‘Reverend, I want to ask something of you – a favour …’
‘Yes, of course, dear Mrs Coogan – anything. Please ask!’
‘I would like to remain on Grosse Île for a while – to work with the sick and the dying. It seems from what you have told me that there is a shortage of people to help, and I could be of some use.’
He looked at her, seeing she was serious, that this was no idle request.
‘You have thought about this, I can tell,’ he said. ‘And it is a noble and generous thing which you propose. But in doing so, you expose yourself to great peril. You may contract typhus, or any of the other dread diseases in such a place. You may even die, Mrs Coogan.’
‘And so might you, Reverend – and so we all will one day. That’s no argument.’
‘And what of Mr Coogan?’
‘Leave Mr Coogan to me,’ she told him. ‘He may be of use also!’ she quipped, wondering how she might present this to Lavelle. Maybe he would want to go on ahead to Boston.
‘One final question, Mrs Coogan. May I ask what it was that motivated you to take such a step – to make this sacrifice?’
‘You did, Reverend!’ She smiled at him.
He seemed genuinely taken aback at this and flushed, a mite embarrassed by her directness.
Then, cutting off all further discussion as to her reasons, she said: ‘Let’s say that this is now between me and my Maker. The favour I ask of you, Reverend,’ – she saw his eyebrows go up, wondering what this red-haired woman would come out with next – ‘is that I would like to assist you in your work.’
‘But you are not of the faith!’
‘But I am, Reverend,’ Ellen protested. ‘As you are. And I promise not to confine my good works solely to those who are Anglicans, but to assist Roman Catholics also, and all who are needy!’ she riposted, with a certain element of tongue-in-cheek.
The Reverend knew she was returning to their old argument about all Christians being Christians first, despite their differences. He could not gainsay her generosity, her ecumenism, so he said nothing.
‘And I trust you will follow my lead in this, Reverend?’ she couldn’t resist adding.
Reverend Bonney realized then that, in the end, you always lost to this woman. This Ellen Rua.
‘David, it all seems so hopeless, so utterly hopeless … Two successive years of blight, followed by a year of respite – yet no respite, the poor being afraid to plant or having no money for seed. What is to be done for them?’
Isabella Moore was exhausted. As conditions for the poor had worsened with Black Forty-Seven she had redoubled her own efforts to improve their lot, throwing herself into relief work with one of Canon Prufrock’s many committees. Her husband, anxious that she was overtaxing her strength, had suggested a stroll in the gardens so he might broach the subject. Now he took her arm and led her gently under the sheltering canopy of the hundred-year-old yew trees which lined Addison Walk.
‘You must not over-reach yourself, Isabella,’ he said caringly.
‘But what can I do to desist?’ she responded. ‘When the poor creatures are not dying of starvation in the most abject manner, then they are stricken with cholera, typhus, dysentery, scurvy, road fever, famine fever – there is no end to their suffering. There is neither work nor food for them, yet food leaves the country in great amounts. When they seek refuge, the workhouses are full. No hospital in the country can cope with the number of the diseased and the dying. There are none even to bury the dead with respect and dignity. They lie in the ditches and on the roadsides …’ Isabella broke off, weeping. ‘Oh, David, it upsets me so to speak of it – life is become without any dignity … any dignity at all!’ she sobbed.
‘There, my dear … you can do no more than you do,’ Moore said, cradling his wife in his arms.
He held her a while, until the tears abated, then they resumed their walk through the gardens, him picking out for her this plant and that. The tall, willowy Pampas Grass from Argentina. The Irish plants, some of which he had brought to the gardens himself: the Killarney fern, the romantically named Blue-eyed grass.
Eventually, and as always, they ended up beside the Last Rose of Summer – Rosa chinensis. Isabella reached over and touched the full-faced flower of the single rose. Its satin-softness soothed the weariness that had grown over her these past few months. The pink petals of the rose ran in places to a red blush, and her fingers followed the changing hue.
‘What a gift,’ she said, in awed, hushed tones, ‘to be able to stand in the presence of beauty – to see it, smell it, touch it, be one with it …’
How many of those who had so horribly died in the last few years had ever seen a rose, or had time to stop and look? To escape, for one awful moment, from the incessant tramping of the roads looking for a single scrap of food. The thought entered her head for a moment of the woman McCallum had met in the mountains. The woman had denounced the Government, yet she had helped him with naming the wildflowers. Isabella wondered if the woman was still alive. She must ask David if he remembered the woman’s name. Ireland was full of such women; believing in the same Christian God, yet bearing their children to milk-dried breasts, carrying the older ones on their backs. Good, strong, noble women, of a noble race. But poor. And doomed.
She felt the overwhelming sadness come over her again and, as her fingers slowly caressed the rose petals, Moore heard his wife, his beautiful Isabella, haltingly, movingly sing:
’Tis The Last Rose Of Summer,
Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone …
So soon may I follow …
Later it seemed to him that she had sung as if she knew.
45
Four days they waited, moored in Quarantine Pass off Grosse Île with the dead and the dying, as the forty ships before the Dove underwent inspection.
At last, the doctor, the priests and the soldiers came on board.
‘Quarantine until further notice,’ ordered George Mellis Douglas, Medical Superintendent of Grosse Île. ‘And all passengers to be transported on to the island for observation and treatment.’
The new dead amongst those providing ballast for the Dove were winched out of the ship’s hold and unloaded by the priests and the military, and Reverend Bonney. They were placed into the flat-bottomed scows and ferried to land for burial. As before, the crew would not touch the bodies and used hooks to drag them along the deck.
After the dead had been dealt with, the yellow spectres of the living were taken off. With their expressionless faces, they seemed to Ellen somehow more lifeless than the dead that had gone before them. But the foul stench that came off these walking dead was so repellent in itself as to almost drive pity and charity away.
‘Some won’t see the day out!’ she said to Lavelle. ‘Isn’t the state of them just pitiful? How could they send people out here like this? It’s a death sentence!’ She turned away, finding the sight of her people too harrowing to bear.
‘Death if you stay, death if you go – what a choice!’ Lavelle said, numbed by the horror of it all. He wondered whether she would reconsider her decision to remain on the island and work with the dying. Whatever happened, he would stay with her. Then the ‘healthy’ were disembarked.
The difference between the healthy and the diseased was barely discernible. Almost forty days between decks in a space designed for carrying timber had seen to that. Decks which had no light-giving portholes, no air-giving ventilation save for a few hatches, which, for the latter part of the voyage, had remained battened down. Thus had the ‘paying ballast’ been entombed in the floating coffin that was the Dove.
“Lord God, have pity on those suffering, and have mercy on those who caused it!’ the Reverend Bonney said, in front of McNab, stricken at what he was witnessing.
They travelled to the quarantine island with Dr Douglas, who left McNab with orders to disinfect the Dove with lime.
‘I am delighted
you are joining us, Reverend. And Mrs Coogan, too. Any help is most welcome,’ the doctor said to them. Then he told them about the island itself.
‘Grosse Île was first opened to prevent a cholera epidemic which had swept the world from sweeping Canada. It has remained open since. After cholera, it was smallpox. Now it’s typhus. So far this year, we have already lain some five thousand souls to rest, many fallen with typhus. Our role is to prevent the disease from reaching upriver to Quebec and Montreal. Clergymen and nurses are also afflicted by the contagion. You must exercise extreme caution whilst on the island,’ he warned them.
They landed at the quay on the western section of the island. Close by was the police station, Mr Bradford’s store, and the angular-shaped buildings which provided shelter for the immigrants. Further back, at a distance removed from the hospitals, and shelters of those who could afford no better, were houses for ‘respectable families’. Nearby were the Catholic chapel and presbytery. To the far south of this western sector was Grosse lie’s highest point, Telegraph Hill. Here, from what looked to Ellen like a large wooden cross, signals were sent by semaphore across the St Lawrence to the mainland, and from there through other relay stations onwards to Quebec.
Towards Back Bay were the Protestant and Catholic cemeteries.
The landing place was shallow, only suitable for the rowboats that now carried them to shore. Along the spine of the island, dividing it in two, was a high rocky ridge which confined all of the island’s activities to this, the near shore. But Ellen could see that the island itself was quite well wooded. Above all, the flag of the Union Jack floated high, Grosse Île being under the command of the military.
Nurses were in severe shortage, Ellen learned. Many feared to work on the island. Those who did come, and who were then forced to leave – through fatigue or illness, or who just died – were even more difficult to replace. The medical staff and the clergy worked round the clock, there seeming to be an endless line of ships in Quarantine Pass, queuing up to disgorge yet ever more diseased Irish immigrants on to the island. It was estimated that “Black Forty-Seven” would see some ninety thousand arrive on Grosse Île, three times the number for the whole of the previous year. Fifty thousand directly from Ireland, the remainder Irish migrants from Liverpool and the other English ports.
Ellen was dismayed, almost rendered useless, by the sheer magnitude of the numbers.
‘What must it be like at home?’ she said to Lavelle after her first day in the fever sheds, shocked by what she had seen there. Made of boards, the fever sheds or ‘Lazarettos’ had been prefabricated in Quebec during the summer and erected on the island in August. Ellen wondered what on earth it could have been like before there were sheds to house the sick.
She worked, and she worked, and she worked, trying to stem the tide of human misery. Some food here, a drop of water there, a few words of comfort and hope in another place. Not much time for anything save, ‘What’s your name?’ and ‘Where do you come from?’
And despite all her efforts, they died around her, by day and by night, and the next day, and the next night, until their faces and names were all just a blur to her.
Lavelle and the men ferried the dead from the fever sheds to the Dead House in wheelbarrows, then buried them so quick and so shallow that downwind you could smell the decomposing bodies, even though they were in coffins.
One evening, Ellen went to what some called the ‘Irish’ Cemetery. Ringed by trees and small bushes, and the waters of Cholera Bay, it was a peaceful bower away from the yellow madness of the fever sheds. Beneath here lay the remains of five thousand of her people.
‘Five thousand!’ she whispered into the breezes that blew up along the St Lawrence. Unmarked and unmourned for, God help them! One shallow mass grave in a green field across the ocean.
She knelt in the wet grass to pray over them. Only then did she notice the eerie contours of the ‘Irish’ Cemetery.
‘Oh, God! Lazy beds – lazy beds!’ she said aloud as her eyes picked up the narrow ridges in the ground, running parallel to one another. For a moment she half-expected to see the green stalks with their white flowers sprouting out of the ridges of graves. But here were no life-giving lumpers awaiting harvest. Here lay instead the final remains of those who had fled the blight on the lumpers, and the inept response of a hostile government.
She waited a while in silence, deep in her thoughts. The words of Dr Douglas burned in her mind: ‘In this secluded spot lie the mortal remains of over five thousand persons who, flying from pestilence and famine in Ireland, found, in America, but a grave.’
And he had told her of those who tried to save them, like the young doctor from Dublin who had arrived on Grosse Île earlier that year, on 19 May. Only in his twenties, Dr Benson had, like herself, decided to stay and help. Eight days later he was dead from the disease.
What would be her own fate? She had been careful – as far as she could be. Washed daily and checked her hair and body for the lice which carried the typhus. Perhaps she would have been better off without her hair, she thought ruefully.
Ellen worked wherever she was needed. Despite her earlier plan, she seldom met with Reverend Bonney in the course of her work, and when they did come into contact for a fleeting moment both were too busy to indulge in the long leisurely discussions she had enjoyed so much on the voyage there.
With frightening regularity, the ships came and went, disembarking their deadly cargo. The death registers of both Catholic and Anglican chapels added daily to the litany of those lost to typhus. The fever sheds grew so overcrowded that the overflow had to be housed in tents.
Those released from quarantine were taken upriver by steamship to Quebec. For ‘healthy’ immigrants a quarantine period of six days was considered adequate. The error proved fatal, it later being learned that the disease could have an incubation period of up to twenty-one days. Some, initially showing no sign of the disease, carried it into the citadel, some carried it further – to Montreal. In both cities thousands died.
As a result, some began to fear the immigrants. Two thousand rioters attacked the immigrant hospital in Quebec, believing it to be the source of cholera in the citadel. But such attacks were the exception rather than the rule. In general, Ellen marvelled at the French Canadians. Threatened with disease, over-run by destitute immigrants, they displayed extraordinary generosity. Bishops and clergymen of every denomination came to the island from Quebec, Montreal, and elsewhere, and worked to exhaustion, some even offering the ultimate sacrifice of their lives. The doctors and nurses too, did not spare themselves in their service to the sick and dying. But it was the stories that came back to her of ordinary citizens, and the organizations and societies they set up to assist the tens of thousands who arrived pauperized from Ireland, which most impressed Ellen.
One day in the fever sheds she had come upon a woman called Mary O’Donnell from Scramogue in County Roscommon. Mary’s husband had not survived the voyage, and her two boys had died on the island. Broken-hearted and riddled with typhus, Mary O’Donnell had at last left behind the sorrow of the world she knew. She had been the same age as Ellen. Beside Mary’s corpse sat her three-year-old daughter, Ellen. Unaware that her mother had died, the child still played with her mother’s hand, still talked to her mother’s prostrate body.
Ellen took the child up into her arms. ‘What’s going to become of you at all, a Ellen bheag?’ she said, cradling the child to her. ‘You poor little thing, nobody left at all in the world to you!’
‘God will provide for her, Ellen,’ said a voice from behind her. It was the young Catholic priest, Father McGauran. The priest, only a year out of the seminary in Quebec, had already contracted typhus on his first visit to the island in May. Upon his recovery he had insisted on returning again. He looked tired now, grossly overworked. She knew that the young County Sligo man would often go three, four, or five nights without any sleep, so great was the demand upon his time. So great his commitment.
‘But who’ll take her? She can’t stay here with no one to mind her.’
‘The good families of Quebec will take her. They have already taken hundreds like her through the parishes,’ said Father McGauran. Then he told her how the French Canadians, and the settled Irish, had opened their hearts and their homes to the orphans of Grosse Île.
News of this goodness lifted Ellen’s spirits, kept her going, when she, like Father McGauran, foundered on her feet. There was hope after all.
She didn’t see much of Lavelle, given the long hours she worked. When she did meet him he was shocked at how she looked.
‘Ellen, are you all right?’ he asked, taking her by the shoulders, worry written all over his face.
‘Yes, I’m fine, just tired, that’s all,’ she replied.
‘You’ve done enough. We should leave,’ he said. ‘Get to Boston before the ice comes and freezes the river.’
‘I can’t leave just yet. They’re dying in there, Lavelle, day and night – children being turned into orphans every day,’ she said, fighting him.
‘You can’t save them all, Ellen. Think of yourself, and your own children!’
She looked at him. He was right. ‘I’ll give it two more weeks,’ she said, feeling the tiredness descend on her. ‘The numbers will be easing off now until the island shuts down in November. We’ll go before the ice comes.’
She smiled at him, thankful for his concern.
‘I’ll be ready,’ he said, returning her smile. ‘But in the meantime, get some rest.’
She didn’t. For the next two weeks she would give her all – then her month’s penance would be done. Then would she go to the young priest from Sligo and ask forgiveness for her sin.
It happened during the third week of her time on Grosse Île.
It was evening-time. Having already worked elsewhere throughout the day, she was tired when she reached the Lazaretto. Too tired to read the register – who had come, who had left, who had died.
The Whitest Flower Page 42