Star of the Sea

by Joseph O'Connor

  ‘Well that’d do for myself well enough, I suppose. But are you not having anything for yourself, Willie, no?’

  And so it went, from day to starving day. ‘To eat one’s words’ was an English slang expression; to withdraw some foolish or unwise thing you had said. But poor William Swales seemed to eat his words literally. His student learned to do it, too.

  There were times when Mulvey suspected the master was so ill that he wouldn’t last the night, never mind see Leeds. He coughed up spumes of watery blood. Shivers racked him so badly that he couldn’t hold a cup. Through all of it he kept up a stream of quips and ventriloquism, as though he knew he would die if he stopped laughing for even an instant.

  On the first of March, 1843, they left the town of Gildersome at five in the morning. Three hours later the dawn came up, and as the cold sun yellowed the snowy fields, William Swales began to sing a Hosanna. He nudged at trudging Mulvey and pointed up ahead of them, to the smokestacks and black steeples of Leeds in the distance. It was the Feast of Saint David, Master Swales pointed out. The holy hero of Welshmen everywhere.

  All day they hiked like weary soldiers, but the road was hard and progress slow. At some point they got lost and appeared to be doubling back; by four o’clock the dusk was beginning to shadow the land. A hobo with the curious name of Bramble Prunty met them near Castleford and counselled them to be careful. The local constabulary were hard sons-of-bitches, he said. They would fling you in the bridewell for vagrancy just as soon as look at you; maybe give you a kicking simply for the fun of it. The best option for a doss was to go deep into the woods. The trees were thick and the forest floor dry and the constables never bothered to look in there. Two lads with a mutchkin of gin might have themselves a good carouse, with no uninvited callers to cause any distress. Assuming the man was looking for drink, Mulvey said he regretted that they had none to offer. The tramp gave a grin and produced an earthen flask from his coat. ‘Ten shillings,’ he said with a greedy stare. It was nine shillings and sixpence more than the market rate but they bargained him down to a pair of shoes.

  Night had fallen by the time they found a place to camp. The wood on the ground was too damp to burn so Swales lit a fire with a few of his shirts and Mulvey went off in search of water. The air was so cold that the trees were cracking. When he got back to the camp, his shuddering companion was tossing his philosophy texts into the flames.

  ‘Heraclitus said every bloody thing in the world is made of fire. Now he knows, the daft Greek sodomite.’

  ‘Willie – that’s terrible. You’ll need your books.’

  ‘Doctor Faustus burnt his. Didn’t do him no good. Least you and me get a little warmth in our sainted arses out of mine, eh?’ He looked into his knapsack and gave a small laugh. ‘What say’st thou, liege? Shakespeare or Chaucer?’

  ‘Shakespeare’d burn longer,’ Mulvey said.

  ‘Ah, nuncle,’ sighed Swales, ‘but Chaucer’d burn sweeter.’ And he tossed The Canterbury Tales into the snapping flames. ‘Burn thy soul, thou whoreson zed.’

  The rotgut they had bartered from the vagabond was evenly shared, though Mulvey handed over an extra swig of his own. It had been Swales’s Sunday shoes that had helped to procure it. Apart from that and a handful of tea and a small loaf stolen by Mulvey in Dewsbury, there was nothing to keep out the blasting cold.

  They burnt their way through the history of English literature, from The Dream of the Rood up to Keats’s Endymion, sparing only Shakespeare from execution by fire. (Though Act III of King Lear was put to a purpose its author had not intended when the gin met the lining of Swales’s famished stomach. ‘Blow winds blow,’ he chuckled miserably as he squatted. ‘And crack your cheeks,’ cackled Mulvey in return.)

  By midnight all the drink was gone, but it hadn’t had the effect for which Mulvey had hoped. He was still sober enough to be able to think and his thoughts became black, as he knew they would. It was the last night he and William Swales would spend together. For all the brave talk of the glories of Leeds, Mulvey knew the place would have nothing to offer him. He had been up this end of England before; had observed what was needed to survive in such cities. Mill work or labouring required physical strength, a stamina he simply didn’t have any more. He had seen the battalions of grim-faced men who assembled at the gates of the factories in the mornings, hoping to be picked by the gangers for a shift. Strong men with hungry families at home. Men who would labour for twelve straight hours without even pausing for a sup of water. The foremen would saunter up and down the line like corporals, selecting the beefier candidates with a nod, rejecting the pitiful implorings of the rest. They weren’t all brutes; they were merely realistic. There wasn’t a bossman from Brighton to Newcastle who would give a hobbling cripple a start.

  Leeds would mean nothing but another clutch of tribulations, in a colder and rainier climate than London. Swales would go on to his situation in Kirkstall; Mulvey would be thrown back on his jaded wits in a city whose workings he did not know. To revise the life of thievery seemed an insurmountable thing to him now; a wall he had no heart left to climb. It occurred to him darkly as he gazed into the spitting campfire that he would be better off at this moment had he remained in Newgate.

  ‘Penny for ’em, nuncle,’ Swales enquired.

  ‘Zero,’ said Mulvey.

  The scholar looked up, his face reddened by the flames.

  ‘Nine times zero,’ Mulvey said. ‘It gives you zero.’

  Swales nodded sorrowfully, as though admitting to something. ‘So it does, my old gallowglass. Pity, that.’

  ‘I should say goodbye to you tomorrow, Willie. You know that, I think.’

  ‘Don’t be a lummox, man. We’re off to make our fortunes.’

  ‘There’s no fortune for myself in Leeds, Master Swales.’

  ‘Friendship is a fortune. We’re friends now, ain’t we?’

  ‘We’re friends, but – I don’t know. I feel awful low in myself now, Willie.’

  ‘Things’ll seem jollier after a good night’s kip. You see if they don’t.’

  They curled up together under the shelter of an ash, Swales in his blanket, Mulvey in his greatcoat, and sang themselves quietly to sleep in the rain.

  Mulvey awoke at dawn to find William Swales brewing the dregs of last night’s tea. The morning was still: a little misty and cold. He limped down to a brook that was trickling over the black rocks and knelt and washed his face and hands. Snow had begun to fall by the time he had finished; fat, wet clumps of woolly whiteness. No other choice was the phrase in his mind. He had been close to death before but not as close as this. He would die if he attempted the walk back to London. The snow descended; milk-white crystals. There were no stones in the brook, or none he could carry, so he used the broken branch of an oak.

  Nine was multiplied by zero.

  He buried William Swales in a pit he scraped out of the forest floor; covered him with branches and broken bracken; filled in the grave as respectfully as possible and wept for the only man in England who had ever shown him a kindness that was totally uncomplicated. Not knowing what faith his victim had belonged to, if any, he said an Ave Maria and a decade of the Rosary and sang the one verse he could remember of the Tantum Ergo. When it came time to erect the little wooden cross, he carved the words PIUS MULVEY, GALWAYMAN AND THIEF. Then he drank the tea, packed up his bundle and took the road for Leeds.

  For eighteen months, Mulvey lived in another man’s clothes. He found schoolmastering a peaceful and satisfying life. The children were aged from five to eleven, so no Doctorhood of Divinity was required to instruct them. Provided you acted with understated certainty, nobody would notice the gaps in your knowledge. Anyway he was teaching them important lessons: the facility to read, to figure and write; the proficiencies which had brightened his gloomiest days. Mulvey was learning an important lesson, too. People see only what they want to see. The best place to hide is in the open.

  It was the happiest time of his adult li
fe, so he often thought; perhaps the only time he had ever truly been happy. The little cut-stone house that went with the position was warm in winter and cool in summer. He had a bed, a roof, five shillings a week and all the food he could possibly want, for the people of the area would bring him endless gifts of food. The sympathy so often felt for the single man.

  Sometimes at night he would look around his neat cottage. Only one thing was missing and it could have been a paradise. But the thing that was missing he did not like to name.

  The murderer discovered that he liked the company of children. He found their curiosity and artlessness affecting, their earnest wonderment at ordinary things. A stone, a feather, a fragment of torn sailcloth – these were the makings of a marvellous story. The poorest among them he liked the most, the little snotty boys and ragged girls who shuffled into school in their siblings’ cast-offs. They had little interest in learning and Mulvey was loath to blame them for that, but always he insisted they take part in the lessons. All they truly wanted was a place to be warm for a while, a respite from the tribulations and hungers of home, the cup of hot milk they received in the mornings; perhaps a kindly word from their bogus master. It seemed to Mulvey as useful a lesson as any other that sometimes you had to dissemble to get what you needed out of authority; that all masters were in some objective sense bogus, but they needed their mastery confirmed from time to time. In this he felt no superiority whatsoever to the children. Being poor himself, he had learned it from experience and merely wanted to pass it on.

  They could be unruly and demanding when they wanted to be, and some of them took a mischievous pleasure in goading him. But he never used the cane that hung on the schoolhouse wall and one night he snapped it and threw it into the little pot-bellied stove. To beat a child seemed a grotesque kind of evil to Mulvey, an admission of your utter spinelessness and inadequacy. He was inadequate, he knew that already; but certain limits existed which should never be transgressed. A child was not capable of hurting you deliberately. To respond to that reality with the infliction of hurt was a statement that adulthood had no meaning.

  It began to eat at the killer that he was a father himself, that his blood coursed through the veins of another living creature he had not had the courage to love. Such thoughts had haunted him before in England but always he had managed to put them away. Surrounded by children, it was harder to do. Every child in his care seemed the ghost of his own.

  The child would be thirteen at its next birthday: a terrible age, a time when you needed your father to guide you. Every life contained moments when your true nature was tested. When that moment had presented itself to Pius Mulvey he had fled from it like a vampire from light. Thoughts of his own father’s fortitude tormented his dreams, of his mother’s loyalty and endless work for her sons. Blights had come and gone and his parents had never left him. How had he repaid their memory for all their love? Deserted the only grandchild who would ever bear their name. How had he repaid Mary Duane for hers? No mere betrayal, his abandonment was also condemnation. He knew how it worked; had seen it often enough; the shame of the unwed mother a variety of widowhood. No man in Ireland would be father to another’s child. (‘Who’d buy a cracked egg?’ he had once heard a priest say.) He had ruined for ever her chances of marriage or companionship. Disgraceful what he had done: beyond forgiveness. And yet such a guilt was also a cowardly lie, and he knew it. The thought of her being married to anyone else was unbearable.

  Why had he left? What was he fleeing? Was it the fear of starvation, or had he wanted to hurt her? Did something lurk in his soul that was truly that monstrous? He wondered if he was father to a girl or a boy. The thought she might be a girl made his spine prickle with dread. A girl with no father to advise and protect her. A young woman in a world of Pius Mulveys. ‘Bastard,’ they would mutter, when they saw her in the streets of Clifden. The bastard created by Pius Mulvey. Daughter of the whore he also made.

  Often he would dream about the night he had walked out of Connemara, that terrible night of the wrecking hurricane. So many times he had wanted to turn back, but somehow every step had made it less possible. He could not starve. He could not die. He loved Mary Duane but he had been so afraid. Some selfishness in his being had beaten down his love but he had allowed it to happen; from that shameful fact no flight was possible. He saw himself running through the tumbling forests, through crashing elders and a snowstorm of leaves. Bridges crumbling; being swept away. He had done a grave thing to the child and her mother. Was there any way back from a sin of such magnitude? Could a bridge, once collapsed, be shored up again? Were the rubbles still there, just below the cold surface? Could even those ruins serve duty as stepping stones?

  On the first of September, 1844, he sat at his table and wrote her a letter. It was the longest document he had ever written, twenty-one pages of apologies and pleadings, and he was determined not to pollute it by the inclusion of a single lie. As a young man he had loved her and hoped they had a future; in all his years in England he had loved no other woman. He had no excuse for the cruelty of what he had done. Simply that he had panicked and succumbed to his cowardice. If she would only take him back he would never hurt her again. Things had happened to him in England: terrible things. He himself had done terrible things in England. The worst horrors he had ever been forced to face had been bearable only because he knew she had loved him once. He had thought about her every day for almost thirteen years: at his darkest moments he had remembered how once he had been loved.

  At midnight he stopped writing and read over the letter. But he knew it was wrong; it was all completely wrong. Words could not disguise the truth of what had happened. He had deserted the only woman he had ever wanted, for no other reason than his own sickening weakness. He ripped up his letter and watched it burn.

  One morning the next week, the Chairman of the Board of Management was waiting in the porch when Mulvey came across from his cottage to unlock the school. He said that a delicate little matter had arisen. He had received a letter from William Swales’s mother to ask why her son never answered her correspondence. Was her son quite well? Had anything happened to him? Somehow the monster had managed to remain silent as he scanned the widow’s anxious pages. A piece of maternal over-enthusiasm, he finally agreed. The tears in his eyes were interpreted as filial love.

  ‘Send her a line like a good thing, William, won’t you? We only have one mother, after all.’

  ‘I certainly shall, sir. Thank you, sir.’

  That night he packed a carpet-bag and walked out of Kirkstall, making for Liverpool, which he reached in four days. There he sold the books he had stolen from the school and the horse he had stolen from outside the inn at Manchester.

  His days of rambling were over now. He would head back to Carna, to Mary Duane and the child. He would tell her what had happened; he had been afraid to stay. If he said it to her face, forgiveness might be possible. If it wasn’t possible now, it might become so in time. He would work; he would slave for her and the child. To be near the child was all he wanted now. To prove he was not a beast, just a man who had been afraid.

  He boarded a steam-packet at Wellington Dock, filched a pocketbook from a sleepy Duke; arrived in Dublin the following morning. A mail-stage was leaving the wharf for Galway and he paid the driver to take him along. He walked from the city into southern Connemara and before nightfall he had come to the village of Carna.

  For a while he thought he must have made a mistake; must somehow have come to the wrong place. He looked at the blackened and crumpled cabin. The broken-down walls. The thatch overgrown with lousewort. Bits of dismembered furniture lay on the floor as though they had been trying to form themselves into some instrument of torture.

  Mounds of soggy ashes. Scorch marks on the flagstones. A shovel handle thrust through a lichened windowpane.

  The breeze off the lake was surprisingly warm and it brought the faint redolence of rushes and summertime. But now he saw something that made him f
eel cold. The door of the cabin had been sawn in two. He knew what it meant. The eviction gang.

  Nobody was nearby. The fields were deserted. A fisherman’s currach was mouldering near the gateposts, its cross-ribs bleaching where the canvas had rotted away.

  He left the wrecked cottage, intending to go up to the manor. He would ask what had happened. Where had everyone gone? As he walked, he became aware that he was stumbling in panic. Another broken bothy. A burnt-down pigsty. Barbed wire across the bogland. A goat’s crusted shinbone. A smashed, rusting bedstead upended in a boundary ditch. A daubed table-top as a signboard, hammered into a midden.

  THESE LANDS ARE THE PROPERTY OF

  HENRY BLAKE OF TULLY.

  TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT

  WITHOUT FURTHER WARNING

  An old man appeared on the boreen leading an unkempt pony.

  ‘God be with you,’ said Mulvey in Irish.

  ‘And Mary with yourself,’ the old man replied.

  ‘Are you a local man, sir, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘Johnny deBurca. I worked above at the manor one time.’

  ‘I’m seeking Mary Duane that lived down by the bayside.’

  ‘There’s no Duanes here no more, sir. There’s nobody here.’

  It swam up at him like a nausea that she might have emigrated with the child. But the old man said no, she was still living in Galway. At least he thought as much, if they were speaking of the same woman.

  ‘Mary Duane,’ said Mulvey. ‘Her people are from Carna.’

  ‘You mean Mary Mulvey as lives up near Ardnagreevagh.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Mary Mulvey that married the priest, sir. Twelve year ago now, I believe it is.’

  ‘– The priest?’

  ‘Nicholas Mulvey, aye. That used to be the priest. Brother of him that got her in pup and scuttled off to America.’