Dark Rosaleen (24 page)

‘My dear, we must leave. I have already drafted my letter of resignation and I intend on sending it to Trevelyan very soon. I've intimated what I shall do if he refuses me.'

‘Then I shall not come with you.' He recognised the spirit in her voice. He knew it well. Like her beauty, she had inherited it from her mother. He stood and warmed his back by the fire. He seemed very calm.

‘Kathryn, you cannot stay here without me. I shan't permit it. You have nowhere to go.'

‘I have the Fitzgeralds.'

She looked up at him. How old he was now, suddenly withered. It was as if some part of him had already left Ireland and was speeding its way home to England.

‘Kathryn, I'll say this once, and only once. Even though you are a grown woman, I cannot, I will not, let you stay here without me. This country is no longer safe for us English. Fear hangs over this island like a thundercloud. When this hunger is done and the fever has taken its last, there will be a war. I know the signs, and these people have a good reason for it. There's a momentum gathering out there that will not be stopped except by our battalions. It will be '98 all over again, except this time we will not put it down so easily or so cleverly. There is an inheritance to this famine as there has been to no other, and it will be violent, believe me. It will last long and God only knows who will be the winner. I will not leave my only daughter, my only family, here among people who are preparing for such a thing. That is my last word on it, Kathryn. You will not mention it to me again.'

He leant down and kissed her forehead. He smelt the fragrance of her hair. He kissed her again, but she did not move. He waited, but she did not speak. He knew then that he was losing yet again. Ireland had taken from him his self-respect, the reputation he had once treasured, the chance to end a life's career with honour. Now Ireland was vying for his daughter.

The black fever travelled as fast as it took one man to touch another and the fool who doubted it was a dead fool. The rich died like the poor, the well-fed with the starving. Upstairs and downstairs, in Dublin's grand houses and in the hovels of Baltimore, among the fat landlords in their great estates and the inmates in the filthy workhouses, it did not discriminate. In all Ireland's history there had never been such an epidemic.

It spread like a summer fire across bracken and no one could tell where it sparked first. Was it Skibbereen? Did it jump from there to Schull and leap again to Killarney and Limerick? Within weeks it had taken a giant's stride, spanning Drogheda, Galway and Sligo. No part of Ireland was left untouched. In two days and nights it killed everyone in Castlebar Prison, including the governor, the matron, the chaplain and the turnkey. The twenty-eight hospitals in Ireland were so full they closed their doors, deciding it was more merciful that the diseased should die quickly and suffer less.

At Lurgan, there was nowhere to bury the dead except in a pit by the hospital walls, next to the well that supplied it with fresh water. In the workhouse at Castlerea over a hundred men, women and children died of fever in one night, and in Cork, eight hundred in less than a fortnight.

Some people lit fires to purify the air or locked themselves inside their cottages, afraid to breathe outside. But no locked door could bar its entry. The mist came to their eyes, their bodies burned with the fever, their skin went as black as the soot in their hearth and they screamed out for water that no one dared bring them.

Bodies littered the streets and when the graveyards were full, the stone quarries were consecrated as mass graves. They dragged the corpses along the coast to the beaches and left them on the sand for the sea to carry away. The fish ate their flesh, the surf broke the skeletons apart, and the returning tides scattered the bleached bones along the shores. Sometimes, a wave would lift a skull and it would grin at the living and they would know that they, too, were doomed.

The government announced it would pay for quarantined fever sheds to be built, but Robin would not wait. He erected a tent in a meadow on the outskirts of Cork, a mile beyond the city boundary, as close as the council elders would allow. It was an old marquee, bought for his father's wedding fifty years before. With Keegan's help, he had it staked and standing in two days and within the week the two of them had built primitive cots. Una helped sew together cloth mattresses and filled them with straw from her father's estate. On the seventh day, the hospital cart came with eighteen men and women and twelve children. Robin shook Keegan's hand, kissed his sister, then went inside and closed the flaps of the tent behind him.

Keegan dug a shallow trench in a five-yard perimeter around the tent and filled it with ash and Robin forbid them to come beyond it. The Quakers gave fifty pounds to buy rolls of cotton, which Una cut into sheets. Sir Robert brought buckets so that fresh water could be carried from the nearby stream.

Keegan and Una worked as many hours as the light of the short winter days allowed. They came at dawn and left at dusk, just as Robin was lighting his candles for the night's watch. There was never a moment inside the tent when Robin's shadow was still. They called out to him regularly, and he answered with his list of things to be done, medicines to be brought, messages to deliver. Not once did he come out, not once did he show himself.

He died from the fever on his father's birthday. In a month of continuous nursing care, he had not saved a single soul. Una and Keegan had arrived in the early morning as usual, just as the light was showing, but there was no candle, no moving shadow silhouetted against the canvas. They called out but there was no reply. They moved closer and shouted louder, but there was nothing to be heard inside. Una ran towards the moat of ash and screamed out Robin's name, over and over again, but no voice answered. She ran to the tent flap but Keegan caught her and held her tight until she was quiet. She and her brother had come into the world together. Now he had left it.

A police inspector came with an order from the magistrates signed and stamped for them to see. Twice he called out Robin's name, and went as close to the tent as he dared. But the only sound was the shuffle of the harness on his horse and the rooks cawing in the trees.

The canvas was brittle and dry with age and it needed only one torch. It exploded. The heat lifted it into the air like a balloon, twisting and snapping as the flames took it higher and through the smoke they saw the lines of the blackened dead, curling and twisting in the heat. Una and Keegan turned their backs and prayed as the brown, cremating smoke spiralled up behind them.

As Kate grew stronger, so did her resolve. The life that was now ahead of her was her own and only she would decide its direction. During her convalescence, Una had written to her every day. Describing every detail of Robin's tent hospital and the work she and Keegan had been doing to help. She wrote of her growing affection for him and the plans they were now making.

They came to her on the day of Robin's death. She listened to them, the room shrouded in the faint light of that winter afternoon, three shadows at a proxy funeral. She did not cry. She had read somewhere that it is not a man's death that causes the greatest grief, but the manner of his dying and Robin had died nobly. There had been purpose to his living and a reason for his dying and he would want them to celebrate both equally.

Una sat on the rug by the hearth, holding her hands to the fire. Keegan stared out of the window.

‘What else is there to tell me, Una?' Kate said. ‘There is something, isn't there?' She waited for Una to speak.

‘We didn't want to tell you today, Kate, not today.'

‘I've heard the worst. What else is there?'

Una sat and took her hand.

‘Keegan and I have decided to leave Ireland. We're going to America. There's a sailing soon from Limerick. Don't be angry with us, Kate. We are not running, we are not cowards. But there is nothing to hold us here. Ireland is dying, and we will not stay to be among the dead.'

‘We have run out of hope,' Keegan said. ‘We stay and we die. We could die in the coffin ships. Either way it is a risk.'

Una kissed Kate's hands. ‘Come with us, Kate. It's a new world where there's no famine and no fever and no hatred. Come with us.'

‘We'll not be alone, Kate,' Keegan said. ‘The docks are crowded with people on their way. Ships are leaving almost every week.'

‘There is another reason,' Una said. She turned to Keegan. ‘Will you tell, or shall I?'

‘He was your brother.'

She was trembling and spoke fast in her excitement.

‘Kate, we have found something wonderful. It was tucked away with Robin's papers, along with his microscope and things. He must have been working on it all summer. He was so thorough and it is so detailed. It made no sense to us at first, just a jumble of dates and Latin names. It was his research, Kate. He's been researching the black fever.'

‘I don't understand, Una,' Kate said. ‘Why should this make you want to leave?'

‘It's in his writing. On the last pages before he died. He even made drawings and there are jars full of them.'

‘Una, drawings of what? Jars of what?'

‘Lice,' said Keegan. ‘Robin believed it is lice that cause the fever. Not hunger, not the rats. But the tiny lice.'

Kate leaned back in her chair. ‘His little breadcrumbs.'

‘We are taking his work to America with us,' Una said. ‘Father says it is the only way. There are doctors there who can prove Robin right. Kate, do you understand how much this means to Father and me? To know that Robin died for something?'

‘Yes, Una. I understand. He died nobly, the way he lived. But why America? Why not England?'

‘We don't think Robin would have wanted that,' Keegan said. ‘He never condemned anyone for the blight, but he did blame England for doing so little about it. Doctors in America are bound to be concerned. We will talk to the Irish there.'

‘Say yes!' Una pleaded. ‘Kate, say you will come with us.'

‘I don't know,' she answered. ‘I was beginning to hope that my home was here with you and Keegan and Robin. But without you, what is there for me here? I shall be alone again.'

‘Then you will come,' said Keegan. ‘I will buy three tickets tomorrow and we'll have a carriage to take us to Limerick.'

But Una already knew the answer. She saw it in Kate's eyes and felt it in the firm hold of her hand. She kissed Kate on her forehead, and again on her cheek and whispered to her, ‘But you will come to see us go, won't you? You will wish us well as we sail to the New World?'

And Kate nodded.

Keegan did not have to pay to hire his carriage. Sir William Macaulay provided it himself. He was relieved to see them go, convinced that with their sailing, Kate would resign herself to returning to England with him. Sometimes he could not help but marvel at fate's happy coincidences.

They came to Limerick in the early afternoon. The sun was warm. The walls of King John's Castle were reflected in the waters of the Shannon and on the far side of the bridge they could see St Mary's Cathedral. Every street in the town was blocked with people, a dense swarm moving slowly towards the piers. Men searched for lost wives, children ran in and out of legs, screaming for lost mothers. Some pushed their belongings in carts, others humped them on their backs, a bewildered, frightened, swirling current of people. English soldiers in their blue and red tunics were posted along the quayside, their rifles at the ready. More lined the gangplanks, guarding the dockers as they loaded the cargo ships bound for Liverpool.

‘Irish bacon and Irish wheat,' said Keegan bitterly. ‘Off to make English bellies even fatter.' He pointed to the ships on the far side of the harbour. ‘And those over there are waiting to take our people to America. Do you know that second only to food, we Irish are the chief export from our own country?'

He left them to collect the tickets. They sat in the carriage and watched him go.