Murder in an Orchard Cemetery

by Cora Harrison

  ‘Let’s go for a drive,’ she said with a shrug of her shoulders, as though to indicate that she had no preferences, and then, as if inspiration had suddenly struck, she said, ‘What about going up to Watergrasshill? We can pick some fresh sprigs of watergrass. You can have it for your tea.’

  ‘I haven’t a clue as to how to find the place, so I hope you are good at reading signposts.’ Maureen gave an indifferent shrug. She was very much on tenterhooks, thought Eileen. She continually looked over her shoulder, and when a policeman in his Garda Siochana uniform arrived, Maureen gave a terrible start and turned very pale.

  ‘Guilty conscience,’ said Eileen gaily, but was sorry for her joke when Maureen rounded upon her angrily and asked her what she meant.

  ‘Sorry!’ said Eileen. ‘I forgot that you’ve had the rozzers on top of you, up there at the convent. Have they found out who killed the fella, yet?’

  ‘Who cares,’ said Maureen in such a surly tone that Eileen decided to avoid the subject.

  She had an aim for this afternoon, she reminded herself, so she sat very quietly and soaked up the atmosphere and looked eagerly through the window as Maureen directed the car away from the Midleton area and towards the rich lands of east Cork.

  ‘Well, Anglo-Irish settlement or not, you have to say this is a nice part of the countryside.’ Maureen sounded to be in a better humour. ‘Wish I didn’t have to do law,’ she said, after a few minutes of driving quietly through the well-tended farms with their small patches of woodland here and there, looking intensely green in the June sunlight.

  ‘What did you want to do?’ asked Eileen. More than ever, she was glad to have been talked out of joining the Maureen Hogan Practice. She, herself, was full of enthusiasm for the law, dying to be qualified, to be sitting at a desk, scanning leather-bound books and leafing through parchment copies of deeds. She wanted to know the law so well, that she could stand up for the poor, for the patriotic and for those threatened with injustice. ‘What did you want to do if you didn’t do law, Maureen?’ She repeated her question, but it was a while before Maureen answered. And before she did so she stopped the car just where there was a break in the hedge that lined the fields. They sat there for a couple of minutes in silence, looking out through the car windscreen. The hawthorn had been recently trimmed and lowered to a neat bank, barely the height of cow’s shoulders, and over the top of it they could see the house that stood in the background.

  ‘Just look at that house,’ said Maureen, and there was a strange note in her voice. ‘Just look at it. Isn’t it perfect? They call that kind of house a Queen Anne, it’s a style of building from the time of Queen Anne. I don’t know whether she had any interest in building or not, but the houses built in that time are just so perfect. Look at them. See the way everything balances, look at the way the windows are set. And the height and the width – it all fits together. Even the slant of the roof is perfect.’

  Eileen leaned back in the car seat. She found that she was quite enjoying herself. It appeared that Maureen had wanted to be an architect, had wanted to design beautiful houses, to start a new age of perfection and make the Irish landscape beautiful instead of flooding it with ugly concrete and brick, to make sure that builders used the lovely limestone which was so plentiful below the surface of the fields they were looking at.

  After a while, they drove on, but Maureen never ceased to talk and as she talked, Eileen found herself, for the first time in her life, to be experiencing a certain sympathy for those intruders who had, as she had always been told, stolen the land from the Irish people. Stolen, yes. But nevertheless, these men, soldiers, commanders of regiments, had built some beautiful homes, had landscaped the ground, had planted orchards and woodlands, had filled the countryside with stately oak and chestnuts and beautiful orchards of pears and apples. They had needed houses, of course, but they had taken care that these houses would fit well into the landscape. And they had built them from local stone, that crisply silver-white limestone which lay beneath the surface all through the counties of east Cork, Limerick and Tipperary, the Golden Vale of Ireland. An easy stone to cut and to shape to a purpose, Maureen told her, and she could see for herself that there was a perfection about the curve of the small stone bridges that arched above the many rivers. Even the lodges at gates, the schools for children of the workers, built here and there, though small and old fashioned, were little jewels of perfection. Through Maureen’s worshipping eyes, Eileen saw it all, was led to understand how beautifully and symmetrically built were the stable yards, framed by the stone stables for the horses, and paved flagstones surrounding small pump houses in the central yard.

  It was only when they came into the town, whose name and spelling she had so carefully memorized when eating her lunch with John Fitzpatrick, that she saw ugliness.

  There were still a few traces of what she now could identify as buildings in the style of Queen Anne: a clergyman’s house, with its regular pattern of windows; an old Protestant church with a single yew in the churchyard and a beautifully shaped spire piercing the blue sky; a library, whose Queen Anne windows were disfigured with some notices and a few ugly replacements.

  But marring all, standing out in its sheer ugliness, was Hamilton’s Stocking Factory, made from ugly corrugated iron, already beginning to rust. And when Eileen gazed upon it, suddenly she knew that she had found the theme for her article. She would paint a verbal picture of all those lovely houses, carefully memorizing the words that Maureen had used; would give dates for as many as she could and then she would come onto this ugly factory. The title of her article would be THE STRANGER IN OUR LAND, and the theme would be that good and bad had come with those strangers. Nothing to alarm even the Cumann na Gael fellows, but she would speculate on the reasons for a factory to be moved from Belfast down to this obscure village in a rural area of east Cork. No reason not to give the man’s name, not even any reason why she should not state that this man, a stranger to Cork, was trying to get onto the city council. And, she would argue, should not the new buildings, so desperately badly needed for the unfortunate citizens still living in rat-infested, crumbling buildings, in conditions of dreadful poverty, should not these new houses for the unfortunates be built so as not to disgrace the beauty of the countryside.

  ‘Yes,’ she said in answer to a question from Maureen. ‘Yes, let’s get back. I have an article to write for the Cork Examiner. Hope it gets into tomorrow morning’s edition.’

  FIFTEEN

  The Reverend Mother missed the pleasant calm of the orchard cemetery. Everywhere she went she seemed to be accosted by people wanting to have her opinion or to discuss politics and so she edged her way around the gardener’s shed and made her way towards the clump of woodland at the far side of a field of potato plants.

  I’m getting old, she said to herself as she stumbled on an uneven path. The ground was rough and her shoes unsuitable for anything but walking upon paths. She was about to go back when she noticed, well inside the shade of the woodland, a small seat, made from elm, she guessed, by the look of the wood. It bore an unused appearance, just the stump of an old tree with straight willow rods inserted into the earth behind it, carefully interwoven with some slim wands giving the seat an inviting appearance. Perhaps some huge old tree had been felled in a storm and the gardener had carved this seat from its remains.

  Or perhaps not the gardener, not that young man who mowed the lawns and cared for the potatoes and for the apple trees. There had been a gardener at work here, but not a professional gardener. Just one who loved plants and who had gathered them and planted them in this secret spot. Here and there were clumps of foxgloves mixed with the frail white flowers of wild garlic and a dog rose had been trained to make an arch, artistically spanning the slight gap between the elm trees and framing the view of the distant city of Cork.

  There were signs, discovered the Reverend Mother, as she looked closely at the stump and at the barely covered heap of crumbled wood on the ground beside the
seat, that hands had recently scraped off, from time to time, rotten wood from the stump turning it into a slightly sunken seat. The crumbs of this decayed wood had been colonized by thick cushions of moss, forming a circle around the seat, and some careful hand had framed these small verdant islands with clusters of primrose and violet plants which must have been very pretty in the spring. There were also, she found, as she looked around, a couple of beds, edged with stones of limestone gravel, filled with montbretia plants, often seen growing wild in their orange and green exuberance on the roadsides, but here as neat and pretty as in a well-cared-for house garden. A similar bed of some purple loosestrife, taken from beneath the hedge of the potato meadow, perhaps, and mixed in with clusters of creamy meadowsweet, was scenting the air. A very carefully nurtured clump of wild white orchids was growing within the protection of a rusty cartwheel and all in all, it appeared as though someone, without recourse to nurseries, or without the money to buy plants and seeds had, nevertheless, made a little secret garden to beautify this hidden spot.

  One of the novices, perhaps?

  Her mind went to Lucy’s words about little Nellie, now known as Sister Mary Magdalene. ‘Nellie was just eight when her mother was killed,’ Lucy had said, ‘the day before her eighth birthday, poor little thing. Used to be a little shadow to her mother, always out in the garden helping her with planting and weeding. I can just see the two of them.’

  The Reverend Mother paid the little wildflower garden a silent tribute of admiration.

  She found herself quite glad to be at a distance from it all. She led such a busy life with demands upon her from early morning to late at night, that the annual retreat where not a word could be spoken, had been, she had often thought, balm for the soul. Now that the bishop had abolished that rule of silence, the day seemed to be filled with non-stop chatter and with the tension of dissenting opinions. Carefully she swept stray crumbs of moss and crumbling wood from the seat, placing them carefully to encourage another small island and then sank down upon the seat, allowing her mind to wonder about the maker of this private garden.

  But her peace did not last long. A heavy footstep, an abrupt rending of a branch. Strong hands by the sound of the splintering wood. Not Mother Isabelle whose presence might be tolerable, though this place was made for one person only.

  The Reverend Mother tightened her lips with annoyance and took from her pocket her enormous set of rosary beads.

  ‘Ah, Reverend Mother, you’re like myself. You like the shade.’ Oddly, he didn’t seem to notice the beads for a moment. Not good eyesight, perhaps. Kneeling, they would have made a better show, perhaps. Still, seated as she was, they were so large that they coiled in her lap like a jewelled snake.

  It was Mr Hamilton – Wee Willie to the people of Cork. Although his factory was outside Cork, he was a frequent visitor to the city streets, in and out of drapery shops, offering samples of his stockings. The Reverend Mother heaved a quiet sigh but did not repulse him. She was, after all, in his debt for many pairs of low-priced black stockings and for the release of the nuns from hours of darning the remains from their trousseau.

  Nevertheless, she did not get to her feet, or make any move to engage in conversation with him. She saw him look around, as though for a seat, or even a tree stump, but if ever there had been a time when other stumps had littered the clearing, by now they were gone leaving little trace.

  ‘What can I do for you, Mr Hamilton?’ said the Reverend Mother, with an air of decision, bearing, she hoped, the demeanour of a very busy person, who had no more than a few minutes to waste. Why on earth, don’t they have a placard around their necks, saying ‘Vote For Me’, she thought crossly and waited resignedly for Mr Hamilton to tell her how very concerned he was for the poor of the city and how he would make it a priority to bestow sums of money upon any charity which the Reverend Mother Aquinas might wish to nominate.

  ‘I was wondering if you could be induced to approve me as a candidate, Reverend Mother,’ he said in a straightforward manner that won her respect.

  ‘You’ll have to give me a few good reasons,’ she replied, meeting frankness with frankness. ‘I don’t mean stockings,’ she added with an attempt at humour which, to give him his due, he appreciated, and paid the compliment of a quick flash of a smile. He would be, she thought, somewhere in his early forties, well-cared-for hands and, as far as she could see, he had all his own original teeth and they had been well-cared-for, also. A reasonably prosperous family, she guessed, and wondered whether his father also had a factory which manufactured stockings. ‘And your fellow candidates, in what way are you more worthy of election than them?’ she enquired, though she knew that the question was an unfair one.

  He took a few long seconds before he answered her question, and during that time, he eyed her sharply. ‘“It’s not what we say, but how good we are as men, or women”,’ he recited.

  The Reverend Mother bowed her head. She recognized the quotation. There was nothing wrong with the sentiment. ‘By their fruits, you shall know them,’ Christ had said, and that phrase she thought would rise more rapidly to the lips of a man who was supposed to be a Roman Catholic. The quote that he had given was from John Knox, the Presbyterian preacher. Only one in ten thousand of the denizens of Cork city would recognize that quotation, let alone have it so readily on the tip of the tongue. She, herself, had recognized it, because she had, at one stage, resolved to collect Knox’s views on women and write a thesis refuting his work. She had only got about a quarter way through it when she decided that the whole business was a waste of time and unworthy of her, and so she had thrown it in the fire and began to draft a document about the teaching of reading to young children who had no background of literate parents. It was a summary of all that she had observed and learned and had been, she thought, a better use of her talents.

  But how very strange to quote John Knox down here in Cork where such a tiny proportion of the population were of the Protestant faith, she said to herself. It was, she thought, almost as if he lived among a fraternity of fellow Protestants. And then as she looked at him with curiosity the bell clanged for the noon recital of the Angelus.

  Automatically the Reverend Mother made the sign of the cross.

  And he copied her. He touched the index finger to the centre of his forehead and then to his breast.

  And when she touched her left shoulder, he touched the shoulder opposite to hers, but it was, of course, his right shoulder.

  He realized his mistake almost immediately. Bent down hastily as though bitten by an insect on the ankle, but she was not deceived. She had seen enough four- and five-year olds, being taught to make the sign of the cross, make mistakes like this – the instinct was to do a mirror image of the instructor. In fact, she had instituted a fun practice in the first days of schooling when the little new recruits were taken through this ceremony by recruiting enough older girls to have one standing behind each child and moving their arm to the correct position while chanting, ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, Amen.’

  No adult Catholic could ever possibly make a mistake like that after a lifetime of signing themselves four or five times, at least, during each of their days.

  But if Willie Hamilton were a Protestant, why on earth did he leave the prosperous north of Ireland and risk life and fortune here in Catholic Cork?

  Her face, she hoped, showed little of her thoughts. She murmured a prayer, smiled upon him and made her way towards the church. Perhaps there she would have some peace during this very secular holy retreat.

  As she mechanically recited the Angelus, there was another matter on her mind.

  That little secret garden in the centre of an area of felled woodland had worried her. Though filled with wildflowers, there was something about the neat, almost suburban arrangement of the flower beds, the climbing wild rose tamed over a makeshift garden arch, framing a view of the city and the small, neat paths made from purloined gravel, that seemed to hint at an
other garden in the mind of the maker.

  Was that girl in need of rescue? In need of time to reflect on what she wanted from life?

  SIXTEEN

  Patrick seldom read the Cork Examiner. He told himself that he had neither the time nor the interest, but he knew in his heart that if he didn’t have Joe to point him towards matters of interest, then he would have to order the wretched thing to be delivered to his room in the barracks and then would have to make time – to cut precious moments out of his extremely busy day – in order to keep up with the news in his local city. Everyone in Cork read it and you could hardly go down the street without someone asking whether you had seen some article or other. Without Joe he would have appeared very ignorant.

  Nevertheless, he always feigned a little impatience when Joe put his head around the door, waving the paper in his hand as he did this morning.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, finishing transferring some details to a card. He had a brand-new box on his desk, full of unused cards and he was starting a collection of the details of everyone who might have been involved in that murder among the apple trees. Bit by bit, the cards were filling up and they satisfied some need in him for an orderly approach to solving the mystery. He thought that once he had a respectable number of words written on all of the cards that he might show his system to the Reverend Mother. She might like to adopt a similar method to keep track of the pupils in her school. He would, he thought, be glad to present her with a replica of the box on his desk.

  ‘Article by Eileen,’ said Joe cheerfully. ‘Read the first few lines, but I didn’t bother reading the rest of it – seemed like a lot of boring nonsense about old houses, but my mother read it as there was something in it about a house where a cousin of hers was working when she was a girl, a place out in east Cork, one of those big houses. She read it right through and then she told me to read it. Not stupid, my mam. She’s got her wits about her and she straightaway picked out a name that we would be interested in.’