Then, after he came out of his library to rejoin the world, he went into the garden and saw the roses choked with weeds. He’d never been a gardener, nor had he any desire to be one. But when he saw those bushes, the bushes that his wife had nurtured so lovingly, he resolved to make them flourish again. He would do it for her. And now Somerville roses were once again the pride of the valley.
He was studying a specimen when a shadow crossed his light. He looked up and saw John Ranahan standing over him.
“Sir, I’ve come with the rent.”
Somerville brushed the dirt from his knees and stood up abruptly. He enjoyed working with the roses because it made him feel close to his wife, but he always felt foolish when someone, especially another man, found him thus engaged.
“Ranahan… Yes, well, where did you get the money—? No, never mind. Put it away. You’ll need it to feed your family.”
Da stood there, awkwardly holding a handful of coins in the palm of his calloused hand. He hadn’t been expecting this response and wasn’t sure what to say. “Your Lordship,” he began hesitantly, “I pay my debts…”
“Of course you do, Ranahan. When things are right again, you’ll pay me. Now off with you.”
Da tried to speak, but the lump in his throat wouldn't let him. He turned and retreated in confusion—and gratitude. The money would feed the family until the next harvest. Thanks be to God. We’re saved.
Somerville watched him go with an expression of sadness and—concern.
Grandmam had not been the same since her husband's death, but since her prized chest had been sold off to the gombeen man, she had retreated into herself even more. Always an early riser, she started getting up later and later. Soon she was spending most of her time in bed unable—or unwilling—to take her customary place by the fire. The family didn’t know what to make of it. She didn’t have the fever, but clearly she was dying.
One night, as the rest of the family was getting ready for bed, Grandmam announced, “I want to go to the Workhouse tomorrow.”
“You’ll not,” Da said. “No Ranahan will ever go there as long as I’ve a breath in me.”
Da was appalled that his mother would even consider such a thing. The Workhouse was a place of shame and dread, a place for the destitute who had no one else to look after them. Workhouse rules were harsh and designed to discourage less than industrious people from taking advantage of the good will of the government.
“I’m dyin’,” Grandmam said. There was no fear or regret in her voice. It was simply a statement of fact.
“Then all the more reason you’ll stay right here with your family around you,” Da said.
“I’ll go to the Workhouse, John Ranahan,” she said more emphatically.
Michael knelt down beside her. “Why, Grandmam?”
“I’ll get the coffin, Michael.”
Michael looked at her, puzzled.
“It’s God’s own truth. I saw it with me own eyes. The Workhouse in Ballyross gives a proper Christian burial with a coffin and all. I’ve seen those mass graves and I’ll not be thrown into the ground like a sack of rotten lumpers.”
“You’ll not go to that place,” Da shouted. “And that’s final. The family is stayin’ together.”
The next morning, before dawn, Michael felt a cold, frail hand on his arm. He came awake with a start. He was still having nightmares about the body in the river. But it was only Grandmam, sitting on the floor next to him.
“Michael, take me to the Workhouse.”
Da awoke and came to kneel beside her. “Mam, we want you to stay here with us,” he said softly.
She looked at her son with sad, rheumy eyes. “John, can you give me a coffin?”
Da picked a piece of straw out of her gray hair. “No, I cannot.”
Later that morning, Michael carried the frail old woman to the Workhouse, an inhospitable, long gray brick building with all the charm of a penitentiary. He rang the bell and a heavy-bosomed matron in a severe gray uniform opened the door. She glared at Grandmam. “Has she the fever?”
“No, she does not.”
“Do I get the coffin when I die?” Grandmam asked.
The matron stepped back. “Bring her in.”
Michael had never been inside the Workhouse, but he’d heard the terrible rumors about what went on behind these thick gray walls. They poison you with a little black bottle… No one ever comes out of the Workhouse alive… They feed the bodies to the pigs…
He didn’t know if those stories were true or not, but the Workhouse, itself, was a bleak, inhospitable place. In a great room, just off the vestibule, Michael saw dozens of pale, sickly women, all dressed in the same drab gray dresses, sitting at tables knitting in forced silence and lost in their own despair.
Michael put his Grandmam down on a chair while the matron went off to find the attendants. “Grandmam, are you sure you want to stay here?”
“Aye.” She squeezed his arm with a bony hand. “Michael, you were right to want to go out to America. Save yerself. Sure this country is doomed.”
The matron came back with two attendants. “You can go now,” she said to Michael.
Michael kissed his Grandmam. “I’ll come see you tomorrow.”
At the front door, he turned and saw his Grandmam being carried away by the two attendants. She looked so small and frail. The women continued their knitting. No one looked up. They were not permitted to speak. There was no sound save the soft click, click of the knitting needles.
Michael stepped outside and filled his lungs with cold, clean air.
They put Grandmam in a ward crowded with the sick and dying. Discordant, pitiful moans filled an air reeking of death and decay. She lay on a bed that was nothing more than a board covered with a tattered stained rag. She paid no mind to the hard wood against her bony shoulder blades, the smells, the moans. She knew she wouldn’t be here long.
She’d tenaciously clung to life, refusing to die, until she was certain she’d be buried in a coffin. How could a decent Christian woman go meet her maker without a coffin? Now that that matter was settled, she allowed herself to slip away. She felt at peace. The arthritic pain that had twisted her hands into useless claws subsided. The chronic gnawing hunger in her stomach abated. She closed her eyes, content to dream of her coffin. She didn’t know how long she lay like that, but when she opened her eyes, Granda was standing at the foot of the bed, smiling at her.
“Woman, are you gonna sleep away the whole long day?”
Grandmam squinted at her husband. “Are you in one of your queer moods, Hugh?”
“I am not. Come on, Aileen”—his eyes twinkled—“it’s a grand day outside. Let’s take a walk down by the river like we used to.”
“I don’t know if I can get out of this bed, Hugh.”
“Of course you can.” He offered his hand and to her surprise she floated out of the bed effortlessly. Then she turned and saw why. There, still in the bed, lay her frail body. But she wasn’t frightened—or surprised. “I’ll be back,” she said to her body. “I’m just goin’ for a walk with my Hugh.”
And together, holding hands like they did when they courted, they walked out the door.
An hour later, the matron stopped by Grandmam’s bed. “This one’s dead,” she said to an attendant. “Move her out.”
The attendant wrapped Grandmam’s body in the rag that had covered the board. Then he carried the body to a window. Outside a wooden slide had been built from the windowsill to the ground below.
He placed the body on the slide. “Here comes another one,” he shouted. The old woman's body went down the slide and bounced onto the ground. Two attendants picked it up and stacked it alongside five other corpses.
The next morning, while the family was having their breakfast of cornmeal and water, there was a knock at the door.
Da opened the door to one of Pat Doyle’s sons. “I was told to tell you the old woman’s dead.” The lad turned and ran off.
That
afternoon the family came to the Workhouse to claim the body of Aileen Ranahan. The heavy-bosomed matron who’d accepted Grandma the day before, stuck a piece of paper in front of Da.
“Sign here to authorize the burial and return of the body to you,” she said gruffly.
Da stared at the paper. “I don’t know how to read or write.”
“Claimant illiterate,” she muttered as she scrawled the words across the paper. “Wait outside.”
Minutes later, two attendants came out carrying Grandmam’s coffin. They followed the men into the cemetery. The ground was pockmarked with freshly dug graves, so close to each other that Michael wondered how they didn’t collapse in on each other.
The men stopped and placed the coffin down by a freshly dug grave. Michael peered into the hole, surprised at how deep it was.
“Where’s Father Rafferty?” Mam asked.
“Called away to the next parish,” the older attendant said. “The priest there died of the fever last night. God rest his soul.”
“Then there’s no one to say a prayer over the grave?” Da asked, appalled that his mother would not have this final ritual.
“Ah, no. But I’ve been doin’ it all day. Would you like me to?”
Da nodded, perplexed.
The attendants took off their caps. The older attendant began, “Dear Lord, here is the recently departed soul—?” He looked at Da.
Da had always called her Mam. He wasn’t sure what her real name was.
“Aileen Ranahan,” Mam said.
“Are you sure?” Da asked.
“Of course I’m sure. Could I forget your own Mam’s name?”
“Aileen Ranahan,” Da confirmed.
The attendant nodded. “Just so. Here is the recently departed soul, Aileen Ranahan. Dust we are and to dust shall we return.” He put his cap on and looked at the family apologetically. “That’s all I usually say.”
Da nodded. The attendants stood on one side of the hole, the Ranahans on the other. The two groups looked at each other in awkward silence.
“Are you not goin’ to lower the coffin into the ground then?” Da asked.
“Ah, no,” the older attendant said. “Not just yet. We have certain preparations to attend to.”
Michael could see that whatever the “certain preparations” were, they weren’t going to do them as long as the family was there.
“Come on, Da.” Michael took his father’s arm. “Let’s go home.”
As they started back on the road to the cottage, Mam said, “It’s so sad, her dyin’ in the Workhouse and all.”
“Aye,” Da said. “Well, at least she got her coffin. Oh…” He reached into his pocket and took out a coin. “Here, Michael, I forgot to give this to the men.”
“Have we so much money we can afford to give it away to grave diggers?” Dermot said.
Michael shot Dermot a warning look. “You go on, I’ll catch up.”
Michael made his way back to the gravesite, stepping carefully to avoid falling into an open grave. As he neared his Grandmam’s burial site, he saw the two attendants awkwardly maneuver the coffin over the open grave. Puzzled by their odd behavior, he stepped behind a tombstone to watch. When they had positioned the casket over the open hole, the older attendant reached under the coffin and yanked a lever. Suddenly, the hinged bottom of the coffin snapped open and Grandmam’s body dropped into the hole.
For an agonizing instant, Michael was too stunned to react. Then, in a blind rage, he hurled himself on the startled attendants, punching, kicking, flailing at them like a wild man.
The older attendant scrambled away, shouting, “In the name of God, what’s got into you?”
Michael straddle the younger attendant’s chest, “I saw what you did you dirty bastards. Are you gonna sell her coffin to someone else then?” he bellowed, raining down blows on the hapless man.
“For the love of God, we’ve only the one coffin,” the older attendant shouted.
Michael stopped punching the man. “What are you sayin’?”
“We do it for the family. Sure we’ve no money to buy coffins, and even if we did, there’s no wood to be had. They’re dyin’ too fast.”
Michael rolled off the man and slumped against a headstone, trying to comprehend what the attendant was saying. He looked into the deep hole and now he understood. “You put more than one in a grave.”
The younger attendant wiped blood from his nose with his sleeve. “We have to. There’s not enough ground to give them all their own place.”
Michael looked at the two frightened men. “I’m sorry... I didn’t know.”
He stood up and started to walk away. Then, he remembered the coin in his pocket. He fished it out and handed it to the older attendant. “I’m sorry,” he said again and stumbled away.
Chapter Nineteen
June 1847
Ballyross, Ireland
Emily sat at her dressing table getting ready for yet another tedious afternoon tea at Lord Attwood’s estate. She’d done her best to be as obnoxious and unpleasant as possible, but in spite of her efforts she was still being invited to these interminable teas and dinners. No doubt Lord Attwood’s forbearance had more to do with her father’s position than any desire to entertain an ill-mannered young girl.
The door opened and Nora came in. “I’ve some fresh bed linens, Miss Emily.”
“Thank you, Nora. Oh, would you please fetch my mother’s emerald earrings?”
“Ah, the emerald earrings. They’re me favorites. Your mother, God rest her soul, used to wear them all the time. Why she looked like a—” Nora wiped her hands on her apron, suddenly realizing she was talking about Emily’s dead mam. “Oh, I am sorry, Miss Emily...”
“No, that’s all right. I like hearing about her. Did my mother really look beautiful in them?”
“Aye. That she did. A queen she was. I’ll go fetch them.”
Emily picked up the photo of her mother and her thoughts went back ten years. A lifetime ago. The weeks before her mother’s death had been a time of stomach-churning anxiety and loneliness. She knew her mother was sick, but no one would tell her the nature of the illness. The servants moved about the house quietly, speaking in hushed tones. When she asked them what was the matter with her mother, she was told to “ask the master.” When she asked her father, he brushed her off and retreated to his library. Every day teams of doctors came and went. They would examine her mother and then disappear into the library. She’d put her ear to the closed doors, but all she’d hear was her father and the doctors speaking in muffled, incomprehensible voices.
Then one morning her father came to her room and woke her. His eyes, red-rimmed and lifeless, frightened her. “Your mother is dead,” was all he said.
The next two weeks were a blur. She had a vague recollection of a gleaming casket in the grand entrance hall, surrounded by dozens of people, all dressed in black, mumbling in hushed tones. Then she was standing at the hillside family cemetery in the rain next to her father watching the casket being lowered into the dark, forbidding earth.
The first thing she clearly remembered about that time was climbing into the carriage, seeing her father standing rigid in the doorway and not waving as she was driven off to the train station. At her London boarding school, she would sometimes awake in the middle of the night in a panic, unable to remember what her mother’s face looked like. She’d light a candle with a trembling hand and stare at her mother’s photo until, comforted that she would never forget what she looked like, she’d fall back asleep.
Nora came rushing back into the bedroom. “Holy Mother of God…!”
Emily put the photograph down. “What is it, Nora?”
The old woman held up the empty jewelry box. “They’re gone, Miss Emily! The earrings, the necklaces, everything! All gone!”
Emily barged into the library where her father was sitting by the fire reading Horace. “Father, there’s a thief in the house,” she announced. “You must send for the c
onstabulary immediately.”
Somerville put his book down, took off his reading glasses, and rubbed his eyes. “Emily, what are you talking about?”
She held up the empty jewelry box. “Mother’s jewelry. Everything’s been stolen.”
“Nothing’s been stolen,” he said quietly.
“But—”
“They’ve been sold.”
Emily slumped against the door. “Sold…?”
Somerville went to the fireplace, picked up a poker and stabbed at a smoldering log. “That fool Trevelyan expects the landlords to shoulder this burden alone. Parliament keeps raising our taxes while at the same time pushing the responsibility of feeding the people on to us. But where am I to get the money? The tenants can’t pay their rent. They have nothing left. Many have eaten the seed for next year’s crop.” He put the poker down and sat down heavily in his chair. “I can’t say I blame them.”
Emily, hardly listening to his excuses, was desperately trying to make sense of what she’d just heard. They’ve been sold. Her mother’s jewelry. Jewelry that was her birthright. It suddenly occurred to her that more than just her mother’s jewelry had been sold. In the last several months, she’d noticed paintings missing from the walls. She hadn’t seen the good silver in months. Tapestries had been removed from the great room. But she’d paid no attention, assuming that they’d been sent out for cleaning or repair. But now she knew where they’d gone. He’d sold them.
A thought came to her, a thought so unthinkable that she could barely speak it. “Are we penniless?”
He turned away from her. “No, no. We’ll be fine. As soon as—”
Emily heard the uncertainty in her father’s voice. “My God, how could you squander everything, Father!”
Somerville’s head snapped back as though he’d been struck.
“Emily—”
“This estate has been in the family for more than six generations. In the name of God, are you so incompetent that you’ve lost it all?”
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