by Kalyan Ray
“ ‘What, Mrs. Bunthorne?’ Is that all you have to say, girl?” she said with vigour. “Imagine serving Master Henry in the kitchen,” she said, waving her arms, at a loss for words.
“The young man was content enough,” I replied.
“Content, Lordy Lord,” she said, aghast. “His Lordship to you, child! What did you think he was—an assistant of Mr. Arkwright here? It’s the young Lord Palmerston, the Viscount. I’ve known him since his nursery days, and so he wants me to call him Master Henry always. Don’t you be saucy, girl.” I stood still, letting all this sink in. Mrs. Bunthorne stopped as if some thought had struck her.
“When did he come?”
I knew to avoid this question and said simply, “I did serve his meal in time.”
Mrs. Bunthorne seemed to infer from that, that Master Henry had come in this very morning. One more question, and my prevarication would be tumbled.
No directives came for Mrs. Bunthorne for over a month. We were happy enough by ourselves in the following weeks. Having finished what few chores there were by midmorning, I would sit with her, knitting and talking all the long afternoons. Mrs. Bunthorne grew very fond of me over the days. I wondered if this was what it was like to have a mother. I was always told of the cruel English, and how wary we need be in all our dealings. Yet the first Englishwoman who came into my life walked right into my Irish heart with her simple affection, and I gave her back the same in equal measure. She told me of her husband who had died, her childhood in Herefordshire, and how she would have loved to have had children of her own.
I, who had been as regular as the full moon in its coming, had missed my time altogether. I waited apprehensively for it. But what came, and that in a matter of ten more days, was not the usual ache and drip of blood but a strange swooning sense in the morning, and a mighty abhorrence for the smell of milk and oatmeal, which Mrs. Bunthorne loved and had given me for all these many breakfasts, and I had eaten in fine humour. One morning as she poured the milk, I watched the bubbling froth, and dashed out, retching blindly by the kitchen door. I wiped my face on my apron and walked away. I stole about the garden aimlessly, killing time till she would have put away the milk.
I do not know what came over me: I knelt abruptly down and scratched the black earth under the mossy cottage tree, and put that handful of the good soil in my mouth. It tasted cool and comforting. Tears were welling in my eyes unaccountably, and I felt very sorry for myself that Master Henry had strode out and left, instead of sending Mrs. Bunthorne on some fool’s errand and holding me close for one last kiss, a whispered word.
When I opened my eyes, I saw Mrs. Bunthorne standing over me. Her nose was flared.
“You’re done for, girl. You let your young gamekeeper in, didn’t you?” she whispered directly. “Now you’d better get him to church.”
“What gamekeeper?” I mumbled, uncomprehending. I had completely forgotten about Jemmy Aherne. Mrs. Bunthorne stared into my face for a long while. I looked away, back at her, then looked down.
“When exactly did Master Henry come here?” she said. I realized that the game was over.
“I do not remember,” I said simply.
She caught me roughly by the shoulders and stood me up. “He is a fine young man, and has treated me always with respect, servant as I am. I have never forgotten my place, and I in their service for thirty-two years. I saw him grow boy and man, and a finer man I have not seen.” She stopped for breath. “But, he is a lord, and a young man who knows how to get his way and has done so many a time—you hear me—many a time. He even has those great young ladies do the foolish things, and some older ones too who should know better.” Mrs. Bunthorne’s voice was low and burned through me. “He likes to write in the fancy papers in London Town and they say he is very charming and witty. But others write about him too, and about his ways. They gave him the name Lord Cupid, and not, it seems, in jest.” Mrs. Bunthorne sat down on the steps leading up to the kitchen from the back garden. All that had been the natural unfolding, very like the dance of the seasons themselves in those short enchanted days, now seemed to me bare and defiled by his practiced ease and skilled hands, tawdry in this flat light of morning.
“Your Aherne, the gamekeeper,” pursued Mrs. Bunthorne, “has he been back?”
I shook my head silently.
“Good,” she said briskly. “Say aye to him forthwith. It’s a blunder you can paper over, you poor fool,” she said angrily and tenderly. “Do not turn noble, child, and say you are in love. He will never come back. Do you understand?” She took me by the shoulder, “Do not try something stupid and bleed to death in some crone’s hovel. Too many have done that, by far. You can make it up to your gamekeeper by being a better wife than he ever deserved and staying that way.”
I felt a wave of nausea sweep over me as Mrs. Bunthorne helped me up the stairs and into the kitchen.
In ten more days, I was married to Jeremy Aherne—poor Jemmy—as awkward in love as can be on the first night, as I wept in his arms. For fear, he thought.
I never was a good wife to him, a better one than ever he deserved, as Mrs. Bunthorne had told me to be. For a month and eight days after we were wed, Jemmy Aherne was shot and killed by poachers and his body found facedown under a flowering hawthorn hedge by Lough Gill’s shore.
My baby was born and I named him Padraig Robert. Padraig for my da, and Robert in honour of Mrs. Bunthorne, who used to hope for a son to name after her father, Robert, the kindest man she ever knew. After all I couldn’t name my boy Hetty or Hester—or Henry! Besides, I liked the sound of the name Robert.
I never saw Mrs. Bunthorne since my wedding day. I do not know what she had said to Master Henry, who lived in London. But Mr. Arkwright, the estate bailiff, conveyed the instruction sent him from London that my small cottage and garden that I had bought in Mullaghmore with the settlement given me on my husband’s death, was free of taxes. Not that I wanted it this way, but the prudent way to stop any tongues was just to accept it—and not go into talk or wrangle. I set up a small store. Four years later, I received a small bequest from Mrs. Bunthorne, who had died a widow woman in London.
The faint beam shifts from floor to wall, the shadows sidle—or do I imagine this? I hardly know the unmoored hours, if it is night or day, as I grit my teeth and await my son, adrift on my raft of fever. Will he not return, though cruelly late? It is time, now or forever. An angry bitterness turns my breath. I try to cling to the island of hope and feel some tide pulling me away. And my lover, a great lord of the kingdom with his untold wealth, who did not hesitate to use a naïve village girl whose eyes were full of dreams? Father and son have both left. My heart is a grindstone for these hard thoughts. My father and my brothers are long dead too. Why need I live on?
Then I hear a small sound: Maeve stirring under my bed! She refused to lie with me, frightened by my swollen arm. She is singing softly, a song I used to sing for my Padraig. She has learnt it, for she insists I sing it to her at bedtime. I must stay alive for someone to deliver Maeve to what safety is possible in this world that has turned to wormwood. My head is full of strange pains. Darkness is pressing down upon me. There are moments when I am not sure where I am, or what brought me here. Then I remember Brendan has taken my Maeve with him.
Mr. O’Flaherty waits with me. There are no candles in my robbed home. I long to talk to someone who would understand. Not just stand by wagging his head and smear my burning head with the holy oil and spatter me with the church water. God forgive me if He wishes. My greatest joys came from my lost Padraig and my lost days with his father. How can I, in the eyes of God, walk away from that?
I think I can tell Mr. O’Flaherty, and he, with his great reading and his telling the brave stories of love and its miseries, will understand. As he sits quietly, I say to him, “I have something to say.” He leans forward.
“I have done something the world would not understand, something I never told my poor Jemmy.” My voice was broken, I
can hear, a scrape upon dying coal.
“Hush, hush, Maire,” he whispers, “there is no need to talk of that mad day. I was older and you were that young,” he murmurs, meaning to be kind.
And I understand. Poor Mr. O’Flaherty is thinking merely of that day, so long ago, I was bathing at his cistern behind his school cottage, and in my pride of youth and beauty and a naked innocence, I had let him look at my young body and my new breasts even when I knew he was looking, and nothing did come of that. . . .
I also understand that I can never tell him all I wanted to say, for Mr. O’Flaherty is merely a man. I let him stay by my side as I begin to sink, slow as tide, into death.
I could have spoken my heart to God—or to a kind old woman—if either of them had come and sat by me. The darkness is outside my window, its palm on my pane. With its fine edge of black lace, it advances—and advancing—drinks the lees of my day.
Padraig
Barisal, Bengal Province
1844
I had begun to be impatient with Alexander Blackburn, counting my days to be quit of this East India Company ship, and this name. I wanted as few people as possible on board the ship to remember how I looked, so had left my sprouting beard untrimmed, let my hair grow so that the very shape of my head looked different. To keep from too much brooding, I sought out work among the barrels and the ropes on deck, and this hardened my sinews as the relentless sun blackened me, and the ship’s strict rations made me wiry. Even my mother would not have known me here on this ship, among people to whom the names O’Connell or Mullaghmore meant little or nothing at all.
We drifted south towards the equator following the Africa coast until we anchored off Ouidah, where I saw two ships with different flags, Belgian and American, lying hull to hull. We were anchored not far from several ships. The wind turned putrid when it shifted and came across their bows. I crinkled my nose involuntarily, and one of the older hands, Tim Landry, spat over the side of the deck rail, saying just one word of explanation, “Slavers.”
Over the next two days, as we took in grains and vegetables, live goats and casks of water, I saw little by way of supplies loaded in the slave ships. What they loaded were naked black people, chained neck to neck, clinking and clattering, and every once in a while there would be a howling cry with other shackled ones joining in. I realized with a cold shiver, it was not howling, but some terrible lament, for they would never see this land or their homes again, headed for death or no country they had ever dreamed of.
Landry smiled and said, “Animals.” From the numbers they were loading down into their hold, I wondered where they would lie. Landry’s skeletal face, crowned with yellow hair, grinning, spat out, “Spoons.”
“What?” I said.
“Spoons. Side by side. Chained. Whole trip. Americas,” he said, licking his sparse teeth that had black spots on them, like dice.
“Why,” I said in surprise, “they’ll surely sicken and many die.”
“Aye. Half. More. Heathens,” he said matter-of-factly. “Pitched over. Rot clamped. If rough seas.” I looked on in horror as they continued loading the human cargo.
That night, on the still oceanwater, I saw four moons: The great grey orb in the sky and its twin on the sea; the other was the round light of the porthole of one slave ship, below which glared its reflection in the dead black water, looking, for all the world, like the maw of hell itself.
• • •
THE LASCARS SLITHERED, agile as monkeys, up and down the rigging, making the most of the winds. The ship sailed on smoothly beneath us, the gulls squawking overhead, splattering us once in a while with their warm splathery guano that smelt like rotten oysters. On a warm day in early February, almost four months into my voyage, we reached a port at the bottom of Africa, with the town spread along the seashore, and a plateau looming behind it, blue with height. They called it Cape Town.
All it meant to me was that it was the southernmost point I would reach, farthest from Mullaghmore. The thought of my Brigid came in a powerful wave over me and choked my breath. Did she think, in Connemara, that I had forgotten her altogether? Had her feckless father kept her back? I should myself have gone to Connemara again and brought her home, instead of paying heed to O’Connell’s call. My heart was a churn of regret. Yet I knew what reckless fervour I had for going to Dublin, and I would have heeded no one—least of all myself. I could not write just yet. Letters were read by the captain or one of the officers, and the East India Company was in its own way god-like and secretive. My secret would keep, I decided, heeding the advice of Fergus Murphy. But just the same, it weighed heavily on my heart, and I felt the hard cost of my footloose youth.
At Cape Town we got a great deal of fine beef and a variety of fruits, it being summer here. The crew ate heartily. Then, with much fanfare, two large sea-chests made of fine mahogany with brass clasps were hauled up; some great gentleman was coming on board, an important colonial official. Cape Town was full of people of note going to or returning from India. Now he was to take our ship to the eastern part of Bengal, some place called Dacca, I heard tell. He turned out to be an overfed fellow, barely beyond boyhood, attempting a pale moustache on his pink face, the younger son of some great lord, farmed out to the colonies.
• • •
THAT NIGHT I dreamt I was back in Mullaghmore, sitting at a table eating praties and sipping sweet buttermilk with my ma and Brigid and Brendan. As I looked at them, unable to speak, Brendan got up and left, and in his place sat Alexander Blackburn, who pointed his finger at me before fading away. The light turned a foreboding grey in which Brigid and Ma appeared ashen. Brigid lay down on the floor as if in great tiredness. My mother held out a hand to me, and before my eyes it twisted into driftwood. I cried out, yet aware that I was asleep, trying to free myself of its tendrils. I sat up, holding my heavy head between my hands, uncomprehending, heart pounding in misery, drifting with each heartbeat away from Ireland.
Having learnt enough of being a sailor, I resolved to find a sailor’s berth as soon as I could, on any ship sailing back to England or to Belgium or any other European land, whence I could sail into Sligo harbour and make it up to my mother and Brigid. At the same time, I knew how bitter it would be to return a poor drifter, penniless and full of idle stories. Why could I not make a small fortune before I sailed back from India, with my full chest hauled behind me from Sligo? I swore I would never once leave home after that. I would amaze them, telling them of the floating curtains of kelp, and days stilled by lack of wind as on a painted ocean, the surface suddenly broken by the skitter of flying fish.
We stopped next on the eastern coast at Mombasa for a week at the beginning of March, and again at Malindi for a number of days to take in curved branches of ivory, which were packed with the greatest care against breakage or stain. We cast off again and started the arduous journey across the emptiness of the Indian Ocean, seeing no ship for weeks, the sun growing sharper, nigh unbearable.
Seven months and three weeks it had taken us, from Gravesend to India, with the ship making port wherever the Company had business, delivering papers at one, loading and unloading goods at others, taking in supplies and goods, awaiting this or that high official who came from the interior. I began to sense what an intricate web the Company had spread out through the world—out from their main office in London Town. Even our almighty Captain Connolly ruled but a tiny filament of that mighty spiderweb. Each port, heavily guarded, left little hope of escape or finding my way home.
• • •
“IN A DAY or two, we reach India,” announced Hanratty.
And so we did. It was mid-May and hard summer, when we hove into sight of broken land, for the force of the great river, whose estuary it was, had shattered its meeting place with the ocean into a thousand shards, each one an island, the edges deep with mud and ooze and stick-like growths up to the tide-point. These heaped trees, with roots of gnarled fingers, spread spiderwise. These, I was told, were the mangrove. Smal
l lizards with spiny backs and hackles slithered among them. The islands appeared to float, not founded upon firm earth. At nightfall, the unkempt heads of the trees were covered with long-necked egrets and thick jungle crows that set up a white and black cacophony. Cohorts of monkeys with muddy fur, some with wizened babies clinging to them, chittered and hooted among the branches. Scattered between these were bursts of yellow leaves amidst tangles of cane-like growth. That was my first sight of India.
As I sat alone at the stern, peering into the gloaming and the passage that lay between two mangrove islands, I had an amazing visitation. Sliding through the nightwater, a moving head, the crawling powerful torso and paws, its round, furry ears tucked back, its fanged mouth drawn in a grin, the muscled glide of the yellow and black stripes. The tiger was making its easy way from one isle to another. I now knew who ruled here. We would make landfall far inland, away from this king of the night.
• • •
THE NEXT DAY, the lascars from the rigging were pointing excitedly and shouting at each other. I thought I could see a line of cobalt-hued mountains on the southeasterly horizon. Hanratty shouted that these were the monsoon clouds. So far, the breeze was gentle and smelt muddy and green. The ship moved with ease along the deep until, to our left, a great channel opened up. At Captain Connolly’s order, the ship urged northward into the channel. The water turned brown, with little eddies in which broken branches and leaves spun as they moved down the estuary, pulled into the grey-green waters of the sea receding behind us.
“How far ahead is Calcutta?” I asked Hanratty, who had sailed there in earlier voyages.
“This isn’t the mouth of the Hooghly at all. We’re going to Dacca first with that lordling. You see those monsoon clouds?” Hanratty said. Landry—pointing, eyes squinting, mouth open and dice-like teeth suspended from his upper gum—had come and joined us. “Storm, rain, drowning,” he said with satisfaction.
I stared, while young Hanratty, eager to show his knowledge, ignored the old salt and held forth. “They move slowly, almost not at all. In two, three days they’ll stir. And then, within an hour they’ll be covering the earth. There will be mighty shaking and rocking on deck and worse, far worse, below.” Sure enough, the ship was moving fast, as if trying to escape a distant foe. “Dacca. Tomorrow,” muttered Landry. That evening we anchored off a wide grassy bank where we saw villagers burning their dead. We could see the tops of thatch roofs, the smoke from evening fires. Captain Connolly let it be known that we would begin to sail again late the next day, with the tide.