The Forgotten Secret

by Kathleen McGurl

  ‘I’ll be back next week,’ she said, as she stepped out of the cottage.

  ‘Aye, and then it’s off to the Sisters with you,’ he replied, gruffly, not raising his eyes to hers.

  ‘Goodbye, then,’ she said, but he’d closed the cottage door behind her. She sighed, and set off on the familiar route back to Carlton House. One more week, that’s all she had. Her dress was tight and there was no more room to let out the seams. She’d have to keep some money back to get a new one, or make one. Or would the Merciful Sisters provide something she could wear until the baby came? She knew very little about the institution. It sounded all right, she supposed, but it was away from home, away from Blackstown. If Jimmy came back looking for her – well she’d just have to hope that someone, her father perhaps, or Madame, would tell him where she was.

  She was lost in thought as she turned in to the long drive leading up to Carlton House. So much so that she didn’t immediately spot the motorcar parked in front of the building, or the uniformed men standing guard at the door. She was a few yards up the drive before she saw them, and ducked behind one of the majestic elms that flanked the lane. Thankfully they did not seem to have spotted her. She peered around the tree trunk. The uniforms were those of the RIC. What were they doing here?

  Someone was being led out of the house in handcuffs, and roughly pushed into the motorcar. It was Madame Carlton! Ellen gasped. She’d thought that being a woman, Madame would be safe from the authorities, no matter what she did. Wasn’t that the reason Madame had asked her, Ellen, to carry all those messages up to the farmyard? How could they arrest Madame? What would happen to her? It didn’t bear thinking about.

  Someone else was standing outside the house. Another woman. Siobhan. Was she being arrested too? No, she was standing with her hands clasped, and one of the RIC officers was talking to her, handing her a package.

  It was Siobhan’s doing, Ellen realised. Siobhan had betrayed Madame.

  The horror of the situation made Ellen gasp. She’d known Siobhan might be a risk. She’d meant to warn Madame – she’d been going to, as soon as she got back today! But it was too late. Oh why hadn’t she said something yesterday, when Madame had said they were being watched? Madame could have got away, gone into hiding up at Gatesend Farm or somewhere else. If only she, Ellen, had warned her of what she knew about Siobhan. It was all her fault. She’d failed Madame.

  The car’s engine started. Ellen realised it was about to come down the drive, past where she was hiding. She had seconds to react, running back to the gate and throwing herself behind the hedge on the opposite side of the lane. She kept her head down as the car roared past, then gingerly got to her feet.

  There was no way she could go back to the house now. With Madame gone the household would disperse. She could only return to her father’s, but via the fields rather than the roads. Would they be out looking for her? Siobhan might have mentioned her as being a member of the Cumann na mBan, or maybe she hadn’t. Ellen was only a simple housemaid, after all. Was she safe? Would her father be safe, if he harboured her? With Madame arrested, Ellen had never felt more alone. How could Siobhan have done such a thing? For money, presumably. Or to find favour with her brother.

  By the time she was back at her father’s cottage she’d realised the safest thing for everyone was for her to go today to this institution, if she could. Surely a religious institution like the Merciful Sisters would be safe from any raids by the RIC? She couldn’t risk staying at home, in case the authorities were looking for her. She was on the run, just like Jimmy. If only she was actually with Jimmy – how much easier it would all be!

  ‘Sure and what are you doing back here so soon?’ her father asked, as Ellen hurried into the kitchen and collapsed in the nearest chair. ‘I was after thinking you had another week to work.’

  ‘There’s been a raid, on Carlton House. Madame’s been arrested. I saw them put her in a motorcar. The RIC. They have her.’

  ‘Always knew there was some dodgy dealings up at Carlton’s,’ her father grumbled. ‘That woman, that Madame as you call her, she should have known her place and kept out of it. Fighting’s a man’s job. So is politics. No call for a woman to be involved.’

  Ellen bit her lip. No point responding to this. Nothing she could say would change her father’s mind. Thankfully, now that older women had the vote, and women could be elected to Parliament, and women like the Countess Markievicz and Madame Carlton were proving that women did indeed have a part to play in war and politics, things were beginning to change. But for now, she had her own predicament to worry about. And she did not want to put her father in danger.

  ‘Da, I need to get away. I’m scared they’ll come looking for me, because I worked at Carlton House and I was …’ She stopped herself in time. No need to tell him any more detail. The less he knew the safer he was. ‘If they come for me, they might hurt you. That place you said, the Merciful Sisters, I should go there today, so I should.’

  Her father nodded. ‘Aye, you should. You’ve brought enough shame on us. You’ll bring no more. I’ll borrow Mickey Flanagan’s pony and trap and take you there myself. Stay here and pack your things while I fetch it.’ He hauled himself out of his chair, shoved a hat on his head, and left the cottage immediately.

  Ellen stood staring after him for a minute. She was grateful for the lift, but at the same time horrified that he seemed so desperate to get rid of her as quickly as possible. But the sooner she was gone the safer he would be. She climbed the steps to her old bedroom and looked around it. There was hardly anything here for her to pack. All her possessions were at Carlton House. Thankfully Jimmy’s medallion was around her neck, not left in the bedroom she’d shared with Siobhan. It was the only thing she truly valued. There was only her overnight bag, which she’d brought from Carlton House the previous day, and that was already packed. Nothing else to add to it.

  She wondered when she would see this room again. She’d be a mother, then. Would she be returning here with a babe in her arms? Would her father welcome her back? Somehow she doubted it. There were hard times ahead for her as an unmarried mother. Her only hope was that Jimmy would come for her.

  Back downstairs, Ellen picked up her bag, sat on a chair at the kitchen table, and awaited her father’s return. It wasn’t long before she heard the sound of hooves and cart wheels clattering on the cobbles outside.

  ‘Hop up then,’ her father said, without meeting her eye.

  She did as she was bid, and bade a silent goodbye to the cottage, Carlton House, Clonamurty Farm, Blackstown, the area where she’d spent her whole life. The Merciful Sisters institution was across the border into Dublin county, on the edge of the big city. It was as far away as she’d ever been. In different circumstances she’d have been excited about the journey, curious about the new country she was travelling through. But all she could think about was that she was travelling further away from Jimmy. He was in hiding further north, in Cavan, Madame had said, so travelling south towards Dublin was putting more miles between them with every minute that passed.

  ‘Da?’ she said, as they crossed the county border. ‘If Jimmy comes looking for me, promise me you’ll tell him where I am? It’s his baby too. He’ll marry me, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Aye, if I see him I’ll tell him.’

  She gave him a weak smile. It was enough. It was all she could ask of him, and it gave her at least a little hope that things would work out for them, in the end.

  Chapter 21

  Clare, May 2016

  The boys took a trip into Dublin the day after my not-date with Ryan. I dropped them off in Blackstown where there was a good bus service running into the city centre, and then went back home to the farmhouse. I had the whole day to myself, to prep dinner for the three of us that evening, to do a bit of work on the old chair, and finally, to do some research into the person whose birth certificate had been shoved inside that old chair for decades.

  It was a day for me, at least un
til the boys came home in the evening, so I decided to start with a cup of coffee and my laptop and try that research. I took out the birth certificate, spread it on the kitchen table and weighted down the ends with a couple of clean mugs to stop it rolling up. Despite finding it weeks ago this was the first time I had looked closely at it. The writing was in a sloping copperplate script, hard to read, and I had to stare at it for some time before I could decipher the details.

  The child’s name was James O’Brien and there was no father listed. ‘Born out of wedlock, little James,’ I said, typing the names into a document on my PC. Date of birth 25th December 1920. A little Christmas baby! Place of birth: the Merciful Sisters Charitable Refuge for Penitent Females, Dublin. ‘What on earth kind of place is that?’ I muttered.

  Well, there was one way to find out, so I typed the phrase into Google, clicked on a likely looking response, followed a few links and before long found myself reading a Wikipedia article about Magdalene Laundries. I’d heard of them, and vaguely recalled there was some sort of scandal surrounding them that was uncovered twenty years or so back, but knew no detail.

  These places seemed to have started out with good intent, as a place where ‘fallen women’ could take shelter and be fed and housed and cared for in return for working in the laundry. Usually run by some religious order or other, some of them had still been active right up until the last decade of the twentieth century. Often the families of disgraced women would send their daughters to the laundry. It wouldn’t be only pregnant girls ending up there; the institutions would also take those of ‘low morals’ – prostitutes or anyone caught having sex outside marriage, even if they’d been seduced or raped – as well as girls of limited mental capacity who, I assumed, the family just wanted to hide away somewhere.

  Some women would enter a laundry and never again live outside, although others would just be there for a short stay. Presumably to have their babies. I wondered what happened to the babies afterwards – did the girls keep them? The articles I read suggested some babies were forcibly adopted against their mothers’ wishes. Others were brought up in the laundries if their mothers stayed on. What a life. It was clear that conditions for the inmates were very harsh, with many reports of cruelty and abuse.

  Following links on Google I came to a report from a few years previously – the scandal I’d vaguely recalled – about how a large number of children’s remains had been excavated from the grounds of one Magdalene Laundry. Many small children had died there, it seemed, and been buried. There were no records of who they were. The last Magdalene Laundry had closed as late as 1996.

  So unmarried Mary-Ellen O’Brien had got herself pregnant, ended up giving birth in a Magdalene Laundry, and then what? What had happened to the child? How had her baby’s birth certificate ended up inside a chair in this farmhouse? She must have had a connection to this place. Perhaps she worked here, as a kitchen maid or dairy maid. Or did she know someone here? Maybe the child’s father lived here …

  A thought occurred to me. I retrieved the communion medallion from the mantelpiece and put it on the table beside the birth certificate. James Gallagher would have been around 20 when James O’Brien was born. I already knew from Ryan’s research that a family named Gallagher owned Clonamurty Farm in the 1920s. Given the name Mary-Ellen chose for her baby, and the fact I’d found the birth certificate and medallion together, I felt it was almost certain that James Gallagher was the child’s father.

  I felt delighted with this bit of amateur sleuthing, and wrote some quick notes with relevant links in a document on my laptop. I couldn’t wait to talk it all through with Ryan, and actually picked up my phone to call him. But then I stopped myself. Two reasons: firstly, he’d be at work and I didn’t like to disturb him in the shop, and secondly, calling him the morning after our date and our kiss felt a bit pushy.

  What would I say about last night? What would he say? What if he was regretting it? I wasn’t sure how I felt about it – the kiss was lovely, but it was so soon after leaving Paul. Twenty-five years of marriage had left me with absolutely no idea how to handle starting a new relationship, if that’s what we were doing here.

  And what if Ryan had woken up this morning vowing never to see me again? If I called him, what if he took that as meaning I wanted to repeat our date on a night when my sons weren’t in the house, and he could come in, and we could … Oh God. No. Not yet, anyway. I couldn’t … it had been so long. Anyway, I decided not to call Ryan.

  Which didn’t mean I didn’t sit there hoping he’d call me.

  By mid-afternoon, I’d finished making notes on my research, eaten a bowl of soup for lunch, tidied up a bit and prepared a lasagne for dinner. I’d also re-webbed the chair and attached the springs. It was so satisfying rebuilding it. Just as I was rebuilding my life, here in Ireland.

  I was in the kitchen, making a cup of tea, when I heard the front door, which I never used, rattle. Odd time for the post to arrive, I thought, and went to check. But there was no post on the doormat. The door rattled again. Someone was out there, trying to get in. I dithered for a moment, torn between wanting to run to the back door and lock it, or grabbing a poker from the sitting-room fireplace to use as a weapon against the intruder.

  ‘Clare? Open the door, would you? It’s raining out here.’

  That voice. I froze. How could it be? Oh God.

  ‘Paul?’ I called out. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Getting wet! Let me in,’ he yelled. ‘Please!’

  ‘You have to come round the back.’ Even as I said it, I wished I hadn’t but what else could I do? I’d been putting off phoning him, and this was the result. Obviously he wanted to talk to me, face to face. And to be fair, we needed to do that. I couldn’t turn him away. I remembered the kiss with Ryan the previous night, with a pang of guilt. Good job that had gone no further. I imagined what might have happened if Ryan had been here when Paul turned up. Not a pretty image.

  ‘Still not fixed this door then?’ I heard him grumble. A minute later he entered by the back door, his raincoat dripping on my doormat. He removed it, hung it on top of my leather jacket on the pegs by the door, and walked through to the sitting room leaving muddy footprints along the hall passage that I had just mopped.

  I gritted my teeth and reminded myself to be civilised. ‘Hello, Paul. Tea?’

  ‘Something stronger. Got any whiskey?’

  ‘Sorry, no.’ Why was I saying sorry?

  ‘Wine? You must have some wine somewhere.’

  I said nothing, but fetched a bottle of Rioja from the kitchen, a corkscrew and a single glass. I put them in front of him. ‘Help yourself.’

  He was silent as he uncorked the bottle, sat on the sofa and poured himself a large glass He drank half of it, grimacing. ‘Shit wine, but it’ll do. You never were any good at choosing decent wine, were you?’

  ‘Well, I like it.’

  ‘An uneducated palate. I failed to teach you what’s decent and what’s not.’

  ‘Paul, I’m not a child to be taught. Now, would you tell me why you’ve come here?’

  He stared at me, took another swig of wine, then composed his features into a sad kind of smile. ‘OK, let’s start again. It’s been a long, tough journey, I got soaking wet outside your door, and snapped. Sorry.’ His voice was softer now.

  I just stared back. Paul saying sorry? Again? This would take some getting used to.

  ‘So anyway, why I’m here … it’s your birthday on Friday. Isn’t it?’

  ‘Ye-es.’ He knew that. In all our years together he’d never forgotten my birthday. That was one thing I couldn’t complain about.

  ‘And it’s a big one. And the boys are visiting you, aren’t they? Matt told me.’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘Here, now?’

  ‘Gone to Dublin for the day.’

  He nodded. ‘So I thought, we should all be together for your big day.’

  It was the last thing I wanted. My visions of a li
ttle party with Janice and Ryan evaporated like smoke on the wind. ‘Couldn’t you have called and asked if it was all right to come?’

  He shrugged and smiled. ‘You’d have said no.’

  ‘Yes, I would have.’

  ‘So I wanted to just turn up. And I wanted to talk to you. Like grown-ups.’ He took another sip of wine, then patted the sofa beside him. ‘Listen, Clare. Sit down with me. Have a glass of wine – it’s not bad. I’m sorry I said it was shit.’

  I stared at him for a moment, then perched on the edge of the sofa, as far from him as I could. ‘I don’t want any wine. Go on. What do you want to talk about?’

  ‘Us. What we had. Look, I realise we had problems. I get that you wanted more to do. A job, or whatever. I get that we needed to move on from how we’d lived when the kids were at home. I get that I probably didn’t recognise this in time.

  ‘But, Clare – we’ve been married twenty-five years. That’s incredible. So many people I know of our generation are divorced or on their second or third marriages. We were strong. We had a great partnership – at least I always thought so. It’s hard for me, realising that you didn’t see it that way.’ He sighed, and sipped more wine. I decided not to respond yet. I’d let him say all that he wanted to.

  ‘I miss you, Clare. I miss the family life we had. I miss having someone there to talk to, to share my life with. Is there any chance we could … try again?’ He raised his eyes to mine. His expression was sad but hopeful. I half expected to see tears in his eyes after such an impassioned speech, but there weren’t any.

  How to respond to all that? I took a moment to think. Maybe I should have had that glass of wine after all. He was right that we’d lasted longer than so many of our contemporaries. I missed the family life too, but then, the boys were grown-up now. I took a deep breath and tried to answer.

  ‘Paul, I don’t know. I like it here, in Ireland. I’m beginning to make a life for myself. If I came back to England I think you’d … we’d soon slip back into our old ways and I’d be unhappy again. We had twenty-five years. A lot of it was good. But I don’t want to go back to that.’