Dark Rosaleen

by Michael Nicholson, OBE

  ‘Mary,’ he whispered. ‘Is that you? Are my babies here?’

  He knelt and drew back the blanket and the dead eyes of his children stared back at him.

  It did not take him long. He wrapped their little bodies in rags and pushed them into a wide crevice in the rock. Then he heaped stones into it until they were safely wedged together in their grave. No fox, no rats, nothing would ever touch them again. He sat down and rested his head against their gravestones. He took off his cap. Inside the rim were five yellow tickets with the name ‘S.S. SARA JANE’ printed in large letters. The sailing time was noon in ten days’ time. He dropped them between his feet and ground them into the earth with his heels until they were gone. Then he looked up at the moon and howled, a long and tortured primaeval howl.

  By his side were the scattered bits and pieces of his whiskey still and fragments of the bottles O’Rourke had smashed the night he brought the excise men. He leant forward and picked up a long, thin shard of green glass. He held it up, sharp and sparkling. How beautiful it was. A precious, lethal emerald.

  The moon moved slowly across the pit and the last of its light shone bright and glistening on the blood oozing from the suicide’s wrists.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The old priest was drunk. He crossed himself a dozen times and swore by the name of his favourite saint. He had already sent a letter to his bishop, and would he do that if he was lying? Mr Hughes, the Inspecting Officer for the Relief Commission, had also seen it. He urged Dr Robin to go with him and verify it himself.

  ‘The baby has stigmata, doctor. I would not believe it if I hadn’t touched the child and seen the marks. It is the most extraordinary thing.’

  Kate went with Robin to the church, which was two hours’ ride away from Cork. But trifles of gossip and rumour travelled fast across the counties and they expected to find nothing.

  The priest led them through the maze of derelict tumbled cottages to a small church on a rise. Where a crowd of thirty or more people were gathered in the graveyard. They held wooden crosses and fell on their knees as the priest approached. He ignored them and pushed his way past into the church. Kate and Robin followed.

  Altar candles had been placed on the floor and they shone onto a makeshift crib tucked into the corner under a plaster cast of the Virgin Mary. A man and a woman were crouched by it.

  ‘Bring him out, Maggie,’ the priest ordered sharply. ‘Be hasty, and show him to the gentle people here.’

  The woman reached into the crib and brought out a baby boy, wrapped in a dirty, ragged shawl. She put him on her knee and pulled the cloth away so that he was naked. Robin looked closer. On the baby’s hands and feet were small red marks where the skin was broken and the blood had congealed. At the sight of them, the man and woman crossed themselves twice over and began a prayer.

  ‘It is the divine favour, the marks of Jesus,’ the old priest said. He went down on his knees by the child’s parents. ‘It is a miracle, a blessed sign from God that he has forgiven us. Now he will save the potatoes.’

  Robin turned the child to the candlelight. Its eyes were glazed and its legs and arms hung limp. He snapped his fingers in its face. The child did not flinch. He examined the stigmata, smoothing the skin around the tiny wounds, gently touching the soft scabs that were beginning to form over them. He leant closer, opened the baby’s mouth and sniffed its breath. Then he pinched its arm. The baby did not move or cry.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ said the priest, ‘What are you doing? This is a holy child.’

  Robin stood up. ‘This child feels nothing and it is certainly not holy. It is unconscious and someone has been feeding it poteen. Smell it. Go on, old priest, you’ll recognise it if anyone can. This poor thing has been drugged so that it won’t cry. Drugged, so they could burn it and make the marks. That’s what they are, priest. Burn marks.’

  The woman pulled the child to her and covered it again with her shawl. She began rocking on her knees, wailing and pleading to the effigy of Mary above her. Her husband ran from the church. Robin held the priest with both hands and shook him hard.

  ‘This infant has been tortured. If you had anything to do with the making of it, old man, then you too are damned.’

  The priest did not reply. He stood up, slowly shaking his head, gaping at the woman crying at his feet as she rocked the drunken child in her arms. Robin pushed the priest aside and left the church with Kate, walking past the hushed crowd waiting outside.

  ‘The father put the marks on the baby with a burning ember and poured liquor down its throat to hide the pain and keep it from screaming.’

  Robin sat with Kate in the front parlour of the Inspecting Officer’s house.

  ‘How could they do that to their own baby?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Hunger gives cruelty a different look,’ Robin answered. ‘It was a desperate act of survival, and hunger is the master. I suppose they thought they might get something from it – money, food, clothes – especially if the bishop had come.’

  ‘Do you think the old priest knew?’ she asked.

  ‘Perhaps. Perhaps not,’ he answered.

  ‘Surely it wouldn’t have fooled the bishop. He would have seen it for what it was?’

  ‘Maybe. But like the priest, he would want to believe. Fakery is the core of all religions, and most especially theirs.’

  ‘What will people do to them?’

  ‘The old priest will probably say nothing. He’ll keep it a secret and let them go on believing. Such is priest-craft.’

  But Robin was wrong. The revelation shook the drink out of the priest. In his rage, he took the burning altar candle and beat the mother with it, then chased her out of the church, screaming his curses. The crowd joined in. They chased after her and when they caught her they beat her and her infant with their wooden crosses and left them to bleed. Then they searched for the husband who had held the stick of burning peat to the child and when they found him, hiding in a hole by his wrecked cottage, they punished him the same way they had punished the gombeen man who had sold them human flesh. The next day, the Inspecting Officer came again to Robin. He said the woman and her baby had died from the beatings and their bodies had been carried away by the dogs. He had searched for the husband and found him nailed to the gibbet on Maundy Hill.

  When Robin and the Inspecting Officer arrived there, they saw that the killers had stripped the body of its clothes. Crows had already taken the eyes. It would remain nailed there until only the skeleton remained.

  ‘His body has turned black, doctor. He wasn’t like that yesterday.’

  ‘Stay back, Hughes, stay well back. We must leave him where he is. We can’t afford to touch him now.’

  ‘What’s happened to him, doctor?’

  ‘The worst, Mr Hughes. For this village and for everyone who nailed him there. It’s the fever, the black fever. It’s come at last. God help us, Hughes, God help Ireland. For now the real dying will begin.’

  Robin did not delay long. That afternoon he and Kate rode directly to Kinsale. The snow had drifted high in places, hiding the road and disguising the ditches, so the going was slow. They rode side by side and trod their horses carefully. Robin was anxious. He knew how rapidly the fever would travel.

  ‘The children must be kept inside the schoolroom. They must sleep inside, eat inside, no one must touch them until we know which way it’s moving.’

  ‘You call it the black fever.’

  ‘It’s typhus. Black because the blood congeals and the skin colours. The body feels as if it’s on fire, as if every part of it is being pricked by a million needles. It can be so intense I’ve known people throw themselves into the rivers to cool themselves and drown because they could not swim … I’ve seen many different ways of dying, Kate, but the black fever is the most terrible.’

  ‘Is it because of the hunger?’

  ‘If the potato fails, the fever is never far behind. When the hunger is on them, people sell everything they have to buy food, the
ir clothes, their bedding and sometimes, God forgive them, even their children’s bodies. When the pennies are gone, all they have left is the warmth of the peat fire. They stay in their hovels, getting hungrier and weaker by the day. It’s then that the fever gets them.’

  ‘I’ve heard that it’s the rats that carry it,’ Kate said.

  ‘Yes! You can get rabies from a dog or a fox or a badger so it’s possible a rat bite could give you the fever. But I’m not convinced.’

  ‘Why, Robin?’

  ‘I’ve seen hundreds die from the fever but I don’t suppose I’ve seen more than a dozen or so rat bites on the bodies. Think of a tiny breadcrumb in the palm of your hand. You’d barely notice it on the body of a dying man, would you, such a crumb? Yet I’ve seen things no bigger than this on the dead and the dying.’

  Kate nodded. ‘They were on the dead at Skibbereen. Their hair was crawling with lice.’

  ‘That’s right. I would have seen a rat’s bite on a fevered man. But I wouldn’t see the bite of something so, small would I?’

  ‘Could something so tiny kill a man?’

  ‘Probably not. It would be a strange act of God, Kate, having made us in His image, to let us be destroyed by something so small and so vile.’

  They rode into the valley shortly before midday and Robin they were already too late. The schoolroom windows had been painted over with a lime wash, the little board with the ‘Hundred Thousand Welcomes’ had been taken down from over the door. There was not a movement from the cluster of cottages.

  The sound of the horses brought Keegan and Una out. Their eyes were red with weeping.

  ‘Stay in your saddles, both of you!’ Keegan shouted. ‘We have the fever. Seven of the children are inside. We’re waiting to bury them. Only the dead are left here now. Go! The pair of you. While you’re still clean.’

  Kate and Robin dismounted and went to them. Robin took Keegan’s hand and held it tight against his own chest.

  ‘I have known you and this house and all this valley in the happiest of times. I’m damned if I’ll leave you now.’

  Then he went to his sister and put his arms around her, his face next to hers.

  ‘Why didn’t you go?’ he whispered. He felt her tears on his cheeks.

  ‘I couldn’t leave,’ she sobbed. ‘Not Keegan, not the children.’

  ‘Who else is inside?’ he asked.

  ‘Only them. Their families left them where they died. How could they do that, Robin? Leave their own children unburied. How could they?’ He stroked her hair to soothe her.

  ‘The fever is a terrible thing, my sweetheart. They know how it kills. They’ve seen it before and there’s nothing they can do. You mustn’t blame them.’ He turned to Keegan. ‘We will bury the children together, and properly, like good little Christians.’

  Kate came to Keegan and held his arm. ‘Is he inside there too?’ she asked. Tears swelled and dribbled down his face. It was his answer. She left him and walked to the open door.

  The schoolroom was dark inside. She could see the seven little mounds laid side by side on the flagstones where once they had sat and listened to her stories. She rested her head on the doorframe and wept for them. And especially for him.

  ‘Oh! My little warrior, my little learned friend. How well you were doing, so bright, so sure. How wonderful it would have been for you.’ She whispered his own favourite lines from the poem he’d given her:

  I could scale the blue air,

  I could plough the high hills,

  I could kneel all night in prayer

  To cure your many ills,

  My dark Rosaleen.

  They brought the bodies to the graveyard in a handcart. In death they were thinner than she remembered them, their faces drawn inwards as the slow process of dying had sucked out all life. The last of the fleeing villagers stopped at the gate, dropped their bundles and came and stood in a circle around the shallow hole in the ground. It was yet another goodbye and there had been so many of them. They remembered the cycle of their existence, the years when they had plenty and the bad years when the earth gave nothing away. Through it all, their families had struggled and survived to carry the valley on into another generation, to live for another harvest. The potato had always put hope into their bellies. But not now, not here, not ever again. The village and the valley were silent and they knew they would never come back.

  Soon the cottages would crumble and cover the bones of those who had died inside them. The winter winds would scatter the thatch and the floods of spring would help bury the stones. When a man came visiting in a hundred years’ time, only the lines of the potato ridges would tell him that, once upon a time, there had been life here.

  Una read out the children’s names and Keegan recited the last prayer of contrition. As the men began shovelling the earth onto the bodies, Una began singing and one by one the others joined her. In that little graveyard on that cold December morning, their voices swelled into a glorious requiem.

  Major Euan Halliday, formerly of the Hussars and now a Poor Law inspector, had been ordered to visit the workhouse in Skibbereen. Magistrates in the city had received unfavourable reports of the conditions for the thousands of inmates there.

  The major was recently retired from the army and new to his employment. This would be his first visit to a workhouse. The magistrate’s instruction was an inconvenience. It was snowing and the ground was hard with frost.

  The gates to the Union Workhouse were some distance from the main doors. The figure of a young girl was leaning against the gates, barely clothed and covered white with snow. The major spoke to her but she did not reply. He pulled the bell cord and waited. Then the snowdrifts around him began to move. Hands brushed away snow and uncovered faces. The waiting spectres crawled towards him. The sound of the ringing had woken them. It was their alert that more dead were about to be brought out on the death cart and spaces had become vacant inside the walls. The turnkey unlocked the gates and the young girl in white fell, frozen stiff and long dead.

  Major Halliday entered the yard and the paupers settled back into their bed of rags under their blanket of snow.

  The major was a Christian man. He had seen much misery in his long service life and was no stranger to people’s suffering. He had spent many years in the primitive outposts of the Empire, and was familiar with the infinite capacity of man to inflict cruelty upon his fellows. He had come to accept it as a basic, degrading, unalterable fact of the human condition. But his thirty years of military service had not prepared him for the Skibbereen Workhouse.

  He knew the fundamentals of the Poor Law regime as laid down by its director, Sir Charles Trevelyan. Successive communiqués to his inspectors had repeatedly emphasised that:

  Relief for the poor must contain a penal and repulsive element and provide only the minimum necessities of life. The workhouses are places of last resort for the destitute. Bear in mind the principle that giving free food for doing nothing is demoralising for those who receive it.

  Those who administered relief knew well enough the subtext of Trevelyan’s words. They were to provide the poor with only enough food to avoid death by starvation. They were to make the workhouses as abhorrent as possible and some were so foul the starving would attempt any number of crimes, preferring the refuge of jails.

  The workhouse had been built six years earlier to accommodate eight hundred paupers. Major Halliday asked the workhouse guardian to show him the current register of inmates. It listed the names of over two thousand adults, one thousand six hundred children under the age of twelve and nearly one thousand old and sick.

  The guardian took him to each of the halls. They were bare, without windows, without beds, without heating. There was strict segregation by sex. Families were separated, husbands from their wives, boys from girls, all children from their parents. Many would never see each other again.

  The floors of the halls were marked out in spaces two-feet square in which a single occupant could squ
at all day and crouch, foetus-like, in sleep at night. The major saw the living side by side with the dying and all within reach of the dead. In the corner of the men’s hall, he counted fourteen bodies piled one on the other, like abandoned rotting rubbish. Rats scampered among them.

  ‘How many dead this past week?’ the major asked. The guardian replied that he had yet to make a tally, but thirty or more adults had died the previous night and fifteen children had been dumped outside the kitchen door that day. He assured the major they would all be buried just as soon as the snow eased and the ground thawed.

  In the kitchen, the major saw four sacks of oats. It was the week’s entire ration for the four thousand six hundred inmates. The guardian said he had not enough fuel for the fire to boil it so he would ration it out uncooked. He said the oats were given by the Quakers but he had heard that they were soon to leave Ireland and he had no idea where any further rations would come from.

  At the far end of the building was a door marked in white paint with the letter ‘M’. The guardian was reluctant to open it. He said it was for the other people, the idiots and the mad. The major insisted. The guardian turned his key on two locks and both men stood back, sickened by the stench. The floor was covered in the slime of human filth. Men and women, barely more than skeletons, hardly human, squatted motionless inside. Saying nothing, seeing nothing, they might already have been dead.

  That night Major Halliday went to his desk and began the report he had intended to write much later:

  Sir,

  I have this day, upon the orders of the magistrates, attended the Union Workhouse at Skibbereen. I have witnessed such sights of suffering and wasted humanity that I will never ever be able to wash from my mind.

  What I describe below is my honest and truthful account. My heart sickens at the recital. There is much I could add, but must not in my capacity as a servant of the Crown. Never in my life could I have imagined such distress could exist in a Christian country and that country mine. I do remind myself, with shame, that I report this from a corner of the world’s greatest Empire. Death is indeed the Emperor here.