyway so what's the odds . . .' She stopped, not because she expected an answer but to catch her breath. After a few gasping minutes she went on.
'I won't give it to any fat undertaker to bury me either. A pauper's grave will do me fine. I'll be past caring when the time comes to put me in the ground anyway. Don't interrupt me,' her hand tightened like a bolt on mine when I tried to stop her talking like this. 'I'll be dead in a week,' she went on, 'I'd planned to more than settle up with you when you left for your married life. Nance can drink some of it but the rest of what I have is yours, Sarah. There's more than enough to set you up in America. You and James and . . .' She stopped to take a couple of deep breaths. 'There's a condition. You're to take Allie Buckley with you. Not because I've any great gra for her but because she'll be useful if either yourself or James becomes ill.'
She released my hand and tried to find some comfort lying on her side. Nothing seemed to give her ease. The stench was almost unbearable. I wondered if she could smell it herself, or had become too used to it.
'You're not dying . . .'
'I'm dying, Sarah,' she closed her eyes, 'but that doesn't make me a fool so don't treat me like one. You know I'm finished and so does everyone else in the village. Dr Allie Buckley knows it better than anyone. All she can do for me now is give me the laudanum. My blood is poisoned through and through and there's no cure for that.' She opened her eyes and nodded to the whiskey bottle, standing in a hole in the ground. 'Pour me a drop of that into a cup. A good drop, mind. It's not doing me the good it used to.'
She watched and was silent while I poured. I couldn't speak myself. There was too much to say and no way of saying any of it.
'My mother died in the workhouse,' Beezy reminded me when I handed her the whiskey. 'She was the age I am now. Why should I think myself any luckier than she was?'
'We make our own luck,' I said. 'There's nothing says we have to repeat our mothers' lives.'
'Nothing,' Beezy agreed, 'but we do it anyway, too many of us. We make the same choices as our mothers and that's what does it. I knew I was making choices that would lead me down my mother's path but I made them anyway. I thought I was strong enough to rise above anything that God, or Fate, had in store for me. I was wrong.'
'You weren't wrong, Beezy, you could have been made well . . .'
'That Father Mangan is no better than a swine,' Beezy silenced me with a frown, 'but his was the hand of God all the same, striking me down.'
She wasn't raving. She believed all that she was saying.
'I knew it then and I know it now. Give me another drop of whiskey, there's a good girl. The pain is killing me.' She laughed. It was a sound like rattling bones.
'You made the choice to come here because of me, Beezy,' I said as I poured, 'and so did Allie. I'm the one should—'
'Lord, but you're an important person, Sarah Rooney!' Beezy, raising the cup at an angle, downed the whiskey in a gulp. She didn't spill a drop. 'So important that grown women with minds of their own follow you around the country. Or maybe it's that you've a magnet attached to your back.'
She held out the cup and I poured again, silently. The bottle was nearly empty. I'd no doubt there was another where it had come from.
'I was coming to the Curragh whether you came or not, Sarah,' Beezy went on, her voice hoarsening from all the talk, 'and Allie Buckley came because it suited her too.' She stopped, looking into the cup. 'We were support for one another, the three of us, and each was responsible for herself.'
She was right. Beezy had always had wisdom, a way of seeing things more clearly than most. Maybe she'd been right too in thinking that her time was up. My mother had always that said God's ways were strange ones
I couldn't believe it though. An evil priest had killed her before her time and that was it, pure and simple. It was my own belief that Father Mangan would burn in hell. But not Beezy. Beezy Ryan had had her hell on earth.
'The receiving officer will send a horsecar to take me to the workhouse,' Beezy said. 'It's time to get myself ready for the journey.' She slipped the rings from her fingers. They fell in a bright heap. 'The scavengers in the workhouse won't get anything off my body. I'll go to them in my shroud. I'll wear red. It was always a colour I favoured. Help me to sit,' she commanded, 'and then bring me my bag and the candle box.'
I did as she said.
'I'll have my own wake before I go. We'll finish the whiskey, and I'll divvy out my worldly goods. You and James first . . .' She took a fat candle from the box, turned it upside down and removed a circle of wax from its base. From the hollow inside she pulled a twist of notes.
'There's plenty there to get you started,' she stuffed it back into the candle and handed it to me, 'keep it in your bodice when you travel.' As I took it from her she lifted the green feather boa from the bag. 'Who should I give this to?' She put it round her neck.
'Don't, Beezy.' I stood, holding the candle. 'Allie won't come to America. You know as well as I do that she's all for making a martyr of herself.'
'She'll go with you, I'll see to it that she does,' Beezy said, 'send her to me with her laudanum. And send Ellen Neary for the receiving officer.'
Allie and I went with Beezy to the workhouse. She'd rouged her cheeks and put kohl about her eyes, giving her face the look of a painted death mask. She was so full of laudanum and whiskey that she was barely conscious for the journey. This was just as well since the springs on the car were far from good. It took us three hours to get to Naas.
In the workhouse she was examined by a young doctor and given a bed in a long, grey room. I stood holding her dry, wasted hand while Allie went outside and spoke with the doctor.
Because of the rouge and kohl it took me a few minutes to realise she'd stopped breathing.
'I never want to see this town or the county of Kildare as long as I live,' Allie, when she came to stand beside me at Beezy's deathbed, was bitter.
I knew then that Beezy had somehow persuaded her and that she would be going to America with myself and James.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Sarah
My mother cried for the three days I spent in Henrietta Street. If I'd stayed another three she'd probably have cried for them too.
'You might have been dead for all that we knew of you,' were the first words she said to me, 'we heard nothing except that you'd left the Magdalen with your child and gone God knows where your father was demented.'
We met in the street. I was walking slowly up the hill with James in my arms
when she came out of the house and saw me. It was foggy, and late in the afternoon, and she stood for a while, unmoving as stone. She told me later it was because she couldn't believe her eyes.
When I waved to her she ran down the hill and gathered me into her arms. We stood for a long time holding on to one another, neither of us uttering a word. She felt like a bag of bones, she was that thin.
'You'd have heard if I was dead,' I said at last. 'There was no need for you to worry.'
'I knew you'd come back,' she contradicted herself, 'I prayed night and day and I'd no doubts but that God would listen to me.'
'This is James.'
She took him from me, and that was when she started the crying. 'I've never seen a more beautiful child,’ the tears ran down her face as she touched his eyes and ears and then his mouth with her finger.
She was right about his beauty. At five months old James had the wide, dark grey eyes of his father and dark curls like my own.
'You'd no right to keep him away so long,' my mother said.
I didn't remind her of the reasons I'd gone in the first place. I couldn't find it in me either to tell her I'd be on my way again in days. She'd aged far more than was normal in the months I'd been away. Even her eyes had grown older.
'How's my father?' I said.
'The same your grandmother's gone she took sick in the night with ferocious pains in her stomach when she was no better by morning we sent for the doctor,' my mother took a breath, 'a new lad from the dispensary he took her to the Mater Hospital straight away.'
'And she died . . .'
It was very cold in the street. I wanted to move, go indoors. But not if my grandmother was dead. I wasn't ready yet to face the empty spaces.
'She died an hour after going into the hospital they did a post mortem and said it was a blockage in her insides killed her.' My mother turned her face from mine. 'Glory be to God but she had terrible pain.'
'When?'
'All the night and before she died.'
'When did she die, Mother, how long ago?'
'She's gone two-and-a-half months now I've a young woman from Donegal living in her room she pays me rent and she's clean she'll have to find somewhere else now you're home.'
'I'm married,' I said. I had to stop her building a life that had me and James in it.
'Thanks be to God and His Blessed Mother for that.' My mother made the sign of the cross. 'Your father'll be pleased.'
The rooms I'd grown up in were the same. My old bed still took up its corner and the bird sat inside the window chirping in his cage. Mary Ann's schoolbooks were on the floor by the wall where she'd always left them and my grandmother's shawl hung black on the back of the door.
But they were different too, quiet and still in a way they're never been. I didn't go into the bedroom my grandmother and Mary Ann had shared. I didn't want to see the lodger's belongings where theirs had been.
James began to cry.
'He's hungry,' said my father with authority, 'a growing lad needs feeding regular.'
My father looked younger, but less alive. My mother said he was spending a lot of his time sleeping and was drinking for most of his waking hours. His skin looked pale and smooth but he was like a man with no life inside him.
'I'm hungry myself,' I said.
My father held James while I got his food ready. He even helped me feed him when my mother made supper for the rest of us. It was going to be hard telling them about America.
I wondered how it was for Allie in Haddington Road. We'd shared a carriage from the railway station at Kingsbridge to Sackville Street and from there gone our separate ways home. We were to meet in two days to arrange the journey to America. Allie was the one rushing things now. She wanted to be gone and away from everything she'd ever known as quickly as possible.
Leaving the wrens had been difficult for her. The duty she still felt to them had pulled hard against the part of her bound by whatever Beezy Ryan had said on her deathbed.
Leaving Moll had been the hardest thing of all.
Moll had tried blackmail. 'My mother will die now you're going. She'll fall drunk into a ditch some night and without someone to make her well again she'll be finished.'
'You can come with me to Dublin,' Allie said, 'the nuns will take you in, or I'll find a family for you to live with.'
'I won't leave her,' Moll was stubborn, 'you'll have to stay.'
'I can't stay,' when Allie tried to put an arm around her Moll twisted away. 'You must look after your mother. Ellen will be staying and I'll leave you a letter to bring to Captain Ainslie in the camp if Clara gets very bad.'
'He doesn't want you to go either,' Moll said and she was right. She stood three feet away from us, eyes brighter than the sparkling frost on the furze. 'Once you're gone he'll want nothing more to do with us.'
'I'll leave you the letter and you'll see that he's not like that,' Allie said. 'I'll leave you my lilac dress too, to wear when you grow a bit.'
Moll caught her breath. It was so easy to forget she was only nine years old and easily distracted. 'Your silk dress . . .' Her breath, when she let it out, made a cloud in the cold air.
Allie got the dress and went to Moll and held it against her. Allie was a small woman and Moll a big child. She wouldn't have to grow a great deal to fit it.
'How could I keep such a thing?' Moll took the dress and held it like it was a baby in her arms. 'What's the good of me owning it in a place like this?' She pressed it against her. 'I'll be killed for it. It'll be robbed from me.'
'Keep it secret then,' Allie said, 'until you've a life you can wear it in.'
'I won't even tell my mother,' Moll said.
Allie didn't say goodbye to Captain Ainslie. I don't even know that he knew she was leaving. He'd come to the village a few times on his horse but she would do no more than bid him good day and tell him to go. Her heart was locked on Daniel Casey and would be for a long time.
Time, now that we were going away, was sadly not on Captain Ainslie's side. He was a decent man and it was a pity but life doesn't run to order and wishing doesn't make it so.
Clara Hyland was drunk the morning we left. She was shouting that we'd be back, that we were wrens now and would be wrens forever, wherever we went. Moll stood beside her and said nothing. Ellen Neary wished us well. She fully believed, she said, that this would be her last winter in the village, that her soldier would be back before the spring. Nance Reilly let us go without a word or a wave and the other wrens didn't say much either.
I got into the horsecar with James. Allie, stiff as a marionette, followed me. She didn't look back once as we went across the Curragh. I kept looking myself until the village disappeared from view. Just before it did I waved and it seemed to me that several hands, lonely and small, waved back. Or it might have been the wind through the furze.
I told my mother about America on the morning of the second day.
'I knew you'd be going I thought about it in my bed in the night and I said to myself she's not home for good she's got plans,' she said as she took James on to her lap, 'why would she come back I said to myself when she's managed so much on her own there's no life for her in these lonely rooms she might as well strike out.' She looked at me over James's head. 'I never thought of America though it's a long ways away.'
'The further the better.' I thought of Jimmy Vance.
'Your husband won't be going with you?'
My mother, though she must have seen how things were, hadn't asked about Jimmy before. When my father had tried to question me she'd told him to be quiet and wasn't it enough for the time being to have me home? My father had agreed, saying that the fact I'd a ring on my finger was the most important thing.
'My husband's in India.'
'He won't be following you to America?' my mother asked. 'No.'
'He didn't leave you without money?'
'No. I have money.'
She poured me more tea. The bird began to sing in his cage and I brough
t James over to listen to him. I would get him a bird like it when we got to America. I said as much to my mother.
'Do that,' she said, 'a bird is a grand thing to have where there's children though I wonder will they have birds of his kind in America?'
I told my mother little about the Curragh and nothing about Beezy Ryan's money. I told her why Beezy had died and was glad when she condemned the priest.
'Some who are called by God are not as good as they might be 'I'll pray for Beezy's immortal soul,' she paused, 'and for the priest.'
'If money should come for me from India I want you to have it,’ I wanted nothing more from Jimmy Vance. I put James lying in a shaft of sunlight coming through the window. I doubted any money would ever arrive.
I went to the nuns in the Magdalen and told them about Beezy and how she'd died.
'It was God's will and we must accept it,' said Mother Stanislaus. 'When we choose a certain path in life there are consequences.'
I knew then the root of Beezy's fatalism.
I met Allie in the Bailey Tavern in Duke Street where, at her insistence, we had Red Bank Burren oysters. I didn't like them, and nor did she, but they were costly so we kept at them and ate the lot.
'Our lives have changed us,' Allie said, 'we must be adventuresome about food as well as everything else. There's no going back to tea rooms and politeness.'
Not knowing what she would find in Haddington Road, half fearful that whatever it was would change her mind about America, I hadn't told my mother and father Allie would be going with me.
I needn't have worried. There was nothing in Haddington Road to keep her here.
'My father spends his time making money and is rarely at home. He's agreed to give me what would have been my dowry to go to America.'
This didn't sound to me like the whole story. 'He wants you to go then?' I stared so hard she had to look at me. She was wearing one of her Paris creations, a costume of violet velvet and over it a loose, velvet paletot with revers of silk. Her bonnet had feathers at the back. She looked beautiful, even with her wind and sun-darkened skin. Her hands, when she lifted a napkin to her mouth, were chapped and red.