The Whitest Flower

by Brendan Graham

  Maybe Faherty was right. Maybe it was fear. Old, deep-rooted, and unspoken, fear.

  Still shaking, Ellen searched until she found a length of wood. Then she re-entered the tomb of the Tom Bawns. She could not leave until she had done this last thing for them. The dog growled at her again and, when she did not retreat this time, crouched with its belly to the ground and bared its teeth at her. She edged forward, the wood between her and the dog. It sprang at the wood, viciously snapping at it. She pulled the wood back to draw the dog to her. Again it slunk to its belly, ready to attack. Ready to defend its food.

  She whipped her free hand forward. Instinctively, the animal went for it. Too late, the dog turned as the blow from the wood cracked its skull. Ellen, sickened by what she had to do, quickly covered its twitching body with stones.

  Once outside she blocked up the door, entombing her friends once more as they had wished.

  Martin Tom Bawn and Biddy would now rest together in peace.

  The girl, who had stood watching the whole time, accompanied Ellen back up to where Faherty and the carriage awaited them.

  As they walked, her mind full of the awfulness of what she had been part of, something caught Ellen’s eye. There, below the road, in the fields, was the flower – the whitest flower of the potato plant. Pristine, radiant, beautiful.

  Down to the field she ran, falling to her knees, wildly scrabbling away the earth. She pulled up the plant, shaking the clay from it. There wasn’t a speck of the blight anywhere to be seen on it.

  She turned to the girl. ‘Look there’s no blight! It’s gone! Praise be to God – it’s gone! The blight is gone!’ she cried out, her mind overcome by all she had been through.

  The girl, unmoved, looked somewhere over Ellen’s shoulder into the high peaks of the Partry Mountains.

  Ellen ran up to where Faherty was, the girl trailing behind her.

  ‘Look!’ she said, pushing the potato plant at him, the lumpers small but perfect. ‘It’s good! No blight – look!’

  Faherty looked at her. ‘It don’t matter now, ma’am, if it is or not. There’s no one left to dig them.’

  She looked at the plant in her hand, then back towards the field. Faherty was right. Even if the lumpers stayed sound – and she’d seen before how overnight this whitest flower could turn black and rotten – there was nobody left to dig them out of the lazy beds.

  She plucked the flower from the plant.

  Back in the carriage, her spirit beaten, the flower in her hand, she remembered something.

  ‘Mr Faherty, what date is it today?’

  ‘It’s the twentieth, ma’am,’ he replied, not understanding the import of her question. ‘It’s the twentieth day of August in the year of Our Lord eighteen hundred and forty-eight, so it is,’ he said jauntily, adding: ‘Why do you want to know, ma’am?’

  She didn’t tell him.

  54

  Before they set off for Tourmakeady Lodge, she asked Faherty to pull down off the road a bit and to look at the lake while she changed her clothes.

  She was going to confront Pakenham as she was now, not as she had been when she had left here. The landlord would be taken aback to see her, ‘that peasant O’Malley woman’, in shoes and stockings. To see her once wild hair pulled back and tied, the emerald-green dress, finely pin-tucked from shoulder to waist with discreet white frills at the neck and cuffs. Yes, Pakenham was in for a shock. She felt her handbag, making sure, yet again, that Dr Peabody was at home. She wondered again, too, if she had the nerve to use it? She hoped she wouldn’t have to.

  When she returned to the carriage, the tiny white flower was lying where she had left it. She picked it up, remembering when she had first begun to unravel Sheela-na-Sheeoga’s riddle.

  ‘When the whitest flower blooms, so too you will bloom …’ It had started this very day three years ago. When the whitest flowers of the new harvest had danced in the morning sun.

  ‘But the whitest flower will become the blackest flower …’ How could the old woman have known the blight was about to strike? That the white mist, eerie and beautiful, would descend on the potatoes, coating their leaves with a terrible whiteness, before destroying them.

  And the last part of the riddle: ‘And you, red-haired Ellen, must crush its petals in your hand.’

  Ellen understood now what that meant. But had it been achieved?

  Sheela-na-Sheeoga was telling her that she must overcome all that the blackest flower would bring – hunger, eviction, separation, death – and that the power to do so was in Ellen’s own hands.

  That she had done. Every tragedy, every grief, every trial – somehow she had come through them all, survived. And now her quest was over.

  Or was it?

  This was what Ellen had been trying to get from the old woman before she died. Strange how Sheela-na-Sheeoga had out-stayed and out-lived the rest of the valley people waiting until she came … But then died before answering the very question Ellen needed answered most.

  Faherty knew she was upset – the Crucán, her village thrown down – the dog. He tried to comfort her.

  ‘It’s a sorry thing what the English have reduced us to – either eating the dogs, or them eating us.’

  Ellen shuddered with horror at the picture Faherty had just painted for her.

  ‘I didn’t want to be saying any of these things to you, ma’am … before … But it is a common enough thing. I heard tell of a man and his wife, back a ways over in Connemara, that was dead a few days with no one to bury them. When they found them – and there’s not the word of a lie in this, ma’am – their own pig had eaten the legs off the poor woman up to the knees. And worse, the people what found them had to beat the pig away from the man’s body with sticks.’

  ‘Faherty, that can’t be true!’ she reacted, but now not so sure.

  ‘’Pon my oath, it is, ma’am,’ the coachman said. ‘The pig was driven to it by the hunger – and that’s not the worst that I heard … But I don’t know if telling it is a right thing.’

  Ellen, horrified, listened to his story, her eyes transfixed on the back of his head as it rolled from side to side while he recounted to her the unspeakable.

  ‘They say the children were worse than the pig. They fought that hard not to be pulled off the dead bodies of their parents. Back Clifden way, it was – but it’s true enough, all right! God bless and save us all!’ he said, crossing himself. ‘But that’s the way they have us gone now.’

  The thought of the scene Faherty had just described to her almost caused Ellen to be sick. It was beyond belief. Here in Ireland, back here in the West! She thought of her own children. She looked at the child beside her. She looked at the children along the roadside. Children were … just that: children. They were all the same. There was nothing different between any of them and the ones Faherty spoke of.

  Could this girl with the stilled tongue and the vacant look – could she do what Faherty had described? Had she already … in order to survive?

  Ellen stared at the girl, looking for some sign, as if there would be some outward mark of the child’s great sin against nature. The girl’s dress caught her eye. Could Katie, or Mary – no matter how desperate, how separated from sense by hunger – could they, her own flesh and blood, do such a thing to her? The thought was too awful to imagine.

  ‘God forgive those little ones,’ she said aloud. ‘God, and His Blessed Mother, forgive them.’ Then, with a strange twist in her voice, she ordered the coachman: ‘Faherty, drive – just drive. Get me to Tourmakeady!’

  She did not speak again until they came to the long driveway.

  ‘Wait here, Faherty, and keep the girl with you.’

  She gripped the girl by the shoulders. ‘You’re to stay here until I return. You’ll be safe with Mr Faherty, and I will be back shortly. Do you hear me?’

  The girl gave no sign if she did, so Ellen repeated herself, shaking the girl to try and get it through to her.

  Ellen hurried to t
he Lodge. The girl was getting under her skin. Would she ever speak? And was the old woman’s riddle about her connected with the first riddle – the fulfilment of which now filled Ellen with fear?

  She was tense with dread and anxiety. She scarcely noticed how the rose gardens had decayed: the walls broken, the roses themselves now faded-looking, their leaves blotched with disease.

  The house itself didn’t look nearly as impressive as she had remembered it. By comparison with Crockford’s it was small. And there was an untidiness to it. Little things, nothing that she could put her finger on. But it unsettled her.

  Nervously she waited at the main entrance.

  It was Bridget who answered the door. Ellen didn’t know why, but somehow she had expected the girl not to be here – to have fled from Pakenham’s service.

  The girl, once so dark and pretty, had aged. She was slightly more plump, her hair straggly – like the Lodge itself she had an untidiness about her, a sense of carelessness creeping in. But it was in Bridget Lynch’s eyes that Ellen noticed it most: a tiredness, the sparkle gone.

  ‘Dia dhuit a Bhríd!’ Ellen addressed her.

  The girl, not recognizing Ellen, looked surprised that the elegant lady in the green dress knew her, and would address her in Irish.

  ‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ she replied, ‘but we are forbidden to speak the native tongue.’

  Ellen thought she could get the hint of alcohol from the girl when she spoke.

  ‘Bríd, is mise atá ann – Ellen Rua!’ Ellen said, identifying herself.

  The girl’s eyes brightened in recognition and she looked Ellen up and down before throwing her arms round her and drawing her into the house.

  ‘Oh, Ellen – it’s glad I am to see you!’ she said, and then whispered: ‘He’s gone very strict against the use of Irish.’

  Now Ellen was certain of the smell of alcohol: the girl had been drinking port.

  ‘Bridget – what’s happened to you?’

  Bridget looked away, not wanting to meet Ellen’s gaze. ‘Oh, nothing. It’s just the times that’s in it – that’s all. But Mr Pakenham’s been very good to me … kept me on. A lot of the men have gone. And he’s fallen on hard times himself,’ she added hurriedly.

  ‘I want to see Pakenham,’ Ellen said. ‘My children – where are they?’

  Before Bridget could answer, Ellen heard Pakenham’s big boom of a voice ring out. ‘Bridget – who is it, for Heaven’s sake? What’s taking you so long?’

  At the sound of that voice, all her previous misfortunes at the hands of its owner re-surfaced in Ellen’s mind. She brushed past Bridget into the entrance hall, and then on into the study where the landlord stood at his desk, his back to her.

  ‘Sir Richard!’ she called out.

  Pakenham swung round, a look of astonishment on his face, unaware until now that it was anyone other than Bridget entering the room.

  ‘What the blazes! Who are you?’ he thundered at her.

  ‘I’ve come for my children!’ replied the fashionably dressed woman before him.

  ‘What?’ Pakenham started, and then he began to see: the red hair, the fire in the dark-green eyes. ‘My God! It’s you – the O’Malley woman,’ he said, astounded.

  ‘My children, Sir Richard – where are they?’

  He flinched slightly, taking her in, the change in her, her clothes, her assurance.

  ‘You have the devil of a cheek bursting in on me in this manner!’ he said loudly, dismissing her question, seeking to redress the advantage she had gained on him.

  Despite this Ellen noticed that he wasn’t at all the same Pakenham as of old. Yes, he was still a big build of a man.

  But he had gone soft, unhealthy-looking, his eyes not as clear. Most of all, she noticed, the voice had changed. The ‘I’m to be obeyed’, order-giving quality was still in it. The loudness was still in it. But there was something else in it, something Ellen had never noticed before – a hesitancy. It was slight, but it was there.

  She remembered Bridget’s reference to him ‘falling on bad times himself’.

  He kept talking at her: ‘Look at you! Thinking that a dress and a pair of shoes would make a lady out of you. It takes more than fine feathers—’

  She put up her hand to stop him. ‘Sir Richard, I am no longer your tenant. I am not here to be lectured at by you – I am here for my children. Your sister Edith and I had an agreement—’

  ‘Agreement is it!’ he cut across her. ‘Well, Mrs O’Malley, you’ve broken any agreement a thousand times over. You have caused nothing but bother for Coombes, an old friend, and now you are back here before time – agitating again … Agreement!’ he added, waving his finger at her.

  ‘Pakenham!’ she shouted at him, dropping the ‘Sir Richard’. ‘If you do not hand over my children at once, I will drag you through every court here and in England too!’

  He was momentarily taken aback by her threat. London … the courts … the banks … his debts.

  ‘Courts be damned!’ he cursed, recovering himself. ‘Who the hell do you think you are? You jumped up bog-peasant! How dare you threaten me!’

  The landlord was purple with rage, shouting at the top of his voice. More like she remembered him. Now she was frightened. Suddenly, he was beyond control, unable to speak. He struck out at her. She felt the back of his hand strike her cheekbone. Then he hit her again. This time she tasted the blood in her mouth.

  ‘I’ll teach you – you priest’s bastard!’

  Ellen, her vision blurred by the blows, felt weak, ready to fall. The children … the children … she had to get them. Peabody’s gun … her handbag … somehow she had managed to hold on to it. In desperation she tugged at the bag … got her hand inside … felt the cold pearly handle …

  Before she knew it, she had pulled out the gun. She pointed it at Pakenham as he came at her again.

  Ellen felt the kick, heard the clap of the explosion, without even realizing she had pulled the trigger. Pakenham reeled backwards from the impact of the bullet at such close range, then took one step towards her. Finally he fell forward, the crash of his body shaking the floor beneath her.

  She stood there, dazed, gun in hand, looking at him stretched at her feet.

  The next she knew there was commotion everywhere. People running into the room, and screaming: ‘She’s killed Sir Richard! Oh! She’s killed him!’

  Bridget ran by her to get to Pakenham, flinging herself on his body. ‘Sir Richard! Oh, Sir Richard!’ she called to him, shaking him, the tears rolling down her cheeks.

  It was only when Bridget looked up at her that Ellen understood the change she had seen in the girl.

  ‘You shot him, Ellen Rua! You shot him! You came here to shoot him!’ Bridget accused her.

  Before she had time to reply, Edith Pakenham strode into the room.

  ‘You!’ she said, shocked at seeing Ellen with the gun in her hand. ‘What have you done?’ she cried, looking at Pakenham, motionless on the floor, Bridget over him. ‘I knew it from the start – you were always trouble, no better than that murdering husband of yours.’

  ‘Well, if I am then I may as well be hung for two Pakenhams as one!’ Ellen threw back at her, turning the gun on the woman. ‘Where are my children?’

  Inside she was quaking. This had gone all wrong for her, terribly wrong – but she couldn’t weaken now, no matter what the consequences.

  Edith Pakenham’s face turned white. The O’Malley woman was dangerous, unbalanced. ‘Bring the boy!’ she commanded, to no one in particular.

  ‘I want all three of them!’ said Ellen, advancing on the landlord’s sister.

  ‘The other two – the girls – are not here. They are at Delphi Lodge in the care of my cousin,’ Edith Pakenham said nervously – not knowing what the O’Malley woman would do next.

  When Ellen heard the words ‘Delphi Lodge’, a cold clammy feeling clawed at her insides. Her whole plan was unravelling. What had happened to Katie and Mary? She couldn’t t
hink straight any more. She just had to get Patrick and then get out of here, rescue the girls.

  ‘Bring Patrick, then. Now!’ she ordered.

  More quickly then she expected, the housekeeper, Mrs Bottomley, and one of the men returned, with Patrick between them.

  Ellen’s heart sighed with relief on seeing her first-born. He had grown so tall, so strong-looking. Thanks be to God. Now she had him back at last.

  ‘Let him go!’ she shook Jacob Peabody’s gun at them, giving emphasis to her words.

  Patrick was looking at her, taking her in: the mother who had abandoned him, now back … different, her face bruised and cut … and Pakenham lying on the ground.

  ‘Patrick, come here, a stór,’ she called to him.

  Slowly the boy came to her side, saying nothing.

  ‘We’re leaving now, Miss Pakenham,’ Ellen said. ‘But if anything has happened to my children, if a hair of their heads has been harmed …’

  She said no more, the woman understood her.

  With that, Ellen propelled Patrick ahead of her, out of the house. She wanted to hold him to say she missed him, but there was no time for that. She had to get to Delphi to free Katie and Mary, then chase back to Westport and out of Ireland before the constabulary could be after them.

  ‘Patrick,’ she gasped, as they ran down the driveway, ‘I’m so happy to see you again! Thank God, you’re all right.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘What happened to Katie and Mary?’ she asked, her breath heaving.

  This time he answered her. ‘Pakenham put them to Delphi before the Christmas. Too many of us together,’ he said. Then, to her surprise, he added, ‘But he wasn’t that bad to us … And Bridget looked out for us, like you said.’

  That was it. Bridget had become Pakenham’s tallywoman. The landlord must have softened towards her, as she obviously had towards him. Was that what the girl was trying to tell her, Ellen wondered, the time she went to meet with Edith Pakenham? Now Patrick was telling her that Bridget had held sway with Pakenham, saw to it that they came to no harm. The girl had been true to her word.