The Star of the Sea

by Joseph O'Connor

  At the time of his death he was said to have been considering an offer from the Edison Motion Picture Company of Orange, New Jersey. One of its executives, an Edwin S. Porter, wanted to produce a short fictional entertainment loosely based on Meadows’s life and many adventures. The provisional title was ‘The Wild Irish Rover’ but negotiations had been stalled in the preceding months. (Apparently the Rover had insisted on playing himself.)

  His funeral was attended by an enormous crowd of the poor, many of whom idolised him and always had. If they saw him as a dirty fighter, as some of them did, they argued, convincingly enough, that a clean one would have left them to rot in the slums. The Marquess of Queensberry, Seamus Meadowes was not. (But as admirers of another flamboyant Irishman will know, neither was the Marquess of Queensberry.)

  Mass was concelebrated by fifteen priests, including two of his five sons and several other relations. A piper played an ancient Connemara lament as the cortège stopped briefly at the Fulton Street dockside: the place where Southpaw Meadows first set foot on America. Archbishop O’Connell of Boston who led the obsequies remarked: ‘Jimmy was a democrat, first and last. All he had to do, to know what the people wanted, was to gaze steadily into the depths of his own magnificent heart.’

  A number of matters had come out at his trial for Merridith’s murder which were extremely painful to the victim’s family. It was revealed that the strange man often seen tailing Merridith around the East End was not in fact an Irish revolutionary but an English detective hired by Laura Markham’s father, who had wondered how his son-in-law was spending so much of his money. Unaware that the Kingscourt estate was almost bankrupt, and that Merridith had been financially cut off by his own father, Mr Markham had suspected the existence of a mistress. The truth emerged in court about Merridith’s visits to brothels and it was a difficult time for Laura Markham and her sons. Inevitably the details of his medical condition were also revealed, and were pruriently reported in all the newspapers, the usual easy moral derived and explained as though such derivation or explanation were necessary by now. Never was it said that what he suffered was an ailment: not a curse, a revenge, a castigation, but a germ. So strong was the popular lust to attribute supernature to diseases (as much as to famines, perhaps not incidentally) that it was tempting when it came time to set down this story to leave out his illness, or edit its chronology, or change it, somehow, to some other thing. But that would have been wrong; a tacit approval of the game. He had what he had, and was pronounced guilty for having it, though he was not, in fact, on trial for anything. He was posthumously condemned by the violently pious judge, an ascendant star of New York politics who knew how to appeal to the avidity for a villain shared by a number of my saintlier countrymen. If he could have found Merridith guilty of murdering himself, he would have; and hanged his corpse outside a chapel.

  As for the note intended to push Mulvey into the act of murder, the reader will already have identified the author; though I did not myself until shortly before the trial. But the moment I actually saw it, I knew who had made it. It was not Mary Duane, nor Seamus Meadowes, nor any of the abject poor who suffered on that ship.

  As David Merridith used often to put it, everything is in the way the material is composed.

  GET HIM. RIGHT SUNE. Els Be lybill. H.

  An expert in doohulla would have noticed the anagram.

  WUTHERING HEIGHTS by Ellis Bell.

  With the ‘M’ in ‘get him’ an inverted W.

  It was the victim who assembled that fatal note, fashioned his own warrant for execution. His raw material was the novel I had given him, the gift of the man who had already stolen what was his. The volume was indeed found in one of his suitcases with the jags clearly visible where the title page had been torn out. As to why he made his choice, we can only surmise. Cowardice had been mentioned but I think that insults him. Vaguely Roman suggestions have also been advanced: the falling of the noble on his sword and so on. I think he loved his children too much for imperial gestures.

  My own belief is that David Merridith was a remarkably brave man who knew that his life would end very soon and wanted to spare his family the shame of a pariah’s death. Perhaps he had other understandable thoughts, too, for the papers found in his desk pertained to the Royal Naval Relief Trust, a fund which supported the private education of the sons of deceased officers whether serving or retired. (Not their daughters, only their sons.) Like all such schemes in that riotously respectable era, it was void in the event of either suicide or syphilis. But not of murder. Murder voided nothing. Murder would give his children some kind of inheritance.

  The dividend was to be seized by his creditors anyway, almost his entire estate being swallowed up by debt; the remainder by lawyers’ fees, taxes and death duties. It was only discovered after his assassination that bankruptcy proceedings had already been initiated in London, but had been briefly delayed on the entreaties of his lawyers. (They had pointed out that as a bankrupt he would have to resign from the House of Lords. An appalling vista, as somebody said.) The lands at Kingscourt were purchased by Commander Henry Edgar Blake of Tully Cross who broke them up, rack-rented the last few tenants off them, and replaced the farmers and smallholders with sheep. The sheep proved more profitable than the troublesome human beings and less inconveniently solicitous of the right not to die. He made the enormous fortune his grandchildren now enjoy. One of them is active in Irish politics.

  On a visit to Connemara in 1850 I met with Captain Lockwood again. He and his wife were living at that time in the village of Letterfrack, near Tully Cross, with other members of the Quaker Society who had gone there to stand in solidarity with the Irish famished. His wife was a cousin of a woman named Mary Wheeler, who had moved with her husband, James Ellis of Bradford, to northern Galway in 1849, hoping to help the local people. They had no previous connection whatever with Connemara; but they saw connections where others who should have seen them simply looked the other way. They built homes, roads, drains, a school; paid their workers fairly and treated them with respect. Lockwood was working with some of the local fishermen, mending nets and repairing boats. He was a modest-hearted man, Josias Lockwood of Dover, and he would have scoffed at being called a hero. And yet he was one of the greatest I have known. He and his sisters and brothers of the English Quakers – he always insisted gently on his preferred word, ‘Friends’ – saved hundreds and possibly thousands of lives.

  It was on the final night of that visit that he made me a gift. Naturally I was more than reluctant to accept it, but once again his gentleness had insistence behind it. Or perhaps he could see that my reluctance was feigned. We had often debated matters of religion – he knew I was not a believer and I knew he was a passionate one – and it was that language he used the last time I saw him; still forging connections as he always had before. ‘You are a Jew. Of the people of the book. Here is my book,’ he quietly said. ‘The things that happened are all written down.’ And he added with a look I have never quite forgotten: ‘Never let people forget what we did to each other.’

  It was as though he knew what I myself had done.

  Perhaps I thought his register might contain some clue to what had happened among us on the ship; a thing that was not at all clear at the time. Perhaps I saw it as a grisly souvenir of the thirty days that set the course for the rest of my life. Perhaps – why not say it now, since an old man must confess all his shames – I thought it might make the bones of a story. The novel I had always wanted to write but had failed to.

  But take it I did, and I have it by me yet; that terrifying ledger of human suffering, its pages withered and yellowed with time, the calf-skin of its cover blanched with saltwater stains. The reader has seen the words of Josias Tuke Lockwood, who died of famine fever in Dover, England, fourteen months after the last night I saw him. Those words have the advantage of being contemporaneous, where my own recollections, still bright as they seem to myself, must inevitably be questioned so long after the e
vent. That is entirely and properly as it should be. I have tried not to distort but no doubt have not always succeeded.

  I would like to think I am objective in what I have put down, but of course that is not so and could never have been. I was there. I was involved. I knew some of the people. One I loved; another I despised. I use the word carefully: I did despise him. So easy to despise in the cause of love. Others again I was simply indifferent to, and such indifference is also a part of the tale. And of course I have selected what has been seen of the Captain’s words in order to frame and tell the story. A different author would have made a different selection. Everything is in the way the material is composed.

  From papers found, from documents discovered, from certain investigations and recollections and interviews; from enquiries made among others who sailed that ship, from questions asked on many return visits to those rocks which maps call ‘The British Isles’, other matters came to light which may safely be lodged in the column of fact. For the benefit of the curious, let me set them down:

  There was once a Galwayman called Pius Mulvey, another named Thomas David Merridith. They sailed to America in search of new beginnings. The first had been charged to murder the second, a man who was blamed for the crimes of his fathers. In a different world they might not have been enemies; at a different time, perhaps even friends. They had far more in common than either of them realised. One was born Catholic, the other Protestant. One was born Irish, the other British. But neither of these was the greatest difference between them. One was born rich and the other poor.

  There was once a beautiful woman called Mary Duane, who came from a village called Carna in Connemara; the middle child of Daniel Duane and Margaret Nee, the former a fisherman and sometime small-farmer, the latter a nanny and mother of seven. She once loved a boy she didn’t know to be her brother. Before knowing she was his sister, he loved her in return; or would have done, maybe, were he capable of loving her. He and the girl who once cherished him so dearly were separated in the end, as perhaps all are, not by what divided them, but by what they had in common – the tangled facts of a past they did not make. What is sometimes called in Ireland: ‘the he of the land’.

  Some will judge his lack of that capacity to be entirely his own fault; others will see in it a kind of victimhood. As for myself, I dare advance no judgement on the sins of another, my own sins being sufficiently consuming of reflection. Call him the son of the father who destroyed him. Call him an untouchable; the lowest of the low. He was a man who could have done good things if only he knew it. I believe Mary Duane saw such a miraculousness in him when they were young enough to believe that power does not matter; before wealth separated them, and class stepped between them, and then made her abuse at his hands become a possibility. They were not Romeo and Juliet. They were master and servant. He had choices in life that she had not. That he chose as he did is a matter of record. That each man is the sum of his choices is nothing less than the truth. And each, perhaps, is also something else.

  Of Mary Duane’s immediate family, her father, her mother and all three of her sisters died of starvation in the land of their birth, as did her youngest and eldest brothers. Her one surviving brother was killed in an explosion while attempting to escape from Clerkenwell Prison in London in December 1867. He had been jailed for membership of a revolutionary faction seeking an end to British rule in Ireland. At the time of his death he was awaiting trial for his part in the murder of a Manchester policeman.

  What became of Mary Duane in America I cannot say. She worked the streets of lower Manhattan for a time; was arrested twice, briefly jailed once, and then seems to have simply disappeared from view. I know she was begging in Chicago in the winter of ’49 and was admitted to the vagrants’ ward of a Minneapolis chest hospital for two days in 1854. By the time we had travelled there, she had quietly moved on. Advertisements seeking her whereabouts remained unanswered. Rewards offered remained unclaimed. Enquiries through detectives over the decades placed women who matched her nationality and description in thousands of places across America, and in as many different circumstances of life. New Orleans, Illinois, Minnesota, Colorado, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine; a sister in an enclosed convent in northern Ontario, a sweeper in a lavatory, a maid in a brothel, a cook in an orphanage, a frontiersman’s wife, a scrubwoman on trains, the grandmother of a Senator. As to which, if any, was Mary Duane from Carna, I simply cannot say and will never know now.

  Only once, in response to a newspaper advertisement, did I receive anything she might have written herself. A third-person account (though clearly autobiographical) of the life of a woman who had worked as ‘a night-girl’ in the heartless Dublin of ‘the hungry forties’, following her abandonment by the son of an aristocrat. It was unsigned, inconsistently spelled, with no return address or identifying clue, but laden with the speech patterns of southern Connemara. It was mailed from the post office in Dublin, New Hampshire, on Christmas Eve, 1871, but a search of that small town by the local authorities yielded no result; nor did a fresh search of the entire state, and then of the whole of the New England region.

  Many will feel that the story is not complete without knowing all its endings. No doubt they are right. I feel the same way. Looking back over these pages, they seem to say almost nothing about her; it is as though she was merely a collection of footnotes in the lives of other, more violent people. So many years I attempted to find her that now if I did I would feel a kind of loss. But I will not find her now. Perhaps I never could have. I would like to have been able to say more in the present account, to do more than record the few known facts of her existence in terms of the existences of the men who hurt her. But I am simply not in a position to do so. Some things I have invented but I could not invent Mary Duane; at least no more than I have already done. She suffered more than enough composition.

  There were times over the years when I would think I saw her. On a railroad platform, once, in San Diego, California. Sleeping in a doorway in downtown Pittsburgh. A nurse in a hospital in Edenton, North Carolina. But I was always wrong. It was never Mary Duane. It can only be assumed that she did not want to be found; that she changed her name and began a new life, as did so many hundreds of thousands of the Irish in America. But I do not know. Perhaps that is wishful thinking.

  The last time I thought I saw her was last November in Times Square: a shade moving slowly through a forest of black umbrellas. The playhouses were emptying into the streets; a strong winter rainstorm had swept in from the Atlantic. A great crowd had gathered to cheer a troop of ambulance volunteers who were marching away to the war in Europe; and it was on the edge of the throng that I imagined I saw her; alone under a street light in the pearl-like rain. She was selling something from a tray – flowers, I think. But she was so fragile and young, the girl I saw that night, and Mary Duane would be old now, if still she lives. The only creed I have ever believed in is reason, a faith that must tell me it was not her I saw. But if her spirit indeed walks the glittered streets of Broadway it is far from alone; so any actor would claim. Ghosts, it is said, are sometimes drawn to theatres; as much as they are to war.

  The dire fate of her lover, Pius Mulvey, is easier told. He died some time on the dismally snowy night of the sixth of December, 1848, a year almost to the day after landing in New York; knifed to pieces in a Brooklyn alleyway near the corner of Water Street and Hudson Avenue, in the ragged Irish shanty town of Vinegar Hill. Across a broken wall was the freshly whitewashed sentence: IRELAND IN CHAINS SHALL NEVER BE AT PEACE.

  In the pocket of his greatcoat they found a leather-bound bible, a five-cent coin and a handful of earth. There was a cheap copper washer on his wedding-ring finger but we shall never know whom he married in America, if indeed he did. He had been going under a variety of assumed names, among them Costello, Blake, Duane and Nee, but many in the neighbourhood knew exactly who he was. It was said that he had been shunned and often assaulted; had been sleeping on the benches of l
ocal parks, begging passers-by for scraps of food. Often at night he had been seen on the waterfront, staring out at the ships coming into the harbour. He had taken to drinking and was desperately thin. Prior to death he had been tortured and horribly disfigured. It was reported by the City Coroner who examined the remains that the heart had been cut out and flung in the gutter, probably while the victim was still alive. A few of the more superstitious of Connemara New Yorkers were said to see meaning in the admittedly eerie coincidence that the murder took place on the feast-day of St Nicholas.

  Nobody was ever charged with the crime and nobody remembers for certain where its victim was buried. It is hard to believe that he even existed. I would doubt it myself had I not met and known him, this monster who murdered his enemy in Newgate Gaol and his friend in a forest on the outskirts of Leeds. Had he murdered David Merridith he might have been a hero. The subject, perhaps, of a valiant song. Instead he is forgotten: a minor embarrassment. The coward who could not bring himself to murder for a cause.

  Part of the land a few miles west of Vinegar Hill was com-pulsorily purchased by the city some twenty-two years ago, including a shabby plot of waste ground called Traitor’s Acre, where local paupers or prostitutes were often flung into shallow graves. Some say he lies there: Pius Mulvey of Ardnagreevagh, younger child of Michael and Elizabeth, brother of Nicholas, father of nobody. The tombs are unmarked; the rocks overgrown with weeds. On that precise spot and its many buried shames now stands the Brooklynside anchorage for the Manhattan Bridge.