‘’Tis a mighty grand vase you have here, Mother.’
Con nodded towards a large red and gold vase, which stood in the centre of a round table.
But if the reverend mother had noticed the irony in his voice, she gave no sign of it.
‘Isn’t it just the most beautiful thing?’ she trilled enthusiastically, moving closer to admire it with him, as though seeing it for the first time. ‘Father Michael carried it all the way home from Chicago himself, you know. It was given to him by a firm of Irish builders, a very well-to-do family. He gave them communion in their own private chapel. Can you imagine that? Before he died, God rest his soul, he asked us to keep it safe for him. I don’t mind admitting, it brightens up my day. There is not one person enters into this study who doesn’t admire it.’
As she rattled on, Con’s gaze took in the rest of the room. The pictures on the wall, fine china, the brass lamp on the desk and the ornate fender around the fire. The room was packed with beautiful things. Silver on the windowsill, a gold knife on the mahogany desk. As he looked down, he noticed that Ruby was copying him. She, too, studied the room. He had expected her to be intimidated and he felt strangely moved that she stood up straight, with her hands rigid by her sides, almost proud and yet, God knew, the child had nothing on this earth to feel proud about. Her gaze rested, just as his had done, first on the vase on the table, then on the paintings, the windowsill and finally on the brass fender around the fire.
She’s mimicking me, he thought to himself, as a faint smile touched his lips. She doesn’t know what to do or how to behave, so she is mimicking what I do, God bless her.
‘Will she be fully educated, Mother?’ The expression on Con’s face said clearly that he would not be fobbed off with prattle of vases and rich American benefactors.
The reverend mother felt slightly uncomfortable.
‘Of course she will. We will do all we can for these unfortunate storm orphans, but please don’t bring me any more children to look after. There are practical limitations to what we can achieve here. You haven’t brought me this girl just for one day, as you well know. She will be here until we can place her into service. But, goodness knows, some of these children we have taken in from the bogs are as good as feral. Now, please sit yourself down, while I ask Sister Francis to fetch some tea and brack, then you can tell us all you know.’
*
Ruby stood next to the chair on which Con was now sitting. He had slipped his hand into hers, to reassure her, and now she stood still clinging onto him, scared to let him go. She was exhausted and the heat from the fire thawed her bones and stung her eyes, while the lack of sleep made her feel drowsy. She looked at the turf stacked up in the wicker basket and her heart constricted with pain. They would only have needed a few sods, she and her brother, to warm up their ma and da. The snow still fell heavily, but here in Belmullet, the wind was nowhere near as fierce as it had been in Doohoma.
The trees outside were thick with the snow, their branches creaking and groaning under the weight of it. She had spent every day of her life with the noise of the ocean breaking on the sands and pounding in her ears. Now, her ears tingled as they adjusted to the unfamiliar sound of voices in deep discussion. The kind man and the reverend mother were talking about her. Their words reverberated in her brain.
Her mammy’s dead. Her daddy’s dead. Her brother’s dead. They are all dead.
‘We are full to the rushes here. The last thing we need is another child. We cannot manage with those we have, can we, Sister Francis? Overrun we are.’
Sister Francis, who had brought in the tea, caught Ruby’s eye and gave her a sympathetic smile. No one offered Ruby a drink.
They didn’t want her. She was not welcome. Her face burned hot with shame. The man, Con, had taken her from a cold hell to his own fireside. His soothing. His wife. She had sat on the pregnant woman’s knee and felt a new life kicking her in the back, as her frozen hair was rubbed with a hot towel. She felt the burning then too, and had wanted to turn around and kick the unborn baby back. Over and over.
‘He’s off again,’ the wife had said to Con, with a knowing smile. He smiled back as he placed his hand on his wife’s shoulder and even though Ruby was sitting there on the knee of his wife, for that moment, she did not exist.
For almost a week, she had squatted on the earth floor by her mammy’s side and done her very best. Every word her mammy had cried out was burned into her memory. During interludes, when her mother recognized Ruby and spoke, she had stared into her eyes, desperately wanting her mother to say something that would help, to make the cottage warm or to tell her where to find food. The words were still there, sitting in her gut, gnawing at her, telling her she was Ruby Flynn and that no man or woman on this earth was better than she.
‘You have family, Ruby. Find my family,’ her mother had croaked.
Ruby had whispered in her ear, ‘Where are they, Mammy?’
‘No one is better than you Ruby Flynn, remember that.’
As she held the melted snow to her mother’s lips, she turned to look at her brother. He lay next to their daddy on the mattress. Something was wrong with Daddy. He didn’t speak or move at all and was very cold.
The dog, Max, lay next to where the fire should have been burning and he looked at Ruby with wide doleful eyes. We are in trouble, they said to Ruby, what can I do?
Where was Max now? Ruby’s heart beat faster as she thought of him and her eyes began to fill with tears.
She wanted to ask the man, would someone take Max when they went for her mammy and daddy? Max needed food. Max would die too. But the words were trapped inside her. The vision of soft eyes came into her mind. The long hair around his mouth, which she used to laugh at and call his beard. The smell of his damp coat when they both came back wet to the house and she lay with him on the floor in front of the fire, stroking his belly with one hand, holding a book with another, listening to her mother busy at the table preparing their supper, feeling warm and content.
The image, the smells, the memory all fluttered about inside her head. She opened and closed her mouth and tried to form the word Max, but nothing happened, no sound came, she could not speak.
Ruby looked at the adults talking, oblivious to her silence. The man’s wife, Susan, had told her she would live here and would attend the school.
‘You will be sad for a while, but you will get better, sweetheart,’ she had said.
Sometimes, her mammy had called her sweetheart. When she was having her soft moments. When Ruby sat on her knee and rested her head against her soft pillowy breasts. When her mammy stroked her hair and sang softly into her ear. She tried to remember the song. It was elusive, just there, hovering, waiting to be recalled, but she couldn’t remember. She could only hear the soothing tones of Susan.
‘It is a great opportunity, just fantastic. Make the most of it. Learn every day. Study really hard. That school is the best in Ireland and even in Liverpool. You will leave with something most girls in Ireland don’t have, the ability to make your own way in the world. With an education like that, you will be able to do anything, become a nurse, a doctor even, they have more lady doctors now than ever before, since the war. Just you make the most of it, Ruby, turn something bad into something good.’
Susan looked into Ruby’s face as she spoke, hoping to find some sign that her words had sunk in, made sense. All she saw was fear, staring back at her.
‘It’s all too much for her to take in,’ said Con, gently. ‘Don’t upset yourself, it’s because you are so close to your time.’ Susan nodded and Ruby saw tears welling in her eyes.
She was confused by Susan’s words. Why should she make the most of it? She didn’t want to live here. When the snow melted, she would escape and return to her cottage. Who were these people deciding the rest of her life for her?
Susan, in her softly spoken way had also said, ‘The nuns will look after you and make you very welcome.’
If she had got that s
o profoundly wrong, what of everything else she had said? Ruby now felt more afraid than ever. The looks the reverend mother shot Ruby, when she thought Con wasn’t looking were far from welcoming.
Con continued to speak. ‘She is about twelve years old, the housekeeper reckons, despite being so small. The only words she has spoken since we found her are her name, Ruby Flynn. They are known not to have family locally. Flynn was an orphan, himself, by all accounts. I will make enquiries, but without knowing which parish the mother was originally from, I don’t hold out much hope… though I do know where she may have once worked.’
Con had finished his tea. His cup tapped the silver teaspoon and it rattled and rang against the saucer as he placed the cup down. She heard the noise of shuffling, the lightest of footsteps, moving along the corridor outside the door and turned her head slightly, to listen harder.
She could hear bells softly pealing, doors opening and closing and muffled voices. The convent, which had been silent until now, was slowly awakening. Her fingers were wound around the thin arm of the chair in which Con sat and they clenched tighter, as though she were reluctant to leave his side. A bolt of anxiety shot through her as he rose to sign the papers the reverend mother had laid out on her blotter. Along with Sister Francis, they huddled over the desk, talking. The heat from the fire burnt the side of her leg and her skin became mottled with ugly red weals. The chilblains on her feet stung, as the freshly warmed blood in her veins forced a way through the constricted and frozen vessels in her almost frostbitten toes.
Sister Francis looked directly at her and smiled again. ‘I’ll fetch Charlotte. She can look after her for a few days, until she settles down,’ she said.
The reverend mother interjected sharply. ‘She doesn’t require looking after, Sister Francis. You encourage the girls to be weak. She just needs someone to show her the ropes.’
The adults continued talking as they walked out of the office. It was as if they had forgotten about Ruby entirely.
Sister Francis turned back. ‘You wait there, Ruby,’ she said, leaving the door half open. They were gone and she was alone.
Ruby’s head banged with panic. Con had rescued her. She had thought that he and his wife had liked her. Susan had clothed her and fed her soup from a spoon. They had tried to remove the matted knots from her hair. They must feel the same way as she did. She must surely belong to them now, until they could find her mammy’s family. Con had spoken to her kindly, like her daddy. She thought he might want to take her back home with him. To his wife and the kitchen with the crib waiting in the corner and the soup pan on the range. To the bookcase against the wall with more books than she thought anyone could ever read and the big lamp and the soft towels. The patterned red rug in front of the crackling fire swam in front of her eyes. She wanted Con to take her back, to the smell of bread, tobacco and safety. Fear rose like bile in her throat and she began to breathe very fast indeed as she controlled the waves of terror, but she could not stop the shaking which began in her knees and now afflicted her hands.
Is he going to leave me? Will he walk away? She felt a cold blast of air race through the room and catch at her legs, as the front door opened once again. She heard muffled voices and words she knew were about her.
‘Best not to visit.’ ‘Regards to your wife.’ ‘Don’t fuss to write.’
Her heart slipped. She tilted her head to one side to strain and hear more.
Will he really leave me here?
Receding, fading footsteps crunched in the snow. A car door clicked shut. An engine fired up.
Will he?
She heard the sound of tyres on compacted snow as the car slowly and carefully moved away and down the driveway.
Does he not want to take me back to his home?
She flinched as the front doors banged shut and she heard the sound of the nun’s footsteps moving back towards her; missing was the heavy solid tread of Con’s boots.
No, he does not.
The pain of his parting was like a new, fresh loss and yet she had known him for less than a day. She moved not a muscle as she stared at the window, the tears stinging her eyes threatening to erupt. The brass clock on the mantel chimed the hour and in response, the turf shifted in the grate and sent a shower of sparks to land on her feet. She took a deep breath and swallowed a gasp, holding down the panic, the hurt, and the pain, down and down, again. Someone called out the name Charlotte, and a second later the door opened wider.
‘Come here, girl.’ It was the reverend mother. ‘Come here.’
She turned her head, but the reverend mother was no longer looking at Ruby. Her attention was on Sister Francis and a young girl who stood under a dim halo of light. She had a pretty face and long dark hair tied with blue ribbon bows in two plaits which touched her shoulders.
The corridor was dimly lit and the tall shadows of the nuns towered and flickered on the rendered walls. Black effigies, whispering, conferring, long fingers pointing, plotting her fate. The nuns stooping to speak to the young girl who had stood between them were not of Ruby’s world. The events of the past weeks had set her apart. No other person could ever know or comprehend the depth of her pain and she could never fit into this world with these people. This place with its antiseptic smell, polished wood and light falling from the brocade fringed lamp.
Ruby fixed her gaze on the vase Con had admired. It glowed in the light from the fire, as if calling her towards the table, and its gold rim burned and flickered, mesmerizing her. The tiny patterns of figurines reflected from the perfect glaze danced mockingly in the flames. Like Ruby, the vase was on fire. She thought she heard her brother’s voice whispering in her ear, We can do it, so we can Ruby, we can.
‘Come here, girl.’ A further summons from the door. Not kindly or caring, but abrupt and impatient.
Ruby stroked the vase and ran her fingers over the luminous, powdery glaze, then with one flick of her hand and with all the force of the pain burning inside her, sent it flying from the table and onto the floor, where it smashed at her feet into a thousand pieces. She heard the fading screams of the reverend mother as she disappeared, deep inside her own broken heart.
*
Later that evening, Con met Thomas in the Doohoma Inn.
‘Why do you think they took themselves up there, Con?’ asked Thomas as he waited for his Guinness to be pulled.
‘God alone knows,’ Con replied. ‘Seems to me that they had an idea to go out and cut the turf for heat and couldn’t get back down again.’
The rescue of the Flynn children had been the talk of the day in the village. The landlord placed Con’s pewter mug on the bar and joined the conversation.
‘Flynn lost his curragh when the storm began weeks ago, but sure, the man was sick for weeks before that. There won’t have been any food in that house for a while, although I have sent up bread meself, and others sent ’tatoes and cabbage. ’Twas the weather that put a stop to it, but we was waiting for them to come down, so we were. I told the mammy meself, sit the storm out down here, I said. Mind, I had no idea then how long it would last and neither did she, but I’m thinking she may have guessed it would be bad and wanted them to stay in their own home with the animals. Did you find the dog? God, the kids loved that dog. Big grey thing, Max I think his name is. He followed them kids everywhere.’
‘I didn’t,’ Con said. ‘We saw no dog, did we, Thomas?’
Thomas shook his head as he took the first sip of his pint.
‘The mammy, she was a funny one,’ said the landlord. ‘Too proud they were to ask for help from anyone. People say that she went down a peg or two when she married Flynn. Some say she had something to do with a grand house. Maybe she was from one of the tenant farms on one of the estates. But there’s no doubting the nature between her and Flynn now. They was madly in love. Neither God nor man could have kept them apart and none tried, so they say.’
Con finished his Guinness and placed his pot on the bar.
‘Come on, Thom
as,’ he said. ‘We have a job to finish.’
‘Eh, what job? Have we not done enough for one day, surely to God?’
Con had felt uneasy since returning from the convent.
‘Come on, Thomas,’ he said again, impatiently. ‘We have to go.’
And once again, Con stepped out into the blizzard. The child might be in the convent, but he could do this. She would probably never know, but if it was the last thing he did, he would find her dog.
*
Back at the convent, Ruby escaped unpunished for breaking the vase. What had saved her was the fact that she turned a ghastly shade of pale and fainted dead away.
‘If she stepped outdoors the wind would break her bones in two, she’s lighter than a feather,’ said Sister Francis, as she carried Ruby along the corridor to the dorm with Charlotte bobbing along in her wake. She said it loudly and ran fast, knowing that while Ruby was at the convent, she would have to watch over her, to save her from the wrath of the reverend mother, which would be fierce indeed after today.
3
1953
She was awake. Ruby was always the first to wake. Often in the middle of the night. It wasn’t the bells of the chapel ringing or even the cock crowing, it was her own urgent thoughts, forcing her eyelids open, escaping the nightmare which had, night after night, haunted her sleep.
In the early days, she awoke screaming. Her punishment for disturbing the slumbering dorm had been severe and now, in the vacillating moments between sleep and wakefulness, she had learnt to control her distress. To lie with her arms rigid, her breathing slow and deep and wait, until her beating heart stilled to a steady rhythm.
‘God in heaven, are you awake again? What’s up with ye, Ruby?’ The dorm bed next to her own would always creak as Charlotte, or Lottie as she was known by everyone, leaned over. Lottie had slept in the bed next to Ruby since that first day at the convent and she had been the first person to hear Ruby speak after a whole year of silence. This from a child who had once talked so much, her father joked that she would drive the fish across the water, all the way to America, just for a bit of peace and quiet.
Ruby Flynn Page 2