Dark Rosaleen (22 page)

‘You call it the black fever.'

‘It's typhus. Black because the blood congeals and the skin colours. The body feels as if it's on fire, as if every part of it is being pricked by a million needles. It can be so intense I've known people throw themselves into the rivers to cool themselves and drown because they could not swim … I've seen many different ways of dying, Kate, but the black fever is the most terrible.'

‘Is it because of the hunger?'

‘If the potato fails, the fever is never far behind. When the hunger is on them, people sell everything they have to buy food, their clothes, their bedding and sometimes, God forgive them, even their children's bodies. When the pennies are gone, all they have left is the warmth of the peat fire. They stay in their hovels, getting hungrier and weaker by the day. It's then that the fever gets them.'

‘I've heard that it's the rats that carry it,' Kate said.

‘Yes! You can get rabies from a dog or a fox or a badger so it's possible a rat bite could give you the fever. But I'm not convinced.'

‘Why, Robin?'

‘I've seen hundreds die from the fever but I don't suppose I've seen more than a dozen or so rat bites on the bodies. Think of a tiny breadcrumb in the palm of your hand. You'd barely notice it on the body of a dying man, would you, such a crumb? Yet I've seen things no bigger than this on the dead and the dying.'

Kate nodded. ‘They were on the dead at Skibbereen. Their hair was crawling with lice.'

‘That's right. I would have seen a rat's bite on a fevered man. But I wouldn't see the bite of something so, small would I?'

‘Could something so tiny kill a man?'

‘Probably not. It would be a strange act of God, Kate, having made us in His image, to let us be destroyed by something so small and so vile.'

They rode into the valley shortly before midday and Robin they were already too late. The schoolroom windows had been painted over with a lime wash, the little board with the ‘Hundred Thousand Welcomes' had been taken down from over the door. There was not a movement from the cluster of cottages.

The sound of the horses brought Keegan and Una out. Their eyes were red with weeping.

‘Stay in your saddles, both of you!' Keegan shouted. ‘We have the fever. Seven of the children are inside. We're waiting to bury them. Only the dead are left here now. Go! The pair of you. While you're still clean.'

Kate and Robin dismounted and went to them. Robin took Keegan's hand and held it tight against his own chest.

‘I have known you and this house and all this valley in the happiest of times. I'm damned if I'll leave you now.'

Then he went to his sister and put his arms around her, his face next to hers.

‘Why didn't you go?' he whispered. He felt her tears on his cheeks.

‘I couldn't leave,' she sobbed. ‘Not Keegan, not the children.'

‘Who else is inside?' he asked.

‘Only them. Their families left them where they died. How could they do that, Robin? Leave their own children unburied. How could they?' He stroked her hair to soothe her.

‘The fever is a terrible thing, my sweetheart. They know how it kills. They've seen it before and there's nothing they can do. You mustn't blame them.' He turned to Keegan. ‘We will bury the children together, and properly, like good little Christians.'

Kate came to Keegan and held his arm. ‘Is he inside there too?' she asked. Tears swelled and dribbled down his face. It was his answer. She left him and walked to the open door.

The schoolroom was dark inside. She could see the seven little mounds laid side by side on the flagstones where once they had sat and listened to her stories. She rested her head on the doorframe and wept for them. And especially for him.

‘Oh! My little warrior, my little learned friend. How well you were doing, so bright, so sure. How wonderful it would have been for you.' She whispered his own favourite lines from the poem he'd given her:

I could scale the blue air,

I could plough the high hills,

I could kneel all night in prayer

To cure your many ills,

My dark Rosaleen.

They brought the bodies to the graveyard in a handcart. In death they were thinner than she remembered them, their faces drawn inwards as the slow process of dying had sucked out all life. The last of the fleeing villagers stopped at the gate, dropped their bundles and came and stood in a circle around the shallow hole in the ground. It was yet another goodbye and there had been so many of them. They remembered the cycle of their existence, the years when they had plenty and the bad years when the earth gave nothing away. Through it all, their families had struggled and survived to carry the valley on into another generation, to live for another harvest. The potato had always put hope into their bellies. But not now, not here, not ever again. The village and the valley were silent and they knew they would never come back.

Soon the cottages would crumble and cover the bones of those who had died inside them. The winter winds would scatter the thatch and the floods of spring would help bury the stones. When a man came visiting in a hundred years' time, only the lines of the potato ridges would tell him that, once upon a time, there had been life here.

Una read out the children's names and Keegan recited the last prayer of contrition. As the men began shovelling the earth onto the bodies, Una began singing and one by one the others joined her. In that little graveyard on that cold December morning, their voices swelled into a glorious requiem.

Major Euan Halliday, formerly of the Hussars and now a Poor Law inspector, had been ordered to visit the workhouse in Skibbereen. Magistrates in the city had received unfavourable reports of the conditions for the thousands of inmates there.

The major was recently retired from the army and new to his employment. This would be his first visit to a workhouse. The magistrate's instruction was an inconvenience. It was snowing and the ground was hard with frost.

The gates to the Union Workhouse were some distance from the main doors. The figure of a young girl was leaning against the gates, barely clothed and covered white with snow. The major spoke to her but she did not reply. He pulled the bell cord and waited. Then the snowdrifts around him began to move. Hands brushed away snow and uncovered faces. The waiting spectres crawled towards him. The sound of the ringing had woken them. It was their alert that more dead were about to be brought out on the death cart and spaces had become vacant inside the walls. The turnkey unlocked the gates and the young girl in white fell, frozen stiff and long dead.

Major Halliday entered the yard and the paupers settled back into their bed of rags under their blanket of snow.

The major was a Christian man. He had seen much misery in his long service life and was no stranger to people's suffering. He had spent many years in the primitive outposts of the Empire, and was familiar with the infinite capacity of man to inflict cruelty upon his fellows. He had come to accept it as a basic, degrading, unalterable fact of the human condition. But his thirty years of military service had not prepared him for the Skibbereen Workhouse.

He knew the fundamentals of the Poor Law regime as laid down by its director, Sir Charles Trevelyan. Successive communiqués to his inspectors had repeatedly emphasised that:

Relief for the poor must contain a penal and repulsive element and provide only the minimum necessities of life. The workhouses are places of last resort for the destitute. Bear in mind the principle that giving free food for doing nothing is demoralising for those who receive it.

Those who administered relief knew well enough the subtext of Trevelyan's words. They were to provide the poor with only enough food to avoid death by starvation. They were to make the workhouses as abhorrent as possible and some were so foul the starving would attempt any number of crimes, preferring the refuge of jails.

The workhouse had been built six years earlier to accommodate eight hundred paupers. Major Halliday asked the workhouse guardian to show him the current register of inmates. It listed the names of over two thousand adults, one thousand six hundred children under the age of twelve and nearly one thousand old and sick.

The guardian took him to each of the halls. They were bare, without windows, without beds, without heating. There was strict segregation by sex. Families were separated, husbands from their wives, boys from girls, all children from their parents. Many would never see each other again.

The floors of the halls were marked out in spaces two-feet square in which a single occupant could squat all day and crouch, foetus-like, in sleep at night. The major saw the living side by side with the dying and all within reach of the dead. In the corner of the men's hall, he counted fourteen bodies piled one on the other, like abandoned rotting rubbish. Rats scampered among them.

‘How many dead this past week?' the major asked. The guardian replied that he had yet to make a tally, but thirty or more adults had died the previous night and fifteen children had been dumped outside the kitchen door that day. He assured the major they would all be buried just as soon as the snow eased and the ground thawed.

In the kitchen, the major saw four sacks of oats. It was the week's entire ration for the four thousand six hundred inmates. The guardian said he had not enough fuel for the fire to boil it so he would ration it out uncooked. He said the oats were given by the Quakers but he had heard that they were soon to leave Ireland and he had no idea where any further rations would come from.

At the far end of the building was a door marked in white paint with the letter ‘M'. The guardian was reluctant to open it. He said it was for the other people, the idiots and the mad. The major insisted. The guardian turned his key on two locks and both men stood back, sickened by the stench. The floor was covered in the slime of human filth. Men and women, barely more than skeletons, hardly human, squatted motionless inside. Saying nothing, seeing nothing, they might already have been dead.

That night Major Halliday went to his desk and began the report he had intended to write much later:

Sir,

I have this day, upon the orders of the magistrates, attended the Union Workhouse at Skibbereen. I have witnessed such sights of suffering and wasted humanity that I will never ever be able to wash from my mind.

What I describe below is my honest and truthful account. My heart sickens at the recital. There is much I could add, but must not in my capacity as a servant of the Crown. Never in my life could I have imagined such distress could exist in a Christian country and that country mine. I do remind myself, with shame, that I report this from a corner of the world's greatest Empire. Death is indeed the Emperor here.

He wrote for over an hour. When he had finished, he dusted the ink and folded the papers neatly into an official envelope embossed with the crest of Her Majesty's Service. He rose from his chair as the clock in the corridor chimed twelve times. It was Christmas day.

‘Father! This morning, outside our house, I saw a dying man crawling in the snow towards the graveyard on St John's Street. He was like a skeleton. Cook took him bread but he didn't know what it was. It was as if he was blind. He was whispering to her that he didn't want to be dropped into a fever pit. He wanted to be buried with his family.'

Sir William seemed not to hear his daughter. He sat opposite her at the dinner table and carved more mutton. It was his second helping.

‘And yesterday, Father, I watched a small boy push his dead mother past this house in a wheelbarrow. Our house again! I asked him where he was going and he said he was taking her to the lime pit by the workhouse. Do you know they have hinged coffins there? They pull a lever and the body drops through the bottom. It is like an abattoir. That's how they're burying them.'