A Ghost in the Throat

by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

  It can’t be.

  I keep straining to peer through that dark, attempting to see her nocturnal tableau as something other than an ending. I grow frantic, seeking some new line of enquiry, anything that might allow me to continue this journey. If I can’t follow their mother, then what about her children? Perhaps an echo of her life might be traced as it moved through the bodies of those she set in motion. To map their lives might reveal some glimpse of their mother – a letter in which they mention her, maybe, a ledger entry, or a record of her gravestone – something, I think. Anything.

  This shift allows me a new path with new clues. At the playschool, I kiss my daughter, and before the door even closes between us, my body is already turning away. For every minute of the following hours I am searching archives, graveyard inscriptions, and old church ledgers of births, marriages, and deaths, building my own jumbled genealogy of Eibhlín Dubh’s family. At first, I can’t quite see them, these people she knew – they are a sequence of shadows, opaque and distant – but as the weeks pass, the file I build on each name starts to grow. One by one, her people step from gloom to light and walk towards me. They begin to move and to breathe – sometimes flawed and affable, sometimes strange, sometimes violent or irate – these people who knew Eibhlín Dubh. They are real and true. They are.

  —

  My search for Eibhlín and Art’s eldest son is blessed from the outset by concrete clues. Because he is buried with his father in Kilcrea Abbey, their shared gravestone allows me a reliable framework of dates to begin from, dates that let me stroll straight into the yellowed parchments of archive pages and old newspapers, until I begin to find ripples of his life moving through text. I compile a long list of facts and quotes, and then, as is my wont, I daydream it to life.

  Eibhlín Dubh was twenty-five years old when she bent over her belly and let out a sharp cry. For hours, she crumpled and crawled and roared until finally, her first baby, a boy, was born. Before he even had a name, he lay in his mother’s arms in a bedroom of Raleigh House, where, on the threshold of autumn, she held his body in hers, folded within her arms, and hummed the songs of her girlhood. The light grew golden as she searched for her people in the squished mirror of his face, but found only Art’s reflection. The baby’s name held his father’s family too, for it was shared by both his grandfather and his young uncle: Conchubhar, which would be anglicised as Cornelius. This baby grew strong in the warmth of his grandparents’ home, where his first gurgles were greeted with shared delight, where he was lifted by his mother from room to room, kissed and sung to, swaddled and carried through the cobbled courtyard over which an eagle watched.

  Conchubhar grew. He began to tilt his head and peer around him, seeing flowers, a horse, golden leaves giving themselves to the breeze. One morning, he lifted his arms to his mother and smiled a toothless grin. He began to eat, soft carrot goo rolling down his chin. A tooth pierced his gum. Then, another. I give him the first word spoken by every baby I have known: Da-Da. He crawled, moving fast by knee and arm, while Eibhlín Dubh hovered over him. An old chair held his hand as he tugged himself to stand. He took a step. Two. He began to run. Every so often, Conchubhar’s father came home. The boy was surely held in Art’s arms for a trot across the meadow, squealing with glee as butterflies and bees hurried up from those long grasses. He was still little when his mother’s belly began to grow again, and soon, the rooms of Raleigh filled with the sailing cry of a new brother, Fear, a name which, called aloud, sounds like distance: Far. When their father lay dying in the dandelions of Carriganima, Conchubhar was three, and his brother was still a baby. No matter how he wept, nothing could change; his daddy was gone, and his mother would never be the same again.

  After the Caoineadh, Conchubhar disappears, hand-in-hand with his little brother. I find no trace of either child for years, nothing of their tree-climbing, nothing of their learning to write or read or ride, nothing of their pranks or birthdays, of falls or games or fights. All I can glean of the second son is that his name was anglicised as Ferdinand O’Leary, and that he became a priest, although there is no evidence of this in any of the clergy’s records – unsurprising, I presume, given how clandestine the practice of Catholicism was in that era. I search until my eyes ache from the jolting scroll of microfilm, and still, I cannot pinpoint even the most basic of details of this younger son’s life. I find no burial place. I can’t even ascertain his exact birthdate, although I hunt through every text I can think of, to no avail. Like his mother, Ferdinand disappears from my grasp completely. Eventually, I bid him goodbye, and turn back to his brother.

  By the time we next encounter Conchubhar, I see him tall and strong, with an easy smile. At twenty-one, he strides through the letters that fly between his uncles, the continual back-and-forthing of affection and gossip, of debts and settlements. On 17 April 1789, Eibhlín’s brother Daniel writes to Derrynane from Paris: ‘I sent you three days agone the receipts of Con O’Leary.’ This brief mention is sufficient to let me envision the young Con strolling the grimy laneways and avenues of Paris, just as the city is sparking towards revolution. Might his mother have visited him there, travelling to Paris by sea and by carriage to kiss her son’s cheek? Eibhlín Dubh, now in her mid-forties, must have endured a certain amount of intrigue to negotiate a situation whereby her brothers would pay her son’s educational expenses. I close my eyes to see.

  The cup was too full. She hadn’t let herself realise how uneasy she was until she found herself back in this room – same mirror, same drapes, same floorboards – summoning her courage once more. The tea rippled, giving itself over the lip. Drip drip. She sipped the scalding liquid, and rehearsed once more her little speech. She would make herself humble, even slope her shoulders to appear slightly pathetic, if it would help. He would hardly notice the money it would take to send Con to school along with his cousins. She must make him see that this gesture would be no gift to her; she must show that she would continue to suffer. Catching her face in the mirror, she tried to arrange her features in humility. Eyes down. No flinching. The steps drew closer. The door opened. Maurice looked stern, with his mouth drawn at the corners and grey fuzz creeping his collar. She saw a flash of him as a boy, stuck in a tree and bleating for help, and tried to quench her smirk. ‘Well?’ He spoke gruffly, as though she were a stranger begging a coin on market day. She bit back the curse that burbled up, and prepared instead to grasp his hands in hers. But her arm was as angry as she was. It misjudged the distance from cup to table, breaking the vessel from its handle, sending a glorious ocean of tea all smash and splash over the floor, on which a fury of fragments lifted like shipwrecks. Eibhlín stared at the liquid. Her brother stared at her. It was an accident, but she knew it would not be seen as such; she could either wait to be chastised, or she could speak first. A shimmer of steam rose, giving itself away so easily to air. Before he even opened his mouth, her legs were already striding her into the hall, through the kitchen with its platters of meat and broth on the boil, and out towards the stables. Let Daniel talk sense into him, she thought, and if he wouldn’t listen, damn him, she would find some other way to provide for her son. Hurrying through the kitchen garden, she found that a chunk of the cup handle was still in her fist, slicing red through her fingertip. She flung it into a mound of kitchen rubbish as she passed, among the gristle and rot. Walking away, she held the wound to her mouth and scowled.

  —

  Somehow, Eibhlín Dubh succeeded in engineering a French education for Con. Afterwards, he followed his uncle Daniel into the military as a member of the Gardes Françaises, where, according to his gravestone, he became a captain. The letter in which Daniel mentions Con’s ‘receipts’ was written only months before the storming of the Bastille, but we do not know anything of Con’s experiences during the chaos that followed. In what is now the Place de la Concorde, a guillotine would soon appear. There, a queen would kneel while crowds jeered at the blade, held over her body for one trembling moment. At Raleigh, a c
row swoops over the courtyard and lands next to her mother’s gift.

  From Paris, Con fades back into the shadows, and for some time, I lose him. During these mystery years, he meets Miss Rebecca Gentleman, who is sometimes noted as his first wife. As I can’t find any record of this union, I can’t bring myself to join in this assumption, although I do mull over how Eibhlín Dubh might have felt attending the wedding of her eldest son, and how she might have behaved as a mother-in-law. I can almost see Rebecca’s hair, coiled, twisted and neatly pinned, but I can’t quite see her face. I search and search for her through every census and baptismal record of England and Ireland, but Rebecca is unfindable. Again, I fail. Again, I look back to Con.

  By the winter of 1805, he has left Paris behind. In his thirties, I find him shivering among a list of entrants to Gray’s Inn, an institution in London that monitored admission to the Bar. A cluster of stone buildings huddles around a pair of scenic squares, and there we see him, our Con, strolling to his next class. I prop an armful of books in his elbow and a light drizzle over his shoulders. The rain falls faster and his gait accelerates, ducking him into a doorway to shake drops from his sleeves.

  To run a finger over the names of Con’s fellow students and say them aloud is almost to see these sons of the elegant homes of Surrey, Devon, and Berkshire, in their expensive overcoats and hats: Gilbert Hele Chilcott, Robert Phipps, Charles Hodges Ware. Con was registered among them on 21 November:

  Cornelius O’Leary, aged 36, eldest son of Arthur O’,

  late of Raleigh, Co. Cork, gent., deceased.

  We might imagine him strolling back to his own quarters, tired and fumbling for a lucifer match, then striking it roughly to light a candle-wick. We might see him slopping porridge in a gloomy bowl, or tugging on his boots again to stride the smoky streets of London, hopping puddles and nodding at acquaintances. Did a letter sometimes arrive bearing his name, written in the hand of his mother? How long might such an item rest among a young man’s belongings before being cast into a waste bin?

  By September 1813, many people, including Con and his cousin, the politician Daniel O’Connell, were agitating successfully against the political brutalities being inflicted in Ireland. An article on the front page of London’s The Morning Chronicle places Eibhlín Dubh’s son in The Bush Tavern for a meeting of Cork Catholic Board ‘with Cornelius O’Leary, Esq., in the Chair’. The following year, his name appeared in very different text, the ledger of Marriage Licence Bonds. There, neat slanted loops pressed the letters of Con’s name next to another: Mary Purcell. Mary was one of ten children born into a prosperous and long-established Protestant family in Cork. I search old newspapers until I find their official wedding announcement in The Freeman’s Journal of 4 May 1814 – ‘On Monday last, in Cork, Cornelius O’Leary, Esq., Barrister-at-Law, to Mary, only daughter of Goodwin Purcell Esq., late of Kanturk, in that county.’ I calculate that Mary was forty and Cornelius forty-six when they walked down the aisle. If Eibhlín Dubh was alive to catch her son’s eye as he left the church, she would have been seventy-one.

  The newlyweds settled in Cork city, and on 6 October 1815, Cornelius Ferdinand Purcell O’Leary – Eibhlín Dubh’s first grandson – was born. This child was ten months old when Mary found herself pregnant again, and on 19 March 1817, Goodwin Richard Purcell O’Leary was born, named after Mary’s father and brother. Mary, like Eibhlín Dubh, had given birth to two boys in three years. I find a reference to a third son, Arthur, who died in infancy, and although I have not been able to find an official record of this birth, it is distressing to imagine this family weeping over the loss of another Art.

  In September 1998, during a talk in the village of Inchigeelagh to a family gathering of his fellow O’Learys, Peter O’Leary traced Art’s genealogy, noting that: ‘It is a curious fact that when Cornelius wrote a short account of his life in a family bible at Manch House, he failed to mention his first wife Rebecca, or his third son Arthur. The account was written in Paris in October 1827.’ The mention of this Bible intrigues me, but by the time I find his words, the man who spoke them has sadly passed away, and I can find neither a reference to his source, nor any clue to this mysterious Bible’s current location. I am hungry for the details I imagine Con must have written there about his mother’s life. At a minimum, it would surely provide me with her date of death and place of burial, and as such, it begins to seem like a golden skeleton key: if I could only find this Bible, I could unlock any number of doors. In searching for its location through the archives of its most recent owners – the Conners of Manch – I read many, many unrelated articles, all of them dead ends. In one, published by Edward MacLysaght in 1946, I’m struck by the following line: ‘Colonel Conner and his brother, Henry Conner, DJ, both informed me that a considerable quantity of the family papers, including several interesting eighteenth-century diaries, had been destroyed by certain ladies of the family a generation ago.’ For such unnamed women to take a family’s story and rewrite it by flame – this is a female text.

  Con and Mary soon moved away from the city and made their home at Dromore House, a large home among rolling fields closer to Mary’s family. I find him in newsprint again in an issue of The Freeman’s Journal dated Friday, 9 April 1824, when three men were indicted to Cork County assizes for felling and removing his trees. The following year, he appears once more in the letters collated by Mrs O’Connell, having sought a bourse, or scholarship, which would enable his eldest son, Cornelius Junior, to study in Paris. His uncles, Maurice and Daniel, hold conflicting views on who should benefit from this opportunity. Daniel writes that:

  O’Leary is very desirous to obtain for his eldest Boy the first bourse that falls vacant on the O’Connell foundation in Paris, and surely he has a fair claim to it, yet Maurice, Connor tells me that you and your Brothers have nominated a younger Brother of his to the first vacancy. I must observe to you that you ought never, nay, that you have no right to do so, and that it would be exceedingly unfair to dispose of two Bourses in the same family, to the prejudice of a nearer relation. Adieu.

  I spend much time puzzling over this letter. The tone is abrupt, which is uncharacteristic in itself, but to me, the phrase ‘a younger Brother of his’ is particularly baffling. At first I wonder whether they are referring to Con’s own younger brother, but Ferdinand would have been in his fifties at this point, and as a priest, it seems unlikely that he would have had offspring with claim over the scholarship. There’s something about the opacity of this letter’s phrasing that bothers me, too. I feel sure that I must be missing something here, something that a qualified scholar would spot, but all I take from this letter are more questions. Like so much of the larger story, this text suggests a complex, living reality lurking beyond it, a reality that is ultimately inscrutable to someone of my distance and inexpertise.

  On the first day of 1830, Con’s wife Mary died. Aged only fifteen and thirteen, their sons were both studying in Dublin at the time, but it is possible that they were home for Christmas when they learned of their mother’s death. Less than a year later, on 5 October 1831, Con’s name appears in the marriage announcements of the Kerry Evening Post alongside that of his second (or possibly third) wife. ‘At Gretna Green, Cornelius O’Leary, Esq., barrister-at-law, to Hannah, daughter of the late Pierce Purcell of Altamira, co Cork, Esq.’ Somehow, I find myself doubting this announcement. For one thing, among seven Purcell siblings, Hannah is the only one whose marriage is not noted in any historical record, apart from this single newspaper announcement. Secondly, as a location for their marriage, the Scottish town of Gretna Green – with its reputation as a haven for lovers seeking a hasty marriage – seems distant to the point of suspicion from the area in which the couple both lived. I long for the Bible again, if only to see how Con might have described this marriage himself, but in its absence, I attempt to imagine him, eldest son of Eibhlín Dubh and Art, now in his early sixties, stepping into the cold Scottish sunlight with a new bride on his arm.
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br />   —

  A whole decade passes without any discernible ripple of this son’s life in the texts I can access – no courtcases in the newspapers, no baptismal records for new children. For Con, life grows quiet. He must have been proud of his sons, Goodwin and Cornelius, the younger studying medicine, while Cornelius, like his father, turned towards law. On the front page of the Connaught Telegraph on 20 January 1836 this son is described as a barrister and a Catholic. He and Con take to attending political rallies together. In an article of The Nation published on 3 June 1843 is an account of a meeting Con attended at The Corn Exchange. Among matters discussed was the proposal of a number of new members of the Repeal movement. When the time comes for Con himself to be proposed to the crowd, Daniel O’Connell proclaims: ‘Another lawyer (cheers)! I have the honour to move that Counsellor Cornelius O’Leary be admitted a member. There is no objection to him at all, except that he is a near and dear relative of mine.’ The resolution was carried.

  In June of 1846, at their home in Dromore, Con’s companion and eldest son Cornelius died at the age of thirty-one. Con ordered his father’s grave opened, and followed his son’s coffin through birdsong and bees over the narrow bridge to Kilcrea Abbey. See Con now, standing on the same soil where his mother once stood, watching his son slowly enter Art’s dark room. Overhead, old crows screech and wheel. I see Con turn away from the grave to leave Kilcrea, his hand heavy on the silver stone of the door jamb. Within a couple of months, the grave would be opened again. This time, Con himself would follow his son through that dark door. He was 77 when he died, just five days shy of his birthday. Now three generations of the family lay together, their bones mingling in the final embrace of father and son and father and son. No female name appears on the gravestone, but the absence of a female name is not evidence of the absence of a female presence. Could Eibhlín Dubh be here too?