The Whitest Flower

by Brendan Graham

  She had wiped the tears from her eyes before Edith Pakenham returned.

  The sister of Sir Richard Pakenham did not even have to ask the woman her answer. She knew it by the way the woman stood, the uncharacteristic droop of her head, the slope of her shoulders.

  The road back to Maamtrasna was the longest Ellen had ever known it.

  26

  She didn’t say anything to Biddy.

  And Biddy didn’t ask her. Biddy Martin Tom Bawn knew that Ellen would tell her in her own good time. She also knew that, whatever Ellen’s news from Tourmakeady was, it was bad news: something was disturbing her neighbour greatly.

  Biddy didn’t even question the food which Ellen pressed on her. ‘Food,’ Edith Pakenham had insisted Ellen take, ‘to restore you for your travels.’ Already broken, this final humiliation had scarcely registered with her.

  Ellen waited to be on her own with the children.

  When they reached the scailpeen, she gave them some of the food, a little bread and some milk, and a small piece of the sweetcake, and settled them down for the night. They said the Rosary and the night prayers: ‘O Angel of God, my guardian dear … ever this night be at my side to light, to guard, to rule and guide me …’ Offering them all up, along with their tears, for their dead father.

  That night, she couldn’t bring herself to tell them that she was leaving them – and so suddenly. But the quicker she went, the better chance they had.

  Instead, she comforted them, watched over them till each one was asleep. Then agonized until at last she, too, was asleep.

  In the morning she again portioned out some of the food to them.

  Mary wanted them to go to Michael’s grave, so Ellen took them.

  It was there, on the Crucán, that she told them.

  Already torn with grief at the sight of their father’s grave, they watched her silently, as she tried to form the words, to somehow make it sound less awful than it was.

  ‘Mammy is going to have to go away for a while,’ she began, as if she was talking about someone other than herself, removed from it all, as if it was one of the Lessons.

  They listened through it all, not fully comprehending what she was telling them, but implicitly trusting her that when she said they’d be all right, they would be.

  ‘You will come back for us, a Mhamaí,’ Katie stated rather than asked, the tears held back in her eyes.

  ‘Yes, Katie, I will, you know I will. The minute I can.’

  ‘Promise?’ Katie asked, uncertain of what it meant for them.

  ‘I promise. And then we’ll all be together forever and ever.’

  ‘But how will you find us?’ Katie, needing further reassurance, asked.

  ‘Of course I’ll find you – you’ll be at Miss Pakenham’s house,’ she said, giving Katie a hug.

  ‘But if Miss Pakenham doesn’t like us and we’re not there?’ Katie persisted, touching a fear which already held her mother.

  ‘That won’t happen, Katie,’ Ellen said with as much conviction as she could muster. ‘But even if I had to comb the length and breadth of Ireland, you know I’d find you, my little stóiríns.’

  ‘Is Pakenham a good landlord now?’ it was Patrick.

  She thought about that for a moment. She didn’t want to tell him a lie, but she didn’t want him going over to Tourmakeady in any sort of rebellious mood.

  ‘Let’s just say he knows Ellen Rua O’Malley will be back. And us Máilleach women, or men,’ she added for his benefit, ‘are not to be trifled with.’

  ‘Or the Young Irelanders either,’ Patrick added. But he seemed happy enough with her response, indicating as it did, some retribution hanging over the head of Pakenham if he didn’t remain ‘good’!

  Ellen was glad they hadn’t stayed silent, for all that they were unable to do anything to change things, no matter what they thought, no matter how much they wanted to – the poor little darlings.

  But it wouldn’t be until she was going that it would really hit them. And her.

  ‘Is Australia far away?’ It was Mary, who hadn’t yet spoken. She had been listening, thinking, working it all out in her own way, trying to fill in all the missing pieces.

  ‘It is, Mary – it’s a long way,’ Ellen said, unsure herself just how far away Australia was.

  ‘Is it a longer way than Boston?’ her child asked.

  ‘It is, and I wish it was to Boston I was going,’ Ellen answered.

  ‘What age will we be when you come back?’ it was Katie again.

  The question of time was one Ellen didn’t want to get into too deeply. To say too short a time would build up false hopes in them. When she hadn’t come back by that time, the waiting would be terrible and they would feel further betrayed by her. Yet, to tell them she would be gone for three years, as Edith Pakenham had said she must, would seem like forever to them.

  ‘Whatever age you’ll be, Katie, you’ll still all only be little rascaleens!’ Ellen said, with a laugh, trying to deflect the question. ‘But what I want you all to do is to say your prayers every morning and night so that your Guardian Angel, and Holy Mary, and the Baby Jesus will mind you. And pray for your father – he’ll be there, too, in Heaven looking down on you, watching you for me till I come back. And,’ she went on, trying to be brave, not to let her voice crack.

  ‘And, another thing, you’re to look after each other. No one of you is in charge while I’m gone, but each of you is to look out for the other like true Máilleachs.’

  ‘Yes, a Mhamaí,’ they all said quietly.

  Then, she told them about Bridget: ‘There’s a woman, a good woman where you’re going, named Bridget. She’s my friend and you can trust her – she knows you’re coming. So do whatever little jobs you’re given to do by Miss Pakenham, and don’t be cheeky or drochbhéasach to anybody. But if you do get into trouble, tell Bridget.’

  She wanted to finish it then – get them to rest so as to build up their strength for the journey, and for when she was gone.

  ‘Is Australia a good or a bad place, a Mhamaí?’ it was Mary still pursuing whatever line of thought it was she was on.

  ‘Well, it’s not really the place, Mary,’ Ellen replied, realizing how little she knew herself about where she was bound for. ‘It’s the people. And there are good and bad people everywhere. Don’t worry, a stóirín – I’ll be fine. I’ll stick with the good ones!’ she said, hoping her answer would satisfy Mary.

  ‘Can we keep Annie with us?’ Katie wanted to know.

  ‘We’ll look after her until you come back – won’t we, Mary?’ she said, full of the idea.

  ‘Now, Katie,’ Ellen said, always forced to smile at Katie’s ideas, ‘you’ll have enough to do looking after yourselves. I’ll take good care of Annie and bring her back safe and sound to you, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

  ‘Now, home to the leaba – or, I should say, the “bed”,’ she said, whooshing them on ahead of her.

  Over the next few days she talked with them again and again in between the sadnesses.

  Each day they visited the Crucán.

  The day they left for Tourmakeady, they first stopped at Biddy’s to tell her. Biddy was grievously sad at their going.

  ‘But it’s the best thing, Ellen – there’s nothing left here only grass, and it’s soon we’ll be feeding the grass ourselves. God speed ye,’ she said making the sign of the cross over them.

  Roberteen came as far as the Crucán with her.

  ‘I’m sorry, fearful sorry, Ellen Rua, for all your troubles … he paused, looking down at the ground between them. ‘And it’s sorry I am to see yourself going from … us.’

  ‘I know, Roberteen,’ she said, touching his arm. ‘Now, I want you to do something very, very important for me.’ He looked up into her face, glad to be of service to her one last time. ‘You must tell the Shanafaraghaun man: “Ellen Rua is gone, but her children are with Pakenham.” He will understand what that means.’

  ‘I’ll
have him told what you said, Ellen Rua, before the day is dark,’ he pledged.

  She knew he would keep his promise. Her mind settled that her bond with Edith Pakenham was now secured, and that there would be no reprisals by the Young Irelanders, she said goodbye to the fair-haired boy-man who worshipped her. ‘Look after your mother and father, and take care of yourself too, Roberteen. Slán go fóill.’

  ‘I’ll miss …’ he started to say, then hastily blurted, ‘ye all.’

  Then he waited at the foot of the Crucán, leaving them to make their final good-byes to Michael. Before he set out for Shanafaraghaun, he watched the ragged little group of them – the three children hanging on to her tattered skirts; she, tall above them, the child in her arms – thinking it was how he might never see her again. He watched them until they vanished out of sight.

  Vanished into the dip of the bend for Tourmakeady.

  At the entrance to the grounds of Tourmakeady Lodge she stopped, and gathered them around her. The walk had been hard on them. They were physically weak, but weaker still in spirit at the thought of what lay ahead, of her going from them.

  ‘My heart is heavy, stóiríns – I want to hold each of you one more time before we say good-bye. But I want you to be brave up there at the Lodge, in front of Miss Pakenham – brave like your father was. Let her see what we Máilleachs are made of.’

  She handed Annie to Katie.

  ‘Now, Patrick … son …’

  He came to her and she embraced him tenderly, holding her first-born till she could bear it no longer. He said nothing, but the bones of his fingers dug into her back as she gave him the parting kiss.

  ‘And Mary … dear Mary …’

  Her quiet, lovely Mary clung to her neck, tightly, silently, until Ellen thought her own heart would break, so great was the weight of sorrow that was on her. As they broke their embrace, the child said to her, ‘I’ll mind Katie and Patrick … like you asked, a Mhamaí … until you come home again.’

  Ellen kissed her on the lips, aware of how pinched the poor child’s lips had become.

  ‘And now, Katie … mo mháinlín …’ she said, a lump in her throat at the words.

  Katie precariously passed Annie over to Mary, and rushed to her mother, flinging herself into Ellen’s arms.

  ‘AMhamaí! AMhamaí!’ she called, her little heart beating wildly. ‘I’ll miss you – I will. I love you, a Mhamaí!’ she said, as if her life depended on it. ‘Say it again – say you’ll be back!’

  ‘Oh, Katie … I promise … I promise you, I will.’

  Ellen fought hard to keep her composure in front of them. If she broke down now she knew she would turn back, not go through with it. She squeezed Katie so tightly, closing her own eyes to keep back the pressure within from bursting through.

  Eventually, she spoke to them – like the mother they had always known – determined, resolute, knowing what the right thing was.

  ‘Muintir Uí Mháille,’ she said, as if summoning the great clans of the O’Malleys. ‘Let us go to Miss Pakenham!’

  And she lifted Annie from Mary, and led them up the long carriageway to the house where she would surrender them.

  Book Two

  AUSTRALIA

  27

  ‘Welcome to Australia!’ Kitty O’Halloran dug her elbow into Ellen’s side, mimicking the words of Captain Ebenezer Penneman Marble, Master of the Eliza Jane, who now addressed the passengers from the ship’s quarterdeck. The Eliza Jane, having carried them across the wide ocean, was now aground on a sandbar, unable to reach its destination – McLaren’s Wharf in Port Adelaide (or ‘Port Misery’, as some of the sailors referred to it).

  It had been a nightmare voyage, so it was with some surprise that Ellen now heard the captain describe their passage as: ‘A healthy trip, with deaths other than infants amounting to only fifteen souls, most of whom were maladied when boarding.’ Ellen thought of the sounds at night, the weighted sacks splashing into the water, sinking to the bottom of the great ocean – the sounds of a burial at sea.

  She held Annie closer to her. The child had done well, proved to be a hardy traveller. Ellen had lost count of how long they had been cooped up in the forever dark of the steerage section with Kitty and the other girls. Marble, not wanting to be labelled a ‘slowcoach’ in the Adelaide newspapers, had driven his crew to exhaustion to save a few days on the journey. More to do with saving on provisions, Ellen thought. Under Marble’s ‘rough but honest’ captaincy, as he liked to call it, the withholding of provisions was not the only problem the emigrants faced: assaults on young women by the crew were commonplace.

  No wonder, then, that the women in steerage had greeted the first shouts of ‘Land ahoy!’ with such joy. They had wanted to get up to see this new land, this ‘Terra Australis’, as Marble called it, but he’d kept them below for a few hours longer, some poor wretches calling out the name to the battened hatches, ‘Australia! … Australia!’ Like the Westport woman beside Ellen: at the start of the voyage she, with her lustrous hair and eyes, black as night, had been the object of general admiration and had sung for them; yesterday, Ellen had tried to talk to her, but the Westport woman only stared through her, seeing nothing, fixed on some place far beyond this life. Now she wailed for ‘Oss-tray-lee-ah’, her hand reaching out towards the upper deck and the land she would never see. Ellen breathed a prayer for her.

  Thank God she and Annie had made it.

  ‘Marble by name, and Marble by nature – a healthy trip, how do!’ Kitty O’Halloran said quite loudly, to Ellen. Sarah Joyce and Nora Burke laughed at their younger companion’s brazenness. Kitty, a nineteen-year-old native of Louisburgh, Co. Mayo, would say anything to anybody – and get away with it. It was the way she had of flicking back her head of nut-brown hair and laughing at you when she spoke.

  Sarah and Nora were pretty too: dark-haired, more comely than Kitty, but not as bright and breezy. The few years they had on Kitty probably gave them a bit of sense, Ellen thought – though not much, the way they giggled and laughed at everything, almost like twins.

  The three girls were part of a group of young Irish women sent out to South Australia as part of an official Government scheme to ‘populate the Colonies’. Or, as Marble had referred to them: ‘Famine-starved Irish wenches happy to be brood mares on the stud farms of Australia.’

  When they had at last been allowed on deck, Ellen’s first views of South Australia filled her with apprehension. She’d expected green majestic shores, like those of the Mask, or a blue inlet like the one at Leenane, cut from the mountains by the giant glaciers gliding ever seawards from the land. Instead, the banks of Misery Creek where they were foundered, looked like a large festering sore of mud banks and tangled mangroves, and tea trees – identified for them by Fletcher, one of the few crew members to treat the women with respect.

  Her fears were compounded when Captain Marble informed them that McLaren’s Wharf – constructed by the South Australia Company to capitalize on the increase in traffic to the province and shake off the old Port Misery tag – was fully berthed. ‘Since we cannot dock there,’ said Marble, ‘we must disembark you here, on to the boats.’

  It was mid-afternoon when Ellen’s turn to be handed down into one of the boats ferrying the passengers up Misery Creek finally came. She had watched others being bundled unceremoniously into the boats below, their trunks, parcels, band-boxes and carpet-bags thrown in on top of them. The waters around the Eliza Jane were strewn with a flotilla of boxes, some of which had spilled their contents so that hats, dresses, stockings, shoes, and a whole colourful array of outer- and under-clothing now swirled in the Creek – much to the dismay of their lady owners.

  The boat, when it filled, was like a floating general store piled in on top of Ellen and Annie and the three other Irish girls: Kitty, Sarah and Nora. At least, Ellen noted with relief, the kindly Fletcher was to be their boatman. On either side, his passengers could see the sandy bottom of the Creek. The old sailor rowed as far as
he could, but it wasn’t long before he exclaimed, ‘Devil take it, we’re grounded!’ and the gentle forward motion of the boat gave way to the arresting bump of the keel striking sand.

  While the women sat wondering, ‘What next?’, Fletcher peered out on every side. Clearly less than pleased with what he saw, he turned to them and said, ‘Well, ladies, looks as if instead of being your boatman today, I’ll have to be your dray-horse.’

  Ellen did not understand what he meant by this, and neither did her grounded companions, who all looked at each other quizzically. With a laugh, Fletcher jumped over the side carrying a length of strong hawser rope which he looped round the prow of the boat. Then, with the other end over his shoulder, he proceeded to pull them along the Creek towards Adelaide – the Land of Promise.

  Without Fletcher’s weight aboard, the boat lifted, and the ladies sat, four modern-day Cleopatras of the Nile, being tugged up Misery Creek by their manservant, who sweated and strained and stumbled through the mud-stained waters. The young girls tittered and giggled at the good of it all, but Ellen found it embarrassing. She couldn’t help but pity Fletcher as he good-naturedly soldiered – or sailored – onwards.

  For a while, progress in this manner was satisfactory, if slow, but the tide and the sands of Port Misery were yet to prove their undoing. Again the boat was sand-wedged. And this time, despite Fletcher’s Herculean efforts, it simply would not budge.

  ‘Well, missies,’ he said, panting for breath, ‘that’s it – journey’s end!’

  The giggling of the young girls stopped. What were they to do now?

  ‘Nothing else for it, I’m afraid: you can either sit it out until the tide changes again – which could take a few hours …’ The look on the young girls’ faces turned to one of dismay. ‘Or …’ Fletcher paused, looking at Ellen with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. ‘You can hoist your mainsails!’

  ‘What does he mean?’ Kitty asked Ellen.

  ‘He means, Kitty, that unless we want to sit here half the night, we’ll have to lift our hemlines …’ And she grabbed the side of her dress, yanking it up over her ankles to illustrate the point.