by Boyce, Niamh
‘He said that we would travel away together, sir, he said that we would marry.’
‘And you believed him?’ The barrister smirked.
‘Of course, sir, why wouldn’t I?’
I could see what he was thinking, that I was a half-wit.
‘This man made a fool of you. Did you ask him to do an operation?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘But you let him?’
‘What else could I do?’
‘Could you not confide in your priest?’
‘Are you mad? What country do you live in?’
‘What?’ Mr Butler leant in – he’d long lashes, like a girl’s.
‘I didn’t confide in anyone, sir,’ I said, ‘because I was very foolish.’
He seemed happy with that. By then I just wanted to go home.
The jury were back in a matter of minutes. Guilty, they said.
‘Eight years’ hard labour,’ said the judge, ‘for the crime of procuring Miss Emily Madden, a woman not being a common prostitute of known immoral character, to have unlawful carnal connection, and for eight counts of using instruments to procure miscarriage.’
Agnes Marian Reilly, known common prostitute, of known immoral character, clapped till she was removed from the court.
I felt shame heat my cheeks as I left the courtroom, but at least I felt something. Not like Rose.
The square was full of people when I went outside. There was a hush when they saw me, even amongst the children, who stood elbow to elbow on the wall by the river. Every hawker was still, arms crossed on their chests at their stalls.
I stood on the step of the courthouse. Old women in black shawls and young women in headscarves seemed to surround me. I’d known them all since I was a child, and they all knew me. Their eyes glittered with hatred. The silence was broken by an awful sound. The women’s mouths gaped, and they squawked over and over again, louder and louder. They wanted something. What were they saying? Spit dressed their chins as they moved closer, and closer. What were they saying? I could almost smell the meat between their teeth.
Someone scooped me up and carried me back into the courthouse. It was Garda Molloy. He shut the door. I put my hands on the wood. Their chanting buzzed my palms. What were they saying? A stout short man smiled at me, patted my back.
‘Better stay here till they settle down.’
The voice was the judge’s. I hadn’t recognized him without his white wig. He was let out and there was a break in the shouting. We heard the motorcar take him away. The herbalist was being brought down the corridor towards us. Sergeant Deegan guided him by the elbow; he was handcuffed.
‘Maybe we should wait, boys,’ Deegan said.
‘Wait, my arse,’ was Molloy’s answer; ‘let him face the music.’
I felt the herbalist move from behind me, to beside me and then past me. I kept my eyes closed. I sensed nothing, no message. There was no last word between us, just the sound of the door being unbolted. I looked at him, but he didn’t look back. I felt a river breeze and heard the crowd begin to bay. This time I knew what they were saying. ‘Hang him. Hang him.’ The women’s voices soared above the men’s. The guard shut the door behind the sergeant and the herbalist. I stepped foward.
‘Don’t follow him. You’ll be killed,’ Molloy whispered. ‘They’ll have him hung, drawn and quartered.’
At first I could hear Sergeant Deegan shouting at the crowd to get back, then I couldn’t hear his voice any more, just a roaring like at an All-Ireland football match. ‘Hang him. Hang him.’ And then there was a deathly quiet. I fainted.
I came to with Charlie rubbing my hand. We were on Aggie’s barge. She was lying on her settle with her old black shawl tucked around her. Men were singing out in the street. There was the sound of glass breaking, and a big cheer.
‘We showed him,’ he said.
‘Showed who?’
‘Him, we showed him and all like him. We showed him for what he was. A trickster. A savage. A killer. You should’ve seen it, Em: farmers brought pitchforks topped with lit turf, and we drove him and the sergeant all the way to the station house. We smeared him with tar. Saw what he really was without the white suit, without the flash smiles – he was a cloven-hoofed devil.’
‘It’s beneath you, Charlie, to be acting like that.’
‘It was for Rose.’
‘It was for you.’
Charlie dropped my hand, and went out to join the other boys.
‘I’m afraid, Aggie. Can I stay here tonight?’
‘You can’t. I’m of no use to you, not any more.’
Aggie looked terrible; she was shivering and part of her hairline was clotted with blood. She must’ve been at the drink, for she kept rambling. Said she’d seen an omen, a red-haired woman the spit of herself. That she was soon for the next world. I knelt beside her, promised I’d be back in the morning. She clasped my hand and gave it a squeeze. I smelt gin off her breath.
I made my way out into the night. Young lads with lanterns and lit pitchforks sang in the square: ‘He’d fly through the air with the greatest of ease, that daring young man on his flying trapeze.’ There was an older crowd on the steps of the town hall.
‘Mind the thatch!’ one of them shouted to the boys.
That made me afraid – what if they set light to a house and one thing led to another and the whole town was burnt in their beds? It didn’t feel safe. Charlie came over, a bottle of stout in his hand.
‘I want to go home, Charlie.’
‘Come on, come on, then.’ He linked my arm and we began to walk.
A pebble hit me on the back of the neck. Charlie was gone in a second, his coat thrown off. Would he ever learn? He lambasted the boy he thought had hit me, while others circled. I couldn’t see, didn’t want to. I leant against the wall, melted into the shadow of the town hall – the brick was so cold. I wasn’t worried about Charlie, he could hold his own.
I was worried about tomorrow. Was I to live like a shunned sow, like the Carver sisters in their flour-bag dresses, eating only from the land, and living like animals? I began to make my way home; there was no sign of Charlie coming. I felt like all the windows of the houses were eyes narrowing at me as I passed. Kelly’s shop was in darkness.
A stick hit my thigh. It was a woman all in black with a black headscarf. It was Birdie: she looked so small and bent since Veronique had passed. I missed the old her, the old sparky Birdie with the halo of white hair.
‘Is there anyone in your house tonight?’ I could barely hear her.
‘I don’t know, Birdie, but I’ll be all right.’
‘Stay at mine.’ She hit me again, this time across the arm. ‘Come on.’
So I stayed in Birdie’s spare room, where everything was ornate and the sheets were cold with damp. She had no hot-water bottle for my feet, so she gave me a long black fur coat and a grey cat. The cat curled up on my feet straight away, obviously used to second jobbing as a foot warmer. I thought of the herbalist: he would sleep between the same four walls for the next eight years. He would never step across the town square in his white suit again. Where was Doctor B, where was the man who had planted the seed? He would never be punished. Why did I feel sorry for the herbalist? He was a monster. Yet I remembered him disappearing through the courthouse door and into the crowd, his hat yet to be knocked off, and felt the pity you’d feel for a lamb thrown to the wolves.
I shouldn’t have felt sorry. He got hard labour, but I got life. If I was a nobody before the trial, I’d be a leper afterwards.
You found me, Aggie, you found me.
I knew I would, love, knew I
would.
I was a good girl, Aggie.
I know, Rose.
Didn’t go out on my own, averted my eyes around men and only went to the pictures with Mam. Sorry, no. Mother. I forgot: not Mam, Mother. ‘Mam’ is common. So is Charlie, but he’s beautiful. Not like my father. My father didn’t go – to the Picture Palace, that is. It’s a low-class thing. Low-class things are so exciting.
Low class, my arse – that dada of yours thought he was royalty; gadding about town with his black bag, pushing up his spectacles and looking down his nose.
That wasn’t his fault, Aggie. He was a doctor because he had to be – he was born to it. My poor father didn’t have a say-so in the matter. He was a very busy man, worked all hours, tending to all and sundry. Mother made a sad face about that, but I know she hated it when my father was under her feet in her drawing room. She hadn’t designed it with him in mind.
Your dada was a bastard.
Aggie, how could you! It wasn’t him. It wasn’t really. My father had a twin. Not many people know that. A not-so-nice a man as him. They were alike but smelt different. He used to barge into our house very late at night – he’d no right. Mother put on her visitors’ voice, all polite and light. I’d listen to them talk, to their voices going up and down – my father’s twin and Mother – thinking, ‘He shouldn’t be there. If my father knew, he wouldn’t like it at all, at all.’
The maid always came up before him. Take your milk, then. Warm milk and whiskey. The new maid was a bit simple. Voices. The simple maid. Warm milk. Whiskey. My father’s twin. That’s the way it went. Mother would say – ’night now – with a catchy kitten in her voice. And he would come up the stairs.
It started the day of the goldfish. I was carrying it home from the carnival. Rushing to get out of the sun; had got a notion the water would heat and boil the fish to death. ‘Look at the girl’s dress!’ someone hooted. I stopped. There was blood on the back of my skirt, like a poppy. Mother told me to run.
She screamed when she got home. Who saw! Who saw! I was twelve years old and counting. To bed with no supper. Later I heard the door clatter, the thick voice, Mother telling tales and laughing. Well may they have laughed, she and my father’s twin. When they were tired of laughing, he came up and did his sin.
It was the stain, you see. ‘You showed me you were ready,’ he always said. But I can’t answer when he blows my mouth full of air, I can’t answer.
I know, I know. Shush, I know. I have you now, I’ve found you.
How did you know where to find me?
Sure I’d seen you, Rose. Saw you every night since the one Seamus and myself set you on the road to that big grey house. Saw you hang over the river like a low moon, all alone. Heard you too in other places, crying by the shed for your child, searching the reeds; in the folds of the day, you were everywhere I lay.
Where are we going now, Ag?
To another river, different but the same as this one. It’s not far at all now, around the next bend. Look, it’s just over the horizon.
Three years later …
Are there more spiders weaving in September, or is it just me? The Holohans’ shop front is grey; the window bald and dark, as mucky as the river, with nothing in it except for my reflection – a pale figure floating in a rectangle of glass as if I was the ghost, as if I was the one that torments this place. My hands leave prints on the dusty glass.
I think back on the impressive straight-backed couple that I once knew, so nice and well-to-do. Dan and Carmel, their respectable faces, their polite voices. How I wish that impression had stayed true. I can see them still, Dan drawing plans for shop improvements in a copybook and Carmel reading banned novels, drinking tonic wine.
I can’t believe Dan went back to Tipperary, that he just abandoned the shop and everything in it. Finbar wanted it so much that he hired solicitor after solicitor to find a loophole in the will. And there was Dan, not wanting it at all in the end. So much for those who say it was the only reason he married Carmel.
The church bells clang, calling the town to attention. In the alleyway, young children skip rope. Soon the path will fill with people making their way to Mass. Not many would recognize me. If they did, they’d think me a vulture, skulking around to see what’s left.
The herbalist would know me. I almost felt him when I walked into the market square, felt his knuckle graze my neck, lift a Marcel wave from my newly set hair, to peer past the pan-stick and eye shadow, past my carefully drawn womanhood.
Emily, he’d whisper, Emily, is that really you? Sometimes I confuse what I knew with what the townspeople said afterwards, so that even in my dreams he becomes just another smooth-tongued devil.
‘A peasant Irish girl,’ he once called me. To think it was me caused all that trouble. Skinny drab Emily. Lover of the next ruler of the Western world, the medicine king himself. Believer of all his promises, waiting to be sent down the river on a raft, to be washed in milk, bejewelled with gemstones and adorned in silks. Something had to be done, but sometimes the cure is worse than the sting. A bad man he was, but I miss the sweetness of his fingertips, and the grand dreams he gave me.
How that crowd of bitches chased him in the beginning, flushed and powdered, perfumed to high heaven. Pushing their bosoms into one another’s backs in their rush to get near his market stall. ‘A great man to have. Aren’t we lucky he came our way? You know he wasn’t going to stay only for the great welcome we gave him?’
Fools, did they really believe that was it? The few pence they spent on invigorating tonic?
We were in love, I thought. I’m a woman now, and soon we’ll leave together and go to Brighton, where we’ll marry. And he’ll make a fortune as a medicine man with his cure-alls. He’s a saviour, a great help to all.
The herbalist always gave out about me and my big gob. Said girls were dangerous because of what’s between their legs and what comes out of their mouths. How right he was. What came out of my big mouth got him prison. I did it for Rose. True. But I did it for him too. Well, it was better than being buried alive in the bog. That’s what Charlie had in store for him.
Wasn’t it funny? The herbalist sentenced to hard labour, considering the nature of his crimes? I can hear Aggie laugh at that. It’s strange, but Aggie was right about not having long to live. She passed away the morning after the trial. Seamus found her and had her taken to the morgue. When he came back, the boat was gone. Biddy must’ve come undone – a badly tied knot no doubt, for it was last seen by Ned drifting in the current of the high river towards the leafy bends. Ned claimed there were two women in it, one old and one young. Everyone agreed that Ned was seeing things again. But the boat was never found.
I miss Aggie’s dirty laugh, but I’m glad she got to see me make my confession. The way that judge looked at me. Poor girl of the lower classes led astray, set upon. He looked at my top button, moved his mouth like he’d like to set upon me himself. Wanted details, he wanted every detail, to better imagine me violated, offended, up against it.
It wasn’t the herbalist that got those girls in the family way in the first place – everyone forgets that. And everyone got it wrong: he and I – monster that he was – we were equals. Not in the beginning, and not in the end, but during the most important time, when he was my love and I was his empress.
Kelly’s shop was shut, in darkness and deserted. A window display of Jacob’s tins held tight to their crumbling biscuits. No one dared enter. No one dared creep up those stairs. It was nonsense, a child’s tale, but youngsters said that Carmel was there still, roaming around, peering through windows, lamenting. The
grown-ups laughed, but no one went in. If they did, they might have seen the peeling wallpaper and the cracked plaster beneath it. The clothes that hung limply in the open wardrobes, the family photographs that lay smashed and greasy on the floor, and underneath – a five-pound note. They’d have to push open the heavily cobwebbed doors first, except for the one upstairs – that one was sealed shut.
The day Carmel drove out the gossiping women and slammed the door behind them was the last day Kelly’s shop ever opened. She hid indoors during the herbalist’s trial and after. Didn’t work, didn’t eat, didn’t answer the knocking out front. A lot of people called in the beginning, but that fell off after a week or two. Birdie kept it up the longest. Finbar never showed his face, not once. The townswomen gathered outside and discussed her – what were they to do?
Carmel went upstairs, shut her ears, but she couldn’t shut them out – The girl was up to no good with Carmel’s husband. Oh, the pity of it, the poor woman! The town crowed with pity and delight. Carmel felt their words beat the roof at night.
The girl Sarah all but disappeared. The herbalist was taken off before harm was done – at least Carmel didn’t have that on her conscience. Whatever evil had possessed her was gone.
Then Grettie B came to call, pushed her way in. Shoved and rattled the back door till the lock snapped. To rescue me, from myself, thought Carmel, but she thought wrong. Grettie came to return the five pounds she had borrowed. ‘It bought death for my daughter. Have it back, go on. I’m making amends for my sins.’ She threw it towards Carmel and left. It fluttered and lay on the floor. Carmel never touched it, never picked it up. The realization hit her fully and straight in the gut. Rose died, and Rose’s child had died, and Carmel’s five pounds had paid for their deaths. There would be no end to her torment now.
Carmel gathered what was left of the rope from the shed and went upstairs. She sat on the rocking chair, and listened for Samuel’s cry to tell her when it was time. When he came, it wasn’t as a cry but as a soft light, a blur in the corner of the room, and she knew that his soul had come to meet his mother’s, so that they could make the journey together.