‘We called ourselves hedgers, Miss Kathryn. It was a nasty game and a dangerous one to play. If I’d been caught, I’d not be here today. The magistrates sent the police to search for us but we were always warned and we would scatter and wait for them to pass. If you were caught you were liable to five years or transportation. Only the Protestant children got proper schooling. It wasn’t until the emancipation that we dared come out into the open. The day it was declared, twenty-five years ago, I opened my own school and here I’ve stayed.’ He said nothing for a while, gazing into the past within the hearth. Then, ‘What is to become of us, Miss Kathryn? You and me? The English and the Irish? How is it to end? Will we always be at each other’s throats, two islands and only a fair day’s sailing between them?’
‘Perhaps it’s because you are so close that we fear you.’
‘Yes!’ said the old man. ‘I can understand that.’
Kate paused, not certain she should say more. Then, ‘I have always been taught to believe that Ireland is England’s enemy and that good fortune for one was bad for the other. My father says that England’s difficulties are Ireland’s opportunities and that in every crisis you have always helped our enemies.’
‘And your father is right. But you English have since made friends of your enemies. So why not us? Why possess us all these centuries? Why all these years of vengeance?’
‘Perhaps this famine will change things.’
‘Maybe, Miss Kathryn. But for better or for worse?’
‘I have seen and heard so much since I came to Ireland, so many terrible things, but I wonder if it is all England’s fault. Is it to blame for the blight?’
The old man thumped the arm of his chair and took the pipe from his mouth. In his sudden anger, colour left his cheeks, droplets of water trickled from his eyes.
‘Don’t blame the English for that. They’re rightly accused of many dreadful things but don’t lay this on them. What has happened this year and all the years past has been the will of God and not even the English can deter God in His doing. The blight is His punishment for our waste and our indolence. I am old enough to remember those years of plenty … Yes, I can … when we had too many potatoes to eat. We would leave them in the ground to rot or if we had a handcart and the gumption to pull it, we carried them to the market. As a boy I could stand all day at the pitch and not even give them away. On the way home I’d empty the lot into a ditch, for they were not even worth the price of the sacks. Then when the next year’s crop failed we knew it was God’s retribution. A wilful waste makes a woeful want, that’s what we would say and that’s the reason for it. The blight and the hunger is His punishment and only He can right it. And in the meantime we must trust the English to keep us alive.’
The old man sank back in his chair, his temper fading. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘if keeping us alive is the government’s intention, it is being painfully slow. It sends soldiers and we need food instead of Fusiliers. But forgive me. This is not polite, nor is it fair to you, Miss Kathryn. We need not spoil our little party with Ireland’s many problems. All my life I’ve lived with them. Mind you, when I was a young man I thought we could do something to change it.’
He poked the peat ashes with his walking stick.
‘A handful of wet straw on a fire can set up such a cloud of smoke that it obliterates the stars and that’s how it was with us then. So much smoke but no fire, so much talk of doing but nothing done. We had our chance once, Miss Kathryn,’ he said it quietly. ‘At Clontarf we had our chance and we lost it to good common sense. Least that was O’Connell’s excuse.’
‘He is a sick man,’ Kate said. ‘My father says he is finished.’
‘Oh, yes! He is dying. We all are. And when he’s gone there’ll be no one to take his place. When his heart stops, so will Ireland’s.’
She waited for him to speak again. The only sound was the hissing of the peat. She thought he was dozing but he was not. He was lost again in his past and, like O’Connell’s, it had been a lifetime of trying and losing. The past was despair. He was O’Connell’s age and had once shared in the man’s fury and ambition, as every Irishman had. But now the fury was spent and the great ambition withered.
The sun travelled away from the window, the room darkened, and with it, the old man’s mood. He seemed smaller, fragile and when he spoke again, his voice was faint.
‘Forgive me, Miss Kathryn. I am an old man drifting backwards and O’Connell’s name put me in another time and another place when we talked of defiance and rebellion. Yet here we are, all these years on and nothing has changed. The soldiers wear much the same uniforms, fire with better muskets and still we pay our rents to the same masters.’
‘Tell me of O’Connell,’ said Kate.
‘We used to call him “Swaggering Dan” because of the way he walked and talked. Such a figure of a man and with a voice that could charm the Devil into Paradise. It was said that he was the yeast in a mass of Irish dough. That was often used to describe him and it was right. When he spoke at his meetings, there was a hush. It was as if he could play tunes on the spines of people, like the great fiddler he was. He promised we would get our Parliament back, the one Pitt stole from us all those years ago. The English called it a union but it was nothing of the sort. They said it was marriage but it was more like a brutal rape. We were dragged to the altar. O’Connell spent his life working for a repeal, to break from the Union and get us back our Parliament and let us govern ourselves. Whenever he called a meeting, thousands – many, many thousands – came to listen. I went to one at Tara and there was such a crowd that the English surrounded us with what we thought was their entire army. But the only disturbance that day was somebody overturning the gingerbread stand. Not a fist was lifted. There was no drink, you see. Can you imagine all those thousands of Irishmen and no whiskey? He had his chance at Clontarf and that’s where his legend ended.’
‘What was Clontarf?’ she asked.
‘It was the test, his biggest ever meeting, a monster. I remember it was a Sunday. I thought it wrong to hold it on the Sabbath, but I went all the same. Clontarf was near Dublin, in a special field, the very place where eight hundred years ago our own King Boru defeated the Norsemen and drove them into the sea. Men knew the significance of that and thought O’Connell had chosen it because he had made his plan and the big day had come at last. He expected tens of thousands but they say there was nearly a million men there and every last one of them ready to march on Dublin Castle and pull down the Union flag. The English were prepared for it but it didn’t matter. It was our hour. We needed only a nod from Swaggering Dan. But he failed us. He was always the man of lovely words, always preaching that the power of talk did more than a charge of gunpowder. But at that moment, the very moment it mattered, he couldn’t bring himself to do the dirty deed. He said there were British warships in the harbour and that their cannons would blow every man among us to smithereens. Ireland, he said, would be a field of blood. So he told us all to go home and wait until another day. And go home we did.’
‘Why?’ asked Kate. ‘A million men could easily have beaten the soldiers.’
The old man shook his head, the glimmer of a flame in the hearth dancing on his face. ‘Because Swaggering Dan said he didn’t want a drop of Irish blood spilt. As if a man’s liberty has ever been won for less. So go home, he said, and we did, like sheep to their pens. And the English laughed.’
Tom Keegan raised himself forward in his chair and held out both hands to the fire as if in prayer. ‘And to think we flocked after him like dogs in heat. We should have kept him in the Derry bogs where he was spawned. O’Connell is dying now and soon he’ll be in heaven. But the saints will mock him there, yes, they will. He lived a hero’s life but Clontarf branded him a coward.’
CHAPTER SIX
June was as hot a month as anyone could remember. In January, people had frozen to death. Now people fainted with the heat. What mattered most was that the potato plants were healthy
and strong, their stems thick and heavy with leaf. There had never been such a crop and they thanked God.
He had put their faith to the test. They had endured the winter’s hunger and not a day had passed without them crossing themselves and praising Him. The green fields were their redemption. To make doubly sure, they used their scarce pennies to buy salt and walked the boundaries of their plots, sprinkling it over the long beds to keep evil spirits away.
Kate had risen early. It was a sparkling morning and she had promised the schoolchildren a drawing lesson. Her saddlebag was filled with rolls of paper, coloured crayons and gum. She would stick their pictures on the schoolhouse wall and there would be prizes for every one of them.
It was too soon to ride directly to Kinsale. The children did not come before nine each morning, so she decided instead to go the long way, past Blackrock Castle, to Monkstown and on to the coastal tracks beyond Minane Bridge. She halted at Shanbally to watch the busy traffic of cargo ships passing in and out of Cork Harbour. She saw a single track, worn through the turf. She was curious and followed it until it widened and dropped away to a clearing. A horse was tethered by the edge of a deep pit, its sides covered in mauve heather and sprawls of clinging ferns. She rounded it and saw within its shadows a small cottage, almost hidden at the bottom. The sunlight barely touched it, its walls were green with mould and there was a dank smell of rotting vegetation. She shivered with the sudden chill and its desolation.
She reined her horse back to leave when she heard a woman’s scream and the cry of a baby. A young man came out of the cottage door and looked up at her. He smiled.
‘Would you perhaps have a clean piece of cloth to spare?’ he asked.
He was in his shirt, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. There was blood on his hands.
‘I have a handkerchief,’ Kate replied.
‘Too small. Even for this baby. And I’ve seldom seen them smaller.’
‘You have a baby in there?’
‘Certainly I have. Arrived this very moment. Come down and see.’
Kate tied the mare’s reins to a boulder and, slowly treading the steps cut into the steep wall of the pit, followed him inside the cottage. A peat fire smouldered in the middle of the dirt floor. The smoke stung her eyes.
The woman was lying on a pallet of straw, penned in a cot of staves.
The young man pulled back the rags that covered the mother and huddled around her like a litter of puppies were three small, naked children. She held her baby in her arms, still wet and yellow with wax. She was a big woman with wide hips, her breasts large with milk, her face glistening with sweat.
‘You’ve done well today, Mary,’ the young man said. ‘I was hoping this young lady might have had something decent to wrap him in.’
He turned to Kate. ‘I thought he deserved something nice and clean for the first few moments of his new life. After all, he’s been waiting long enough to join us. By the way, I’m Robin. A doctor, as you might suppose. And this is Mary McMahon.’
‘How do you do? I’m Kate.’ She turned away, lifted up her riding skirt, tore out her white linen petticoat and gave it to him.
Dr Robin Fitzgerald was accustomed to surprises. He knew well enough who she was. Since the whipping of Ogilvie in Kinsale, her name and fame had spread well beyond the boundaries of County Cork.
‘Thank you, Miss Kate,’ he said, tearing the linen apart. ‘It is a privilege to meet you although I might have preferred a pleasanter place for it.’
He wiped the baby clean, wrapped him tight in its swaddling cloth and put him in his mother’s arms.
‘I’ll be back, Mary, the day after tomorrow. Now keep him clean and away from the fire smoke. It’s no good for him or you and I’ve told you so many times.’
They washed their hands in the spring water that trickled from the rock face and climbed back up to the light. The sun was high. It was still some hours to midday but the cottage was already in dark shadow.
‘Why do they live in such squalor?’ Kate asked. ‘Surely you can be poor and clean?’
He shook his head. ‘Kate, it only takes a tub of water, a bar of soap and some scrubbing to keep yourself and your home tidy. But she will have sold her tub long ago. She has no pennies to spare for soap and she has lost the will to scrub. It really is as simple as that. She only has a little strength left and her baby will soon take that away.’
‘She must have been a handsome women once. Perhaps even beautiful. Such lovely long brown hair and those blue eyes.’
‘Yes! I understand she was something to be proud of. Her father was a weaver. But she’s had a year or more of making do on her own.’
‘How does she cope?’
‘As they all do. Or they die. There is no other way. I have nothing to judge their lives by. You and I are strangers to them, aliens. We visit them, administer, give them orders, punish. We smell of brilliantine and perfumes, our hair shines, our faces are powdered, our shoes are well heeled. They see our belts loose about our fat bodies and they wonder at the mystery of us, alone in their miserable lives. As Mary is now, waiting for her husband Patch to come back to her.’
‘Is he on the road, looking for work?’
‘Who knows? This is the first time he’s been away and he’s been gone six months now. They lived well enough down there in that pit on his whiskey-making. Then the excise men came and smashed his still. They would have broken Patch too if they’d caught him. But he scampered away just in time and he hasn’t been heard of since.’
‘When he comes back, he will have a fine boy waiting for him, thanks to you.’
‘She could have managed on her own. You saw three in the bed but she’s had more.’
‘Where are they?’
‘Dead. Born healthy but disease took them. Things doctors can’t cure.’
‘You must despair. Seeing so much.’
‘Yes! Despair is the word. I wonder, I really do wonder, what massive crime they must have committed to be treated so badly. There was a time when I would hold a newborn in my hands, straight from God’s own cradle, and I would think what spirit there must be in these people to want another child when there is such a world to greet it.’
‘Why then?’ she asked.
‘I think the poorer they are, the more precious their children. When you have nothing, to be able to create a child must be like discovering a jewel in a turnip field.’
‘And they’re always living with the dread of being hungry.’
‘Yes! Always. It never leaves them. They say that hunger never sleeps. They seem to accept it as second nature, just as Mary does, as if it is hereditary. But she has her dream to keep her going. She tells me that one day Patch will take them all to America. She talks about the sea and the big ship that will take them to the other side of the world and all the things they will do there. It’s her dream. It’s all she has left. It’s what keeps her alive.’
They rode side by side for nearly an hour and Dr Robin talked the whole way without stop. He spoke of the famine and his fear of the fever epidemic that so often follows the blight. Where would they find doctors and nurses if it came? Where would they find the medicines? Why was nobody preparing for the worst when that was what they must expect? He spoke as if all Ireland would soon be bare of people.
‘I have read a report by a man called Tuke, an Englishman and a Quaker, who has come here to help with relief. He is compiling his own journal of the famine. He writes that he has been to America and has seen the wasted remnants of the great Indian tribes there living like prisoners on their reservations and how badly the Negro slaves are treated in the southern states. But he says he has never seen anything so degrading or so much misery and suffering as he has in the bog holes of Ireland.’
‘Why are the people so patient?’ she asked.
‘Patient and without protest,’ he answered. ‘Can you understand that? Because I cannot. There can’t be a country anywhere in the world where oppression has ruled and the oppres
sed have protested so little. I’ve never heard them complain about God or man, even though their misery is of man’s making. We must be content, they say, with what the Almighty has put before us. They wait in their blind, patient hope until death relieves them. And they die, like the faithful they are, with a prayer of thanks upon their lips.’
‘Don’t we call it Providence?’
Robin shook his head. ‘And don’t the priests call it divine intervention? God’s punishment for sins past and present?’
‘And it’s not?’
‘Of course not, Kate. And you don’t believe it either. We may never know what causes the blight but we know who’s responsible for the suffering that’s followed it. It’s man-made, landlord-made. Do you think people would be dying if they still had their homes to live in? Would they be starving if the landlords had let them eat their own oats and barley instead of handing it over as rent? The blame sits squarely on the landlord’s doorstep. Do you know, Kate, there are days when I come from such sights of misery I feel disposed to take a gun and shoot the first one I see?’
They came to a village. They stopped and he turned to her. ‘I’m breathless, Kate. I cannot remember ever talking so much for so long. You must think me a prig and a bore. But you are inspiring.’
She laughed. ‘I am just a very obedient listener.’
‘No. You’re more than that. I seldom ever declare myself so readily. You are good for the spirit, Kate, you really are. Will you come and meet my family? Will you do that? Come to my home? We’re at Youghal, less than half a day’s ride from Cork. Father will be delighted and my sister Una will be thrilled to meet you. We are twins. Do say you’ll come.’
Kate nodded. She would go. It was ordained. Father and son. The Keegans and now the Fitzgeralds. How perfectly matched. How patterned her life was becoming.
‘I will come. Of course I will. But you must send me an invitation. My father will be most impressed. He insists I’ve turned my back on what he calls civilised society.’
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