The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (3 page)

The young captain was stationed in Ballina, in that part of Mayo where the French invaders and the Irish rebels had triumphed so briefly during the recent troubles of 1798. These days, ever since the Act of Union had come into law, the countryside was quiet enough. All that was troubling the young captain, as he rode over the narrow bridge to Ardnaree, was a nasty sore.

"Its on my, ah, manhood," he muttered to the apothecary, whose name was Knox. "My
membrum virile,
don't you know."

"We call a prick a prick in this country, sir," said Knox pleasantly. "A rash too, all over? Yes, yes, I've seen this many a time before. And what part of England did you say you hail from?"

The captain hadn't said; but he did now. It was hard to refuse information to a man who was holding one's penis between finger and thumb, and peering at it through greasy spectacles. The captain told the whole short story of his career to date, and when he had finished the apothecary gave him an old claret bottle full of black liquid, stoppered with a rag. "Nothing to worry about," said Knox. "Three swigs of that every morning, and wash yourself in the same stuff at night."

The bill, scribbled on the back of an old militia notice, staggered the young captain.

"Why, but I'm not charging you a farthing for my own humble services; it's the medicine that costs, my boy," Knox told him. "I admit it, you'd be cheaper dipping your wick in frankincense and myrrh! Though I venture to predict they wouldn't do the trick in the case of this little problem like my patent mercurial tincture will. Good air, regular sleep and evacuations, and riding too," he added. "You'll be your own man again by the time you get back to your good lady in England."

The captain was not married.

"Is that so?" asked Knox, and invited him to stay for dinner and try a fine pink salmon caught in the Moy, "off the very bridge you crossed this morning. Famous for its fish, our river, if I say it as shouldn't."

They ate in a parlour of such smoky darkness that the captain could barely distinguish his plate. With the soup ladle, Knox proudly pointed out a framed license from the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries up in Dublin, but the captain could hardly make out a word of the spidery print. "I'm no mere druggist, you understand, sir," Knox assured him. "My profession is a genteel one, no matter what some high-and-mighty physician might tell you. I'm the best you'll find in this part of Mayo for bleedings, purgings, plasters, or any other cure. Yet some of my ignorant countrymen take their ails to the farrier instead, can you credit it?"

The visitor laughed politely, and tried not to scratch his rash.

The other guests were a skinny little parson and an attorney from Ballina. They talked politics from the start—meaning to impress him, he could tell.

"Oh, we suffered in Mayo during the late troubles, let me tell you, Captain," sighed Knox through his soup.

The attorney was nodding along. "Those craven Wexfordmen, they hadn't half as much to bear. The rebels stole a flitch of bacon from my own kitchen!"

"And then the crown soldiers confiscated my whole stock of bandages and fill my French brandy besides," complained Knox.

"There was a rumour going round, at the time," said the parson in a thrilling voice, "that every man, woman, and child of us would be gutted with a pike if we didn't convert to Rome."

"Aye, we were in fear of our lives, all through the fighting. Blood flowed down the streets of Ballina," said the attorney.

"And Ardnaree," murmured Knox.

"It did not," said the attorney, helping himself to more port.

"It did so."

"The battle took place in Ballina," raged the attorney. "Isn't that right, Reverend? Wasn't it through the streets of Ballina that the Frog soldiers and their papist traitor underlings pursued us with pistol and sword?"

The parson nodded, speechless as he gnawed on a rabbit bone he had found in his soup.

"Nobody pursued you anywhere, sir," said Knox; "you were locked up safe in your parlour."

The attorney ignored that remark. "So how, may I ask, did those rivers of good Protestant blood cross the bridge to Ardnaree and flow
up
the street, contrary to the law of gravity?"

"It's a figure of speech." Knox rolled his eyes. "You should have stayed longer in school."

The young captain laughed nervously, and coughed on a piece of gristle, and choked. Knox ran round the table to thump him on the back. When the captain could breathe again, his host beamed down at him and told him he was a lucky fellow not to lie dead in his plate. "And I won't charge you a penny for that little service, either 1"

The fish was brought in and carved by a woman to whom nobody seemed to pay much attention. The captain found himself glancing sideways at her, every now and then; despite the dark fug of the room, he could see that she had pale hair in a tight bun, pale eyes, and shadowy crescents under them. Finally she drew up a stool.

The fish was sweet, flaking in his mouth. "Most excellent salmon, may I say," the captain told the woman, and she gave a brief nod.

The attorney was expounding on the multitudinous benefits of the late Union. "Ireland now shelters in the protective embrace of Britain, to their great mutual advantage."

"If only
every
Irishman saw it that way," sighed the parson.

"I was told—," said the young captain, stopping to clear his throat, "my superiors informed me on arrival, that is—that the rebels had been quite put down in this part of the country?"

"Well, yes," said Knox blandly, "but there'll always be troublemakers."

"Those who protest at paying tithes to God's own Established Church," complained the parson.

"And the occasioned hamstringing of cattle, as a consequence of evictions. Secret societies, and the like," contributed the attorney.

"I see," said the captain, pushing a bit of fish-skin round his plate in a disconcerted manner.

"As a crown soldier, you should mind your back on dark nights, hereabouts," said the parson with relish.

"And your throat!" Knox went off in a long guffaw.

The captain met the eyes of the woman, who shook her head a little as if to say they were only teasing him. She seemed weary, listless; her shoulders sloped, hiding her body from view.

"You like the look of my niece, young sir?" Knox called down the table.

The captain flinched, and looked away.

"You're not the first, nor will you be the last."

"Oh, aye?" said the attorney, with a titter.

The host gave his friend a belt on the shoulder. "Shush, you. How're your piles these days, by the way?"

"Very bad," said the attorney, sheepish.

"I'll roll you some more pills. And laudanum, that's your only man for the pain."

"I need another few bottles too, for my stomach," the parson put in.

"I'll send them over with Seán in the morning. But as you were saying, Captain, my niece is a treasure," he said, turning back to the visitor, "a prize beyond price, beyond rubies, as they say in the Good Book."

Miss Knox's eyes never lifted from the platter of roast beef that she was carving. Her fingers were very slim.

"Helps my lady wife run the household, so she does, not to mention sewing and spinning and all manner of feminine accomplishments, isn't that right, lassie?"

She gave her uncle a brief, unreadable look.

"You'll put her to the blush," said the parson.

"Oh, nonsense," said Knox, "the dear girl must know her own worth."

"I do," she said, very quietly, and the young captain almost jumped in his seat to hear her speak at last.

"Twenty-three years old, merely, and the wisdom of a grandmother!" boasted her uncle.

The captain said he did not doubt it.

The attorney whispered something in the parson's ear.

A little later, Knox burped, clapped his hands for the plates to be taken away and the bottles to be brought out. "You'll take a dram with us, young man." When he caught sight of his niece slipping out the door he bellowed out, "Miss! You'll not deny us the favour of your company tonight. Set yourself down there, in the empty chair."

She slid onto the seat beside the Englishman, blank-faced.

"She's only shy, don't mind her," her uncle assured the captain. "A little prey to melancholia, ever since she lost her parents, and she's not the only one whose spirits are depressed in these troubled times. I'm dosing her with salts; she'll be lively as a doe come summertime."

The captain smiled at Miss Knox. He wondered what it would take to make her smile. Kinder treatment than she got from these rough old men. Sympathy and sensitivity, from someone who understood the finer feelings of the soul.

"Will you have some parliament whiskey," the attorney was asking the young visitor, "or will you take some of the good stuff?"

He looked confused.

"Poteen, don't you know," contributed the parson in a loud whisper; "there's not a hill in Mayo without a few stills speckled across it! Sure, on this land, few could pay the rent without the cash it makes them, and the landlords know it."

"Half the price of the taxed stuff," commented Knox, "and besides,
stolen water is sweetest,
as the proverb tells us."

"Mayo poteen, now, is nearly as good as the Donegal, which is agreed to be the best, especially if it's from Inishowen," the attorney told the captain.

"I beg to differ. Mayo's better by far," said the parson hotly.

"Maybe our guest will take a dram of both, " suggested Knox.

"Parliament whiskey and Mayo poteen, or Inishowen?" demanded the attorney.

"All three, for a true comparison," decided Knox.

The first hit of poteen shook the young captain like a dog. "My God," he coughed. "I heard the rebels were mad with drink, by the time the French landed; was it this stuff they were on?"

"Not at all," said Knox in outrage; "it was Scotch whiskey they'd looted from some squire's cellar. Poisonous stuff!"

The second toast was to the King, and the third to the Union; the captain could hardly refuse. He couldn't tell the Inishowen from the Mayo poteen, no matter how many times his host made him try; he lacked an Irishman's palate. When the young man attempted to pass on the bottle, next time around, the parson took offence. "Didn't Jesus himself drink wine with his friends?"

"No sober man's long welcome in Ireland. Don't tell us you're on milk and tar-water, for your health!" said the attorney in amusement.

"He is not," said Knox, topping the visitor's glass up; "nary a bit of harm a drop of the cup that cheers will do him."

An hour later the captain felt like the conqueror of the world. The room swam around him. He saw kindness on every man's face. Miss Knox's white throat seemed to him to be like a swan's. She sipped a small glass of poteen, and kept her eyes on the table. He felt he knew the shadowy thoughts of her melancholic mind, the secret motions of her bosom.

"I think the lady likes our young Englishman," said the attorney with a grin.

"I think she does! There are certain unmistakable signs, to a trained medical eye. And sure what lady wouldn't," said Knox, slapping the captain on the nearest shoulder. "The young are drawn to each other, as natural as magnets."

The parson proposed a toast to young love.

The attorney followed it up with a toast to young lovers, naming no names, wink wink.

"How well I remember my own dear departed wife, your aunt," said Knox, with a nod in his niece's direction, "on the day I met her, and her barely home from school in Dublin. Ah, marriage," he extemporised, "that shelter from every storm, that medicine for every ill, that cornucopia of delights!"

"I tell you this much," the attorney breathed heavily in the captain's ear, "if you were to make your proposals to young Miss Knox there, this very night, I don't think you'd be shown the door!"

The captain let out a shriek of laughter. "Do you think not?" he whispered back. "I mean, do you think so?"

The attorney threw his arm round the visitor. "Hem, hem," he said loudly, chiming his fork against his glass. "Our young visitor has something to say."

In the long silence, the captain felt panic bubble up in his head. He threw Miss Knox a wild glance. "Oh no," he stuttered, "I was just saying, I mean..."

"What the young gentleman in question was wondering," said the attorney, "was whether our generous host would ever consider ... surrendering his lovely niece?"

Knox threw up his hands in delight. The woman shot to her feet, but her uncle had a hold of her wrist. He pulled her down again, bent over her as if in an embrace, whispered fondly in her ear for some time.

The captain watched, frozen. He didn't know what he hoped or dreaded. His vision was blurred; his head was a burning bush.

"Fear not, my boy," hissed the parson.

When Knox sat down again, his niece's face was very still. He spoke with a calm grin. "In answer to your question, my dear young sir, I believe I'll follow modern custom and let the lady answer for herself."

She turned her head to the captain; her milk-white face was only inches from his. She nodded, just once.

A cheer went up from the three older men.

"You do me the greatest honour, Miss Knox," the captain babbled, and took another long swig of poteen to steady himself. "We could wed next week, perhaps, at St. Michael's in Ballina."

"Sure what need a moment's delay, when Providence has so arranged it that we've the holy vicar of St. Michael's sitting here across the table?" said Knox, pointing with an air of wonder. "He could do it right this minute. It's the Irish custom, you see," he explained, "to many at home."

"Tonight?" faltered the captain. "But—" He turned towards Miss Knox.

Her uncle creased his brow and put the question to the attorney. "Here we have two young Protestant persons of sound mind, past the age of majority—it'd be legal enough, surely?"

"Indeed, indeed so." The attorney nodded over his glass.

"Let's do it, then," said Knox, leaping to his feet and tugging open a bureau drawer. "You can draft them a simple contract; here's a clean sheet of paper. Of course," he threw in the captain's direction, "the poor sweet girl is sowerless, and I couldn't rob my own, but as the poet once said,
Do phósfainn
—hey, how does it go?"