Dark Rosaleen (12 page)

He had put their faith to the test. They had endured the winter's hunger and not a day had passed without them crossing themselves and praising Him. The green fields were their redemption. To make doubly sure, they used their scarce pennies to buy salt and walked the boundaries of their plots, sprinkling it over the long beds to keep evil spirits away.

Kate had risen early. It was a sparkling morning and she had promised the schoolchildren a drawing lesson. Her saddlebag was filled with rolls of paper, coloured crayons and gum. She would stick their pictures on the schoolhouse wall and there would be prizes for every one of them.

It was too soon to ride directly to Kinsale. The children did not come before nine each morning, so she decided instead to go the long way, past Blackrock Castle, to Monkstown and on to the coastal tracks beyond Minane Bridge. She halted at Shanbally to watch the busy traffic of cargo ships passing in and out of Cork Harbour. She saw a single track, worn through the turf. She was curious and followed it until it widened and dropped away to a clearing. A horse was tethered by the edge of a deep pit, its sides covered in mauve heather and sprawls of clinging ferns. She rounded it and saw within its shadows a small cottage, almost hidden at the bottom. The sunlight barely touched it, its walls were green with mould and there was a dank smell of rotting vegetation. She shivered with the sudden chill and its desolation.

She reined her horse back to leave when she heard a woman's scream and the cry of a baby. A young man came out of the cottage door and looked up at her. He smiled.

‘Would you perhaps have a clean piece of cloth to spare?' he asked.

He was in his shirt, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. There was blood on his hands.

‘I have a handkerchief,' Kate replied.

‘Too small. Even for this baby. And I've seldom seen them smaller.'

‘You have a baby in there?'

‘Certainly I have. Arrived this very moment. Come down and see.'

Kate tied the mare's reins to a boulder and, slowly treading the steps cut into the steep wall of the pit, followed him inside the cottage. A peat fire smouldered in the middle of the dirt floor. The smoke stung her eyes.

The woman was lying on a pallet of straw, penned in a cot of staves.

The young man pulled back the rags that covered the mother and huddled around her like a litter of puppies were three small, naked children. She held her baby in her arms, still wet and yellow with wax. She was a big woman with wide hips, her breasts large with milk, her face glistening with sweat.

‘You've done well today, Mary,' the young man said. ‘I was hoping this young lady might have had something decent to wrap him in.'

He turned to Kate. ‘I thought he deserved something nice and clean for the first few moments of his new life. After all, he's been waiting long enough to join us. By the way, I'm Robin. A doctor, as you might suppose. And this is Mary McMahon.'

‘How do you do? I'm Kate.' She turned away, lifted up her riding skirt, tore out her white linen petticoat and gave it to him.

Dr Robin Fitzgerald was accustomed to surprises. He knew well enough who she was. Since the whipping of Ogilvie in Kinsale, her name and fame had spread well beyond the boundaries of County Cork.

‘Thank you, Miss Kate,' he said, tearing the linen apart. ‘It is a privilege to meet you although I might have preferred a pleasanter place for it.'

He wiped the baby clean, wrapped him tight in its swaddling cloth and put him in his mother's arms.

‘I'll be back, Mary, the day after tomorrow. Now keep him clean and away from the fire smoke. It's no good for him or you and I've told you so many times.'

They washed their hands in the spring water that trickled from the rock face and climbed back up to the light. The sun was high. It was still some hours to midday but the cottage was already in dark shadow.

‘Why do they live in such squalor?' Kate asked. ‘Surely you can be poor and clean?'

He shook his head. ‘Kate, it only takes a tub of water, a bar of soap and some scrubbing to keep yourself and your home tidy. But she will have sold her tub long ago. She has no pennies to spare for soap and she has lost the will to scrub. It really is as simple as that. She only has a little strength left and her baby will soon take that away.'

‘She must have been a handsome women once. Perhaps even beautiful. Such lovely long brown hair and those blue eyes.'

‘Yes! I understand she was something to be proud of. Her father was a weaver. But she's had a year or more of making do on her own.'

‘How does she cope?'

‘As they all do. Or they die. There is no other way. I have nothing to judge their lives by. You and I are strangers to them, aliens. We visit them, administer, give them orders, punish. We smell of brilliantine and perfumes, our hair shines, our faces are powdered, our shoes are well heeled. They see our belts loose about our fat bodies and they wonder at the mystery of us, alone in their miserable lives. As Mary is now, waiting for her husband Patch to come back to her.'

‘Is he on the road, looking for work?'

‘Who knows? This is the first time he's been away and he's been gone six months now. They lived well enough down there in that pit on his whiskey-making. Then the excise men came and smashed his still. They would have broken Patch too if they'd caught him. But he scampered away just in time and he hasn't been heard of since.'

‘When he comes back, he will have a fine boy waiting for him, thanks to you.'

‘She could have managed on her own. You saw three in the bed but she's had more.'

‘Where are they?'

‘Dead. Born healthy but disease took them. Things doctors can't cure.'

‘You must despair. Seeing so much.'

‘Yes! Despair is the word. I wonder, I really do wonder, what massive crime they must have committed to be treated so badly. There was a time when I would hold a newborn in my hands, straight from God's own cradle, and I would think what spirit there must be in these people to want another child when there is such a world to greet it.'

‘Why then?' she asked.

‘I think the poorer they are, the more precious their children. When you have nothing, to be able to create a child must be like discovering a jewel in a turnip field.'

‘And they're always living with the dread of being hungry.'

‘Yes! Always. It never leaves them. They say that hunger never sleeps. They seem to accept it as second nature, just as Mary does, as if it is hereditary. But she has her dream to keep her going. She tells me that one day Patch will take them all to America. She talks about the sea and the big ship that will take them to the other side of the world and all the things they will do there. It's her dream. It's all she has left. It's what keeps her alive.'

They rode side by side for nearly an hour and Dr Robin talked the whole way without stop. He spoke of the famine and his fear of the fever epidemic that so often follows the blight. Where would they find doctors and nurses if it came? Where would they find the medicines? Why was nobody preparing for the worst when that was what they must expect? He spoke as if all Ireland would soon be bare of people.

‘I have read a report by a man called Tuke, an Englishman and a Quaker, who has come here to help with relief. He is compiling his own journal of the famine. He writes that he has been to America and has seen the wasted remnants of the great Indian tribes there living like prisoners on their reservations and how badly the Negro slaves are treated in the southern states. But he says he has never seen anything so degrading or so much misery and suffering as he has in the bog holes of Ireland.'

‘Why are the people so patient?' she asked.

‘Patient and without protest,' he answered. ‘Can you understand that? Because I cannot. There can't be a country anywhere in the world where oppression has ruled and the oppressed have protested so little. I've never heard them complain about God or man, even though their misery is of man's making. We must be content, they say, with what the Almighty has put before us. They wait in their blind, patient hope until death relieves them. And they die, like the faithful they are, with a prayer of thanks upon their lips.'

‘Don't we call it Providence?'

Robin shook his head. ‘And don't the priests call it divine intervention? God's punishment for sins past and present?'

‘And it's not?'

‘Of course not, Kate. And you don't believe it either. We may never know what causes the blight but we know who's responsible for the suffering that's followed it. It's man-made, landlord-made. Do you think people would be dying if they still had their homes to live in? Would they be starving if the landlords had let them eat their own oats and barley instead of handing it over as rent? The blame sits squarely on the landlord's doorstep. Do you know, Kate, there are days when I come from such sights of misery I feel disposed to take a gun and shoot the first one I see?'

They came to a village. They stopped and he turned to her. ‘I'm breathless, Kate. I cannot remember ever talking so much for so long. You must think me a prig and a bore. But you are inspiring.'

She laughed. ‘I am just a very obedient listener.'

‘No. You're more than that. I seldom ever declare myself so readily. You are good for the spirit, Kate, you really are. Will you come and meet my family? Will you do that? Come to my home? We're at Youghal, less than half a day's ride from Cork. Father will be delighted and my sister Una will be thrilled to meet you. We are twins. Do say you'll come.'

Kate nodded. She would go. It was ordained. Father and son. The Keegans and now the Fitzgeralds. How perfectly matched. How patterned her life was becoming.

‘I will come. Of course I will. But you must send me an invitation. My father will be most impressed. He insists I've turned my back on what he calls civilised society.'

‘Then it's done. I will send you a splendid invite in the largest envelope, embossed with the family crest. Your father will not be able to refuse.'

They laughed. They shook hands.

‘The day ends well,' he said. ‘It's wonderful we can laugh.'

‘It's a sad time for laughter.'

‘But there's great hope in it, great hope. Goodbye, Kate, and remember your promise to come and see us.'

As they rode off their separate ways, the crayons rattled in Kate's saddlebag and she thought again of the children waiting in Keegan's schoolroom.

The glorious summer and the blossoming potato fields did nothing to lift Sir William Macaulay's depression. His gloom brought everybody down. There was no laughter now from the clerks and couriers in the outer offices and no welcoming dinner for Friday guests. Trevelyan had promised him that the Commission would have completed its tasks by the autumn but Sir William knew it would not. Week by week, he was sinking deeper into the calamity. Ireland was defeating him as it had defeated centuries of Englishmen before him. There was more than blight on this land. It was arrogance, indifference and greed. It was rank and corrupting.

All this he knew to be true. Yet he was obliged to say nothing. He had to pretend he could save Ireland when he knew he could not. The country's salvation was now in the hands of bankers, corn merchants and landlords, further encouraged in their profiteering by the dictates of his own government. He had asked for extra money to buy more grain, yet that morning he had received a prompt and terse reply from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Charles Wood:

May I remind you yet again that England's coffers will not be emptied to fill Irish stomachs. If they cannot buy their food they must stint themselves. They do nothing but sit and howl for English money. Rents must be paid. Landlords cannot be denied their dues. If they cannot collect their rents they cannot provide relief. So arrest, do what you must. Send horse and dragoons and the whole world will applaud you. I repeat, I shall not be squeamish about how close you come to the verge of the law. You may even need to go a little beyond it.

The landlords needed no spur from Whitehall. The Earl of Lucan had already evicted six thousand tenants from his estate in Ballinrobe. On his orders, as chairman of the Castlebar Union workhouse, he had turned the inmates out onto the streets and over one hundred died within a week. No mercy tempered his ruthlessness and from that day he was known by the name ‘The Terminator'.

The Marquis of Sligo and his friend and neighbour Lord Palmerston, son of an Irish peer and a future British Prime Minister, were just as ruthless. Lord Lorton had razed the villages of Ballinamuck and Drumlish on his estate in Longford, condemning a thousand families to a slow death.

Sir William was obliged to write a daily communiqué to London reporting all these happenings. Trevelyan did not condemn but defended the landlords in the language of the moralist.

Concerning the landlords, I do not despair seeing them taking the lead which their position demands of them. A deep root of social evil remains and the cure has been applied by the direct strike of an all-wise Providence. God grant we can rightly perform our part in what is intended as a blessing. I think I see a bright light shining through the dark cloud that hangs over Ireland.