I wanted to leave a message for the strangers who would be the last to touch me. In choosing white ink for my tattoo, I thought of the milk bank. I thought of the Caoineadh emerging from a sequence of pale throats. I thought of all the absent texts composed by women, those works of literature never transcribed or translated. I thought of Hélène Cixous: ‘there is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink.’ I knew then that I must choose the words of Eibhlín Dubh. The fragment I chose occurs when she wakes suddenly from a dream in which a prophetic vision is revealed to her, ‘Is aisling trí néallaibh’, which I translate as ‘such clouded reveries’.
When the tattooist’s needle approached, I pinched my eyelids closed and let the pain carry me to the room for the fifth time. As her words were etched into my skin, letter by pale letter, I saw those old windows once more, cathedral-elegant, and glazed in blazing sunlight.
7. cold lips to cold lips
Níor throm suan dom
No slumber hampered me
—Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill
i never grew out of the habit of reading by fingertip. Now, whenever I search archives for references to Eibhlín Dubh, the line of my scalpel-scar mirrors the pale space between lines of text. My skin remembers that blade well, but it is rare that these antique papers remember her name. I try to find her. I try and try and fail and fail. Eventually I return to Mrs O’Connell’s enviable access to the letters of her brothers. Perhaps the compulsion to lay a woman’s life before me and slowly explore each layer started in the dissection room; so many of our most steadfast patterns are begun in those years between childhood and adulthood.
—
Nelly was still a teenager when she returned to Derrynane. I calculate that the twins would only share three further years of each other’s company before being separated by another marriage. Whereas Nelly was now a dark-haired, teenaged widow, her twin sister Mary is described by Mrs O’Connell as ‘the flower of the flock, blue-eyed and golden-haired’. Whenever a ship ran aground, the family proved generous hosts to those in need. I imagine the twins spying on the crews’ comings and goings, lifting skirts from their ankles as they dodged puddles. Soon, the sight of splinters on the tide brought a lover to their strand.
While waiting to arrange passage home, an English aristocrat named Herbert Baldwin fell in love with Mary. He made up his mind quickly: he would marry this Irish girl and bring her back to England: happy ever after. How taken aback he must have been when his proposal was rejected by her parents. Máire believed that if her golden Mary were to marry an aristocrat, she would always appear a bumpkin by comparison. She would have preferred her daughter be considered noble in a simple marriage, than simple in a noble marriage. No matter how Herbert implored her to re-consider, Máire shook her head. Eventually he left, vowing to secure written assurances from his family for Mary’s hand. Máire smiled. Máire began to plan a marriage.
In lieu of Mary’s sweetheart, Máire selected another Baldwin from a prosperous family of English descent, based in Clohina, County Cork. Poor Mary – although he was rich, Mrs O’Connell writes that this man ‘by no means struck her fancy, as he was not young, and was a tall, gaunt, long-limbed personage’. In his youth, James Baldwin had been disowned for a time following his conversion to Catholicism – a perplexingly strange decision in Penal times. In 1762, three years after Nelly’s return to Derrynane as a widow, Mary set to packing her own trousseau. How often did her gaze read the horizon in search of a ship? How long did hope pulse within her? When she left Derrynane it was with a generous dowry of 120 black cattle, an unrecorded sum of cash, ponies, a riding mare of her own, and the foster-sister she had known since infancy, Cathy Sullivan. At the meal following the wedding, many notes of congratulations were received. Among them was a letter from England, a letter that held a formal invitation for Mary to become Herbert’s wife. Too late, too late. Mary was already Mrs James Baldwin. The End.
—
All her life, Mary had been a ‘good girl’. Now she proceeded to excel at the parameters of success that had been sketched for a woman in her position. Having accepted her mother’s choice of husband and brought a fine dowry to the household, her first decade at Clohina saw her birth six children. Her family must have been pleased with such achievements. However, Mary did not forget what might have been – holding her third infant, she named him Herbert.
Mrs O’Connell recounts how ‘when even the best of husbands are apt to be a little tiresome, sometimes, she could always put down her spouse by observing “But for you, Mr Baldwin, I might have been Countess of Powis,”’ a retort that brings to mind the wit of her mother.
Máire, meanwhile, must have felt sorry for the little widow moping around Derrynane strand, because it wasn’t long before Nelly was given permission to visit her twin.
—
I describe these lives as though they were easily conjured, but that is not true. I mulled over these early years of Eibhlín Dubh’s for months. Whenever there wasn’t space for both of us in my days, I chose her needs over mine, skipping meals and showers and sleep – an impulse that came easily, as I was accustomed to shunning my own desires to serve the needs of others. I turned every available moment of my life towards learning more of hers. I grew thin. Despite the dark circles that swelled under my eyes, despite my unclean hair and echoing stomach, I was comforted by the thought that this labour might somehow prove worthwhile. I just wasn’t sure how.
Milk was inextricable from my labours: my body responded to my daughter’s hunger with a rush of milk, and then my mind responded to the milk by rushing back to the scattered jigsaw of Eibhlín Dubh’s days. Whenever I felt milk move along my inner paths of ducts and lobules, I thought of udders swaying along a dirt boreen towards a harp in the distance, its strings taut, still. In her sleep, my daughter gulped.
—
From Clohina, the twins decided to take a jaunt to the town. There, Nelly’s gaze dawdled towards the market. Impossibly handsome and extravagantly attired, Art Ó Laoghaire did not merely walk through her line of vision. He swaggered. As her eye followed him, a verse was being composed by her future self, the first verse of a poem Nelly couldn’t have imagined yet, a text that would carry her to this stranger’s death, a text that would outlive all of them. This is the moment that opens the Caoineadh –
The day I first saw you
by the market’s thatched roof,
how my eye took a shine to you,
how my heart took delight in you,
I fled my companions with you,
to soar far from home with you.
These lines occur simultaneously in two landscapes, both in a busy streetscape, and within a female body. The poet portrays herself as the active party – it is she who sees Art, it is she who feels the physical twist of desire and of love, and it is she who chooses to flee with him.
Like Nelly’s, Art’s family had found a way to thrive quietly under the vicious regime of the Penal Laws, his father having secured employment with a prosperous family of landlords. As land agent to the Minhears, he worked as an intermediary, collecting rent from local farmers and delivering it to his bosses. This role allowed him to lease a farm at Raleigh, a short ride from Macroom. Although it may sound English, in this case Raleigh is an Anglicisation of Ráth Luíoch: the ringfort of Luíoch. For an ambitious man like Art – one of a younger generation of what had once been a noble family of the Gaelic gentry – the reality of the Penal Laws meant that he was barred not only from accessing education, but also from behaving publicly like the gentleman he felt himself to be. Once he came of age, his father set aside sufficient funds to pay Art’s passage to Austria by sea and by land, as well as purchasing a commission for him in the Austro-Hungarian army, loyal to Empress Maria Theresa. Within his regiment, the Hungarian Hussars, Art swiftly rose to the rank of captain, making such a name for himself that the Empress gifted him his own horse, as well as a decorative bronze eagle an
d two large ornamental statues of soldiers. These sculptures followed Art home, moving across Europe by covered wagon, by sea, and by road. Eventually they would be fixed to the courtyard walls of Raleigh House, gifts from the mother of a little girl who would grow up to be a French queen, and who would later kneel at a guillotine.
Art was fearless, or foolhardy, or both. Whenever he returned home on leave, he made a spectacle of himself, flaunting a sword in public, say, or running on top of a barrel as it rolled down Main Street. In doing so, he was also making a spectacle of the laws designed to crush him. To a teenager accustomed to watching men behave with fearful deference, his strut must have seemed hopelessly glamorous. Nelly’s eye clung to his body as it moved. Nelly found herself desiring an introduction. Nelly found herself desiring.
—
Of all that I desired in my own small life, the discovery of another woman’s days had become what I wanted more than anything else. More, even, than sleep. In pursuing this struggle, my principal nemesis was myself. I was weary. No, I was exhausted, and yet, my determination outweighed my body’s desires. No matter how inconsequential they might have appeared to a bystander, any new detail I came across felt precious to me. I hoarded every scanty fact and carried them through my own days, untethering my imagination as I did my chores, or bathed my children, or sat in traffic. I hoovered and scrubbed and read stories and wrestled duvets into coverlets, and all the while, inside me, she was beginning to feel more and more real.
Whenever I found myself too tired to continue, I felt I was failing Eibhlín Dubh. I grew angry with myself. In desperation, I took to drinking coffee late, tipping its hot ink into my mouth with a tequilaflinch. I kept my phone by my bed as everyone else slept, tapping notes and images and new lists onto my screen. In that darkness, I was thinking about desire and power. I was seeing Mary’s wedding ring, Nelly’s grin, or Art’s shadow as it slid over the walls I knew in Macroom. Every night, I was brawling against my body until it fought back, dropping my eyelids mid-sentence, releasing my fingers so that my phone went crashing to the floor. Every night I repeated the ritual, lying awake as long as my body would let me, listening carefully in case she might knock. There was a knocking – I could hear it, dim and weary – but it rose from within my own chest.
—
That this new couple spent time smiling in each other’s company, we may safely assume. Perhaps we may also assume that there may have been the occasional furtive touch or kiss, but we cannot know how such moments were arranged, monitored, or thwarted. I wonder whether Mary was dragged along too – poor Mary, vigilant or bored in her role as chaperone; poor Mary, pregnant again and tired, longing to be at home.
It takes some time to pinpoint the location of Clohina House. I squint at old maps, determined to match the jagged boundaries of old roads and fields to contemporary satellite images. The landscape looks so different when I arrive that I grow confused, driving slow loops around the area I suspect she knew. Eventually, I hop out and stand on the lip of a boreen, trying to peer through a tangle of brambles, but I can’t see beyond it. I grow impatient, feeling the inner itch that tells me that I’m running out of time, that my daughter will soon be calling for milk at home. On a whim, then, I ask Mary herself to show me to her home. I tell myself that such an oblique approach is in keeping with the strangeness of my mission, and yet, I cringe at the sound of my voice. A sceptic might call it coincidence that a car soon slows by my side, and that inside is a farmer who asks if I’m lost. He knows the Baldwins’ old place, he says, leading me to the wet meadow where Mary’s rooms once stood. ‘See?’ he says. ‘Nothing.’ He walks away, leaving me perched on a six-bar gate, peering at the empty air where a poem of beautiful rooms once stood, each stanza holding its own careful litany: the parasols, portraits, and books, the blue vases and embroidered blankets, the drapes and the sideboards, the letters, the combs, and the coats, the spoons and looking-glasses and scrubbing cloths, the coal buckets and diaries and piss-pots. Now: nothing. Another grand deletion, this. Another ordinary obliteration of a woman’s life. The farmer is right, I am looking at nothing. I am also looking at everything.
—
There are many moments in Nelly’s life that I won’t let myself sketch in the absence of evidence, because to do so would feel like trespass, or theft. Whenever I can’t bring myself to imagine the gap where a jigsaw piece should be, I look instead towards its periphery. Rather than imagining the intimacies of Nelly and Art’s courtship, I find myself thinking of the imperceptible beat in which a word exists, between the articulation and the hearing. I sketch the couple apart rather than together. First, the urge, the pulse, the need. Then the smile, the mischief, the little desire in its little flickering. Next, the paper, the quill’s pause, the hover, the liquid drop: blot, blot. The human effort to articulate a want and a love. The scratch of nib to paper, the liquid birth and loop of the letters, each connected to the next, word following word, and all the small spaces that exist between them. The paper sealed and sent on its way. The strange silence between a letter’s departure but before its delivery, the curious time after words have been imagined and imprinted on paper, but before they are read. The letter as a kinetic object of desire, in motion from one body to another. These spaces between Nelly and Art are all that I let myself see, how after a letter had left, one might linger at a window, imagining it held in the grip of a lover, and one’s own words moving quietly over another’s lips.
—
Art is galloping, now.
His horse’s sides are heaving and frothing. He draws the reins to a trot, smears sweat from brow to glove, then shades his eyes. The ocean, dazzling, and beyond, Derrynane. Nearly there.
Now, the door. Now, the rap of knuckle-bones.
Now, the swish-hiss of skirts, the silver song of keys: Máire.
For one swaying moment, she is on one side of a portal and Art is on the other, his fist in mid-air, weighing a second knock, while her hand approaches the door handle.
The door opens.
Their eyes meet. Máire is as quick in her assessment of trouble as he is in his.
Both smile.
Art is welcomed with the same hospitality extended to any young man finding himself far from home. When he clears his throat, his palms are open and bright, but as soon as he says Nelly’s name, the heads of both parents shake. Art is a threat, and a noisy one at that; even the temporary presence of such a character could mean trouble. Despite their dismissal, Art grins. He has no cause to feel discouraged. He knows their daughter well.
—
When I brew myself a cup of tea something always interrupts me, and my tea grows slowly cold while I buzz about more chores, with a baby on one shoulder and a dish-towel on the other. I have made my peace with drinking repeatedly abandoned and re-microwaved tea. Once the baby sleeps, I sit and blow again on that old steam, and Eibhlín Dubh tiptoes in to join me in my daydreams. I am never alone.
Today, I hold my cup and imagine her belongings into being. I give her a large, sturdy chest with a clasp of polished brass. Within, the ordinary treasures of a life: a locket, a favourite cup wrapped in a blanket, a shell, a quill, a diary, nightdresses and gowns, a looking-glass, a heavy winter cloak, table linens, a necklace, and a clutch of letters neatly ribboned together. I will never touch the belongings I conjure for her, and yet, each one feels right to me as I imagine lifting them to the light and then placing them back in her chest, one by one. Our possessions are as fleeting as our days; how quickly it all vanishes. Upstairs, the baby is already stirring from sleep – I hear a cry and I am soon running up the stairs again. Somewhere behind me, steam lifts and disappears.
—
To order a new gown is to pinch fabric between thumb and fingertip, and to choose a form into which it will be bound by seams of neat stitches. Thread is touched to a tongue. The needle is pushed through cloth, again and again and again, each stitch and scissor snip following a distinct pattern. The thread is bitten, the kno
t tied, the body buttoned into the garment, the flowers severed and bound. There are eyes on either side of the aisle. They observe the woman’s slow arrival. They smile.
—
It was late 1767 when this couple married. December. A shiver-bright day. Art was twenty-one, and Nelly twenty-four. They pressed cold lips to cold lips and watched their names written side by side, a text that could not be undone. I set sunlight glinting through the windows where they swore to be true to each other until death. Turning together, they faced the door that led to the rest of their lives. The aisle returned the sound of their footfall as they left: for-ev-er, for-ev-er. Their marriage was to last six years.
No letter exists that voices the response of any of the family’s women to this elopement, but her brothers’ reaction survives. On 26 May 1768, six months after the ceremony, Maurice received a letter from his brother Daniel in France: ‘I am sorry to learn that our sister Nelly has taken a step contrary to the will of her parents, but love will not know nor hear reason.’
In eschewing her dowry and Derrynane, she left part of herself behind too. Nelly was gone. Unlike Mrs Baldwin of Clohina, this twin would never be known as Mrs O’Leary. In choosing her own husband, she would choose her own name. Her surname remained Ní Chonaill, while ‘Dubh’ moved in the antique way from the mother’s name to the daughter’s, from Máire Ní Dhonnabháin Dhubh – Máire of the Dark Donovans – to Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. The more I sit with even the most cursory details of this woman’s existence, the more is revealed. Here, a name is never simply a name. The ‘Dubh’ in Eibhlín Dubh – the darkness in her – comes from her mother.
A Ghost in the Throat Page 8