'Fire smoulders, it burns, it rages, it purges and
purifies; it engenders great passion. . . and it destroys.'
'You were named for fire, Ellen. . .

From the author of the acclaimed The Whitest Flower
comes the story of an unforgettable heroine, Ellen Rua
O'Malley. Widowed by Ireland's Great Famine, she has
fled her native land for Boston. With her are her two
surviving children, Patrick and Mary, and the 'silent girl'
rescued from the hordes of the dispossessed.

Boston in the 1850s is the hub of the universe: gateway
to America's temples of commerce and learning; liberal,
sophisticated -- the very best place in all of the New
World for a woman to be. There, awaiting her, are the
stability of a new life and Lavelle, the man who loves her.

But Ellen, desperate to shake off the Old World, is driven
by her own demons to put everything at risk. And Boston,
on the brink of Civil War, seems only to mirror her own
conflict, to sound the knell of her own battle for survival.

A powerful and compelling tale of lives and loves
dislocated, The Element of Fire captures emotions as
timeless as life. And love.
Brendan Graham's first novel The Whitest Flower was
published in 1998 to international praise. Born in Co.
Tipperary in 1945, he now lives in Dublin.


Praise for The Whitest Flower:


'A novel of immense potency.'
Irish Post

'Disturbing, challenging, and rewarding.' Sunday World

'The guy can write. Lyrical music. Musical prose.'

Sunday Independent


'A love story, a saga and an historical document.'

Woman's Realm

'This novel will delight many.'
Irish Times

'Important addition to the Irish national story.'

Sunday Times, Canberra


'Extraordinary novel ... a history of the times.'

Belfast Telegraph


'Painted on a wide canvas ... a powerful and ambitious
novel.'
Woman and Home


'Intimate, warm and clear ... a rattling good epic'

Irish Independent


'Writes with passion and energy from a woman's point
of view.'
Irish Literary Supplement, Boston


'What is sure to remain long after The Whitest Flower has been read is the enduring sense that the inner
strength of people tested in adversity is something to
not only admire but to celebrate.'

The Sunday Tasmanian

By the same Author
Brendan Graham





THE WHITEST FLOWER

The Element
of Fire
HarperCollinsPublishers
HarperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London w6 8B

www.fireandwater.com

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2001
135798642

Copyright © Brendan Graham
Brendan Graham asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work

Although this work is partly based on
real historical events, the main characters
portrayed therein are entirely the work of
the author's imagination.

A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library

'The Fair-Haired Boy' Words and Music by
Brendan Graham
© Acorn Music Ltd/Warner/Chappell Music Ltd
Lyrics reproduced by permission of International Music
Publications Ltd

Dedicated to the memory of
'The Coot',
Fr. Henry Flanagan O.P., Newbridge College (1918-1992)

Sculptor, musician, teacher, friend



isbn 000 711002 2

Typeset in Postscript Linotype Sabon
with Bauer Bodoni display by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Polmont, Stirlingshire

Printed and bound in Australia by
Griffin Press Pty Ltd, Netley, South Australia

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publishers.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A number of people generously assisted me with advice,
research material and general sustenance, throughout the
writing of this book.

In Boston: Staff at Boston Public Library, in particular
Curator of Humanities William M. Grealish; at Thomas
P. O'Neill Library, Boston College, Kathleen M. Williams;
Ruth-Ann M. Harris, Adjunct Professor of History and
Irish Studies, Boston College; Joan McAllister at the
Boston Pilot; Michael and Colette Quinlin. A special
thanks to Dr Eileen Moore Quinn, Anthropology Department,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In Ireland:
Staff at the National Library of Ireland; R.V. Comerford,
Professor of Modern History, National University of
Ireland, Maynooth; Hugh Duffy; John Hassett; Seamus
Duffy; Dr Inge Leipold; The Tyrone Guthrie Centre,
where some of the writing was done; Kim Mullahey,
who did initial background research. To Nicholas Pedgrift
in London and Tom Rest in Toronto. To the people
at HarperCollinsPublishers Ireland, UK, Australia, New
Zealand and Canada, a sincere thanks for everything. In
particular, special thanks to Adrian Bourne, Managing
Director, Trade Division, UK, and to Editorial Director,
Patricia Parkin - for patience beyond virtue, and to
Georgina Hawtrey-Woore and Sara Walsh.
Finally, to my wife Mary and my family - for forbearance
and endurance - and with a special word to
Grainne and Niamh for transforming illegible handscript
into intelligible typescript and to Donna for a critical
reading of the final draft - buiochas om chroi.

Brendan Graham
February 2001
'The element of fire is quite put out;
The sun is lost, and th' earth . . .'
'An Anatomy of the World'
John Donne (1572-1631)
1848 - Ireland

It was a grand day for a funeral.
A grand August day, Faherty thought.
The coachman, a thin, normally talkative fellow, with a tic in
his left eye, held back now. Cap in hand, he waited, a respectful
distance from the graveside.
He had brought them here, deep into the mountains and lakes of
this remote Maamtrasna valley. The red-haired woman, her twin
daughters, one dead, one alive; the son, and the orphan waif, silent
as a prayer, beside him.
The silent one was a mystery to him. A week ago - the first time
he had brought the woman back here from the ship at Westport the
girl had appeared out of nowhere and attached herself to them,
running near naked alongside his carriage for miles. Not a word
out of her mouth, not even begging.
He wouldn't have stopped if it hadn't been for the woman. She
had taken pity on the girl, saved her from almost certain death.
Since then, all through the last few days, she had been like a shadow
to the woman, quiet as a nun. God knows, he decided, seeing the
woman kneeling over the grave - settling into it the tiny white
flowers of the potato plant - someone would want to watch over
her. It was surely a strange thing to do - potato flowers on a grave.
The way she ran down from the hillock here. Ran, barefooted to
the bare-acred field, on past the tumbled cabins and, like that,
snatched up a fistful of the flowers from the derelict potato beds.
Before that the child's shawl - 'Annie's shawl', she called it - must
be another one she lost - twined it round the hands of the little
dead one, like rosary beads.
Now her fine, emerald-green American dress was ruined with
kneeling in the clay, but she didn't seem to notice. Just kept
repeating the child's name over and over: 'Katie! Katie! Oh, Katie a stor!' He wondered what she was doing beyond in America, with
her three children here - left behind her? Not knowing whether
they were dead or alive. He watched the shape of her stretch
backwards. She was hardly the thirty years out - a fine woman. He
turned his head slightly, so as not to be watching her that way.
Out of the corner of his good right eye, he glanced back along
the curl of the valley, with its lake of green glistening islands. There
wasn't much here for her - a few patches of hungry grass. Not a
beast in a field. Hard to get a morsel of food out of a place like
this - even before the potato rot. Nothing but rocks and stones
and water everywhere, as Faherty saw it.
The sun was bothering him, making his eye jump even more.
Sailing all this way to find them, and then one of them up and
dying, just when she thought she had them safe. Hard on the little
one left too - she must be only the nine or ten years, same as the
other little one they were burying. A split pair they were - one
taken, one left behind, but the two of them the spit of the mother,
their hair like it was spun out of hers.
The boy was a biteen older, maybe two or three years. Distant
from the mother - for leaving them, Faherty supposed. Didn't look
like her either, dark, must have taken after the father. But then,
what else could the woman have done? Her husband already put
down in this spot and their cabin thrown down. What had she
left here, only the gossoors and no way of supporting them? The
boy would understand in time - give him a few years, and a few
knocks in life. He'd understand all right, know she had no choice.
Still, it must have been hard.
The woman was straightening, dusting down her dress, wiping
the earth from her feet, readying to go. She was tall, for a woman.
His eye, practised for horse flesh, put her at seventeen hands,
maybe even the seventeen and a half. A hand or two above his
own five feet four inches. A fine ainnir of a woman. She wouldn't
wait a widow long, Faherty thought. He crossed himself, slid on
his cap again, fell in behind the silent girl as they descended the
burial place, the same as they'd come up, in single file, the boy
leading. Next, the living twin, followed by the mother, then the
girl and himself.
It was a strange thing the way, when they had set out on the
journey here . . . the way she had carried the child, not letting on at
first that she was dead at all, just bad with the fever. He supposed
the woman had her reasons. In case they'd take the girl from her,
throw her into the lime pit, maybe. Faherty didn't know what in
God's name she wanted to be hauling all the way out here for, to
this wild place, making a thing of it. Sure, weren't people dying
like flies on every side, on account of the Famine, half of them
getting no right burial at all. Faherty was well used to death by
now. There was nothing special about it. When you were dead,
you were dead. She could have buried the child back in Westport,
in the Rocky, and saved them all this trouble. The Rocky, if it
was a quarry, was consecrated to take the fevered dead - would
have done fine, Faherty thought. Sure, wasn't half the countryside
already flung into it!
He picked his way down the Crucan, the sweep of the Maamtrasna
valley unnoticed before him.
Nell had strayed from where he'd left her, snaffling the sweet
grass of the long acre which bordered the mountain pass road.
The horse was tired from all the travelling. He patted her neck,
relieved she hadn't wandered too far. Back here, in the valleys, a
wandering horse wouldn't last long.
'I'm sorry, Nell . . .' he whispered into the animal's ear, so the
woman wouldn't hear him, '. . . dragging you all the way out here
where they'd eat you, quick as look at you.'

As they rounded the bend, skirting the edge of the lake, Ellen held
the three of them into her: Patrick crooked in her right arm, Mary
in the near reach of her left, half-lying across her, half-smothered in
the lap of her dress. The girl then beyond Mary, but within the
circle of what remained of the family. Ellen watched the back of
Faherty's head, rolling from side to side as it did when he spoke.
Now, he was saying nothing, unless he was talking to himself.
She looked out at the Mask, probably seeing the lake for the
last time, not caring if she never saw it again. Nor the valley,
hanging there around it, so green, so empty, so full of death, the
sun spilling over it as if nothing in the world was wrong. As if it
were the Plains of Heaven.
Faherty's head stopped lolling about for a moment. She watched
it half-turn towards her.
'It was a grand day . . .'
She hardly heard him, her attention drawn to his jumping eyelid.
It must be a nervous thing. He was probably nervous as a child,

she thought.
'. . . a grand day for a funeral, ma'am!' he said, meaning it.
On the journey around the lake she never spoke. Faherty too, apart
from that one occasion, was silent.
He never heard her even weep. It was all too much for her, he
thought, and had driven her down, into herself. Sorrow and guilt a
bad mixture. It would be better if she keened it out of herself,
got shut of the grief. But after this, it would be easier. Beyond in
America with only the two to care for - and the silent one, if she took
her with them? At least they had a chance, somewhere to go to, out of
this God-forsaken place. Not like the poor devils here, wandering the
roads scouring for scraps, arms and legs stuck out of them like scarecrows.
Eyes burned into the sockets with fever. No sound. Only the
bit of a breeze rattling through bared ribs. Wherever they were headed
it didn't matter, they'd get nothing, neither food nor sympathy. It was
the same all over - a land full of nothing. Their only hope a quick
exit out of this life and Paradise in the next, if they were lucky.
Faherty wondered about Paradise, the Garden of Eden. Would
it be like the big houses once were? Hanging gardens; carpets of
flowers; servants at every turn; fruit on every bough. And long
rows of lazy beds, the fat lumper potatoes tumbling out of them,
asking to be eaten - and no want on any side. He wanted to ask
her was America like that; but he caught himself in time.
Mairteen Tom Anthony, a big bodalach of a fellow from the foot
of the Reek, once told him the buildings were so tall in New York,
that when he first went out there he stood all of a gam looking up
at them, so long that the roof of his mouth got sunburnt. Faherty
wasn't sure if Mairteen was tricking him or not. America turned
people into tricksters - even a simpleton like Mairteen Tom.
Leave her be, he decided.
It was still light when the conical-shaped mountain of Croagh
Patrick grew large over them, telling their destination was near.
She made Faherty bring them straight to Westport Quay. As
they passed the workhouse and Fever Hospital, a shiver took
her, remembering how, inside, she had once frantically sought
her husband Michael. Beside the workhouse was its cemetery, the
Rocky. From here she had snatched Michael's body, dragging it
on a cart the twenty miles to the place from which they had now
just come, to bury him on the Crucan.
About the workhouse gates hundreds clamoured, seeking admittance.
Hundreds of others, near naked and starving, sought to
clamber over the top of these, calling for 'relief tickets' that would
grant them soup; sole sustenance for one more day.
'There must be three thousand inside, if there's a soul,' Faherty
opined, 'and as many more outside wanting in.'
They sloped down Boffin Street, past the boatmen's houses and
the gaunt Custom House still, in the reign of Victoria, called the
'King's Stores'. Here, fuelled by hunger, six hundred in rags milled
around, battened by musketed militia. Nearby, cart-followers,
employed to protect the grain being transported to the town's
merchants, waited, slinking on the margins of the famished until
they were needed.
Another angry crowd shouted as a ship from Marseille discharged
its cargo of wheat, beans and chestnuts. A clipper of Constantinople,
bursting with Indian corn from New Orleans, lay by, flanked by Her
Majesty's revenue cruisers. Behind the ships were the small island
drumlins of Clew Bay - giant hump-backed whales, silhouetted
against the purple and crimson of the dying day. Ellen leapt from
Faherty's carriage. One of the ships must surely be Atlantic-bound.
Westport Quay throbbed with all the mixed ingredients of quay
life. Pampered gentry and a starving commonality jostled with
tidewaiters and landwaiters. While elbow to shoulder with the
herring- and oystermen of Clew Bay, shipping agents of indifferent
character plied their trade.
'Passage to Amerikay!' they called, thrusting beckoning circulars
into the hands of all who would snatch them from the surrounding
chaos. She took one.
At Westport
For Philadelphia
To sail about 10th October
The splendid first-class
Copper-fastened, British-built ship
GREAT BRITAIN.

She pushed it back against the agent's hand. 'Today . . . these
ships . . . America?' she shouted above the din. The agent, a puffy
little fellow in an important hat, breathless from his exertions, gave
her the once-over.
'Yes ma'am, to the exotic city of New Orleans,' he puffed - as
if he'd ever been there - face creasing into a red-veined smile.
A well-heeled mark, this one - a bit soiled about the hem, but
had the wherewithal for passage, he'd wager, unlike most of the
idlers here.
'No. . . Boston, I want Boston!' she impressed on him, impatient
that he didn't already know.
'Boston, New Orleans, Philadelphia - it's all America!' he
expounded expansively, his wind now fully regained. 'Four to
a berth, splendid provisions and a quart o' water a day. Is it just
yourself, ma'am?'
She left the sound of him puffing away behind her, and through
the pandemonium eventually made her way to the offices of John
Reid, Jun. c Co., Ship Agents.
Mr John Reid, Jun., an affable youngish-looking man in his
fifties, had 'no intelligence, in the coming weeks, of any ship
Boston-bound. But we are sometimes surprised by what the tide
brings in,' he informed her, helpfully. Her only course of action,
he advised, was to keep a daily watch at the quay and enquire
of him regularly. He could promise her 'a ship fitted with every
attention to the comfort of passengers for Quebec, before three
weeks was out', adding, 'Quebec being but a tolerable land journey
from Boston'.
cu.
- was dismayed. Here she was, her two remaining children
secure, and no way out of Ireland. She wondered about Quebec,
about taking a chance, but feared for the ship Mr Reid Jun.
had described as 'fitted with every attention to the comfort of
passengers'. She had seen these 'comfort of passengers' ships
before, during her time on Quebec's quarantine island. 'Coffin
ships' and rightly named so. And then to land on Grosse lie, with
its fever sheds. She could not subject them to that, she told him,
so declining his suggestion.

'Ne'er mind, ma'am, something will crop up,' Faherty tried to
console her with, when she found them again. 'I'll take you to
The Inn on the North Mall, in the town,' he offered. 'You can
rest up there a while, till a ship comes.' He imagined a lady like
her wouldn't be shy the tally for the innkeeper, his second cousin.
'It's for ever full of agents and customs men. I'll put word with
the owner, a dacent man,' he said, without naming him, 'to keep
an ear out on their talk.'
Again he drove them, this time up against the slope of Boffin
Street, up through the town's Octagon, past the Market House,
a fine, ashlar-built, two-storey, with pediment roof and louvred
bell cote.
It reminded her of Faneuil Hall, in Boston's Quincy Market.
But Boston was a city much advanced on Westport. Although
the Octagon, with its Market House and imposing monument a
fluted Doric column - was oddly at variance with the inched-out
life of those below it.
She felt the children dig in closer to her as they passed the stench
of the Shambles where the butchers of James Street rendered
carcasses. Faherty yanked Nell to the right, away from the gated
entrance to Westport House, home to Lord Sligo, and took them
instead down along the North Mall.
On this tree-lined boulevard, with its leafy riverside, the poor
huddled, congregating outside the place to which Nell carted them.
Faherty nudged the horse forward, shouting at those who blocked
their progress, 'Get back there! Let the lady through! She's had a
sore loss this day!'
Ellen bowed her head, embarrassed by Faherty's words, aware
of the pitiful, near-death state in which most of his listeners were. It
didn't seem to bother Faherty, who skipped down from his driver's
perch, tied Nell to the hitching-post and then helped her and the
children alight.
The near-dead gaped at them, shuffled out a space through
which they could pass. Some made the sign of the cross as she
approached, respectful of her loss.
He gentled her in under the limestone porch, solicitous for her
well-being, and bade her wait while he sought the keeper.
Inside was a sprinkling of red-faced jobbers, stout sticks in their
paw-like hands, the stain of dung on their boots. Beef-men in this
'town of the beeves' - Cathair na Mart - as she knew it by name.
She wondered who it was bought their beef, in these straitened
times? Merchants with money, she supposed. Some of the beeves
would end up in the Shambles they had just passed. Some would
go out on the hoof, heifered over in ships to help drive those who
tended the hungry machines of England's great industrial towns.
Not a morsel would find its way to the empty mouths of those
outside.
The tug at her arm recalled her from England's mill towns. It
was Mary. 'Patrick's not here!'
Ellen spun around. The boy was nowhere to be seen. She bade
Mary and the silent girl wait and rushed for the crowds outside,
impervious to everything except that she must not lose him now.
She looked up and down the Mall and saw him some twenty paces
away, on his knees in company with a ragged boy, scarce older
than himself. She ran to him, ever fearful of ... something - she
didn't know what.
She reached him, relieved to see he was not harmed. 'Patrick,
what. . . ?' she began, then stopped when she saw what he was doing.
'I was only helping him,' Patrick said, defensively.
The other boy, a tattered urchin with a vacant stare, backed
away, afraid of what this frantic and well-dressed lady might do to
him. 'Ta bron orm, ma'am' - 'I'm sorry, ma'am' - he said, fearfully,
in a mixture of Irish and his only English word apart from 'sir'.
She spoke to him in Irish. This seemed to help him be less cowed.
Nevertheless, he kept his eyes thrown down as he told his story.
They lived five miles out on the Louisburgh road. Both his parents
had been stricken with the Famine fever. They had hunted him
and his two younger brothers, eight and six years, out to the road,
'to go to Westport for the soup-tickets'. So the three had set off,
he in charge. Upon reaching the workhouse, he was too small
to make any headway against the clamouring crowds. Instead,
he had followed the flayed carcass of an ass, bound for human
consumption, and stolen some off-cuts, which he and his brothers
had eaten. After sleeping in one of the town's side alleys, he had
awoken, planning to come here to The Inn, the headquarters of
the Relief Works' engineer, 'looking for work, to get the soup that
way, ma'am', he explained.
At first, unable to arouse his two younger brothers, he thought
they still slept, 'sickened by the ass-meat'. Eventually he realized they
lay dead beside him. Then he had stolen a sack, put their bodies
inside and carried it over his shoulder 'to get them buried with
prayers'. At the Catholic church on the opposite South Mall, he
had sneaked in the doors on the tail of a funeral: 'for a respectable
woman like yourself, ma'am - she was in a coffin'. But, while the
church-bell tolled the passing of the 'respectable woman', he had
been ejected on to the streets with his uncoffined brothers. Again,
he had carried his sack back to The Inn, hoping against hope to
get food. Food that would give him enough strength to find a
burial place for his dead siblings, 'till I fell in a heap with the
hunger!'
That was what Patrick had seen - the boy collapsing - the sack
flung open on the road, the two small bodies within revealed. Not
that he hadn't seen plenty dead from want before. It had to do
with Katie, Ellen knew.
Filled with compassion for the boy's predicament, she made to
approach him. He backed away, still afraid that he had caused
some bother to her. She halted, hunkered down, then called to
him. Slowly, he approached her, arms crossed in front of him,
head down on one shoulder. A hang-dog look on him as if waiting
to be beaten. She reached out and enfolded him.
'You're a brave little maneen,' she said, feeling his skin and bone,
his frightened heart, within her arms. 'We'll get them buried. And
we'll get some soup for you,' she comforted, wondering as she
spoke, what in Heaven's name she would do with him then.
After a few moments, she released him and went to Patrick. 'You
did right, Patrick, to go and help him,' she said, and held her son
against her. 'But I was so afraid I'd lost you again.'
Patrick made no reply, neither accepting nor denying her
embrace. She was a long way yet from his forgiveness.
Grabbing the sack, she twisted the neck of it closed, not bearing
to look inside. The weight of the corpses within resisted her, each
tumbling for its own space, not wanting to be closed in, carcassed
together in death. The movement caused her to loosen her grip on
the sack, forcing her to redouble her efforts to keep it closed. She
didn't know how the boy had managed to carry it for so long.
Then Faherty was beside her. 'Ma'am, are you all right?' he
panted, all of a flap, seeing her struggle with the sack.
'We need your services again, Mr Faherty,' she said grimly.
He looked at her, looked from Patrick to the boy, then to the
sack, finally back to her, his eye jumping furiously all the time. She
saw the realization dawn on his face, the ferret-like look he darted
at her. Then the jaw slackened, the hand pushed back the cap on
his forehead and a thinking finger scratched his head.
'You'll be paid, of course!' she answered his unspoken question.
'Right, ma'am, I'll fetch Nell.' He made to go, all concern for her
well-being now abated. Money was to be made. He turned. 'And
what about him, ma'am?' He nodded towards the boy beside her:
'You can't save all of 'em.'
'I know, Mr Faherty. I know!' she said resignedly. Of course she
couldn't take the boy with her. She would have to release him again
on to the streets, to take his slim chances. How long it would be
before he, too, joined his brothers, either coffined or uncoffined,
she didn't know.

Later, in the bathroom down the hall, she filled the big glazed tub
with buckets of steaming water. She dipped her elbow in. Maybe it
was too hot. She waited until it was barely tolerable then went for
Patrick, scuttling him along the corridor in case some dung-stained
jobber got in ahead of them. She undressed him and bustled him into the tub, all the while Patrick protesting strongly at this forced
intimacy between them and her all too obvious intentions.
'I'm clean enough!' and 'I don't need you to scrub me!' elicited
no sympathy. She was taking no chances after the episode with
the boy and his dead brothers - who knew what they carried? She
rolled up her sleeves and scrubbed him to within an inch of his life,
until his skin was red-raw. He thrashed about in the water trying to
get away from her but it was to no avail. She did not relent until she
was satisfied he was 'clean', until she had found every nook and
cranny of his body, however much he resisted. Then, one hand
lugging him by each earlobe in turn, she stuck long sudsy fingers
into his ears, to 'rinse' them. When she had finished he was like a
skinned tomato. Sullen, jiggling his shoulders so as not to allow her
to dry him with the towelling cloth. She gave up, threw her coat
over his shoulders and led him back to the room. 'Dry yourself,
then,' she ordered him, tartly.
The two girls she put together into the tub. She was not so
worried about them. But even from Katie they might have taken
something; much as she didn't want to think it, she had to be
careful about that too. She had learned enough from her time in
the fever sheds of Grosse lie to know that disease there passed from
person to person, even from the dead to the living. Ellen thought
the girl would be shy about letting her touch her. This proved not to be the case. Mary, though, seemed to recoil from the girl, not
wanting their arms and legs to touch, get entangled. Maybe it was
a mistake putting them in the bath together, so soon after Katie.
She was as gentle as she could be with Mary, kept talking to her,
soothing her saved child.
'Katie is with the angels in Heaven, with Annie and the baby
Jesus . . . with -' She paused, thinking of Michael. '. . . with your
Daddy . . . He was so brave, just like Katie . . .' she said, leaning
over Mary, the hot steam of the tub in her eyes. 'I was too late . . .
to save them, too late a stor . . . but they're looking down on us
now ... it was hard, Mary, I know . . . and on Patrick . . . and
Katie too, with your poor father laid down on the Crucan and me fled to Australia. What must have been going through your little mind?' Maybe it would have been for the best if they had
all crawled into some ditch and huddled together till the hunger
or the elements took them. But how could she have watched them
waste away beside her, picked at by ravens, their little minds going
strange with the want of a few boiled nettles, or the flesh of a dog.
She thought of the boy and his brothers - or any poor manged beast
that would stray their way. She had had to go, it was no choice in
the end - leave them and they had some chance of living, stay and
they all would surely die.
Mary, head bent, said nothing, the steam rising about her, hair
streaming down into the water, red, lifeless ribbons. What could
she say to the child? She pulled back Mary's hair, wrung it out,
plaited it behind her head.
'God must have smiled, Mary . . . when He took Katie. He must
have wanted her awful badly . . .'
Mary turned her face. 'Then why did He leave me?' she asked
limply, boiling it all down to the crucial question. The fact that
they had survived so much was in Mary's mind not a blessing from
God, but, without Katie, a punishment.
'I don't know, Mary - a stor,' she answered. 'There were times
when I prayed He'd take all of us. He must have some great plan
for you in this life,' she added, without any great conviction.
How could the child understand, when she couldn't understand
it herself - the cruelty of it - snatching Katie from them at the last
moment. She fumbled in her pocket, drew out the rosary beads.
'The only thing is to pray, Mary; when nothing makes sense the
only thing is to pray, Mary,' she repeated.
Already on her knees, arms resting on the bath, Ellen blessed
herself before starting the great prayer of the Mother of God. She
was caught between reciting the Five Sorrowful Mysteries or the
Five Joyful Mysteries.
'The First Joyful Mystery, the . . . the Annunciation,' she began.
They had to have hope in their hearts. The sorrow would never
leave, she knew, and maybe there would never be full joy in this life.
But they had to have hope, keep the Christ-child in their hearts.
She and Mary passed the Mysteries back and forth between
themselves, each leading the first part of the Our Father, the
Hail Marys and the Glory be to the Father as it was their turn.
Once, there were five of them - a Mystery each. Now it was just
herself and Mary, the Five Mysteries between them - and Patrick,
whenever he would kneel with them. The silent girl gave no hint
that she had ever previously partaken of such family devotion,
merely exhibiting a curious respectfulness as the prayers passed
between Ellen and Mary through the veil of bath-vapour - the
mists of Heaven. Ellen's clothes were sodden, her face bathed in
steam, the small hard beads perspiring in her hands. The great
thing about prayer was that you didn't have to talk to a person
while you prayed with them. Yet souls were joined talking to
each other, while they talked to God. She was sorry when she
had beaded the last of the fifty Hail Marys. But there was only
so much time for prayers and she whooshed the two out of the
tub before they could get cold.
Afterwards, she boiled all of the clothes they had worn, along
with her own, before at last climbing into the tub herself. It was a
blessed relief for her aching body. When she had finished rinsing
her hair out she lay there, head back on the rim of the tub, the
heat in her nostrils, her eyes closed. Everyone and everything done
for. A little snatch of time to be on her own. Just her and Katie.
The memories flooded back to her. How she would send Katie
and Mary to the side of the hill for water, and they would forget.
Instead, would lie face-down on the cooling slab of the spring well,
watching each other's reflections in the clear water. Then, when she
called them they would scamper down the hill to her, pulling the
bucket this way and that until half of its contents was left behind
them. The times when she did the Lessons, teaching them at her knee what she had learned at her father's, the Maistir's knee,
passing it on. While Mary would reflect on what she had learned,
Katie just couldn't. Always bursting with questions, one tumbling
out after the other, mad to know only about Grace O'Malley,
the pirate queen of Clew Bay, or Cromwell and his slaughtering
Roundheads. God, how Katie had tried her patience at times! The
evenings, when as a family they would kneel to say the rosary,
Katie's elbowing of Mary every time the name of the Mother of
God was mentioned, which was often! At Samhain once when the
spirits of the dead came back to the valley, Katie had thrown one of
the bonfire's burning embers into the sky. No amount of argument
could shake her belief that she had hit an 'evil spirit' with it.
That was Katie, a firebrand herself, filled to the brim with life.
But she had the other side too; like the time she had dashed to the
steep edge of the mountain as they crossed down to Finny for Mass.
It had put the heart crossways in Ellen. But Katie had returned
safely, clutching a fistful of purple and yellow wildflowers, a gift
for her mother.
Perhaps her fondest memory of Katie was of the time when
Annie was born. Katie had crept into the stillness to be with Ellen,
to be the first one to see 'my new little sister'. One tentative finger
had stretched out to touch Annie's cheek, like an angel touching
starlight, in one of those beautiful frozen moments. How Ellen
herself had cried, then laughed at her own foolishness. Katie, as
always, asking the ever-pertinent question. 'A Mhamai, why are
you crying when you're laughing?' And she couldn't answer her.
They had lain there together, she and Katie and Annie, into the
gathering dawn; touching, whispering, rapt in wonder until the
others came. Now both of them snatched from her, Annie in far-off
Australia, Katie on her own doorstep.
'You in there!' The loud rap at the door of the tub-room startled
Ellen. 'You've been there all night, we have others waiting!' The
gruff voice of Faherty's cousin was matched by further rapping.
'I'm sorry,' she called back, clambering out of the tub, 'I'm

coming.'
She was relieved when she opened the door to find he had gone
downstairs, and she didn't have to face him. She padded along the
corridor, marking it with her wet footprints. The sound ringing
in her ears was not the voice of the gruff innkeeper but a child's
question.
'Can we make wonder last, a mhamai?'
And her answer, those two and a half years ago. 'Yes, Katie,
we can.'
Back in the room, Patrick, Mary and the girl were already asleep
She dried herself freely, nevertheless, keeping herself at a discreet
distance from the window in The Inn's west wing. The window
looked out across the Carrowbeg river. Directly opposite she could
see St Mary's Church, with its imposing parapet. The thought of the boy with the sack being evicted from the House of God because
of his wretched condition angered her. Why did she feel responsible
for the boy - as she had for the silent girl? Why for some and
not for others, when thousands were dying? Faherty had told
her thirty-nine poor souls had received the last sacraments in that
day alone.
'And it's the same every day, ma'am. Monday to Sunday. They
say there's thirty thousand of the destitute getting outdoor relief
around here.'
She could well believe it. Thirty thousand in one small area. She
wondered if there was any hope for the country at all. But why
didn't she feel as bad about these, about the nameless hordes, as
she did about the boy? She had never asked his name. That way,
he was just a boy, any boy. But she was ridden with guilt when
after giving him some food and a few coins with which to send
him off, he had thanked her saying, 'I'll pray for you, ma'am.'
Faherty was right, she couldn't save them all. But what would the
child do, where would he go? For how long would he survive?
The limestone facade of St Mary's looked back white-faced at
her from the South Mall. Nothing much had changed since she
had left Ireland. If you had money you lived proper and you died
proper, as Faherty might have put it. You had the Church behind
you. Otherwise it was a pauper's life and a pauper's grave.
This thought reminded her she needed to be careful with the
money. She had depleted what she had carefully squirrelled away
over many months in Boston, by coming to Ireland. Now, with The
Inn, and who knew for how long, and the extra cost to Faherty for
the two coffins, she had eaten further into her reserves. The silent
girl could only come with them because Katie wasn't. If they had
long to wait in Westport, Ellen mightn't even be able to afford
that passage. She would be forced to leave the girl behind them.
At one stage, she had almost decided to disentangle herself from
the girl and leave her with the nuns, if they'd take her.
the waif, who watched and shadowed her everywhere, seemed to be a manifestation of the past dogging her, a spectre of loss,
separation, Famine. It unnerved her the way the girl never asked
anything of her, just was there like a conscience. But, given a little
time, she might make a companion for Mary. Not that anybody
could ever replace Katie; it wasn't that. But maybe Mary might
find some echo of her own unvoiced loss in the silence of the
mute girl. Some small consolation in her companionship on the
long journey across the Atlantic.
Now, Ellen prayed across the waters of the Carrowbeg to the
House of God that she wouldn't have to change that decision.
She closed her mind from even having to think about it. Instead,
she tried to recall what it was Faherty had said about the church
opposite. About the inscription from the Bible that its foundation
stone carried?
'This is an awful place. The House of God.'
Faherty knew all these things.
The days dragged by. Each day she trudged with the children to
the quayside and scanned out along Clew Bay for the telltale
line against the sky. Each day they returned dispirited, almost
as much by what they had witnessed on the way, as by the lack
of a ship. Was there to be no let up in the calamity? No relief for
the poor? The scenes of despair and deprivation seemed to her to
have worsened. Droop-limbed skeletons of men - and women too hauled turf on their backs through the streets, once work only
for a beast of burden. When she mentioned this at The Inn, they
laughed at her naivete.
'There's not an ass left in Westport that hasn't been first flayed
for the its pelt will bring, then its hindquarters eaten,'
a well-cushioned jobber jibed. 'Now the peasants who sold them
have to make asses of themselves!'
She was shocked at this callous indifference of the commercial
classes to the plight of 'the peasants'.
Nervous of everything, she kept the children close by her and
was cross with them if they wandered, terrified that she'd lose
them. That they'd be swallowed in the hordes of the famished
who filled the streets with the smell of death and the excrement
of bodies forced to feed inwards upon themselves.
Once she traipsed them with her to Croagh Patrick - the
Reek. They climbed to where they could look across the dotted
archipelago of the bay, out past the Clare Island lighthouse.
She could see no tall ships, only boats far out, maybe tobacco
smugglers, or those ferrying the contraband Geneva, an alcoholic
liquor flavoured with juniper and available from under the counter if asked for at The Inn.
They climbed higher for better vantage, Ellen straining her eyes
against the gold and green of sun and sea. Here, on this age-old
mountain, St Patrick had fasted for forty days and forty nights.
'Those who worship the Sun shall go in misery . . . hut we who
worship Christ, the true Sun, will never perish.' In the writing of his Confession the saint had decried the sun and its worshippers. Now
she prayed to the sun to bring them a ship. Sun-up or sun-down, it
didn't matter, as long as it came. To the west her eye caught a rib of
white stone rising heavenwards against the bulk of the mountain.
A 'Famine wall' going nowhere, built on the Relief Works to exact
moral recompense from the starving stone-carriers. They in return
were given 'relief; a few pence in pay, a handful of soup-tickets.
The cry of a curlew ringing up from the Clew Bay shoreline
seemed curiously to give voice to the misery of this place. She
wondered how true it was about the legends of the Reek. Legends,
she guessed, grown to feed misery and repentance, to keep the
people out of the sun, blackening their lives.
She remembered how on the last Sunday of summer, Reek
Sunday, as it was widely known, the Clogdubh - the Black Bell
of St Patrick - was brought there for weary pilgrims to kiss, for a
penny. She had never kissed it. For tuppence, those afflicted with
rheumatism might pass it three times around the body, for relief.
Another superstition of the shackling kind that bred paupers to
pay priests.
She thought of ascending the whole way - making the old
pilgrimage, beseeching the high place where the tip of the mountain
disappeared into the lower heavens, to send a ship. Not that the
place was short of pilgrims, some hardly able to lift one foot ahead
of the other. She thought they'd be better off saving their energy,
rather than expecting a miracle to save them from starvation.
What was it, anyway? Only a heap of piled-up rocks, only a
mountain. And what could a mountain do? Torn between what
she once believed in and her pressing need now to get away from
it and all it represented, she called the children and followed the
path to the First Station. Seven times they shambled around the
cairn of stones intoning seven Our Fathers, seven Hail Marys and
one Creed. She wondered why once of everything wasn't enough,
why it had to be seven times.
Then she turned her back on St Patrick's holy mountain, angry,
yet disquieted by her rejection of it, and dragged them down
the miles with her to Westport. Westport, relic of the Anglicization
of Ireland. A Plantation town of well-mannered Malls,
the canalized Carrowbeg outpouring the grief and suffering of its
hapless inhabitants.
St Patrick and the Protestant Planters could have it between
them.
Whether her anger had moved the sullen mountain, or whether
it was merely favourable winds, the next morning produced a
miracle. A ship out of Londonderry - the jeanie Goodnight had
rounded Achill Island under cover of darkness and now sat
at the quay: she was Boston-bound. Word of the ship's arrival had
spread like wildfire, igniting all of Westport into frenzied quay-life
once again. As soon as the news reached The Inn, it emptied.
Ellen left the children behind her in the room, admonishing them
not to leave it. Wild with excitement, she threw off her shoes and
ran bare-stockinged all the way to the office of Mr John Reid, Jun.,
her dress hiked up behind her like a billowing sail, with every stride
storming Heaven that she wasn't too late.
The quay was teeming with people. Would-be travellers clutched
carpetbags to their breasts - food and their entire earthly possessions
within. Many were young, single women, who vied with
barking agents and anxious excise men to hold their ground.
Jostling jobbers belayed obstructive buttocks with the knobbed
handles of their cattle-sticks.
Already the ship agent's door was mobbed with people, cries of
'Amerikay!' ascending at every turn, the damned at the Gates of
Hell like it was their last hope.
It was her last hope. If she didn't embark on this ship, who knew
when another would come. She and her children would be fated to
stay in Ireland. Her money would run out, and in time they would
sink lower and lower, until they, too, ended up seeking to survive
on scraps of pity and charity and the off-cuts of ass-meat. She
lunged into the steaming, clamouring crowd, all thought of her
gender put aside. Nor did the opposite gender give ground to her,
unless she took it. Pushing and elbowing, she scrimmaged her way forward until she reached the front.
'Mr Reid! Mr Reid!' she shouted, money in her fist, shaking it
above her head. 'Passage for four to Boston!' she beseeched. At
last the agent beckoned her forward. She banged the money on
his desk.
Fifteen minutes later she left, four sailing tickets to Boston
clenched like a prayer between her two hands.
Their passage was secured.

The children were overjoyed, although Mary was more restrained
than the others, her joy severely tempered, no doubt at the thought
of leaving Katie behind. Ellen didn't know if the silent girl really
understood what all the excitement was about. Sometimes, you
just didn't know with her. But the girl clapped her hands, looking
from one to the other of them, her hazel-brown eyes shining, her
pert little nose twitching with delight.
Thrice daily, morning, noon, and at eventide, Ellen went to
the quay to check on the Jeanie Goodnight lest the ship slip
out again unexpectedly, just as she had ghosted into the western
seaboard town.
Three days later they were headed out into the bay, Westport
receding behind them in the mist, like a shaken shroud. She hated
the place. Its workhouse which had taken Michael, the hordes of
its hungry, clawing to get aboard the ship ahead of her. The lucky
ones, their passage paid by land-clearing landlords.
Once aboard, she had changed her clothes, shaking the stench
of Ireland out of them, then boiled them. As the Jeanie Goodnight threaded its way through the drumlin-humped islands, she was
aware of the Reek to her left, the cursed mountain always looking
down on them, whichever way you went, by land or by sea;
watching, judging. She wouldn't look at it directly. It was part
of the Ireland of the past drawing away behind them. An Ireland of Famine; of vacant faces and outstretched hands - an island of
beggars, no place for her and her children.
There they had been, she, Michael, their neighbours - the Tom awns - all of them, back there in the mountains, waiting, year
in, year out, for the potatoes to grow. Beating their way down theroad to the priest to give thanks, prostrating themselves, when they
did grow; beating their breasts in contrition for imagined sins when
they didn't. Then, trudging over and back to Pakenham's place to
pay the rent, hoping the landlord wouldn't raise it on them when
they had it, grovelling for clemency, citing 'the better times to
come' when they hadn't.
Always on their knees, either giving thanks or pleading. They
were to be pitied, the whole hopeless lot of them. It wasn't the
mountains of Maamtrasna that imprisoned them on their bare
acres, or the watery arms of the Mask that land-locked them.
It wasn't even, she knew, the landlords and the priests. It was
themselves. Going round in circles, beholden to the present and
beholden to the past, with its old seafoideach customs, handed
down from generation to generation. Tradition, woven around
their lives from before they were born, like some giant web from
which there was no escape. She wanted to strip it all away from her
now, never return. If it wasn't for Michael and Katie back there on
its bare-acred mountain, in its useless soil. The sadness of leaving
them that she had struggled so hard against now swept over her
whole body.
'A Mhamai . . .' The tug at her sleeve startled her.
It was Mary. The child's eyes, though dry, were blotched from
rubbing. Mary would try to hide it from her that she still cried
over Katie. That was her way. In the days they had waited for
the ship, Ellen had talked to her and Patrick about the need to
be strong; the child now beside her looked anything but. Ellen's
first instinct was to take Mary in her arms. Instead, she led her
to the bow of the ship.
'See, Mary! See out there beyond the horizon - the place where
the sea meets the sky?'
Mary nodded.
'Well, out there is America '
'Is it like Ireland?' Mary interrupted.
'No, Mary, it isn't. America is a big and rich country. It's not
like Ireland at all.'
Mary fell silent. Ellen, sensing the child's disappointment,
pressed on. 'It will be better than Ireland, Mary, I promise you it will be better. But we are going to have to be Americans. We
must forget we are Irish. Leave all ... all that behind us.'
Mary turned from looking out ahead, trying to see this land
where they would be different people. 'But, a Mhamai '
Ellen stopped her, gently. 'Mary . . . you mustn't call me that
- Mhamai"" - any more. We are going to be Americans now.
People don't say that in America. From now on you must call me
"Mother"!'
The child said nothing - only looked at her.
'It's all right,' Ellen said, taking her by the shoulders. 'Nothing's
changed, only the language. We're still the same between us. Do
you understand?'
Mary once more looked out to between the deepening sky and
the widening ocean, trying to see out beyond where they met. Out
to this place, this America.
'Yes . . . Mother,' she answered, saying the strange-sounding
word - the wind from America holding it back in her throat - that
Ellen could scarcely catch it. At least, she thought, there had been
some advantage to the children from the time spent in Pakenham's
service - their English was much improved.
Out they tacked, past the Clare Island lighthouse, tall and
solid-walled. Its white-painted watchtower, lofted heavenwards
two hundred feet, would see them safely out past Achill Sound.
'A graveyard for ships,' Lavelle had told her before she had
left Boston. It was his place, Achill. This island, cut off from
Ireland's most westerly shore. 'Achill - wanting to be in America,'
he always joked.
She hadn't yet broached the subject of Lavelle with the children,
except in a general fashion, like she had mentioned Peabody; both
as people in Boston with whom she conducted business dealings.
She would have to tell them more about Lavelle - that they were
Partners, but in business matters only. Albeit that she was fully
conscious of his affection for her, and she in turn regarded him highly, prized his companionship and his rough humour, it was
her intention never to remarry. She would be true to Michael to he grave. If, thereby, she was denying herself the tender comforts
Carriage life, and a father's guiding hand for her children,
then so be it. That was the price to he paid of her troth to
Michael.
Her weakness in succumbing to Lavelle's advances the night
before she had left Boston, would, she hoped, not prove to be
an insurmountable obstacle to re-establishing their previously
platonic relationship. She had kissed him fully on the mouth and
with all of her person. It was an error of judgement on her part.
An eddy of breeze swirling up from Achill Sound made her
shiver slightly. She loosened and then re-knotted the blue-green
scarf Lavelle had given to her at Christmas more tightly about
her throat. She had four long weeks at sea in which to reaffirm
her intentions.

The Jeanie Goodnight, a triple-masted emigrant barque, with
burthen eight hundred tons, and a master and crew of nineteen,
was constructed of the best oak and pine that Canadian woods
could yield. On her arrival at Westport she had disgorged four
hundred tons of Indian corn, twelve hundred bags of the dreaded
yellow meal; flour, Canadian timber and East Coast American
potatoes. As with the riot Ellen had witnessed on first arriving
back in Ireland with food leaving the stricken port, then, too,
there was a riot, the poor seeking to seize what supplies arrived
with the ship. It was the only way they would get food, she knew:
by taking it.
When Patrick raised the question of inferior food being shipped
into the country crossing with superior food being shipped out,
all she could say was, 'It doesn't make any more sense to me,
Patrick, than it does to you. I don't understand these things.'
It really didn't matter what food there was, good or bad. The
famished had scarcely a penny with which to buy it anyway.
Soon they had gone beyond the reach of Achill Sound and left
behind her last view of Ireland - disused lazy beds climbing towards
the sky over Clew Bay.

The voyage was a good one, the elements favouring them so that
the copper-fastened Jeanie Goodnight sat steady and proud in
Atlantic waters. Ellen kept themselves more or less to themselves.
Their fellow passengers were a mixed lot. Above were the commercial
Catholic classes - shopkeepers, grocers, middlemen - and those
called 'strong farmers', taking what possessions they had, fleeing
the sinking ship that was Ireland. There was too a good sprinkling
of voyagers from Londonderry and the northern counties.
It surprised her to hear them talk in their brittle way of 'the
calamity biting deep in Ulster'. She found it hard to reconcile the
notion that those who called on the Hand of Providence to strike
down the 'lazy Irish Catholics', should also be stricken by the same
levelling Hand.
'Planters', or 'Scots Irish', as Lavelle called them; Irish, but
not Irish. And they were different. More sober in dress and
demeanour than the boisterous middlemen from the southern
and western counties. Two hundred years previously, they had
been brought in from the Scottish lowlands, and given Catholic
land. In return, they were to 'reform' Ireland and the Irish. This
zeal had never left them. She had seen them in Boston. Hard work
and privilege had kept them where they were - looking down on
the 'other' Irish, every bit as much as the 'other' Irish - her Irish
- despised them.
These 'Scots Irish' on board the Jeanie Goodnight already spoke
of Boston as if it were theirs, naming out to each other the congregations
where they would gather to worship; giving no sense that
they were leaving anywhere, only of arriving somewhere else.
Below deck, sober demeanour counted for nothing. Nightly the
scratch of fiddles and the thud of a reel-set staccatoed the timbers,
as the peasant Irish ceilidhed their way to 'Amerikay'.
The 'cleared', passage-paid by landlords happy to see the back
of them, at first rejoiced openly at their leaving. Then, inhabitors
of neither shore, they floundered in a mid-ocean of conflicting
emotions, fuelled by dangerous grog and even more dangerous
fiddle music.
Along with the 'cleared' a large body of those below deck were
single women from sixteen to thirty years, those Ellen had noticed
a the quayside. 'Erin's daughters', fleeing Famine and repression.
Most would find their way into the homes of affluent Boston as
domestic servants to become 'Bridgets'. Others would sit behind
the wheels of the new-fangled sewing machines in the flourishing
clothing and cordwaining shops of the Bay Colony. Others still
would become 'mill girls', factory fodder in the Massachusetts
mill towns of Lawrence and Lowell. There, their fresh young
bodies would sweat and ache, making the machines sing and the
bosses happy, their spirits thirsting for a drop of spring water, or
a cooling valley breeze.
In Boston, the agents of those same factory bosses would be
waiting on the piers, to corral the freshest and strongest of these
young women, to put shoes on the feet of America, clothes on
American backs. She had seen it so many times on the Long Wharf
when the ships came in.
And she had seen the jaded 'Bridgets' traipse down to Boston
Common with their silver-spoon charges, glad of an outing and
a few mouthfuls of fresh air. And the threadbare needlewomen,
bodies like 'S' hooks from fifteen hours a day, every day, shaped
over their machines. America promised much. But it took much
in return.
Those below were allowed on deck for an hour of an evening
to cook what little they had on the open stove before being driven
below again. Once uncaged, like ravenous dogs they tore at the
carpetbags until the meagre contents contained within, spilled on
to the deck. A few praties, a bag of the hard yellow meal - 'Peel's
Brimstone', after the British Prime Minister who sought to feed
the starving Irish with it, until it sat like marbles, pyramided in
their bellies. Sometimes she saw a side of pig or the hindquarter of
an ass, smoked or salted for preservation. Finally, the carpetbags
carried a drop of castor oil for the bowels - to clear out Peel's
yellow marbles.
Once she watched horrified as a young lad, no older than Patrick,
was flung from the carpetbag melee by a much older man, his
father. The boy careered against the tripod supporting the cooking
cauldron. The screams, as his arms and upper body were scalded,
served to distract none but his mother and sister from the frenzy
taking place. The ship's doctor was finally summoned, but the
boy's frailty was unable to sustain his sufferings and he expired
before relief could be administered.
She noticed, the following evening, that the tragedy stayed no
hand from the continuing brawls for the carpetbag rations.
Again, Ellen kept the children close to her, having found the
silent girl one evening to have disappeared and crept amongst the
carpetbaggers, peering into their faces, searching out a spark of
recognition between any and herself. Ellen could still get nothing
from her, nor did the girl speak to either Mary or Patrick.
At first the strangeness of being on the ship had seemed to
frighten the girl - as it did Ellen's own two children. Then, she
became fascinated by it. Looking out on every side, running quickly
from windward to leeward, watching the land slide away behind
them. Or, facing mizzenward, almost, it seemed to Ellen, listening to the flap of the wind in the masts. Other times she would find the
girl staring for hours into the deep, ever-changing waters, finding
some kinship there, amidst the white spume, the dark silent depths.
What was ever to become of her, Ellen wondered. She would have
to give her a name. She couldn't be just the 'silent girl', as they had
taken to referring to her, for ever.

The thirty days at sea, whilst giving Ellen time to regain herself,
had done nothing to restore her with regard to Patrick.
Mary had gone very much into herself since Katie's death. Ellen
understood this, trying, as she also was, to come to terms with her
own grief and guilt. What it must be like for Mary, filled with the
guilt of the circumstances, which had caused Katie to be separated
from her, Ellen could only imagine. But Mary's guilt and blame
were directed inwards, not towards Ellen.
Not so with Patrick. He still resented her for deserting them
and didn't seek much to conceal it either. Ellen had decided to
let things take their own course between them, not to rush him.
But Boston wasn't far away - and Lavelle. If Patrick didn't show
some sign in the next week or so of coming around, then she
would have to sit him down anyway and tell him about Lavelle.
Already, when she had returned to Ireland to retrieve the children,
her changed appearance and failure to return sooner had caused
Patrick to accuse her of having a 'fancy man' in America.
Three days out of Boston, she spoke to them of Lavelle. 'I want to
tell you about Boston . . .' she began. 'There are a lot of houses.
Big, big houses and a lot of streets. Not like our little street in the
village, but long, long streets and every one of them crowded with
people,' she explained.
'Like Westport?' Mary ventured.

'Like twenty Westports all pulled together,' she answered, 'and
the sea on one side of Boston and the rest of America on its
other side.'
Mary's eyes opened wide at the idea. Patrick stayed silent.
'And Boston Common, itself as big as all Maamtrasna. Where
people walk and children play in the Frog Pond and skate in the
snow. And,' she drew in close to them, 'a giant tree where they
used to hang witches! And,' she moved on, seeing the frightened
look on Mary's face, 'horses that pull tram carts - you'll love going
for a ride in them.'
This restored Mary's fearful-eyed-at-the-hanging-of-witches look
to something more approaching ordinary delight.
'When we get there you'll be going to school to learn all about
Boston and America, and lots of other things besides,' she went on,
wondering what she would do for the silent girl in this regard.
'Will you not be doing the Lessons with us any more, a Mary
started to ask and corrected herself, 'Mother?'
'Well, Mary, I think you and Patrick are too grown up for me
to be still teaching you at home. The best schools in the whole,
wide world are in Boston. It will be very exciting for you both with
American children . . . English and German children . . . children
from everywhere,' she told them.
'Will they be like us?' Patrick spoke for the first time.
Ellen, not sure what he was driving at, replied, 'Yes, of course
they will. They'll all be of an age with yourselves, bright and eager
to get on.' she said, thinking she had answered him.
'No, but like us - Irish?' he countered.
She had to think for a minute. 'Yes, yes, of course there will
be children like you, who have come from Ireland. Did I not
say that?'
Patrick pressed his point. 'And what about those?' he pointed
to the deckfloor, 'those ones below there?'
'Well I'm sure they'll all be wanting education,' she half
answered. The way Patrick looked at her told her he knew she
had tried to skirt his question. She decided to plunge straight on,
into the deeper end of things. 'Now, as well as the schools, you'll
meet some people in Boston . . . who - who have helped me . . .'
She slowed, picking out the words. 'A Mr Peabody, a merchant
who owns shops . . .'
Patrick watched her intently, searching out any flicker or falter
that would betray her.
'Mr Peabody helped me to get started in business and a Mr
Lavelle, a friend . . .' she could feel Patrick's eyes burning into
her, '. . . who saved my life and helped me escape Australia to get
back to you. Mr Lavelle works with me in the business.'
There, she had gotten it all out and in one blurt. It was so silly
of her to be nervous of telling them, her own children.
Neither of them had any questions, Mary's face lighting up at
the news that Mr Lavelle had saved her mother's life.
'Oh, he must be a good man, this Mr Lavelle, to do that ... a
good man like Daddy was!' she added.
'He is,' Ellen said, more shaken by the innocence of Mary's
statement than by any hard question Patrick might have asked.
It was what she had wanted to avoid at all costs - any notion
that Lavelle was stepping into their father's shoes. He wasn't. God
knows, he wasn't.

Soon they were within sight of America, evidenced by increased
activity in every quarter of the Jeanie Goodnight. Ellen still had
not resolved the problem of naming the silent girl. Calling her by
no name seemed to be so soulless. How well she had come on since
Ellen had first found her. Or rather since the girl had first found
them, with her silent running alongside their carriage on the road
towards Louisburgh. Not begging, just running and running until
Ellen had been forced to halt the grotesque duet and take the girl
aboard. Now, if only she'd speak - tell them what her name was.
Ellen determined to try again with her.
To her horror she found the girl part way up the rigging, seeking
a better view of America. Petrified that she'd fall, Ellen anxiously
beckoned for her to come down.
The girl jumped on to the deck, smiling at Ellen. Tall and
dark-haired, her frame now filled out the skimpy dress that, a
month past, had hung so shapelessly on her. She still had a bit
of condition to put on, still looked scrawny but at least she was
on the way.
'What's your name, child, and where did you come from?' Ellen
asked - almost more of herself than the girl. She, eyes still alight
with the rigging fun, just looked back at her - happy, forlorn,
smiling, such a mixture, Ellen thought she must have her own
pinings and no one to share them with.
The one and only time the girl had spoken, at Katie's burial,
it had been in Irish. She probably had no English. Ellen tried
again asking her name, this time in Irish. English or Irish, the
silent girl made no response. Ellen was sure the girl heard her,
understood her even, but, for whatever reason, could not, or
would not, reply.
'We have to get you a name, child,' she said, touching the girl's
face. 'A name to go with those hazel-brown eyes and that pert
little nose of yours. A name for America.'
The deck was now getting crowded with sea-weary travellers,
jubilant at the sight of land before them. Before she could progress
things further with the girl, Mary ran at her all of a tizzy.
'Is that it, is that Boston?' she burst out, more like Katie than
anything, unable to hold back the excitement the sight before
them evoked. Patrick too arrived, his forehead dark and intense
with interest, but not wanting them to see it.
Ellen felt her own spirits quicken. Momentarily forgetting her quest for a name, she began pointing out places to them. 'Look at
all the ships! Remember, I told you. And all the islands, let's see
if I still have names for them?'
Mary laughed at the strange-sounding names as Ellen tried to
get them right.
'Noodles Island, Spectacles Island, Apple Island and Pudding
Point!' she rattled off, pleased with herself.
'No shortage of food here in America then,' Patrick cut in, trying
to deny them the moment.
Ellen ignored him. 'And that's Deer Island! We'll have to stop
there for . . . for the people below, for quarantine . . . that they
have no diseases,' she hurried to explain.
And their eyes were agape at the size and splendour of the
sprawling Athens of America, with its tall spires distantly spiking
the heavens.
'There's the harbour way ahead,' she pointed out, trying to
distinguish the Long Wharf, 'where we'll dock. Beyond that is
the State House and Quincy Market.' They heard the quiver of
recognition in her voice as she tumbled out the names, all foreign,
all strange to them. 'Further up is Boston Common - I'll take you
there.' She hugged the three of them, this time leaving out the
witches. 'On the higher ground at the back - you can't see it clearly
from this far - is Beacon Hill, where once were lit the warning
lights for the city if it was going to be attacked.' She gabbled on,
childlike, dispensing all she knew to them. 'And there's a place
up there called Louisburgh Square - like Louisburgh back home
- where I found -' She stopped, looking at the silent girl in front
of her. 'Louisburgh - that's it! That's it!' She laughed excitedly.
'We'll call her after the place where she was found, and the place
she is coming to! Louisburgh - we'll call her "Louisa".'
Ellen looked from one to the other of them. Mary smiled,
nodding her head up and down. Patrick signalled neither assent
nor dissent. '"Louisa" - it's a good name, a grand name,' Ellen
Went on. How easy it had been in the end - naming the girl. 'It'll
suit her well! Oh, everything is working out fine! I knew it would
once we came to America!'
The silent girl, who had drifted a few paces off from them,
sensing the commotion turned from looking at her new home,
the place she was now being named for.
'Louisa!' Ellen took the girl by the arms, jiggling them up and
down, like a girl herself. 'Louisa - welcome to America!'
The girl just looked at her, beyond her, before turning her
attention back to the sight of her adopted home, indifferent in
the extreme to her new appellation.
'It's not even an Irish name,' Patrick mumbled, more to himself
than anybody.
Ellen, nevertheless, heard him. 'You're right, Patrick . . . it's not,'
she said sharply, fed up with his surliness. 'It's American!'
Lavelle was waiting on the Long Wharf for them. As they disembarked
he waved, a big smile creasing his weathered face. It was
easy to pick him out on the thronged jetty, his well-built frame
setting him apart as much as the casual colours he favoured a
russet-coloured jacket; a wheaten homespun shirt - colours
of the season. But he wouldn't have thought of that, she knew,
watching the bob of his head - like summer corn in autumn sun.
He never looked Irish, the way Michael did - 'Black Irish' with
the Spanish blood. Lavelle always looked Australian, reminding
her of the bushland, the baked earth, the wide-open spaces. She
was pleased to see him, but nervous, none the less, about how
the children might regard him. Of her own reaction to him she
was clear. He was her business partner, her good companion. She
would reinstate that particular relationship from today and that
relationship only.
He was restrained when he moved to greet them through the
milling crowds, but shook her hand warmly.
'Ellen, it's good to see you again! You're welcome back! And
who are these fine young ladies and gentleman?' he went on, unsure
of how to deal with her return.
She saw him stop for a moment as he took in Mary, looked for
the missing Katie, then at Louisa, it not making sense to him.
'This is Patrick,' she intervened. 'Patrick, this is Mr Lavelle of whom I spoke . . . and this is Mary,' Ellen introduced the
nine-year-old image of herself. 'And this is . . .' she paused as
Lavelle's gaze transferred to the silent girl, '. . . this is Louisa, who
has come with us to Boston.' She saw the question still remain in
Lavelle's eyes. 'We had to leave Katie behind . . . with Michael.'
He caught her arm, understanding at once. 'Oh, I'm sorry, Ellen.
So sorry - you've had so much of trouble . . . after everything else
to . . .' he faltered, unable to find the words.
'Well, we're here,' she said simply. 'At last, we're here.'
'And how is it in Ireland?' Lavelle moved on the conversation.
They would talk later of Katie and this girl Louisa who, when
he made to greet her, seemed not to notice him. She was deficient
of hearing, or speech, or both, he thought.
'Ireland is poorly,' Ellen answered him, 'Ireland is lost entirely.'
'And what of the Insurrection - the Young Irelanders - we read
something of it in the Pilot.' he said, referring to the Archdiocese
of Boston's weekly newspaper.
'The Insurrection failed - I brought you some newspapers, The
Nation,' she answered. 'There was much talk of it in Ireland and
aboard ship. I have little interest in it. Now we are here and Ireland
is . . .' she turned her head seawards, '. . . there.'
He heard the weariness in her voice. God only knows what she
had gone through to redeem her two remaining children.
'Mr Peabody enquires after you frequently,' he said, in an effort
to brighten her up, knowing how much she enjoyed her dealings
with the Jewish merchant.
'Oh! And is he well himself, and the business - how is it?'
she asked.
'Both Mr Peabody and the business continue to thrive,' he told
her with a certain amount of satisfaction, she noticed. Things must
have gone better between him and Peabody, in her absence, than
she had hoped for.

The children were agog at Boston's Long Wharf, stretching, as
Mary put it, 'from the middle of the sea, to the middle of
the town'.
'City,' corrected Patrick, showing he was a man of the world,
not like his sister who knew nothing. 'It's a city!'
If Westport Quay swirled with all the varied elements of quayside
life, then here, in Boston, it was as if the mixed ingredients
of the whole world had collided together. Tea-ships, ice-ships,
spice-ships. Syphilitic sailors, back from the South Seas, poxed
and partially blind, bringing home with them 'the ladies' fever and the stale stench of flensed whales. In their midst stood sinless
and sober-suited Bostonians cut from the finest old Puritan stock;
anxious for merchandise, disgusted by this new influx of paupers
and the sanitary evils accompanying them.
The hiring agents of the mill bosses agitatedly sized up this fresh
supply of factory fodder. 'Labour!' they hollered, to this sea of
'green hands'. 'Labour!' they called, winking and smiling at the
wide-eyed Irish girls. Seeking to seduce with American smiles, as
much as with dollars and cents, those they considered 'sober of
habit, sound of limb and with good strong backs' - as they had
been instructed. One man's 'sanitary evil', it seemed in America,
was another's 'strong back'.
The children's heads turned at every step, gawking at this and
that, each new sight and sound of Boston a greater wonder to
them than the one before. Like the gaudily bedecked sailors of
various hue, reeking of spices and perfumes from the far reaches
of the Orient, chattering in unintelligible tongues. Or a few freed
slaves from the South silently bullocking the heavy cargo. She had
to prevent them from staring at people.
'But that man . . . he's all black, what happened to him?' Mary
couldn't contain herself.
'He's a Negro - from Africa,' Ellen hushed her.
'But will it rub off?' Mary persisted.
'Only if you shake hands with him, Mary,' Lavelle cut in
solemnly.
Mary's eyes opened even wider, craning her neck to see this man
who would change colour at a touch.
'Mr Lavelle should have more sense, Mary, ignore him!' Ellen
rejoined. 'Some people have a different skin to ours, that's all and
it doesn't rub off!' she stated emphatically, more to Lavelle than to Mary. Nothing she had told them about America had ever
Prepared them for this, for Boston's Long Wharf.
And the Irish. Everywhere the Irish; shouting, laughing, crying,
mobbed by relatives who had crossed the Atlantic before them.
Others, solitary young girls clinging to their carpetbags - no one
to meet them in this throbbing kaleidoscope, this frightening place. Like motherless calf-whales they were, these daughters of Erin
floundering unprotected in the great ocean of America. Easy prey
to the welcoming smile, the outstretched hand, the familiar lilt;
to their own, the Irish crimpers and 'harpies', who would flense
them of everything.
'I can see that Boston is as busy and bustling as ever,' she said
to Lavelle, full of being back in the place.
'And bursting at the seams -thousands have arrived these past
months - mostly Irish,' he replied. 'The bosses are happy; "green
hands" from Ireland mean cheap labour,' he continued, 'but the
City Fathers are not, thinking pauperism and Popery both will sink
Boston!'
She didn't care about either bosses or Brahmins. Boston, bursting
or not, was such a far cry from what she had left; the tumbled
villages, a famished land; silence-no hope. Here there was hope.
To her, the city with its crowded chaos, its cacophonous quay-life,
rang out with the very music of hope.
'Stop, Lavelle! Stop here!' she called out of a sudden, almost
forgetting. "I want them to see it!'
Lavelle 'whoaupped' the big bay mare he had hired for the day
and had scarcely pulled them to a halt, when gathering up her
skirts she leapt from the trap-cart.
'Come on, come on!' she beckoned to the children, shepherding
them across the mouth of the busy wharf.
Lavelle stayed where he was. She was as impetuous as ever, he
thought, watching the long straight back of her weave through
the crowds. He smiled to himself- the factory bosses would be
glad of a back like that! Three months since she had left and he
had thought about her every day, wondering what awaited her in
Ireland. Wondering when, if ever, she would return. Then, these
past few weeks, he had spent scouring the pages of the Pilot for
shipping intelligence and keeping an eye on the Wharf for a fair
wind to bring her back.
She looked a bit racked, he thought. Her face, the way she didn't
smile as big as he remembered. That little furrow above her lips the
one he could never help watching, fascinated at how its fine fold
rose and fell with the cadence other speech. It didn't fall and rise as
much now, as if she was holding it back, keeping it in check. Still,

it was a wonder at all that she looked as well as she did. She must
have been too late to save the other twin, whatever had happened.
It must have near killed her, and would eat away at her for ever,
he knew. This one, Mary, with the dos of wild red hair on her
- he couldn't get over how like Ellen she looked. Going to be
tall like her too. He could see it now, as together they rounded
the corner of the building away from him. The girl was quieter
than her mother, he thought, less impetuous, more of a thinker.
But maybe that was down to the foreignness of the place and him
being present. And all that had happened.
The boy had made strange with him. With his black unruly hair
and sallow skin, he looked more like he'd come off a ship from
the Spanish Americas, than Ireland. He was unlike her in every
feature. Lavelle wondered about the boy's father - Michael, her
husband. It was her strong attachment to Michael's memory that
was holding back her affections from him. He had been hoping
that when she stepped down from the ship, she would have been
wearing the scarf he had given her. But she wasn't. He wondered, what had she told the children about him? Or, if she'd thought
much on him at all these past three months?
And that girl - he wondered about her too. The one who said
nothing, only looked at you with those big brown eyes taking
you in. Where had she appeared from? He'd never beard tell
of her before Ellen went back to Ireland. Maybe she was a
neighbour's child, orphaned by famine; there was no shortage
of those here either. Nearly more orphanages than groggeries in
Boston, so fast were they springing up. She'd probably put the
girl into one of those - run by the Sisters. He 'gee'd' the horse,
threading it gingerly after them, glad that he'd painted the sign.
It would be a surprise for her. She was standing in front of it, her
finger outstretched, reading aloud the strange-sounding words to
the children. She turned, hearing the clip-clop of the horse.
'Mr Lavelle's been busy painting, I can see,' she said proudly to
them. But it was meant for him, he knew. '"The New England
Wine Company",' she read out the larger letters again, then the
smaller ones underneath, '"Importers of fine wines, ports and
liqueurs". That's us!' she said to them with a little laugh. Even
Patrick seemed impressed, looking at her, then at the sign over the warehouse, then back at Lavelle, trying to piece it all together.
'You're a merchant, Mother!' Mary said, flushed with pride in her, yet not in the least bit surprised.
'I ... I suppose I am,' Ellen replied, never having thought of herself in that way.
They went inside, Louisa remaining close by her, Mary and Patrick going from rack to rack examining the bottles lying there, the labels with the unusual writing wrapped round them.
'Fron-teen-nyac, pair ay fees' - Frontignac, Pere et Fils - she tried to explain, 'the people we get the wine from in Montreal, in Canada. Frontignac, Father and Son,' she went on, watching them watch her as if she was some stranger. And in truth she was. Their memories of her were as far removed from the woman now before them, explaining French wines, as Massachusetts was from the Maamtrasna valley. An ocean in the heart's geography. It would take time.
'Bore-dough,' she pointed to a ruby rich red, 'the place the wine comes from in France.'
It was a strange thing, Patrick thought, for her to be selling this French wine, her and the 'fancy man' that kept eyeing him up and kept smiling at his mother.
Ellen was well pleased at what she saw in the warehouse. Lavelle had kept it solidly stocked against the coming season and the winter closing of the St Lawrence river. Furthermore, he had secured her new accommodation.
'In Washington Street between Milk and Water Streets, near the Old Corner Bookstore,' he told her. 'I know you like to be at the centre of things, and it's bigger, will be more suitable now with the children.' She had surrendered her old lodgings, not knowing how long she would be away. Her belongings Lavelle had stored in the warehouse, and more recently moved to the new address, paying the rent to secure it against her return. He himself continued to live where he previously had, in the North End, though it was 'now being over-run with the poorest of our own'.
The Long Wharf led them into State Street, New England's financial heart, its temples of commerce close to the city's importing and exporting lifeline - the wharves. Lavelle took them left at the Old State House, down along Washington Street, its patchwork of buildings, filled with apothecaries, engravers, instrument-makers and 'Newspaper Row'. Signs and hoardings were stuck everywhere, higgledy-piggledy, while canvas awnings jutted out above the footwalks, providing shelter from the rain, shade from the sun, for those with dollars to spend.
Four flights of stairs they climbed of the high-shouldered building, which itself stretched upwards above the world of commerce below. The effort was repaid in full when arriving in their rooms she saw, across from them on the corner of Milk Street, the nestled campaniles of the Old South Meeting House; how they ascended like a pinnacled prayer to the steepled sky.
She knew she would love it here 'on top of the world', as she said to Lavelle. They had three rooms. One large, with two windows, for living in, and above that, two smaller rooms, each lighted by dormers, for sleeping. The larger one for herself and the girls, the smaller for Patrick. She had considered giving the three children the larger one, her taking the lesser room. But Patrick was of an age now.
It was close to everywhere. The Wharf and their warehouse, the Common, shops, churches, schools and the Old Corner Bookstore - which she had commenced frequenting before she left - only a hen's footstep away from her. Beneath their roost, on the next floor down, were commercial offices. Below that again, suppliers of mathematical instruments, while a sewing shop for ladies' garments and a dye house occupied the street level of the premises.
She was grateful to Lavelle. He had gone to some trouble to find this place, knowing how she much preferred the rattle and hum of city life above the quiet of some numbing suburb. The frantic commercial life of 'Hub City', as Bostonians liked to call it, was rapidly devouring all available space here at its centre. She wondered how long it would be before trade and commerce would drive further out the dwindling number of inhabitants, like themselves. Where they now stood would soon enough fall into use as an instrument-maker's den, or a sewing sweatshop.
But while ever they could remain here, she knew she would
be happy.
When she had thanked him again, Lavelle left and she began to
settle them into their new home, high above the world of clarion
calls and the street noise of Boston life, far from the hushed valleys
they had known.
Jacob Peabody made an exaggerated fuss of her when, the following
week, she came to visit him at his premises on South Market
Street across from Faneuil Hall. On top of the Hall's domed cupola,
its weathervane - a copper grasshopper - spun from side to side,
busily welcoming her back.
Now Peabody, white-domed and wrinkle-faced, grasshopped
from behind his counter to welcome her, rubbing his hands on
the white apron he kept on a peg, but which she had never seen him
wear. 'Ellen! Ellen Rua!' he exclaimed, both arms outstretched, a
bleak shaft of October sun diagonally lighting one eye and a flop
of his white hair, vesting him with a kind of manic enthusiasm. He
clasped her to him. He not being quite the match of her in height,
her head ended up over the shoulder of his well-seasoned cardigan,
in its wool the smell of salted hams, spices from the East, tobacco
from the Deep South, all indiscriminately buried there.
'Jacob, I'm going to reek of pork and spices just like you,' she
laughed. 'Let go of me! Anyway, I thought it forbidden by your
beliefs to sell certain things,' she added, unable to resist poking
fun at him. He laughed with her, held her back from him, the
snow-white eyebrows arched, the canny eyes taking her in.
'Ah, Ellen, you are as beautiful as ever. Weary from your travels,
I can tell . . . ?' He paused. 'And beyond that a certain sorrow in
you . . .' He had never changed, could tell everything from studying
her and then never hesitated in its saying. 'But underneath,' he went
on, 'your spirit has not changed. Look at you, the very first minute
you are here flinging the beliefs of an old man in his face. It's good
to have you back - back home in Boston,' he beamed. And he
clasped her to him again in his pork and spice way.
It felt good to her to be back. And Boston was home. The
sounds, the smells, the bustle of Quincy Market, the air spiced
with possibility instead of the pall of oppression which hung over
Ireland. And good old reliable but mischievous Jacob. He had been
a tower of strength before she had left on her journey to Ireland.
He made her tea, Indian, from the Assam Valley, closed his
door against the world and bade her sit. 'I want to hear every word, Ellen,' he emphasized. 'I've missed the music of your voice
-- the Boston drawl has no music to it - as flat and as cold as the
Quincy marble that built the place!'
"Whatever about missing her, Jacob still didn't miss any chance
to snipe at his adopted city. Some day she'd ask him about that
and Papa Peabody, as he called his father, and the change of
name from something Jewish to Peabody. Whatever his origins,
Jacob had built up a commodious store on South Market Street.
It was frequented alike by well-heeled clientele from Beacon Hill,
the literati of Louisburgh Square and Boston's rising middle class.
Always well stocked with the exotic and the oriental and anything
from pickled gherkins to spiced Virginia hams, 'Peabody's' did a
thriving business.
When she and Lavelle had first arrived in Boston, they had
decided that rather than she go to the factory gates and Lavelle
to 'build railroads to build America', they would invest in some
business. The wine had been her idea, after Australia - being all
that she knew apart from potato picking in Ireland. She had written
to Father McGauran, the chaplain she had befriended in the fever
sheds of Grosse lie, with the idea that she could import French wine
from French Canada. Through the old Seigneurie connections of
the Catholic Church in Quebec's province, Father McGauran had
found them Frontignac, Pere et Fils, Wine Merchants, importers
of vin superieur de France.
Soon the deliveries came. Crates of full-bodied reds and clean on the palate
whites, from the chateaux of Bordeaux and Burgundy.
Sparkling mousselet from the chilly hills and chalk caverns of
Champagne. Darker, liqueured aromas too, matured in oaken barriques; coveted by angels in the deep cellars of Cognac. All
signed with the flourished quill of Jean Baptiste Frontignac, their
quality guaranteed with the waxen red seal of the French cockerel.
At first, she had approached the Old English-style merchants
of Boston - the Pendletons and Endecotts. These had politely
but firmly turned her away, astounded at her nerve, she only
a 'jumped-up Irish "Biddy", and selling French wines!'
Finally, she had come upon Peabody's place. Although at the
time uncertain of his motives - the way he had taken her hand,
lingered over it - Jacob had taken a chance on her, when no one
else would.
She too had taken a chance on Peabody, devising an 'at cost'
agreement with the merchant. The terms by which it operated
guaranteed that she and Lavelle would deliver him the finest of
wines and brandies, at cost, taking no profit. Peabody, when he had
sold their wines, would then split the profits with them. Further,
she had convinced Peabody to give their wines a separate display
from the rest, near the entrance, on shelves specially constructed
by Lavelle. It had been a risk but it had worked.
As the story of her journey to Ireland unfolded, Jacob Peabody
held on to her hands, rubbing them underneath in the fleshy part,
but not in the suggestive, wicked way that was normally his wont,
but of which she never took any serious notice. Now, he comforted
her, his sharp eyes on her face watching, understanding.
It surprised her how much she opened herself up to Jacob. Not
nearly so much had she to Lavelle. To this Jewman, who had
changed his name to survive in Nativist Boston - a city as zealous
in attitude to Jews and other foreign-born as it was towards 'papist
Celts' - but had closed his shop to listen to her story. When she had
finished, it was as though a great weight had lifted from her.
Peabody waited before speaking, letting all she had told him sink
in. She had suffered much, more than most who had found their
way here to the Bay Colony. But she had an indomitable spirit.
Time and America would heal her loss, if she let them. She was
angry now at the 'Old Country' and all that it had inflicted on
her. But that would pass. He hoped that, on its passing, it would
not be replaced by the misbegotten love for their native land, so
often the fruitful cause of insanity among the Irish here.
At last he spoke. 'Ireland is behind you now, Ellen,' he said
tenderly, still stroking her hand, like a father. 'A new life in the
New World beckons. Try, not to forget, but to remember less. It
works, Ellen, believe me, it works.'
'Thank you, Jacob . . . for listening . . . for everything.'She leaned
over and kissed his cheek. How wise he was. What he had told her
was like something her father - the Maistir - would have said. 'Try,
not to forget, but to remember less.' It was good advice.
She could never forget; that would be a betrayal. But she could
remember less, without letting Ireland and its Famine gnaw at her
insides, fetter her.
They sat for a while, exiles both. Trade had been good for Jacob
and things had gone well between him and Lavelle - 'her young
helper', as Peabody insisted on calling him. She didn't pick him up
on it this time, just thanked him again, with the promise she would
be back within the week to talk about 'clarets for Christmas and
champagnes for the New Year'.
As she walked back from Peabody's, Boston, with its busy
streets, its banks and fine tall buildings, seemed indeed to be
the hub of the universe. The buildings that, when first she came
there with Lavelle, crowded in on top of her, taking patches out
of the sky, now signified something else - progress, getting ahead.
Looking upwards instead of downwards.
She wanted to be part of all that now, instead of on her hands
and knees clawing at the lazy beds for the odd lumper missed by
the harvesters, up to her eyes in muck. What good were grand
mountains and sparkling lakes, when you had to crawl, belly to
the ground, in order to fill it? An empty craw sees no beauty.
Faneuil Hall, the spiralling Old South Meeting House, the
Grecian pilasters of the State Street buildings, Beacon Hill these
would be her new mountains. The harbour with its wharves
and docks, its busy commerce - her new lakes. It was all here.
Everything Ireland wasn't, this place was.
'Try, not to forget, but to remember less,' she repeated to
herself.

In the following weeks, in her efforts to 'remember less', Ellen
threw herself with abandon into her new life in Boston. Lavelle
had indeed done well while she was away. He had kept Jacob's two
stores fully stocked and the merchant reasonably happy, despite
Peabody's frequent mutterings about it not being the same 'since
Mrs O'Malley deserted me and sailed for Ireland'.
Lavelle had also secured a new outlet for the New England Wine
Company, in the developing suburb of West Roxbury. It was far
enough away not to damage Peabody's business.
'What he doesn't know won't bother him!' was Lavelle's dictum.
Ellen wasn't so sure.
'It's a bit underhand - Jacob's been a good friend to us and our
business,' she said to Lavelle and resolved to tell Peabody herself
at the right moment.
The children seemed to take up so much of her time, but she
was happy 'doing for them', busying herself more with domestic
matters than business. In this she was forced to rely, to a greater
degree than she thought fair, on Lavelle. If during the daylight
hours she didn't manage to get to the warehouse, then at evening
Lavelle would call on her to discuss matters of business, bringing
various documentation of invoices and receipts. Because of the
nature of their arrangement with Peabody, resources had to be
prudently managed - something to which she had always applied
herself vigorously. She looked forward to these evening visits,
finding some time for titivating herself in advance of them between
household chores and the children. This total reliance
on Lavelle would, she knew, be but a temporary measure, until
she had settled them into suitable schools.
Situated in the 'Little Britain of Boston' - the non-Irish end, of
the North End - the Eliot School was one of Boston's better
public schools for boys. Nominally non-denominational, pupils
nevertheless sang from the same hymn sheet - the Protestant one.
Too, the official school bible was the King James version. However,
Eliot School had the best spoken English in Boston, fashioned no
doubt from that bible of the city's non-chattering classes, Peter
Piper's Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation.
She wasn't unduly worried about the Protestant ethos prevalent
in Boston's public schools - the 'little red school houses' as the
Boston Irish called them. Patrick would receive a more liberal
education at Eliot than in the 'little green school houses' - the
narrow Catholic schools. She, herself, would see to his spiritual
needs outside of school. At first Patrick resisted her choice of
schooling for him, but finding Eliot School populated with a good
sprinkling of other Irish Catholic boys, his resistance diminished.
Mary's future, Ellen decided, would be best served by placing her
with the nuns. She saw no contradiction in this, relative to her plans
for Patrick. Boston, in terms of schooling for girls, particularly
young Irish and Catholic girls, far surpassed that available to its
young men, mainly due to the influence of the 'Sisters of Service' the
nuns. Mostly Irish or the American-born daughters of the Irish,
they were a group of free-spirited and independent-minded young
women who had eschewed marriage in favour of the economic,
social and intellectual independence the Sisterhood offered. What
Ellen liked about them was that having liberated themselves, they
had a more liberal view of other women's roles in society. Orders
like the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, where she would send
Mary, and others, sought not to prepare the young immigrant
women solely for marriage, but to lead lives of independence and
dignity. This, in turn, would provide the pathway to spirituality,
rather than the more usual one followed by most young Irish
women - the bridal path.
The nuns would be good for Mary.
With regard to Louisa, Ellen had much with which to occupy
her mind. She had grown a great fondness for the girl but still
wondered about her - where had she come from? Her family, if any? The Pilot ran regular columns of the 'lost' and 'missing' Irish
- those who had become separated en route to the New World, or who had moved deeper into the American heartland before family
had arrived from Ireland to join them.
Each week Ellen read the 'lost' notices, relaxing only when
nowhere among them could she find a description to match that
of Louisa. She agonized for weeks as to whether she herself should
put in a notice, seeking any family of the girl who might be in
America. Reluctantly, she came to the conclusion that it was 'the
right and proper thing to do', as she explained to Patrick and
Mary, 'and pray that we don't find anybody!' she added.
For a month she had inserted the notice, hoping it would go
unanswered.

Female child - of about twelve or thirteen years, unspoken.
Tall, with dark brown hair and hazelwood eyes - found
among the famished near Louisburgh Co. Mayo 20th
day of August 1848. Now living in Boston. Seeking to
be reunited with any members of family who may have
escaped the Calamity to the United States.

To her despair, she had been flooded with respondents. With each
one her heart sank lower, fearing that this would be the one to
claim Louisa, then lifting again with relief when it was not. In
turn, she was filled with guilt at her own selfishness, then sorrow
at the disappointment carved out on the faces of those who came
with so much hope but left again, empty-handed. Faintheartedly
they would apologize with a 'Sorry for troubling you, ma'am!' or 'I
was hoping 'twould be her,' some would say sheepishly, awkward
for having come in the wrong.
One young woman from near Louisburgh arrived brimful of
hope. She had, she said, been told that her young sister 'had
been taken pity on by a red-haired woman, rescued from the
famished hordes and brought over to Amerikay'. She had searched
high and low, traipsed the mill towns waiting outside until,
disgorged in their thousands, each night the mill girls poured
out into the streets. She was afraid she had missed her sister in
the crowds.
'Was it to Boston she came?' Ellen enquired, wondering if the
young woman's task was fruitless from the start.
'To Amerikay, anyway!' she replied, as if 'Amerikay' were no
vaster than the townland of her home village. 'She has to be here
somewhere, if it's true what they say!' she added, defiant with
faith. The girl had no idea where her sister was, would spend a
lifetime looking for her in 'Amerikay'. Probably never to find her
- in this life at least, Ellen knew.
'You have to keep looking,' was all she could limply offer
the girl.
'I do - them that's still alive back home are always asking
for news of her - she was the youngest ... but I'll find her
yet, I will!'
Ellen's heart had gone out to the young woman, her hopes
dashed once again, yet still full of faith, still resolved to finding
her sister.
'Thanks, ma'am - this one is very like her,' she said of Louisa,
'but it's not her. She's a fine child, God bless her, I hope you find
her people.'
Ellen spoke to Lavelle about it, devastated by the experience.
'There are thousands upon thousands of them still searching for
their lost ones, still hoping to find some trace. It's heartbreaking.'
'They've done a right good job, the Westminster government,'
he replied, scathingly, 'scattering the Celts to the four corners of
the globe. Keeping us on the move, wandering, like a divided army
trying to find itself. One day that army will regroup '
'Oh, Lavelle!' she had chided him. 'I'm not talking about armies or the British Empire. You should've seen the look on that poor
girl's face - she will search all of America, search till the day
she dies. Louisburgh, and all that's in it, will have long since
disappeared before she finds her sister.'
As the months passed the number of enquiries about Louisa,
originally mainly from Boston and the greater Massachusetts area,
reduced. Then a trickle from the further-flung regions of New
York, Montana, Wisconsin and even Louisiana, found their way to
her door clutching old issues of the Pilot, clinging on to even older
hopes. Eventually the stream of people calling dried up completely.
Only then did Ellen allow herself to fully relax, previously having
measured out to herself only small, fragile rations of relief as each
month had slipped by.
Louisa herself bore all of this with apparent equanimity, Ellen
having assured her in advance that this course of action was not an attempt to get rid of her, and again reassuring her, each time
someone called, of how much both she and the others loved her.
What went on within Louisa's mind, as people came and went,
Ellen would never know. Some callers took just one look at her,
knowing immediately she wasn't the girl they sought. Others
inspected her more intently, peering into her face, asking questions:
'Did she ever utter a sound at all?' or 'What name has she?'
Always, Ellen had the feeling that Louisa understood. Once or
twice she had faced her, asking, 'Louisa, can you hear me - tell me if you can hear me?'
The girl had just looked at her lips as she spoke, so that Ellen
didn't know whether she was avoiding looking directly at her, or
merely trying to understand in that manner. Either way she got no
response, only the killing smile.
Although Louisa did not converse with anybody she was yet
such a part of their lives; always there, soaking up everything. If
not, indeed, through her ears, then through her eyes, and, in some
strange way Ellen couldn't define, just through her presence. She
resolved to take Louisa to a doctor.

'I can find no physical defect in the child, Mrs O'Malley,' Doctor
Hazlett confided in her after examining Louisa. 'It may be that
the abject circumstances in which you found her have locked a
portion of her mind, a portion in which she still remains,' he
offered, referring to their pre-examination discussion, when Ellen
had told him her story.
'What am I to do, Doctor?' she asked.
'The answer lies not with me,' he replied, 'but the answer, if
anywhere to be found, will be found in Boston - the cradle of the
sciences. I propose sending you to Professor Hitchborn for further
consultation.'
'What kind of professor?' Ellen worried.
'Professor Hitchborn is a doctor of medicine - a graduate of the
Harvard School, but shall we say he deals more with what the
eye cannot see and the ear cannot hear, rather than with what
they can Doctor Hazlett informed her. With this conundrum still
ringing in her ears, he bade her 'Good-day!'
The girl would most probably speak in her own time. She
remembered the old woman's prediction, 'She will speak in the
"far-off land"' - the far-off land now obviously being America
- '. . . in the time of great silence,' whatever she meant by that!
But the old woman - Sheela-na-Sheeoga - had been right in her
previous predictions about Ellen's own life.

Professor Hitchborn failed to elicit any utterance from Louisa
after four visits. Ellen hated going back to 'the old stiff-neck',
as she called him, but continued to do so for Louisa's sake.
Always, Ellen seemed to leave these visits with the feeling that
she herself was somehow to blame. That her own motives in first
saving, then adopting Louisa, were not morally pure, thus causing
Louisa's condition. It troubled her. If Louisa felt that she was a
burden on them, that she was adopted only out of guilt and a
sense of duty and not out of love, then maybe Louisa's silence
was fear. fear that if she was found to be able to hear and speak,
to be not so dependent on them, she would be packed off again,
to an orphanage, or worse, to the streets.
Finally, it was Mary who decided for Ellen what to do regarding
Louisa. 'Send Louisa to school with me, I'll look after her!' she
appealed to her mother. Ellen had at first been doubtful of this
solution and considered keeping Louisa at home, giving of her own
time to the girl's education. It would be difficult, but somehow
she would manage. Mary's entreaties of 'Please let her come - I
can help her!' won the day. After consultation with the Mother
Superior, it was agreed the two would be put side by side in the
classroom at the Notre Dame de Namur School for Girls.
Ellen delivered them on Louisa's first day. Both the girls were
bursting with a mixture of excitement and nervousness. Ellen
herself was every bit as on edge as they were, the day being for
her not without its tinge of sadness, too.
'The
last leaving the nest,' she said to Lavelle when he called to
see her that evening.
He perked her up, telling of his escapades as a young scholar,
and asking about her own schooldays.
'They were spent in timeless wonder with my teacher - my
father,' she told him, falling into 'remembering' for once.
Mostly though, she was 'forgetting'. She read with an appetite
Lavelle found hard to understand. Newspapers, periodicals, handbills,
anything from which she could glean more information for
herself and her children about Boston and 'America-life'.
Though he could still raise a smile, even a laugh from her, Lavelle
thought she had gone into herself a bit since returning to Boston. It
was to be expected, he supposed, added to by the preoccupation
with getting the children settled into their new environs. She always
seemed glad to see him, though she never once adverted to their
encounter before she had left for Ireland. Nor did he, deciding to
let things take their own course.
At times, she teased him about Boston's belles, and while there
were many among them who flashed their eyes at the handsome
Mr Lavelle, none caught his in return, as he expected she knew.
Lavelle, since she had left, had been busy in more ways than one.
His geniality and easy manner had led him to form acquaintances
with some of Boston's more go-ahead Irish community. He prevailed
upon her to visit the gathering places with him, thinking
she had 'rarefied herself from all things Irish'. This she agreed
to on occasion but only for his company. She couldn't say she
enjoyed hearing the endless stories of 'Old Ireland' - and in the
old language. Steadfastly she refused to sing the times when song
and dancing broke out, even if Lavelle himself was armed with
his fiddle, hurtling the bow across its strings. At the first of such
gatherings, he had introduced her as 'Ellen Rua'. Afterwards, she
had corrected him.
'It's just "Ellen", Lavelle, plain "Ellen"!'
'Why?' he challenged.
'It just is. "Ellen Rua" is in the past,' she answered.
I understand your wish to forget the past,' he said, 'but this is
something more than that.'
'What is it then, Lavelle?'
'It's a denial of who you are,' he stated matter-of-factly. 'You've
been known since a child as "Ellen Rua", your parents . . .
Michael . . your neighbours . . .'
'Well, they are all of them gone now and so is "Ellen Rua",' she
insisted. But lie would not be put off.
'You're also denying your Irishness, the language, everything . . .
Since the moment you set foot back here, you don't want any part
of it.' he accused.
'Would you blame me?' she retorted. 'And you, Lavelle, what
do you want?' she challenged in return. 'Only your notion of a
red-haired Irish colleen - a Kathleen Ni Houlihan - who you
can hold on to as your dream of Ireland? An Ireland that's dead
and gone . . .' she continued, the blue-green eyes firing up. He
watched, saw the furrow between her lips and nostrils rise and
fall like he remembered. Deepening its well, swelling its narrow
ridges. '. . . and in the Famine grave, an Ireland that all of you
are trying to hang on to, filled with mist and grog and dewy-eyed conneallyes. Living for the day when you all will rise up and send
a big army home to rout "the auld enemy"!' she threw at him.
'And why shouldn't we?' he answered calmly, taking no small delight at seeing her in such an impassioned state. 'Isn't it the
English that have us the way we are?' he added, giving as good
as he got.

With the children now settled in their respective schools, she had,
as she had hoped for, more time to devote to the business of the
New England Wine Company, so taking some of the load from
Lavelle's shoulders.
Coming up to Christmas was their busiest time; Peabody was
demanding and irritable, wanting stocks early, pressing for replacement
stock immediately, arguing that with the large volumes he
was now taking for two stores, rather than one, she should be
'beating down the French with their high prices'. Lavelle made
extra shelving to try and appease him. Lavelle looked after all
activities related to shipping, warehousing and deliveries. She saw
to the ordering, the banking and the documentation, being, as
Lavelle put it, 'better able to hurl the pen' than he was.
Twice weekly she called on Peabody at Quincy Market, soothing
his irascibility, he wanting to hold her hand at every turn, still
referring to Lavelle as 'that young helper of yours, not much
between the ears'. Mockingly he asked her to 'make an old man
happy this Christmas and marry me, Ellen!'
She, in turn, replied, 'Don't be exciting yourself, Jacob, with all
that talk or you'll get a heart attack and never see the Christmas.
I'll neither be an old man's sweetheart, nor a young man's slave.'
Jacob feigned hurt, 'rejected again' . . . then laughter . . . 'Ah
well, what would I do without you to brighten the day?'
what was it about men, she wondered, that they were distracted
so easily? If they had a few children to bear and rear, it would soon
soften their coughs. Always thinking about their 'scythe-stones'! She'd
card the valley women, when they huddled to talk, often laugh and
'It is the last thing to die in a man - the scythe-stone - if it was ever
" good for anything but sharpening a blade in the first place!'

She loved the way that in the Gaelic you could talk 'round' a
thing, with everybody knowing what you meant, say it without
saying it. The Americans never talked in the 'roundabout talk' she
missed that, much and all as she tried to distance herself from
her previous life.
Despite everything, getting the children settled, easing once again
into the business, she hadn't really fitted back into Boston life as
she would have hoped. She didn't know what it was. She still
grieved for Katie, guilt always suffusing the grief. Once started
her thoughts would then run to Annie and Michael, until she
would have to go and hide in the dark of Holy Cross Cathedral,
or slip away to sit in the cold of the Common under the Great Elm.
No matter how busy she was, how she was furthering their lives,
there was always the void, the big aching void, always waiting to
claim her.
Lavelle had been her one constant, steadfast in everything. He
laughed and poked fun at how she worried over things, her
single-mindedness. Kept at her, forcing her not to take herself
too seriously. At first this irritated her, but he didn't stand for that
either, and she found it hard to sustain any measure of annoyance
with him, such was his enthusiasm for 'life to be lived'. And the
children liked him. Even Patrick, though he'd never say it, had
softened towards Lavelle.

They had all gone on 5 November - 'Pope's Night' - to see the
Orange Parades, with their Kick-the-Pope bands. Patrick was agog
at the display of anti-Catholic paraphernalia and the aggressive
clatter-thump of the lambeg drums, the manic drummers facing
each other 'hoop to hoop', with their malacca canes banging out
deafening military tattoos.
'But . . . they're Irish too!' Patrick protested, as Lavelle tried to
explain the sashes, hard hats and anti-Irish slogans.
'They are and they aren't, Patrick!' Lavelle responded. 'Their
feet are on the same island as us at home,' and he laughed, 'and
they've even stolen some of our jigs and reels and fifed them into
marches, though they'll never admit to that. But their hearts are
for ever in England.'
That was the moment, Ellen knew, when Patrick had begun to
change towards her 'fancy man', as he once called Lavelle. The
boy identified with Lavelle's antipathy towards the Orangemen
and their bitter, threatening music. To his credit, Lavelle did not
encourage Patrick, make a thing of it, as he could have done. And
she noticed it had gone on like that, in little fits and starts that
bonded them, without any great scheme being behind it.
Without any great scheme, either - certainly on her part - things
had settled into a comfortable pattern between herself and Lavelle.
He was as much a part of the landscape of her new life as the Old
South Meeting House, spiking the sky across from where she lived,
or the Long Wharf, spiking the sea. Like these boundaries of the
heavens and the ocean, always there, marking out, securing this
exciting New World of hers, so too was Lavelle. Not that she
was unaware of his physical attractiveness, the way he sometimes
collided with her, and would catch her arm, steady her up, and give
that grin of his, causing her a momentary embarrassment. Once
or twice he had held her longer than necessary, startled her by his
nearness, said something like 'Boston life hasn't softened you yet,
you're still a fine woman,' then laughed and let go of her just as
suddenly again.
At Christmas, after he had dined with them, tramped in the
snow, laden with presents for the children, she wasn't totally
unprepared when he asked her.
She had gone down the flights of stairs ahead of him, held the
door, looking out into the abandoned stillness of Washington
Street. No hawkers' cries, no noise of commerce, the Old South
Meeting House cribbed in white. No sound at the Hub of the
Universe, only his voice, clear and as impudent as you please,
passing her, going out into the dampening snows.
'You know, Ellen, we should get married after Lent!'
She never answered him at first, giddy in the moment; she drew
back, waited until he was outside, half-turned for home.
'You know, Lavelle,' she said, mocking his impudence and
laughing, 'I had the same notion myself!' And, despite all of her
previous resolve, it was out before she knew it.
She watched after him, his boots crunching the snow, wayward
flakes haloed on his head, whistling his way down Washington
Street - some old jig-time tune she half-remembered.

In the New Year, little doubts had begun to raise themselves about
whether or not she was doing the right thing. She hadn't remained
steadfast for long. Getting married again was against everything
she once held; against 'being true to the grave'. But that was just
it - that was part of the old ways. Here in Boston, it was different.
After a suitable period of mourning a man and, to a lesser degree,
a woman might marry again. Still, it was only three years.
Not that she ever forgot Michael. Not for one single day, nor
would she, ever. But she had great ease with Lavelle. He had no
fixed notions like some of the other men about where women
fitted - mostly in front of a baking oven. Maybe it was his time
in Australia, where women tamed the harsh bush as much as the
men did. Whatever, there was ease and comfort between them, and
she liked his off-the-cuff manner. He granted her respect, but not
too much. Even the way he had asked her - going out the door as
if not caring if she had said 'yes' or 'no'. Herself and Lavelle
would be a good match.
She had told the children on the following day, St Stephen's,
when she herself was more composed. Mary, she thought, took
it well. Patrick less so, but she did not receive from him the
level of opposition she had expected. The excitement somehow
catching her, Louisa too joined in, running to kiss her as Mary
had done.
By early Lent, she had cast her doubts aside. She had made
her bed, now she must lie in it. At times, the thought of lying in
Lavelle's bed caused her a shiver of expectation.

Spring saw her preparing for the rites of marriage as precepted
by the ever-expanding Archdiocese of Boston. Purity in thought
and action,

The Inviolata to the Blessed Virgin . . .
Inviolata, Integra et casta es, Maria . . .
Stainless, inviolate, and chaste art thou, O Mary . . .
Nostra ut pura pectora sint et corpora . . . That pure our minds and hearts may be ...

Nobody 'forbade the banns' - read out on three consecutive
Sundays at Holy Cross. Each week she sat through their reading,
mortified lest somebody would shout out objecting to her intended
marriage. Worse still that without her knowing it, some prudish
biddy would slink around to the sacristy after Mass and coat the
ear of the priest with poisoned whisperings about her. Then she
would be quietly summoned, the reading of the banns suspended,
she and her children shamed.
When the day finally came, the wedding was grander than anything
she could have had back home. Much grander - and in a hotel
too. While she was against wasting too much money on frippery,
there was a sense of statement, as Lavelle had put it, 'That we're
not paupers any more. That we're no longer the Famine Irish!'
So she had relented, rigging the children in new outfits, had cut
for herself a dress from a foulard of silk, thin and soft and cream
in colour, virginal white being forbidden to her state. Lavelle too,
hatted, cravated, looked every inch the fine Boston gentleman.
The day itself was a great success and had seemed to spin out for
ever. As indeed the evening did - into the next morning. 'It's in
danger of turning into a wake . . .' she whispered to Lavelle, in a
private moment, '. . . if it goes on any longer!'
And she had sung, especially for him, 'Una Bhan' - 'Fair-haired
Una', one of the great love songs. Didn't really sing it as she should
have, she felt. She hadn't spoken a syllable of Irish for eight months.
Now the words felt clumsy in her mouth so she trimmed the song
from its forty-odd verses down to a dozen or so.
Peabody, whom they'd invited but didn't think would attend,
to her delight, if not wholly to Lavelle's, presented himself for the
after-wedding festivities.
'I might as well close up shop completely if I was observed
entering a Roman church,' he confided to her jokingly. 'It reminds me, Ellen - it reminds me . . .' He started to tell her something after
she'd sung, then changed course. 'That song - what does it say?'
he asked instead.
'It's a song from Connemara, two hundred years old,' she
explained, 'composed for the woman Una, whose father would
not let her marry beneath herself. Being kept from her beloved, she
died. Her lover, seeing her laid out, remembers her beauty - like the
music of the harp always before him on the road. His love for her
was so great that she had come between him and God. There, that's
all forty verses of it in Irish, in one in English!' she laughed.
Peabody, after he had thought about it for a moment, remarked,
'Isn't it a strange song to sing on your wedding-day, Ellen - a song
about death?'
'Oh no, Jacob! That's the beauty of the song - it's not of death,
it's of great love. He would lose God for her,' she answered,
impassioned.
Peabody looked away from her into the revelry beyond. 'I
suppose a life without great love is like that - a losing of God,'
he said. He was speaking of his own life; she waited, silent. 'The
tenacity of true passion is terrible; it will stand against the hosts of
Heaven, rather than surrender its aim, and must be crushed, sent
to the lowest pit, before it will ever succumb. Something I heard
once,' he mumbled, by way of explanation.
'Jacob - were you ever . . . ?' she started, wanting to ask him.
'It's something I have observed, Ellen,' he interrupted, deflecting
her, 'about the Irish. How at once happiness and sadness can coexist.
Your wakes are laced with merriment, your weddings with
lament. It is a peculiar twist of character. Little wonder the English
find you a disconcerting race to govern.' Peabody laughed a little.
'We're no different from any other peoples,' she said gently,
thinking of him, rather than the Irish or the English.
'Oh, but you are, Ellen!' he said, rising to the argument. 'There's
a blackness within your race, a perversity. Nothing is allowed to
be as it is. Love must be death. Death must be love. Everything
turned on itself.'
'Jacob, come along. This is most unlike you to be so dark, on
such a day.'
He apologized, and she was drawn back into the merriment,
sorry she had started it all by explaining the song to him.
She had some difficulty pulling the children away from all the
excitement and settling them down across the hall from where
she and Lavelle would spend their wedding-night. Later, as she
undressed, thinking about the day, waiting for Lavelle, the song
came back to her. 'Una, wasn't it you that went between me and
God?' What a thing for a person to live with! It was unimaginable
to her - throwing over God for love.
She hiked up her nightdress, knelt by the bedside. She'd shorten
the prayers a bit tonight, didn't want to be still out of bed when
Lavelle came up.
Besides, Boston in springtime had yet quite a nip to it.
The very next day they moved into the new quarters Lavelle had
found for them in Pleasant Street. Before the wedding, they had
decided they should rent, until they were better fitted to buy a place
of their own. The fear always being with them both, that if they
overstretched themselves with borrowings, and things took a turn,
the banks would then tumble them out of the house, evict them.
She and the children already carried that scar. It was something
she'd never put them through again. With the rent it was less of
a risk. They'd still have a bit aside to tide them over, if a reversal of fortune came about.
She had hated leaving Washington Street. In the end it was
marriage, not commerce snapping up every parcel of space which
had forced them out.
The Pleasant Street house was in a neat terrace, with its own
hall-door and a shiny letterbox low down - that was one thing
about Washington Street, it was never her own hall-door. A slab of
granite stone stepped up to this one, which Mary thought was 'very
grand'. Louisa meanwhile was fascinated by the brass lettering
facing them, running her finger around the welcoming curvature
of the number that would be her new home, 29.
Inside there was a short hallway, a kitchen, a parlour and a
'good room', as Ellen regarded it. Upstairs three bedrooms, two
commodious, one less so. 'That one's for you, Patrick,' Mary
couldn't resist teasing. Out back was a small yard and a cabbage
patch. It was all perfectly adequate. She could do a lot with it, and
at least they wouldn't be crowded in on top of each other.
They were hardly in the door, solid and black apart from the two
light-giving panels of frosted glass, when it resounded to a vigorous
knocking. On the step outside, Mrs Harriet Brophy fixed the tilt of her snug hat. pushed back an unbiddable wisp of hair and waited to present herself to her new neighbours. A trim dart of a woman
from the Donegal-Derry border, she had already espied them.

'Newlyweds,' she had heard, 'with three grown-up children,' she had exclaimed to 'himself, hand to her mouth. 'What's
the Christian world coming to at all, Hector?' 'Himself wasn't
much interested. 'Bringing down the neighbourhood, that's what.
What have we got to leave our children, if not a decent neighbourhood?'

'I'd
just like to welcome you all.' Harriet Brophy beamed as
Ellen opened the door. "I'm your neighbour - a few doors up.' Ellen
bade in the woman, who sparrow-hopped in over the threshold.
She had a paper with her, something wrapped inside. 'For luck,'
she said, 'for the house.' Ellen opened it. 'A piece of anthracite to
keep winters warm,' the woman said. 'A handful of salt, to keep
the table laden.' And in a small bluish bottle, 'A sup of the holy
water to sanctify the home.'
Ellen thanked her, moved by the woman's thoughtfulness, but
Harriet Brophy wouldn't hear of it.
'Och, for nothing at all - I think the custom came from Scotland
first, except it was a sod of turf then, instead of the anthracite!'
She
had thin bony hands, Ellen noticed, which she fluttered
like wings when she spoke, and a waist like a wasp. She was
the smallest bitteen of a woman, Ellen thought, that she had
ever seen. But she insisted they come with her to her house

for tea.
'Himself is out and won't bother us!'
Ellen looked at Lavelle.
'You and the children go, I'll take care of things here,' he

smiled.
At tea, Mrs Brophy, as Ellen knew she would, filled her in on
Pleasant Street life. 'Nice neighbourhood, Americans and the likes
of you and me,' she confided, 'hardworking people, none of the
other Irish, you know what I mean . . . from the ships.' Then,
stretching her thin scrogall of a neck and leaning forward. 'And
no blacks, Mrs Lavelle.' Harriet Brophy pursed her lips, narrowed
her eyes and gave a knowing nod to Ellen. 'You'll be all right here,
Mrs Lavelle, nice neighbours to look out for you here!'
And so it was, with Ellen settling into an ordered continuum of
life with her new husband, two children and 'the fosterling', as
Mrs Brophy referred to Louisa.

By the summer of 1849, the number of Irish in Boston had swollen
to a quarter of the population, the weight by which they were
arriving almost suffocating the city. Each one bringing his or her
own story of the distressful state of Ireland.
Half of all the city's paupers were Irish, many of them having
left the workhouses of Connacht, finding only in Massachusetts
the State Lunatic Asylum - alcohol and the tug of home combining
to make sanity elusive. Half of the male Irish who did
manage to find work were labourers. Of the females, two-thirds
of all cooks, housekeepers and laundresses in Boston were Irish.
Ellen marvelled at the resoluteness of her people. There was no
going back and the Irish would work at anything. Boston bosses
welcomed the increasing supply of green-hand drudge horses, who
would work for next to nothing, $1.25 a day or less. How they
kept body and soul together for this - labouring a twelve- or
thirteen-hour day - she didn't know, except it was an everyday
miracle.
The Pilot carried regular letters detailing the trials and tribulations
of the new arrivals:

For the promise of $2.00 a day, I was carted halfway across
America. When we got there, they said it was a mistake, the
most they could give was a dollar a day, with 5 cents a day
gone for the first month for the cost of getting us here.
A couple of Tipperary lads and me started complaining
about what they had promised first when the ganger from
Clare says, 'Well Paddy, start walking!', and he pointed his
finger to the east. 'You should get there by Christmas!'
It was only June then, so we stayed.
She spread it out to the children. 'Life in America is not all honey
and gold,' she said to them. 'So keep to your books, then us Irish
can "up" ourselves!'
She herself didn't come much into contact with the masses of
Irish who polluted the neighbourhoods of the North End and
Fort Hill, though it was hard to avoid them, the way they spilled
over like treacle into the areas around the docks. New vessels,
holds bursting with more Irish peasantry, arrived with worrying
regularity.
'The city is swamped with them!' she said to Lavelle.
'We'll all be over-run by the Famine, as much here in America as
at home,' was his comment. 'It would never have been let happen
in Devon or Cornwall, only in John Bull's Irish province,' he added
caustically.
She was still careful of the children, and kept them in as much
as possible lest they came into contact with the other Irish from the ships, be diseased by these new arrivals. Things had gone well
for them and she wanted nothing to go wrong now.
The French wines and brandies supplied to them by Frontignac,
Pere et Fils, Montreal, found their way steadily off the shelves of
Peabody's two stores and likewise from the shelves of their newest
customer, Higgins of West Roxbury, and on to the finer tables of
Boston. There they were frequently served by the swelling number
of 'Bridgets', who arrived almost daily to inhabit the plush parlours
of Roxbury and Beacon Hill.
Once, when she was visiting Peabody, the merchant had introduced
her to one such of his customers. This gentleman, having
disposed of the normal courtesies, confided in her: 'We have one
of your countrywomen amongst us - "Bridget" - excellent girl,
clean and no trouble; the children adore her.' Ellen was pleased
for him. The gentleman sallied on. 'She's the very best "Bridget"
on all of Chestnut Street, my wife assures me!' he said, smiling at her, as if she, being Irish, had something to do with the supply of
'Bridgets'!
'Really?' she smiled back.
He, mistaking this for interest, continued. 'Every home in Boston
"should have a "Bridget". They require some training, but are
so genial by nature. We hear so much of the turbulence of
the Irish character. Perhaps geniality is more particular to Irish
womanhood?' he said, thinking he complimented her.
'So, we have become nameless?' she brusquely replied.
He looked at her, surprised at this apparent change in her
attitude, at her obvious lack of geniality.
'If they are all to be called "Bridget", then they are all without
identity,' she stated, with little patience.
'Oh, not all, madam!' the gentleman from Chestnut Street
responded. 'Our "Bridget" is a Mary, and next door's "Bridget"
is an Ellen; they are all named with their own names, eh, before
becoming "Bridgets",' he studiously explained, wondering at her
slowness, and why on earth Peabody had ever introduced them in
the first place.

Whatever about the turmoils Boston was experiencing, she and
Lavelle settled into a happy and tranquil state. 'A pool of contentment',
was how Mrs Brophy ('Wasp-waist' to Lavelle) described it.
Harriet Brophy had an opinion on most things in life - and most
people. Furthermore she was not one bit backward about coming
forward with these opinions, in whatever company she might find
herself.
'He, Mr Lavelle, is such a dashing man, always good-humoured.
It was made in Heaven . . . made in Heaven, Mrs Lavelle, as my
own and . . .' she added quickly, '. . . all good marriages most
surely are,' she informed Ellen.
Ellen, though she tolerated the woman, was careful not to reveal
too much of anything to Harriet Brophy, for by the following
Sunday after Mass the whole parish would have it. But yes,
'Wasp-waist' was right about her and Lavelle. They were 'a pool
of contentment'. Lavelle was everything the woman described him
as and more, being as well an industrious worker and a good father
to her children and 'the fosterling'. Ellen knew he would have liked
a child of his own and she was full in her desire to grant him that
wish, but so far they had not been blessed.
Lavelle never asked, but every month or so he would look at
her. When she said nothing, she would see the hope dashed from his eyes. But it never lasted with him, nor did he ever attach any
blame to her, only saying she was the 'plenty of all happiness' in
his life. Once she had told him that for the six years before Annie
was born to her and Michael, she had been barren.
'She must have been born hard,' was all he said, 'taken a lot out
of you.'
Sometimes of an evening he spoke of Australia, its vast bushland,
its sounds, its redness. She neither naysayed nor encouraged him in
this. Australia had been a dark experience for both of them. But it
had, after all, been where she had first met him.
'You miss it,' she stated, during one such reminiscing.
'Yes, I suppose I do, Ellen,' he told her. 'I grew up on an
island, Achill, wild as winter. Australia always reminded me of
that wildness, though it was hot and red instead of wet and green.
I miss the wide-open spaces, the smell of the gum trees - the silence.
This Boston's a noisy place.'
'It is that,' she replied.
'Would you ever return?' he asked, turning the question on her.
'No . . .' she said, '. . . to neither. Australia is a far country
and Ireland even farther in my mind. I'll do with being buried
in America.'

Whatever about dying in America, living in America was an
excitement that barely disguised itself. There was always something
happening, some new discovery. She followed the newspaper
reports of how life was progressing in her adopted homeland as
assiduously as ever.
'See, Lavelle, all we need is a chance! A chance to prove
ourselves. We can be as good as the rest!' she said, reading of
how the electric telegraph, developed by two County Monaghan
brothers, had carried a message from President Polk throughout
the United States. 'They have five thousand Irish employed and
are as well building a railroad across Panama to join the Pacific
and the Atlantic oceans!'
Lavelle was not so impressed. 'And why wouldn't they, at a
dollar a day on the broken backs of their countrymen?'
'Lavelle, why do you always down your own, those who have
advanced in America?' She was annoyed with him.
'Because if we don't say how America was built - at what cost
- then it will all soon be forgotten,' he answered. 'Forgotten that
Paddy's shovel filled the coffers of this Commonwealth, the same
way that Paddy's green fields filled the granaries of the British
Commonwealth. Everything has a price.'
'At least the Paddies here have a chance, a chance to be part of this Commonwealth,' she answered him.
'Commonwealth me arse!' he said, forgetting himself.
She ignored his outburst. 'You're still caught up in the wrongs
of Ireland, and the British Empire, and all of that ... all of what
we've left behind us,' she said, calmly.
'But have we left it behind us, Ellen?'
'Well, I have,' she said, more firmly.
Her assiduousness in gleaning every scrap of new information from
the periodicals and magazines led her to a most unexpected bounty
- Mr Horace Mann, an educator of high standing.
She read how Mann, following travels in Europe, had published
a report on a new departure in the education of deaf-mutes, a sort
of 'silent talking', advocating it be introduced to the schools in
America. Her hopes were raised for Louisa and she pursued this
new avenue whereby in Germany 'the deaf can now read on the
lips, the words of those who address them, and in turn use vocal
speech'.
When, all of an excitement with this news, she sat them down
and through Mary tried to explain it to Louisa, she was met with
total indifference. Not the hazelnut eyes sparkling with hope as
Ellen had expected. Not the joy such news must surely bring.
Louisa, it seemed, did not want to be liberated from her affliction.
It was almost as if she wanted to remain locked away in her own
silent world, Mary to be the sole key-holder.
It perplexed Ellen. She tackled Mary on the matter.
'I think she's afraid of something,' Mary told her.
'But what, Mary? It can only be to her benefit.'
'I don't know, Mother. She wouldn't tell. Maybe she likes being
the way she is ... not part of everything.'
That night, she tucked Louisa into bed, prayed with her as
always, whispering the prayers up close to the girl's face, so that
Louisa could at least see the shape of their sounds, feel them, if
not hear them. The child, hands angelically clasped, lay there,
eyes fixed on her adoptive mother's lips, until the final breath
of blessing. Then Ellen folded Louisa's arms across her bosom
in the shape of a diagonal cross, pulled the bedclothes up about
her neck, and pressed her lips to Louisa's forehead. She sat with
her longer than usual, caressing the girl's brow, soothing her to
sleep, with touch and talk.
'It's all right, Louisa dear, you won't have to do it any more.
Sleep now, and don't be fretting yourself. I only wanted what I
thought was best, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe, after all, I
was wrong,' Ellen confessed. She put her face next to Louisa's,
fingered the hair back from her far temple. 'My little fosterling,'
She remained until Louisa had fallen away from the world and
its noises.

Despite the huge influx of paupers, these years were Boston's
golden years and the city continued to grow and prosper in
every direction. At the Massachusetts General Hospital, an ether
anaesthetic had been used on the operating table for the first time.
It was the start of a new era in surgical medicine. Where previously
brandy and even opium had been used, now ether - the 'Death of
Pain', as Bostonians proudly proclaimed, had arrived.
The ether of the Irish - alcohol - continued to provide the
'death of pain' of deprivation, disease and displacement, suffered
by the city's immigrant population. This, despite the fact that
Ireland's Temperance priest, Father Mathew, had visited the city
to admonish the frequenters of Boston's twelve hundred taverns
about 'the evils of the bewitching glass'. But nothing, it seemed,
not even the ethered Irish, could hold back the city's progress.
Added to its horse-drawn streetcars, on which one could travel
for a nickel, Boston now had eight railroads, bringing twenty
thousand people daily into the city. New iron-works opened in
tandem with the new locomotive industries.
Marvelling at the ever-expanding Commonwealth of Massachusetts,
Ellen vowed that one day she would travel every single
one of its new iron roads. The Cochituate Water System had
already opened to meet the increasing demands of a swelling
population and much to the delight of Boston's children, the
Frog Pond on the Common was now regularly filled with water
from Lake Cochituate. She had taken her own children there when
first it opened and Mayor Josiah Quincy ordered a column of
water to rise eighty feet above the Pond - immortalizing himself
in water with a sky-high statement that Boston's citizens would
never again be short of it. There had been a symphony of bells and
cannon and rockets streaming the sky, and fireworks. Surrounding
public buildings and private houses alike joined in with their own
celebratory illuminations.
There was nothing, it seemed, that Boston and its citizenry could
not achieve. The city filled her with a breathlessness as much for herself as for what it opened up for her children. She brought them
regularly to the Frog Pond, to skate and tumble and laugh on its
winter ice, to wade in its cooling waters in the summer, often
taking one of the horse-drawn trams to make it a special treat.
The Long Path, which diagonally traversed Boston Common, was
her favourite stroll, a walk long favoured by those in love. She
explained its tradition to them.
'A young man, too timid, perhaps, to directly propose to his
Boston beauty, would ask her, "Would you take the Long Path
with me?" If she said "Yes" and walked the Long Path with him,
it meant she would marry him. They would never part. But,' Ellen
paused, 'if she stopped to rest - here perhaps, under this gingko
tree, it meant she didn't love him.'
'Oh . . .' said Mary, looking around for the ghosts of lost love,
'that's so sad - but at least she would have not said "No!".'
'No - that was it!' Ellen explained. 'The young man was spared
that embarrassment. So ladies, if any young beau asks to walk the
Long Path with you, consider carefully if you should rest along the
way,' she advised.
Patrick, however, though he regularly accompanied them to
the Common, at fourteen was less interested in marriage-making
stories than in watching the haymaking on the Common, a custom
that still persisted. Unless, of course, she recounted stories of Paul
Revere and the Sons of Liberty, and the military history of the
Common, long a mustering-ground for armies of every flag and
allegiance.
The Great Elm commanded attention from every element of
the family, even boys. The giant tree, whose protective branches
offered one hundred feet of shade, stretched heavenwards for
seventy or eighty feet. But if Heaven was its aspiration, Hell was
its application, for the Great Elm was once a place of executions.
Witches, martyrs, adulterers alike, all swung from its gallowed
limbs. United in macabre fascination, all three of the children
would close in around her, fearing its embrace, wanting none the
less to hear its dark history retold yet again. Tales of 'the Puritans', or of 'the Reverend Cotton Mather', who stalked the condemned,
seeking to save their souls from a fate worse than death - eternal
damnation! Or, 'Tell us Mary Dyer!' Mary asked. They knew the
story well by now.
The Quaker girl had left the early colony, protesting at the
banishment of another young woman dissenter. On her return
she was imprisoned and saved from the tree only by her son. She
was then banished for ever from the Bay Colony.
'But Mary came back again,' Ellen told them in hushed tones, 'to
fight for her freedom. But the death sentence previously given had
not been lifted. Mary refused to repent, because she had done no
wrong.' Ellen paused, looked into the branches above them, before
delivering the final verdict. 'So the Great Elm took Mary Dyer.'
'And her ashes were scattered on the ground here,' the young
Mary O'Malley put forward fearfully.
'Yes, we should be careful where we tread,' Ellen told them,
herself almost frightened by the notion of it.
The Great Elm where the dead and the living came together had
a sobering impact on all of them. Yet, time and again, Ellen was
drawn back to it. Sometimes, she would sit alone there, waiting
for them while they played. It reminded her of the Reek - strange,
silent, overshadowing. More than its trunk and limbs was the Great
Elm, just as the Reek was more than its rocks and steep crags. Tree
and mountain, both seemed to her to be warnings posted on the
path of life. Grim, penitential listening places, for the strayed and
the wayward. While the Long Path had its whisperings of love, the
Great Elm had other darker intimations. Of love betrayed, and
murmurings too of the terrible consequences its infamous gibbet
had wreaked on the necks of those betrayers. She had not yet told
them those stories, lest, in innocence, they should have sympathy
for adulterers.
It took her into the following spring 'to put a shape' on No. 29. But
she was not foolhardy, hunting down bargains - crockery ware on
Washington Street, 'sensible' curtains from the Old Feather Store, a
thick-in-the-hand, good-wearing Turkish counterpane for the floor
of the good room; sturdy chairs, slightly shop-soiled, a chip or two
gone from them but still perfectly good for sitting upon.
Lavelle did the heavy work - painted and decorated and put
a snas on the backyard. Then Patrick wanted to 'get at' the
gone-to-seed cabbages, but at her request left it to Ellen. She
decked the front and back borders of the cabbage patch with
small yellow flowers - a Latin name, ending in Hum' - she couldn't
remember when Mary asked her. Peabody had told her when he
had given her the seeds, but she'd forgotten. The other two sides
she left open, so she could 'pluck the new cabbages, when they
grew', she hoped.
Eventually, the house was the way she wanted it; for the moment,
at least. She had one other idea for the good room, but that could
wait a while.
Lavelle, who unlike her had always maintained close links with
those Boston Irish interested in the 'Irish Cause', had recently
begun to attend meetings for the repeal of the Union of Ireland
with England. She would have preferred he didn't, that he'd leave
'the past to the past'. Lavelle's view was that 'the past never goes
away - it's like a pavement - always coming from somewhere and
leading somewhere else'. She couldn't win with him, so she gave
up trying. She did once remark to him that with his increasingly
frequent absences on 'matters of Ireland', 'Now the house is settled
here, I have a mind to move back to Washington Street - and you
could pay court to me every evening, as before!'
He knew she wasn't serious, grabbed her and kissed her, laughing
as he exited the door.
She read, instead, sitting at the rosewood bureau he had restored
for her, opening down its angled top, placing her book on the
baize-covered writing surface, vanishing away from the world.
Her visits to the Old Corner Bookstore had been less frequent
since they moved here, yet more precious, so that when she did
go there she lingered over its store of treasures, lovingly fingering
the gold-lettered spines, imprinting into memory titles and the lives
within. The English poets: Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience - showing the two
contrary states of the human soul - Byron and Donne, these
were her favourites, opening her eyes to an England, pastoral,
passionate, spiritually provocative, different from the 'perfidious
Albion', she had known, an England of Cromwell and Queen Victoria, 'The Famine Queen'.
At Christmas, Lavelle had presented her with Legends of New
England, in Verse and Prose, by the Massachusetts-born John
Greenleaf Whittier - 'to wean you away from old England'. And
she was much interested in New England writing. Emerson with
his spiritual vision, his belief that all souls shared in the higher,
Over-Soul, that nature is spirit, rang with a resonance close to
her own, which the organized pulpitry of the Catholic Church
could not achieve for her. The women writers of New England,
she also sought out, as much for their 'Bloomerist' agenda as for
anything. However, the Old Corner Bookstore, Lavelle's 'Repeal'
meetings, and even the aggrandizement of No. 29 were only the
sidelines of their lives in Boston. The education of her children, the
steady growth of the business, and the unerring stability of her life
in general was what mattered, what she had always craved, what
now was within her keeping.
The children all were nourishing. Patrick at the Eliot School,
Mary, and even Louisa, with a little additional schooling from Mary,
at Notre Dame de Namur. Peabody had now opened yet a further
store, his third, in the affluent suburb of West Roxbury. And she
had settled more easily than she had expected into the marriage
life, seldom a cross word between them, Lavelle, unlike many,remaining sober in manner. Mrs Brophy's 'pool of contentment'
continued to surround them, if not indeed deepen.
She thought that maybe the time was now right to try again
some of Boston's better establishments which had once refused
her, given that they themselves were better consolidated now, but
upsetting the arrangement with Peabody worried her.
'We are too much in his hands already,' was Lavelle's view. 'I
wouldn't put it past Peabody to go directly to Frontignac himself.
What's stopping him - except you?' he added, teasingly.
She swiped at him with her apron. 'You might be right, Lavelle,'
she teased back, 'but underneath everything, Jacob is all business,'
adding more seriously, 'he is at no risk financially. That is what's
stopping him. He doesn't pay until he sells. Nobody else affords
him that arrangement.' She paused. 'But if we are to give the same
terms to enter business with others, then what little reserves we
have will be strained. We will need to approach the banks - or
R.G. Dun, the credit agents!'
'Well we didn't give it to Higgins . . .' Lavelle started, referring
to their customer whom he had secured while she was in Ireland;
a steady, but not startling account. 'I mean, I wouldn't . . .' he
corrected himself, so as not to appear critical of her arrangement
with Peabody. 'The city is bursting at the seams. It cannot develop
quickly enough. There is such wealth that we can scarce go wrong
by expansion, and without having to extend excessive credit,' was
Lavelle's final word.

She told Peabody of their plan, reassuring him that they would
not supply anybody within a certain radius of his own stores.
'I wondered how long it would take you. Of course, you must
expand - God forbid anything should happen to me!' was all he
said. 'Come, sit now a while and we will discuss life, instead of
this business - all only business with you Irish,' he mocked.
She was relieved at his immediate and generous response. There
were times when Jacob seemed more interested in philosophy than
Profit, and she did love these discussions with him. He seemed to
know so much, quoted freely from poem and psalm alike and had such seeming wisdom. How like her father he was in that
respect. Yet, unlike the Maistir, Jacob never revealed much about
himself; his defence was to veer off into being flirtatious with her,
if she probed too deeply. Not that he needed much excuse for
that either.
'Jacob, how did you come to know so much ... of everything?'
She had decided to try some probing of her own. 'Was it from your
father or through schooling?'
'Neither, Ellen,' he quipped, 'but from gazing into the eyes of
beauty. Much wisdom is to be found there.' Then he turned it
around, asking questions of her. 'That song at your wedding I was
reminded of it again recently,' he began. 'The "Una" in your song
intrigues me. Love beyond death? Death in love? Which is it?'
She laughed; he always did this. 'It is both ... it depends,' she
answered vaguely.
'On what?'
'On the love, the lovers - you know that, Jacob!'
'And is this love a common thing, do you think, or only in
songs?' he pressed.
'It is uncommon. If it were common, it would not be written
about.' She tried to bring the discussion back within the framework
of the song but Peabody was having none of it.
'So, there is love and there is love. One, the common kind for
the many and the other - great, tragic love - for the few. Is that
it?'
She knew where this would lead. He could be wicked, Peabody,
the way he forced her to uncompromise her thinking.
'Yes ... I suppose so, Jacob,' she parried.
'What begets the difference, Ellen Rua?'
It was the first time he had called her that since she had spoken
of it to him on her return to Boston - about how she had shortened
her name, dropped the 'Rua'.
'I don't know, Jacob, and don't call me by that name.' She
stamped out the words at him.
'Do you know the Four Elements of the Ancient World, Ellen . . .
Rua?' he repeated provocatively.
'Of course I do!' she said, angry that he still persisted with her
old name. 'Earth, wind, water, fire,' she reeled them off.
He held up his hand. 'Fire - that is it, the Element of Fire. That
is what begets the difference, Ellen Rua.'
Sometimes he was hard to follow, the way his mind twisted and
darted.
'The Element of Fire? What on earth are you talking about,
Jacob?' she asked. 'And I told you - it's Ellen!'
He ignored her reprimand. 'That is the difference between love
for the many and love for the few - the Element of Fire,' he
answered, as if it were all self-evident, Then, seeing the look on her
face, he continued, 'Fire smoulders, it burns, it rages, it purges and
purifies, it engenders great passion . . . and it destroys.' He paused,
took her hand as if passing some irredeemable sentence on her.
'You were named for fire, Ellen . . . Rua.'

The talk with Peabody had unsettled her. What was he at with
such a statement? That she was named for fire, the element that
destroys! Jacob was trying to bait her, to stir something in her.
Maybe some tilt at Lavelle and herself? But why? While Peabody
was dismissive about Lavelle, he was hardly suggesting that she
didn't love him, that it was merely a marriage of convenience? You
never knew with Jacob. Sometimes she felt that if she encouraged
the way he flirted with her, Peabody would be quite willing to
draw down the shutters, pull her back into the storeroom, and
fling her onto the nearest flour sack, or chest of Indian tea from
the Assam Valley.
He was capable too. More than once when he embraced her, he
had pushed in close to her, so that even through her underskirt she could feel his 'scythe-stone'. Whatever about Jacob's 'scythe
stone', his mind was sharp and dangerous, always trying to cut
through her thoughts, to lay them bare.
She didn't speak to Lavelle about her discussion with Peabody
except to say, 'My fears were unfounded, Jacob was most generous
at the news.'
'I don't trust him, Ellen; and neither should you,' was Lavelle's
response.
'He has always been upright in his dealings, give him some
credit.'
'It's not in their nature, the Jews.' Lavelle would give no
ground to her argument. 'While there's money to be made, they're
trustworthy. When more is to be made elsewhere, then see how
far their trustworthiness stretches,' he challenged.
'Lavelle, you can't say that. They're not all the same, no more
than all the Irish are fighters and drunkards,' she retorted.
But Lavelle was not for turning. 'History teaches us - didn't they
betray the Saviour for thirty pieces of silver?'
'That was just one, Judas,' she responded.
'Yes . . . His friend,' Lavelle retorted. 'Kissed Him and betrayed
Him, and the rest - all Jews - stood by while it happened. How
well the like of Peabody got started here. The wandering Jew will
get in anywhere.'
'Jacob was our saviour when -' she started to protest, but be
cut her short.
'I know you and Peabody have talks, and I know, too, that at
the start, he was our saviour, but he is too familiar in his talk with
you, and,' he added, 'how he looks at you!'
So that was it. How could Lavelle possibly think that Jacob was
a rival for his affections? Nevertheless, this side to him pleased her
somewhat, and brought a small flush to her neck. She went to him,
embraced him.
'Oh! Lavelle, please stop it!' she chided. 'You know he looks at
every woman under fifty years of age like that, it's just his way. Jacob
has never made any indecent approaches to me - yet,' she teased.
He laughed with her, kissing her fiercely. 'All I say is, beware
the Judas kiss,' was his final word.
Later, on her own, she raked over what had passed between
them. She hated it when Lavelle got like this about Jacob and
the Jews, as if Lavelle never saw the parallels with the wandering
Irish, or the Irish who betrayed their own for the Queen's shilling.
She did remember her father telling her about the Jews, condemned
to wander the world for ever because they had crucified the Son of
God. How they were buried standing up, not like other people,
laid out flat. Whatever was the reason for that? She had never
doubted the Maistir's teachings before. All those years growing
up, all those years after his death, his voice had come to her, guided her like a beacon in times of trouble. Strange how here, under the
shadow of Beacon Hill, he hardly ever spoke to her now. Had he deserted her?
Or, she wondered, had she deserted him?

She encountered the same problem as before with the Pendletons,
Endecotts and the others - 'the wine Whigs of Boston, old world
Sassenachs', as she described the merchants to Lavelle. Polite but
definite 'no thank yous". They still wouldn't deal with her because
she was Irish; by definition, a Catholic. It must change, she thought.
Some day, surely it must change. But it didn't help her now in
their hunt for new customers. She continued to search, now
looking among their own - the coming Irish. Those who had
'upped themselves' out of the North End and into the South
End, in the process forcing the second-generation Yankees to
move onwards.
The palates of these burgeoning middle-class Irish now sought a
little more refinement than Boston's one thousand groggeries once
supplied to them and still did to their less elevated countrymen.
So, on a train journey to Dorchester, she found 'Cornelius Ryan's
Emporium', boasting 'wines, whiskies and refined liquors'.
Ryan was a sly but affable Tipperary man - or 'Tipp'rary', as
he pronounced it, dropping one syllable. He had come to America
before the exodus caused by the Great Famine. Like many he had
started his first enterprise in the corner of a tenement basement.
Things had obviously gone well for him.
He rolled his 'r's like the Scots and gave her an order for 'half
a crate of the "Bordelaux"', as he called it, putting back into that
region the syllable he had previously denied to Tipp'rary. She
thought it a peculiar twist of his speaking but didn't correct him.
'Till I see how it goes . . . and half of the white too - you can put
them all in the one box,' he added.

Riding back to the city to the sound of steel on steel, she wondered
why she wasn't more excited about finding this new outlet. When
she and Lavelle had first started she would have been beside herself
to have found a new customer, any customer. Now it didn't seem to
matter an awful lot to her. But it should have. She let her thoughts
wander far from Tipp'rary and Cornelius Ryan.
What she loved on such journeys was the way you could lose
yourself in the sway of the train. Fix your gaze on everything, your
mind on nothing; let the world swirl by. It was a wondrous thing,
the way the trains were going everywhere, pushing out further and
further, finding out America. Far from trains she grew up - many's
the day barefooted, going over the bent mountainy roads and back
again - twice or three times the length of these train journeys in
and out of Boston - it not even bothering her.
Everything was so easy here, once you got a foot on the ladder.
Neither she, nor the children, wanted for a thing. No mountain
roads, no bare feet. Theirs was a secure and comfortable existence
and showed every sign of remaining so, she thought, lulled by
the train, making a note in her mind for Lavelle to deliver the
Bordelaux to the Tipp'rary man. Strange how everything had
worked out well in the end, if she could call it that without
Michael and Katie and Annie - but it had. It surely had.
She wasn't one of the potato Irish now; neither would her
children be singled out as such. What harm if in Boston's public
schools they had to recite the Protestant Ten Commandments and
the Protestant Our Father? Or read the King James Bible that
Patrick had brought home for the 'edification of your family',
as the Headmaster of the Eliot School had so delicately put it.
It was all much of a muchness to her. 'Bishop John', as the
Catholic prelate of Boston was familiarly called, could rant and
rail against Anti-Popery all he liked. In the end it didn't make one
'Amen' of difference. She had always maintained it was 'how you
came into the world and how you went out of it' that mattered.
Even to be born hard and bred hard, if, in the end, you died easy
- in the grace of God - wasn't that it? And it was the same, she
thought, for black, as for white, for heathen, as for Christian, for
Sassenach, as for Jew. The main thing was to see that the children
got a good education, Catholic or Protestant. To ready them for
this life - and the next.
One evening as she sat reading, waiting for Lavelle to come
in from one of his Repeal meetings, she heard a noise outside.
Thinking it was him, she looked up. There, darkly framed in
the window, were the head and shoulders of a woman. Gaunt,
sunken-eyed, a rag of a headscarf about her, the woman scratched
at the windowpane, a withered finger bent against the glass. The
sight of her startled Ellen. But when she opened the door the old
woman was gone.
The woman was so frail of limb, skin so translucent, that she
reminded Ellen of the poor souls ravaged by Famine that she had
once seen along the Doolough Pass Road between Westport and
Delphi. That day the wind had whipped up along the Pass, swirling
the wafer-thin phantoms to a watery grave in the Black Lake. The
memory sent a shiver over her and she crossed herself. 'No use
thinking of all that now, is there?' she said to herself, before closing
the door and running upstairs to the children. Probably just some
poor old beggarwoman looking for a crust of bread. Then, maybe
got frightened and took off.
'Too much reading, agitating the mind,' Lavelle had brushed it
off with when he had come in later.
Whatever about frightened beggarwomen or imaginary phantoms
from the past, she knew him the minute she opened the door.
He didn't recognize her as instantly. Then the surprise in her
face, her intake of breath, alerted him. He darted a look at her
hair. The long-maned tumble of it, that he would have known,
was gone. Instead, the much shorter tangle of curls was rather
severely nested to the back of her head, securely pinned above the
high-necked collar of the dress she wore.
'Ellen . . . I Ellen Rua . . . I Can it . . . ?'
The man, whom she had only known as the 'Shanafaraghaun
man' in Ireland all those years ago, couldn't seem to finish the
question. Not that he had ever been much for words, if she
remembered him correctly. She nodded, as dumbstruck by his
appearance here in Boston as he was by hers.
'Mrs O'Malley? Lavelle . . . ?' He looked utterly perplexed. 'You
are Lavelle's wife?' he tried.
'Yes,' she said simply, without still yet greeting him or showing
any hospitality towards him, trying to come to terms with his
appearance out of her past life.
'You remarried?' He seemed unable to take in what she had
just told him. 'But ... I ... thought you were in Australia?' he
fumbled, trying to make sense of it all.
'I was,' she said, not making it any easier for him.
How many more questions had he, this man who had led
Michael to his death? This man without a name, but the threat
of whose name she had once used to guarantee her children's
safety. She should offer him in. He was obviously acquainted with
Lavelle. She hesitated.
'I have recently arrived in Boston, and I call merely to pay respects to your husband -- to Lavelle,' he explained, as if reading
her mind, 'who has been doing much good work for the cause.'
Her instinct was to ask him more. Why was he in Boston? What
was his connection with her husband? Instead, she eased the door
towards him, closing it. She could never forgive him for Michael's
death - him and his 'causes'.
'Thank you for calling, Mr . . . ?'
'Joyce,' he filled in. 'I'm sorry, I forgot you didn't know.'
'I'm sorry, but my husband is not at home,' she said.
He donned his tall hat, gave her a pleasant smile and left.
Once the door was closed, she leaned against the inside of it. He
was the harbinger of death, this man, and she feared his appearance
here might be as fateful for Lavelle as it had been once for Michael.
This Mr . . . Joyce, if that were his name, he who, Michael once
told her, had proclaimed, 'The sword is a sacred weapon.' She had
remarked on it then, had never forgotten the words. It was such a
frightening image. Making it all right, holy even, to kill, putting
the name of God on a killing blade.
Later, when Lavelle came home, she told him, 'You had a visitor
today.'
'Who?'
'The Shanafaraghaun man - as I know him. It seems my past
follows me to Boston.'
'Your past - the Shanafaraghaun man?' Lavelle paused, knowing
the name from something she had told him years ago.
'Mr Joyce, he calls himself now!' she said, helping him.
'Joyce - he is already here?' Lavelle seemed surprised. But it also
seemed to her that he was expecting the man.
'Who is he?' she asked.
'He comes to Boston via Van Diemen's Land. He had some part
in the failed insurrection of 1848,' Lavelle answered.
'The Young Irelanders?'
Yes, the Young Irelanders. But how did you know him?' he
asked.
I knew him from before . . . that he was a Repealer. Don't you
remember?'
Now Lavelle did. 'He is the same man?' he asked, rhetorically,
'who led the attack . . . with Michael. What a strange coincidence,'
he said, his mind recapitulating what she had told him in Australia.
How when Michael had died, she had used this man's name as a
threat against her landlord in order to keep her children safe.
'It is too strange, and not to my liking that he is here in Boston,'
she replied. 'So-called revolutionaries,' she continued. 'Imagine it,
seizing a poor widow-woman's house and children to start a
revolution - were they all mad?' she asked, wanting to dismiss
Mr Joyce and his co-insurrectionists. 'Fighting the Crown from
a cabbage patch!'
'Ballingarry was ill-timed,' Lavelle responded. 'The people wanted
potatoes instead of pikes, and the priests were against it. But it
wasn't a failure!'
'Of course it was a failure,' she contradicted him.
'No, Ellen, the English made the usual mistakes, this time
sending the leaders to Van Diemen's Land, letting them live. But
all the Crown got were live martyrs instead of dead ones!'
She didn't want to hear this kind of talk. 'What does he want
here in Boston, with us?' she demanded.
'The same as every true Irishman ever wanted - repeal of the
Union with England,' Lavelle answered, wondering why she was
so against the man's visit.
'Pshaw the Union!' she returned. 'Isn't it more important for us
to repeal the laws of Massachusetts so that we have equal rights
for our children, like other white people, and not be kept down
like the blacks? We had enough of that back home.'
Lavelle seemed taken aback by her attack. 'You've changed,
Ellen, changed so much, lost the fire for freedom you once had.'
She looked at him. 'There are different freedoms, some worth
fighting for, some not. Some you never get anyway,' she argued.
'Ellen,' he countered, his composure regained, 'you well know
that in Ireland, the land still belongs to the few. The many live
from hand to mouth in circumstances far worse than the slaves of
the South. Thousands upon thousands still crowd in here, forced
to flee from their own country. That is the most basic freedom
- to be in your own country, to live off your own land. That is worth fighting for,' he said strenuously, in one of the longest speeches she had ever heard from him. It was the company he was
keeping of late.
'Lavelle, I don't want us to argue now,' she answered. 'I've done
enough, lost enough for the "Ould Counthry". What I have left I
want to hold - you, the children. Don't, please, drag us back into
all of that. I'm worried by him being here.'
He could see that the man's visit had troubled her greatly. 'It'll
not affect us, Ellen - the family,' he said, trying to reassure her,
'but it is only if the ones who have succeeded abroad, like us, show
solidarity, agitate, that change will ever come at home.'
She was afraid for him, angry that he and the Joyce man would
use America as a mustering ground for Irish dissent, distressed that
everything she had struggled for would be put at risk by timeworn ideals and would-be revolutionaries, recently reduced to hiding in
cabbage patches.
If Ireland was Lavelle's cause then soon her own hands were full
with a cause, one much closer to home than Ireland's: Patrick.
At the Eliot School the boy, now fifteen and 'starting to have a
notion of himself, had protested against reciting the 'Protestant
version' of the Ten Commandments. When the teacher insisted,
Patrick had resolutely stuck to his guns, stating he would recite
the Ten Commandments, 'but only the right version'. Things had
come to a head and Patrick was caned with a rattan until his hands
bled. He had refused to cry and left the classroom. A number of
other Catholic boys walked out in protest, some of whom brought
him home to her.
She nearly died when she saw him, ashen-faced and the blood
splattered all over his hands. She bathed and bandaged them but
could not stop the bleeding, while Mrs Brophy, who had come
to see 'what all the commotion was about', scurried away for
a doctor. He subsequently rushed Patrick to hospital, declaring,
'The boy is so savagely cut, he may lose a finger or two.' She
went with him, frantic with worry for her son. To her great
relief, Patrick did not suffer the predicted loss. However, his
hands were so sore and so heavily bandaged that she was obliged
to spoon-feed him for the following week, undressing him at night
for bed, dressing him again in the mornings. Mary and Louisa
were equally solicitous of Patrick's well-being, waiting on him,
comforting - as much as he let them. Lavelle wanted to deal with
the schoolmaster who had flayed the skin from Patrick's hands.
Ellen restrained him. Even under such harsh circumstances for
Patrick, she was glad to have him at home. Just the two of them,
for a change.
Putting the food into his mouth, her fingers touching his lips, or dabbing his chin with a napkin, where clumsily she had spilled
some broth, was at first awkward for them both. It brought back to her the memory of a previous intimacy, one of their very few,
since he was a small child. When, at ten years of age and dying of
hunger, she had force-fed him from her breast, with Annie's milk.
She could tell by him now, easing some bread into his mouth, that
it was his remembrance too.
After the first day or so, things relaxed between them. He
never complained. He was so like Michael in character, as well
as countenance, she thought as she washed his face. She held
back the black-curled hair to dampen his forehead, her face next
to his. 'You're so like him, Patrick, so like him, in every way,'
she whispered. Then, it all flooding back on her, she was forced
to leave the room, Patrick wondering if he would ever make any
sense of understanding his mother.
So outraged at Patrick's treatment were the other Catholic
parents whose sons attended Eliot School that the next she knew,
Bishop John was on her doorstep, in his wake the ever-attendant
Mrs Brophy.
Tall and well-built, 'a fine stock of a man', as Lavelle described
him, Boston's newest Bishop, John Fitzpatrick, was as cultivated
as he was popular. Bostoniari by birth, he moved equally within
both communities of his diocese, as frequently dining with the
Brahmins of Beacon Hill or discoursing with the Scots-Irish in
the Thursday Evening Club; as he just as regularly rambled about
on foot, visiting and meeting with the ordinary, mainly Irish, folk
of his flock.
Although she had never met him personally, Ellen attended his
Masses in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross on Franklin Street.
She had taken Holy Communion from his hands on many an
occasion. A powerful preacher, Bishop John spelt it out to his
congregation in no uncertain terms that they should forget the
old squabbles of Ireland and concentrate instead on getting on
with life in Boston.
Now, all flummoxed at his sudden appearance, she was rising
from kissing the ring on the proffered hand. 'My advice, Mrs
Lavelle, is that you engage legal opinion and execute charges
was to praise Patrick's refusal to read the 'Orange' bible. Cornelius
Ryan, thereafter, ordered only full crates of the 'Bordelaux,
from that grand Mrs Lavelle woman - the mother of the
O'Malley boy!'

Fall, she loved fall.
On the Common, the red and gold leaves, fiery-embered emblems
of a dying summer, fell winterwards in one last glorious sunburst.
Soon the cooling Atlantic chill would roll inwards from
the coast, preparing the Common for the blustery snowstorms
in its wake, snow that would quickly weave its winter-white
mantle over everything. But fall - the in-between season, after
the excitement of summer - always seemed, to her, to settle
things down.
The summer madness that had touched Peabody had lightly
passed him and, for the most part, it was business as normal.
And business was good. Bordeaux instead of Byron, port instead
of poetry; everything in its place. And, as if to herald the new fall,
Boston of 1851 was finally linked with Montreal via the Grand
Junction Railroad, thus breaching another frontier. In line with
Boston's usual penchant for announcing the city's advancement,
three days of celebration followed. Canada and the North were
now opened up for commerce with the Hub City.
For Ellen and Lavelle it meant that the railroad could now
carry their fine wines from Montreal all year round. Now the
New England Wine Company, previously dependent on ships
that plied the St Lawrence, need not hold so much stock against
a transportation route frozen solid four to five months of each
year. She resolved, in time, to travel the new railroad, make her
own maiden voyage to Frontignac Pere et Fils.
She resolved, too, this fall, to improve herself further, her
original plan when she had first come to Boston, perhaps join
one of the evening clubs for ladies which Mrs Brophy kept harping
on about. They sounded interesting and educational - if all the
ladies weren't too like her breezy, neighbour with the buzzing
tongue. And they couldn't be, Ellen thought.
Boston ladies had, like the trains, continued to breach frontiers
for themselves, unlike in any other society in America. In the mill
towns of Lowell, Lynn and Lawrence, the women of Massachusetts
had already raised their voices, through the Women's Trade Union
League and reforming organizations like the Nine to Five Association.
And more importantly, their voices had been heard. Their
vision of a better working world for women had gilded the way
for the Massachusetts model to spread nationwide. The mill girls
from the farms of New England, later joined by the tenement Irish,
bonded together to form a Sisterhood of Toil. These young women
workers refused to let the spirit of freedom imbued in them be
crushed by the daily grind of the five-storey textile mills. Life
was more than 'sun-up to sun-down', six days a week, in the
company of clattering looms, rotating spindles and flying shuttles
- 'all enough to dizzy a girl'.
'Mill life,' Ellen explained to Mary, 'was the tyranny of employment
replacing the tyranny of unemployment.' Mary, thirteen now,
had recently engaged her mother in a number of debates on these
matters arising out of a visit to Notre Dame de Namur by Bishop
John. The Bishop had spoken to them about their new home in
America. That while they could never forget their old home, it
was best not to be looking over one's shoulder. A tramcar might be ahead of you! Bishop John had then 'preached', Mary said, 'as
if he was in the pulpit', about the role of young ladies, and older
ladies, too, in the New World.
'He thinks a woman's place is in the home!' Mary stated Bishop
John's case, making it clear by her manner of speaking that it was
not a view she necessarily shared.
Ellen could not resist a smile, hearing her child speak so.
Mary continued. 'He said that Boston was leading the way, with
women in the marriage life leaving the home and going out to
work. That it was becoming a fashion . . . and not a good one!'
Ellen broke her silence. 'Well, it's a fashion that's here to stay
whether Bishop John likes it or not!' she said, trying not to speak
too disparagingly of Boston's most senior prelate. 'Work is plenty for the men. But there are so many "green hands" here, it has driven
the wages down and prices are high. Women have no choice but
to work.'
'They have, according to Bishop John,' Mary replied. 'They have
the choice to stay at home while the men fight for higher wages, and
the Bishop would back the men. He believes that "God's creatures
must work to live, not just live to work".' Mary had obviously
taken great note of what the Bishop had said.
'What if it wasn't just for the wages?' Ellen put to her. 'What
would Bishop John say then?'
'If women just wanted to work?' Mary paused. 'I think he's still
against it,' she answered. 'Bishop John says the most rewarding job
in the eyes of Holy Mother Church is marriage life and being a
mother. That the mother educates the man.' Mary was nothing if
not well briefed.
'Bishop John has a lot to say on it - for a man, Mary!' Ellen
laughed.
Mary nodded, asking, 'But what do you say on it?'
Ellen considered her answer. 'I suppose if a woman has a parcel
of children she'd be hard put to work sun-up to sun-down six days
a week, outside the home, as well as in it.'
Mary nodded again, but had yet another question. 'Is that why
the Irish girls who come to America stay single and don't go into
marriage life?'
Ellen thought before answering. 'I was too young, Mary, when
I married your father. Just turned seventeen when I saw him
at the Pattern Day Fair in Leenane.' She started remembering,
but pulled herself up. 'But then, they were different times in a
different place.'
'Imagine - you were only four years older than I am . . .'
Mary said, wonderment in her voice, '. . . but you fell in love
with him?'
Ellen looked at her child, imagining how she would look in four years time, seeing in Mary's face how she, herself, must have
looked back then. She had been a mere child. Then she had gone
from child to mother in the space of a year when Patrick was born. That was the way it was. She had nursed him and reared him while
still seventeen, as if she had been born to it. And she supposed she
was; women were.
'Ah . . . love him . . . indeed I did, Mary, but I hardly knew
the meaning of the word.' She held Mary to her. 'Don't worry
about it, a stor. There's always time for love afterwards. Here, in
America, you can "be somebody"; be anybody. There, in Ireland,
you could be nobody. Just keep working the same hard acre, year
in year out. Marriage was a way out, an excitement. This is why
I brought you all to Boston - to give you a different way out, so
you could all "be somebody".'
'Does "being somebody" mean I might never get married and
have my own little babies?' Mary got right to the point.
'Mary, whssht child! Do you hear yourself talking? Sure you're
only a gossor yourself. But no, it doesn't mean that at all!'
Ellen hoped that she hadn't overstated her case. 'To "be somebody"
means to "be somebody" for yourself, whether you have
a marriage life or not.'
Mary nodded - but she had one last question. 'Then . . .' she
paused, trying to find the right words, 'did you not love our Daddy,
our first Daddy . . . and if you were in America, and met him, does
what you said about "being somebody" mean that you wouldn't
have married him?'
Mary always saved the hard questions until last.
'I did love him, Mary, very, very much, from the first day I set
eyes on him. I think no matter where I was in the world, it would
still be the same.'
'Even if you were seventeen?'
'Yes, Mary, even if I was seventeen.'
That seemed to satisfy her, at last. God, the child had such an
exasperating way of turning everything back on you. Still, it was
to be encouraged in a girl who was going to 'be somebody'.
She resolved to rummage out for Mary an essay she had read in The Lowell Offering on a 'Society for the promotion of Industry,
Virtue and Knowledge'. Ellen had been taken with the vision of its
author, Betsy Chamberlain. It was to be a society where women
would be equal to men. She found the article and the following
evening, Mary read aloud Betsy Chamberlain's resolutions.
'Resolved: That the wages of females shall be equal to the
wages of males that they may be enabled to maintain
proper independence of character ..."

'I like Betsy Chamberlain,' Mary declared after she had completed
reading all of the author's resolutions.
'So do I,' her mother concurred.

At the other end of the scale from the mill girls, Ellen delighted
in reading of Margaret Fuller, who had introduced 'The Conversations'
into the parlours of Boston for the 'gorgeous pedants'
who attended such meetings. The gorgeous pedants were women
of 'incomparable intellect', as regarded by themselves, who in
wintertime engaged in 'high parlour conversation' while dressed
in every finery that money could buy. But they shared, if not their
finery, at least one thing in common with the mill girls of Lowell
- the opinion that there was 'a lot more to life than a dress, a
pudding and a beau'.
In one sense Ellen admired the gorgeous pedants, almost as much
as she did the mill girls. It was unthinkable that this would have
happened for women in Ireland. The male-ridden Catholic Church
would have stomped it out. 'Rosary beads and rearing children
was as far as a woman could go there,' she said to Mary, another
evening when pursuing their own 'conversations'. 'Beading and
breeding!'
Louisa sat with them, listening almost, Ellen thought, moving
her head, first towards her when she spoke and then towards
Mary, watching their mouths. The girl chalked something on her
slate board and passed it to Ellen.
'Bloomerism?' was what Louisa had written.
Ellen looked from her to Mary. 'Bloomerism? What do you
know about Bloomerism?'
Louisa pointed at Ellen's mouth, then put her hand to her own,
moving her fingers as if drawing sound from it, wanting Ellen
to talk.
'Bloomerism? What kind of a pair am I raising?' she laughed.
She began, speaking slowly for Louisa's benefit. 'Even here in
Boston, the Church denounces Bloomerism -- pegging it "the end
of family life as we know it". But I don't think that women here,
either the mill girls or the high-society ladies, will be shaken from
Bloomerism by the belt of a Bishop's crozier!' Maybe some of the
newly-arrived Irish might, she supposed. 'Bloomerism is here to
stay and I think we should be a part of it,' she told them. 'Cooking,
dressing and loving we can still do as the Church commands, but
we can do more, much more.'
Mary agreed wholeheartedly, while Louisa cleaned her board
and scribbled a new word. 'Yes!'
Ellen was determined somehow to be part of 'the new movement
for the advancement of women in society'. While she empathized
with the militant mill girls, she didn't see how she could be a
part of the movement. Neither had she the intellect, she felt,
and more importantly, the entree to be a gorgeous pedant. She
would have to settle for some in-between grouping, probably
containing a mixture of mid-parlour Bloomerists, some 'reformers
and abolitionists' and a sprinkling of the likes of Mrs Brophy,
interested in 'a bit of gossip-talk and getting out of the house'.
So she threw in her lot with the 'Daughters of the Commonwealth'.
She was put forward for membership by Mrs Brophy as
'a woman of faith and fortitude who, having snatched her children
from the jaws of famine in the Old World, has instilled in them
those same virtues, so desirous, in the New'.
There were twelve Daughters of the Commonwealth. No more,
no fewer. That was the rule. And any such organization worth its
title had rules, and a constitution by which its members lived. A
new 'Daughter' could join only when there had been a defection, or
ejection, of a sitting 'Daughter'. The latter unhappy circumstance
had never afflicted the 'DOCS' - Lavelle's abbreviation - as yet.
But there had been a defection which had allowed Ellen to go
forward.
'Like the twelve apostles we are,' she told Lavelle.
'And who is to play Judas?' he jibed.
'You have Judas on the brain!' she mocked, pleased that she
had at last made this further move to improve herself.
The twelve Daughters of the Commonwealth met weekly, on
Monday evenings, in a room at Faneuil Hall, also the venue for
Trade Unions and Anti-Slavery campaigns. A motley assemblage,
as Ellen had imagined, of mid-class Bostonians, 'upped' Irish, and
one or two who professed 'no affiliations save that of gender'. Life
would be lively among the Daughters, Ellen imagined. Topics for
discussion could be anything under the sun and were proposed,
seconded, and voted on, a week in advance.
'To allow time for reflection and reading,' Mrs Brophy had
explained to her.
Men could not attend except in the capacity of 'invited speaker'.
Allowing men to be present was 'the death of many such a
grouping', Mrs Brophy also opined as they travelled home together
after the first meeting, '. . . they being a distracting influence and
inhibiting the different way in which we think'.
Ellen revelled in the discussions, the arguments, the broadening
of the mind. But no matter how great her own interest was in the
DOCS, it palled by comparison with Mary's, who with Louisa
in rapt attendance peppered her with questions before and after
each meeting. So much so that Ellen began to worry if she had
encouraged them too much in Bloomerism.
'The discussions,' she reported to Mary and Louisa, 'are as
diverse as Boston itself. Freedoms in general are high on every
agenda. The "freedom of black Americans"; the "freedom of
workers from industrial slavery"; the "freedom of women from
domestic slavery"; "freedom of expression"; every "freedom"
imaginable.'
There had even been a discussion on 'To Bring Back or Not
Bring Back The "Third Row"', which she had avoided telling
them about. The infamous 'third row' was traditionally the row
in theatres where Boston's ladies of the night arrayed themselves,
often attracting more attention from male theatregoers than the
stage itself. However, the bedizened third row never sat easily
with the strongly puritanical streak of Boston's ruling class and Mayor Quincy had banned the tradition, effectively dismantling
the third row.
Ellen had found herself in the midst of a lively debate. Some
supported the 'removal of vice from our midst' stance. Others
excoriated 'male laws which would seek to enchain female bodies',
while Mrs Brophy was firmly of the view that 'if a man got
good cooking at home', as she put it, 'then he would not sup
outside of it!'
The Daughters of the Commonwealth would keep the third
row intact, if only by a narrow majority. Little wonder then, she
thought, that Bloomerists were charged by Church leaders with
being the 'free-thinking cesspool out of which moral dangers crawl
into society'.
Eventually, as she knew it would be, it was Ireland's turn. The
'Great Calamity on Erin's far shore' caused some outpourings of
concern in Boston, supported, indeed, by some generous outpourings
from Boston's well-laden coffers. Strangely, the city's ruling
elite did not consider the tens of thousands fleeing the 'Calamity'
to be worthy of the same concerns, once landed on Boston's near
shore. These new immigrants were a scourge, a pestilence. Those
fleeing one 'Calamity' became the Calamity themselves, in Boston.
Ellen wondered how the Daughters of the Commonwealth would
view the issue with the problem not now merely on the far side of
the Atlantic, but here in Boston, on their very own doorsteps.
'Renaissance or Revolution, the Future for Ireland?' was the
declared topic for discussion, and there would be a guest speaker.

The women applauded when he had finished speaking. All, that
is, except Ellen. Not that he hadn't spoken well, with clarity and
passion. He had. She knew he would come to her. He had noticed
her silence, her sign of disapproval.
He had done this before, she knew - spoken to groups, maybe
even crowds. The way he had posed a question then paused, giving
them all a chance to consider the answer, before he supplied it. His answer, as if he replied for all of them. He was quite arrogant, she
thought, with his slightly gaunt, black-eyed poet's face, and his
talk of revolution.
'Ellen Rua!' He insisted on putting the old badge on her.
'It's plain "Ellen" here!' she said to him, surprised that he was
still in Boston, unsettling things, as she saw it.
'You did not agree with my sentiments?' he asked, ignoring the
frostiness of her reply.
'Ireland and its revolutionaries have well failed us, Mr Joyce . . .
then and now,' she answered him.
If he was stung by this, as she intended, he concealed it well.
'Perhaps it is we who have failed Ireland, Mrs O'Malley?'
'Lavelle,' she corrected him for the second time. 'It's Mrs Lavelle,
Mrs Ellen Lavelle. We have not failed, Mr Joyce, we have survived.
Our first duty is not to Ireland, it is to our children. You and men
like you come here to distract us from that cause!' she accused.
'I know what you have suffered,' he said, not arguing with
her, 'as many have. It is through the suffering of its people that
a country is reborn.'
'Reborn is it?' she retorted. Then are full of words. High
ideas . . . What do you know about birth or death, except what
you read about in your books?'
He flinched, but didn't rise to her. 'The idea must first be born,
before its realization,' he steadily replied, watching her.
'And what "idea", Mr Joyce, do you have for us - the "Daughters
of Old Ireland" - here in America?' she said, mockingly.
'Will you have us drilling on Boston Common, then sail back
over the ocean and lay siege to London? Will we be America's
first "Petticoat Armada"?'
She was aware of having raised her voice; Mrs Brophy and the
others who circled nearby had fallen silent. She didn't care, she
was sick of it all; him, Lavelle, the Repealers. The revolution
was not back in Ireland against the English Queen; it was right
here in Boston. A social revolution - better working conditions,
a fairer chance at life, equality in the schools, something to be
done about the tens of thousands of Irish living in squalor. He
kept looking at her, he too oblivious to all but this 'Daughter
of Erin' who railed against his philosophies, railed against

Erin itself.
'We can't change history,' she continued, 'but we can make a
new history here. Here each of us has a chance to be somebody,
if we don't keep looking over our shoulders at the past!'
'I am glad my talk stimulated you so, Ellen Lavelle,' he smiled.
'As your talk has me!'

On the way home Mrs Brophy reproved her, in her usual waspwaisted,
around-the-houses kind of way.
'Oh, my, Mrs Lavelle, what an exciting evening - that nice
gentleman Mr Joyce seemed to take a great interest in your point
of view.'
Ellen agreed. It was easier than enduring the usual nonstop
babble from the woman. But Mrs Brophy wasn't for shaking.
'Did you notice the love-spot under his left eye?' Mrs Brophy
beaked on, referring to the small dark spot on the man's skin.
'I did, Mrs Brophy; a ball seirce we used to call it '
'Wasn't it very fetching, very fetching indeed, dark and brooding,
like himself?' she insisted.
Ellen couldn't agree any further with the woman. 'I found him
to be both arrogant and opinionated, Mrs Brophy.'

too
'Well, he met his match in you,' Harriet Brophy said, sparrow
hopping about her. Ellen thought the woman intended it as a
compliment.
Now she'd get nothing but Mr Joyce and love-spots for the
next week, unless some other diversion popped up to distract Mrs
Brophy. And one usually did - on a daily basis. She offered up a
silent prayer that the days of this week would be no different.
Maybe it was a mistake - perhaps she wasn't cut out to be part
of such a gathering, to be too mannered. She should instead just
concentrate on the fundamentals of life, the children, Lavelle, the
business, not be trying to rise above her station. For that's what
it was, rising above her station, a forgetting of who she was,
where she came from, getting notions. 'Going before herself as
they would put it, back home in the valley villages.
Lavelle was at home waiting for her. She didn't give him a chance
to greet her, still in her hubris over Mr Joyce. 'Why is it, Lavelle,
when we are prospering in the plenty of a new country, that some
still want us to be still shackled to the rag and bones of the old
country?'
He never answered her, knowing by her manner that she was
much aggrieved. 'Who was the speaker?' he asked.
'Your comrade-in-arms, the Shanafaraghaun man, Mr Joyce,
or whoever he is. He doesn't much speak like the people of
Shanafaraghaun that I know,' she levelled at him.
'We have a duty to the old -' Lavelle began.
'We have no duty,' she interrupted him. 'It's guilt, Lavelle, that's
all. Guilt that we escaped. Guilt that we left misery behind us. Guilt
is strangling us.'
Despite having done business with the Frontignacs for the past
number of years, she had never met with them. All her correspondence
had been by letter, since the priest of Grosse lie,
Father McGauran, had first put her in touch with them. Now
with their own business expanding and the opening up of the
Grand Junction Railroad to Montreal, it was timely to meet
with Frontignac, discuss new supplies from France, and terms
of business in general. Peabody had always maintained that she
should be enjoying a more favourable set of prices from the
Frontignacs because of the growing volume of business from
Boston.
It was perfectly natural for her to go rather than Lavelle, as she
was the one who conducted all such dealings - 'hurling the pen' as
Lavelle put it. He himself was more comfortable with 'hurling the
hammer', keeping the warehouse in order, doing repairs, building
new racking, and everything to do with freighting the wine both
inwards and outwards. 'I am the hands and feet of the business;
you, Ellen, are its face and mind,' he often remarked. Besides, the
journey would be good for her, Lavelle knew. She had become
increasingly fraught of late, seeing faces at the window, arguing
vehemently with him over Ireland's cause. Obviously, too, had
vented her spleen on Mr Joyce. And Lavelle had no fears for
her personal safety, although a woman travelling alone might
invite some surprise. She too was glad of the opportunity to go
to Montreal. She would have time to herself, to see more of this
vast land; time to think.
The journey necessitated her having to forgo the next meeting of
the Daughters of the Commonwealth. She knew that her absence
would afford them the occasion of discussing her recent behaviour.
Let them do what they wanted, censure her, let her be the first to
be ejected. She had had to say what she had said.
Maybe she had been a bit hard on Mr Joyce. It was over
Michael. Deep down she knew that was what had caused her
to react so. Now this man was back like a ghost to haunt them,
bringing the past with him. She feared for Lavelle, afraid that he
was involved in some conspiracy with the man. Was she now to
lose him too? She loved Lavelle dearly. No matter his politics, he
was everything to her; steadfast, loyal - would move the world for
her. It didn't bear thinking about, that like Michael he too would
be taken from her.
The train rattled onwards, leaving Boston behind, swaying her
forward, losing her to the past receding outside her breath-misted
window.
Then it ground to a halt - some commotion up ahead - 'bears
on the tracks'. They had been warned not to leave their carriages
in such an event. Her face continued to press against the window,
looking out into the soul of nowhere. She was unaware, until she
heard his voice, of the man who had entered the carriage as it was
stopped, and now stood behind her.
'Am I again the fitful cause of such trouble on your face?'
She turned, some sense of what she had been thinking about
telling her it was him.
'Oh, Mr Joyce . . . I' she fumbled for the words.
'I am journeying to Canada to speak,' he said by way of explanation. 'This time, I hope, to a less hostile reception than
Boston afforded me. I trust, Mrs Lavelle, that your reason for
travelling is therefore not the same as mine!'
It was the first time she had seen him laugh. She was embarrassed.
How long had he been watching her?
'I can assure you it's not, Mr Joyce,' she replied, unable to resist
a smile.

He sat down across from her, explaining how, in the crowds,
he thought he had seen her boarding the train at Boston, but
was himself late and had taken the nearest carriage. He had
decided then to come looking for her, taking a chance with
the bears.
'You are not coming to Montreal to hear me speak?' he asked
in mock disappointment. 'Perhaps this time to heckle me?'
'It matters not to me where you speak. Canada is, I am sure, as
America is, a land of free speech,' she said, a little more coolly than
before. He waited before replying, and looked out of the window,
then leaned towards her.
'I am sorry about your husband . . . Michael . . .' he said
seriously, his granite-dark eyes locking with hers. She could not
help noticing the tiny macula, Mrs Brophy's 'love-spot', high on
the rim of his left cheekbone, near his eye. 'He did what he did for
you, Ellen, not for me, you must know that. But I am sorry none
the less. The assault on Pakenham's house was under my command
- Michael was my responsibility.'
She remembered. She knew, by his sincerity of tone, that this
man, with his non-Shanafaraghaun speech, spoke the truth. Her
Michael, his mind altered by hunger from breaking stones for
Famine roads that led nowhere, had wanted to 'do something'
against the way Pakenham had been grinding them down. He had
felt he had failed her and the children. His 'doing something' was
Michael's way of being restored in her eyes. She was as much to
blame for his death as this man was.
His voice broke in on her thoughts. 'Some must die for what
they believe in,' he said gently. 'Most of us are denied the opportunity.'
She
believed him, this strange man. That he would embrace that
opportunity if it arose. Death to him would be a victory. If your
oppressor killed you while resisting him, you were not defeated,
he was. She studied him. He had an intensity with which his face
seemed constantly alight with the tiny dark macula, set in brooding
contrast. Tall, and slender of build - like a girl, but not soft - he
was sinewy and corded. He was, she believed, a man of the sword.
She saw it in him. To use it or die by it.
'I should thank you for being guardian to my children. You must
think it ungrateful of me not to have done so already.' she said
apologetically.
He nodded, neither agreeing nor disagreeing with her. At times
he said so little - until something fired him up - only locking eyes into her all the time. Part of her wished he would leave, go away
to wherever on the train he had come from, but she had things to
say to him.
'I don't want you to encourage Lavelle in your ways.' There,
she had said what she had been thinking.
'Lavelle is . . .' He stopped, changing his mind. '. . . his own
man . . .'
But she knew it was not what he had started to say. However,
Lavelle being his 'own man' had the effect of preventing her saying
anything more to him on Lavelle's behalf. He smiled at her, waiting
for her next question.
She wondered if he was married. She thought not. What kind
of marriage life would it be for his wife? A man who spent
half his time living in the shadows, the other half in prisons
and traipsing the world, fomenting trouble. In the window she
caught the side view of his face, reflected there, landscaped with
her own, imprinted on America. A man consumed with only one
passion - Ireland.
'Do you ever think of Ireland?' He surprised her.
'Ireland is behind me, I am American now,' she answered.
'Is that why you've shorn your hair and your name - to cut away
the old life?'
She wasn't ready for this directness, but didn't falter in her
answer. 'Yes! To tell the truth, that is part of it.'
'And is the truth only to be told in the English language?' He
was trying to catch her out now, like Peabody would do.
'There isn't much use for the old tongue here. It's hard talking
the price of pigs to Germans and Jews,' she gave a little laugh, 'in
Gaelic!'
He didn't share her sarcasm. Probably didn't see much humour
in life anyway, she thought.
'Do you ever sing any more?' He was actually worse than
Peabody with his questions, diverting from subject to subject.
'No,' she answered, then remembering, 'once only - on my
wedding-day . . . for my husband,' she said pointedly.
'Never since?'
'No.'
'To sing is good - it releases the soul. What was your song?'
She told him.
'Would you sing it for me now?'
She looked at him askance. Was his mind altogether altered?
His head, perhaps, at some stage glanced by a bullet? He stared
at her, like a boy would, awaiting a favour.
'I ... couldn't, not here ... on the train,' she found herself
saying, when she should have just refused him outright.
'Sing it for me, Ellen Rua - I'm sorry, Ellen . . . sing it for me!'
He leaned forward, physically willing her.
'No, I don't know you ... I don't sing any more!' she eventually
got out, his nearness unnerving her.
'You don't sing any more?' he said, drawing back as if she had
told him she'd lost her faith, given up on God. 'I remember you,
Ellen, hair to your waist, the beating heart of the Maamtrasna
valley, fiery steel to your dear husband's resolve.' He pushed his
face closer to hers again. 'Don't you know what you were?'
She looked at him, stymied by this new turn in the conversation.
All because she no longer sang!
'You were hope,' he said passionately. 'Hope for a people long
dashed with hopelessness. Your courage, the sacrifices you made,
it gave those people hope. To them, Ellen, you were the symbol
of Ireland, rising out of the ashes of Famine '
'Stop it!' He was mad, this man sitting across from her, mad with
the extreme madness of zealots. 'I was none of that, Mr Joyce,' she
said, controlling her voice. 'I was a wife like many, destitute and
with a dead husband. I was a mother - once with four children,'
she paused and he saw the line cross her face, '. . . who lost two
of them - like many.'
'You did, Ellen, you did,' and he took her hand in his. 'Yet you
came back again for your children, as generations have done and
will continue to do. You are the living story of Ireland.'
She withdrew her hand, shaken by his fervour. 'I am not.
Whatever it is you want me to be, I am not.'
He was Peabody all over again, trying to fashion her into some
imaginary 'element', make of her a symbol. Something she wasn't.
Something they wanted her to be.
'You have grown comfortable in Boston,' he said, unruffled by
her rebuttal. 'Prosperity has embraced you. It is the great danger
for us all - we are at our finest only in adversity.'
There he was again, explaining her to herself. This rankled her.
'What danger?' she demanded. 'Isn't it what everyone who has
come here with nothing wants, to make something of themselves?'
she challenged him.
He continued, plausible, passionate in his beliefs. 'What we
are now faced with in America, Ellen, is that we, the Irish, will
become what we once despised in others. We are becoming the
next generation of colonizers - the new Imperialists.'
'Riddles and Raimeis, Mr Joyce. We only want a better life for our
children than the cabin-life we had. That's all. We want nothing
more than that.'
He was troubled, this man, twisted of vision, locked in some fatal
embrace with a mythical Ireland. And he saw her as some kind of speirbhean, the 'woman from Heaven', who in the vision poems
appears as lover to the sleeping poet. He the poet, she Ireland.
'I am not Ireland!' she said out loud. 'I am no speirbhean. I
am flesh and blood. Look! Feel!' and she grabbed his hands and
clasped them to her face, held them there so he could feel her skin,
her cheekbones flushed with anger. When she tried to push them
away again, he resisted, momentarily.
'To Ireland in the coming times, Ellen Rua. In the coming times,'
he whispered passionately, drawing his fingers down along her
cheeks.
He left as the bears were cleared and the train groaned into life
again, swinging down from the door like some long black wraith
of a highwayman. She turned, pressed her face to the window, its
welcoming coldness dissipating her anger. Then with her finger
she traced the outlines of her face on the glass. All it revealed was
herself, everything as before, no noticeable difference. She trailed
back a wandering wisp of her hair from between her forehead and
the glass, weaving it around her finger. It had held its lustre well
these last years.
'Ellen . . . Ellen Rua,' she whispered. Was she always to be
Ellen Rua?
Everything had been tailing so well into place for her in Boston.
She and Lavelle were happy. The children, even Louisa, were all
adapting well, apart from the upset with Patrick. The business
provided them, if not with largesse, then with a steady income.
Life in Boston, as she had hoped, was falling into a predictable
and well-ordered sequence, and nothing and nobody was going
to turn her from that course. Outside, the tall trees of Canada
deep-dimmed the woods. Then for the most fleeting of moments
the reflection in the glass was not hers. She drew back, frightened;
it reminded her of something she couldn't place. She looked to see
if anyone stood behind her. There was nobody there. When she
looked back at the window, it was her own face she saw. But of
course it was. She was out of sorts a trifle, upset at all his talk, and
that nonsense of visions and 'women from Heaven'. She snuggled
into the corner of the carriage and closed her eyes, a comfortable
warmth coming over her as she settled her thoughts on Lavelle
and her children.

To her annoyance, Mr Joyce appeared again, this time to assist her
to alight from the train at Montreal. Courteous to a fault, he held out a helping hand for her. She, careless in the moment, miscued
the landward step and stumbled awkwardly against him, her face
striking his shoulder. He steadied her.
'Flesh and blood,' he smiled, repeating what she had earlier
said to him and heightening her embarrassment. He insisted on
accompanying her to her hotel. Something to do with a connection
between the 'thinner numbing climate of Canada' and the 'onset
of dizziness'.
Montreal was teeming with life and bustle, colour and smells.
She loved it immediately, its glittering turrets and steeples, the
mountain behind it, the 'flowing road' of the St Lawrence river
before it - two miles wide but choked with bateaux, sloops
and raftsmen poling their timber platforms along its scudding
currents. lie de Montreal, with its timber kings and river barons,
its melting pot of scarlet-costumed Iroquois, proud and plumed.
Blue homespunned girls breezily clogged along in their sabots the
shoe boot - hollowed from wood. English, Irish, Americans, Jewish, French-Canadians - all were here. Not even in Boston was
there such an assortment of accents. Scots Presbyterians were here
too, who with traditional Calvinistic determination had originally
arrived, laden with millstones in their travelling bags, ready to
grind and conquer.
'The Scots are the new Seigneurs here,' Stephen Joyce explained.
'They are the captains of commerce. You will see their mansions
on Mount Prospect and Dorchester Boulevard, town houses, what
would elsewhere be considerable country retreats. They ride to
hounds when not in their counting houses and generally take
their cue from London,' he said, not displaying much fondness
for the Scots-Canadians. 'Les Anglais,' he continued, 'those who
are English, and that includes us Irish - the Anglophones - have
little love for the Francophones, who reciprocate the feeling in full
measure.'
She didn't care about the divisions between Anglophones and
Francophones. She wanted to explore the leafy culs-de-sac, linger
over the market stalls brimming with iron pots, mirrors. And the
pelts of beaver, mink and otter, side by side with the smell of
syrup of maple. White assorted brandies vied for the bundled stall
space with vermilion dyes, ground from cinnabar into a brilliant
red-wormed pigment.
A red-coated regimental band crossed them, stamping out its
brass-thumping tune, trying, as it were, to do down the other
sounds and colours of the city. By comparison, Boston seemed
to her dull and conservative.
'You like it here, I can see,' he said.
'Oh!' she replied, 'do I reveal myself so easily?'
'Not very often,' he answered, being kind.
'Your own disposition seems much lighter?' She arched her
eyebrows in a questioning manner. He had relaxed considerably
since their encounter on the train.
'It is the company in which I am honoured to be!' he complimented
her.
'Oh . . . thank you, Mr Joyce.'
'Please call me Stephen - and if in return I might call you
Ellen?'

'As, on the rare occasion, yon have already . . . Mr Joyce,'' she
emphasized. Then she laughed, seeing his serious look return at
her imagined reprimand. '. . . Stephen!' she added, still laughing.
Her laughter was compounded by the sight of a pig who had run
amok among the marching band, either attracted to, or distracted
by, the music. Soon the hapless band was hopelessly out of step,
the once-rousing march dismembered into a series of syncopated
'oomps' and 'pahs'. The demented pig had meanwhile begun to
snout the breeches of the tuba-player in an excited state, obviously
deciding that the instrument's low-pitched grunting sound was an
invitation either to fight or to mate. She thought it perfectly in
keeping with the place.
Where she was to stay, the Hotel Fond du Lac, was also where
he would stay whilst in Montreal. She would have preferred him
to be at a distance from her. Things were happening, coincidences,
connections with the past. Coincidences she had never trusted.
She'd seen her share of them, often to her benefit. But even with
whatever good there came of these apparent coincidences, came
the sense of some design being constructed about her. By the time
you understood that design, it was too late. You were by then
central to it.
'What a pleasing coincidence, that we share the same accommodation.
Fate, to some end of its own, must be flinging us together!'
he commented, as if reading her thoughts.
He was most definitely not of the valleys. He had that arrogance,
born of station, common to none of the local men she had known
in Maamtrasna. She ignored his remark.
'Please do me the pleasure of dining with me. I would consider
it a great honour if you did.' His enthusiasm was flattering.
'Your engagement . . . ?' she protested.
'My engagement waits until tomorrow.'
It was foolish of her. He would not have asked her otherwise.
Now she had given him an opening, or would have to refuse him
outright.
'Thank you, Stephen, I'm afraid I can't.'
'You have other plans?'
'No . . . but '
no
'Then I insist, Ellen. You cannot dine alone in a foreign city.
And Montreal is so foreign - so French!'
She looked at him, expecting to see that half-mocking smile. She
was sure her life wouldn't be at risk if she dined alone.
'French. I am surprised,' she said, playing him at his game.
'Montreal is full of Scots, English and Irish - as is Boston!'
She saw his long dark brows rise, framing the question. 'Unless . . .
you consider it an impropriety to dine alone with a man who is not
your husband?'
'Impropriety had not entered my mind!' she replied, perhaps too
hurriedly, she thought, rising to his bait.
'Well then, my company has overtaxed your patience. I am
sorry.'
He had disarmed her, this man who had protected her children
- what was she now to say to him? She laughed, and was pleased
at the flash of bewilderment that showed in his face.
'Don't be so serious about everything, Stephen. I'll be happy
to dine with you. And you'll know full well when my patience
is overtaxed,' she said.
'I hope that day is never,' he said, smiling.
She was surprised at how generous a smile it was, once he let
slip the hauteur which normally governed his countenance.
'At seven then?'
'At seven,' she replied.
She was ten minutes late.
Their earlier badinage had seemed to relax him and he talked,
if not openly, then at least more freely about himself.
'Secrecy is an unfortunate necessity,' he offered by way of
explanation. 'Spies of the Crown are everywhere and Boston is
as much England as is Dublin.'
She could only imagine at what he hinted - wondered if, indeed,
some of it was just in his head. He had ordered champagne,
Taittinger, imported by Frontignac, Pere et Fils.
'The French betrayed us at Paris when we sought support for
1848; they scarce do anything else - but we forgive them everything
for their champagne!'
She rarely imbibed alcoholic beverages. Tasted, yes, but she had
seen too much of their ill-effects on her countrymen. He raised the
slender long-stemmed glass, toasting her.
'Some civilization will remain in North America while Canada
remains partly French.'
He held his glass aloft, watching, waiting until she had wet her
lips with the drink, the mousselet catching the tip of her tongue,
fizzing there, melting with the warmth of her mouth.
'Thibaud IV, the Comte de Champagne, it was who first brought
the Chardonnay vine to France from the Crusades,' he told her.
She interrupted him. 'And the reverend Doms of the Benedictines
continued the godly work, nourishing the cru in the chalk
pits of Champagne, safe-keeping its secrets in the cellars beneath
the Abbey of St Nicaise.'
'You know about champagne?' He smiled at her.
'It is my business to know,' she answered him.
'So . . .' he continued, 'champagne is a holy drink crusaded for
by Comtes, benedicted by monks. Let us enjoy it!'
She took another sip of the 'holy' drink. He did, after all, have
a sense of humour. She put down her glass.
'You're not Irish,' she said, 'the way you speak . . . you're a
"Planter".'
'Yes ... a "Planter",' he replied, 'my people were from Scotland,
but I am in all other things Irish.'
She made to get up, excuse herself.
He grabbed her arm. 'Sit, hear me out!' he said.
'I knew you were different, but this - Scots-Irish, a "Planter"
masquerading as a patriot . . .' She shook her head in disbelief,
unable to reconcile the contradictions in him. He was too good
to be true, this dark and intense man, who just appeared and
disappeared, bringing trouble everywhere with his poet's talk,
making himself out to be a man of the people.
'Listen to me, Ellen,' he said forcefully. 'Am I to be for ever
damned by history, by the sins of the past? I am as much of Ireland
as you are. I was born there and shall probably die there.'
'You can't -' she started.
'Can't? You mean I have to be Catholic and poor to claim
Irishness?'
She fully realized that this was exactly what she had meant.
'And if I tell you that further I was educated at Trinity, the
"Devil's College" as your prelates would have it, does that make
me even blacker still than the "black Protestant" you see before
you?' he demanded of her.
This was why her children hadn't been harmed while in Pakenham's
care. The man had influence indeed, more than she had counted
upon. That of a common faith with the landlord.
'You are a fraud, Mr Joyce, I'm leaving!' As she rose, he again
caught her arm, forcing her for the second time to sit down. Then
he told her his story.
'After the flight of the Earls O'Neill and O'Donnell, to Spain,
their lands in Tyrone and Tyrconnell were forfeit to the Crown.
We, the McCoists, were small tenant farmers in the Highlands
of Scotland. It was the barest of existences. London had, beyond
its own purposes, no interest in us. Like thousands of others, we
came to Ireland to survive. In return for the land promised us,
our duty was to "cultivate, colonize" and in particular "civilize"
those parts of Ulster to which we had been transplanted. One such
"civilizing" process was to alter the name of Derry to Londonderry.
To my shame, there was a McCoist hand involved in that.'
She listened, fascinated by his revelation.
'Streets within the same Ulster towns became known either as
the "Scotch quarter" or the "Irish quarter". My forefathers, stout
Presbyterians all, moved eastward to County Down, hated alike by
Irish Catholics and the Anglicans, who classed us as "dissenters".
On Sunday afternoons, the McCoists with others would set out in
boats from the Down coast to Stranraer in Scotland to receive the
Holy Sacrament, forbidden us in Ireland by the English Church.
Thus fortified us Scots dissenters would return again across the
Irish Sea to our new homeland.'
'But your name . . . how did you come to live in . . . ?' the
questions tumbled out of her.
'Eventually the fugitive Catholic rapparees left behind by the
O'Neills and the O'Donnells came down out of the Mourne mists
attacking the settlements, with their short pikes and swords . . .'
He fell silent. The telling of it was paining him.
'Please go on,' she said, wanting to hear it all.
'It was November. Portadown was attacked, the English and Scots
rounded up. Men, women and children . . . Annie McCoist . . . who
was in childbirth . . .' he faltered, '. . . her child half delivered, was
in that condition driven from her bed, stripped naked and with her
other three children herded to the bridge of the Blackwater. Annie,
by every account a dignified red-haired woman, pleaded, not for
her own life, but that she be allowed to complete the delivery of
her child and her other children be also spared.'
Ellen's heart shuddered, fearing what was next.
'From the midst of the jeering crowd, a young swordsman came
- "You are brave for a 'Planter' woman," he shouted. "We should
remember you." With his sword he sliced a collop from each of
Annie's buttocks and threw them to the clamouring crowd. She,
her half-born child and her other children were then prodded with pikes and skeans until they leapt from the parapet to the drowning
waters below. One of Annie's children of eleven years, Elizabeth,
who by God's saving grace was swept to shore by the current, was
then stunned on the head by a gallant rapparee and pushed out
again into the life-taking tide.' He paused. 'Such was the fate of the
McCoist womenfolk. As for Annie's husband, Duncan, having had
his feet fried was buried alive, his Catholic gravediggers, it is said,
taking great pleasure in hearing him speak to them as they tumbled
down the earth upon him, until they could hear him no more.'
She saw the tears fill up in his eyes, then spill over, the grievous
scars of two hundred years. She reached across to him. 'Stop, you
don't have to go on, Stephen!'
'Oh, I do, Ellen, I must, if you can bear it,' he said, drying the
black pools of his eyes.
She nodded. She couldn't really bear it, so sickening, so gut
wrenching, so clear it was in her mind's eye. 'Oh my God, Stephen!
Oh my God! It's, it's . . .' The horror of what she was hearing put
her beyond words. It couldn't be true, it just couldn't be. 'No one
would . . .' In her mind flashed the young and innocent faces of
the Aboriginal children she had once witnessed being butchered
by overlanders - Irish - her own. 'Catholics ... we ... we
wouldn't . . . it is . . .' She struggled to come to terms with the
enormity of it.
'It all happened as I have described, perhaps the telling through
time . . . exaggerated . . .' His voice trailed off, mitigating the crime
of her creed. '. . . but I know it happened, it is ever in my dreams.
It speaks from my bones!'
She kept hold of his hand, her own shaking, almost recoiling
from touching the teller of such atrocities.
'One McCoist out of all survived,' he continued, almost inaudibly.
'He fled south and west - to Joyce country - your land. Stuart
McCoist became Stephen Joyce. The people, who were at first
suspicious of the stranger, eventually accepted him. He married
a local girl, a Catholic. They lived more or less untroubled and
had four children. Two hundred years later ... I am here.'
'Madame, elle voudrait encore du champagne?' The waiter,
armed with a white cloth, held the bottle at the ready.
She declined; the cm of Crusaders, blessed by Benedictine monks,
was far from her troubled mind.

Later, in her room, unable to sleep, she lay on the knotted macrame bedspread. Above her beams of mighty cedar trees, the bark still
preserved on them.
She had excused herself, but shaken and unsteady as she was, he
had escorted her to the room, apologetic for ruining the evening.
Now, no matter how she tried, she could not expunge the image
of Annie McCoist from her mind, in that most sacred of moments,
birth-giving . . . and the young man who had cut collops of flesh
from her buttocks, desecrating her.
Outside her window, dominating the Montreal skyline, the twin
towers of Notre Dame stood, their giant bells tolling the passing
day. Le Gros Bourdon, the largest, dedicated to the Virgin Mary
and St Jean-Baptiste, seemed to shake the very timbers above
her. The second largest, inscribed to Queen Victoria, boomed in
reply. She tried to pray, to be in communion with the Catholics
of Montreal, to be rid of Annie McCoist. But the bells only
clogged up her head. She imagined the cedar beam above her
head would crack with the sound, blood spill out of its wound,
giving life to shapes on the crinkled bark. Jean-Baptiste, sword in
hand, the red-haired Salome screaming and the two Queens of
Heaven and Earth, the Virgin Mary and Victoria, dancing away
to the flutes and drums, on the bridge at Portadown. She would
drown in the sound of it all, before the bleeding cedars finally fell,
crushing her.

He rapped on the door the following morning. She was still asleep
atop the bedspread. When he saw her disarray he was perturbed.
Would he summon a doctor, fetch some resuscitation salts from
the apothecary? She assured him she would be altogether fine.
She would rest, take the air once she had restored herself. The
Frontignacs could wait until the following day.
She was touched by his concern for her, agreeing to dine with
him again, on his insistence that he be given the 'opportunity
for reparation'; that it would be a 'lighter and more pleasant occasion'. She wondered though about his meetings, thinking
them more clandestine than the open address he had given in
Boston, and at how he was again free to dine with her.
In the afternoon, she walked first to the colourful three-storey
Bon Secours Market with its silvery dome. It reminded her of
Quincy Market and Faneuil Hall. Her spirits lifted, she visited
Notre Dame. The Basilica, with its new neo-gothic twin towers,
was the largest structure in Montreal. It was built, she learned
from a cloying sacristan, under the architect James O'Donnell, an
Irish Protestant from New York, who converted to Catholicism
during the course of its construction. 'He died of a broken heart,
unhappy at how his dream was disfigured by bad taste - in here.'
The sacristan pointed to the spotted columns, the interior decor,
then led her to the right of the altar. 'The architect lies buried at
the foot of this first pillar.' She thought how appropriate it was
and on the way out left a donation, while the sacristan watched
her, satisfied.
Protestants building Catholic churches, Stephen part-Scots, part
Irish, part-Planter, part-patriot. Nothing was as clear as she had
once imagined it to be, wanted it to be. It was easier when things
were clear, had dividing lines.
And the bells pealed while she wandered among the tall slender
forms of the Lombardy poplars to the rear of the Basilica. 'It was
a mistake to cast them in England,' the sacristan had confided to
her, earlier, in his broken English. 'Le Gros Bourdon - the Great
One - taller than a man, developed a crack. It was a sign. Had to
be recast.' He shook his head. 'They should have known - a bad
mistake, madame.'
She sauntered along, following the curve of the buildings that
followed the curves of the meandering streets. Tin rooftops, silvered
against the sky, bespoke the ice-cold winters when wood
in large quantities would be burned to drive back that shivering
season. Fires, Montrealers had learned to their cost, could shoot
sparks to roofs made of the same timber which gave them warmth,
destroying their town. It was a hard lesson. Now they used tin
instead of timber. Other roofs - Victorian mansard - sloped down
on every side to meet her. An opening on du Port Street drew
her to its ancient iron-studded door, sequestered between large
rectangular blocks of dressed limestone. She wondered who or
what it was the door wanted to keep out, or perhaps even
keep in?
And windows, Victorian, Venetian, small circular oeil-de-boeuf windows - an eye to the world set into triangular pediments.
Other windows held old iron pins to secure sheet-iron shutters,
Montrealers believing 'the night air to be unhealthy". She had
never seen such windows, some overlooking Italianate palazzi, others nestling under crow-beaked corbel stones, which jutted
out into the streets, guiding her way, like the hands of the eyes
of Montreal.
She must have walked for miles, leaving the windows behind,
when she came to Chateau des Messieurs on the western slopes of
Mount Royal. The Chateau was set in rolling meadowlands with
the wooded slant of the mountain forming an idyllic backdrop. It
was the jewel of her afternoon. Within the vineyards and orchards
of the former Indian mission house of the Gentlemen of St Sulpice,
she could see its cassocked inhabitants. Some walked singly,
breviary in hand, at prayer. Others in silence, stood blackstatued
in the secluded corners of the ornamental gardens. Chateau des
Messieurs - the 'priests' farm'. She approached, seeking entrance,
more to imbibe the spirit of solace the place offered than the water
she asked for.
The madame was welcome in the Lord's name. The chateau
was, she discovered, now a retreat house and 'Le Seigneur Jesus
had directed her footsteps here to pray - to confess', the monk
who admitted her explained. After what she had experienced
the previous evening, she felt that she had indeed been led here
for renewal. In the tiny chapel of Our Lady of the Snows, she
confessed to sinning against what Jesus had called the greatest of
His Commandments - 'Love thy neighbour as thyself - she had
not shown charity of thought to Stephen Joyce, a troubled man.
She confessed her strange swooning images of St JeanBaptiste
and Salome and the Virgin Mary and Queen Victoria, not being
sure for this aberration which of the Ten Commandments she
had trespassed against. The Monsieur, in absolving her, gently reminded her or the dangers of 'bewitching beverages' and 'the
occasion of sin that being in the solitary company of unwedded
persons of the opposite gender might present'. Having made her
penance, 'one decade of the most holy rosary, to petition Our
Lady of the Snows for a guiding hand', she remained a while in
the silence of the chapel.
She had never before heard of Our Lady of the Snows, but then
the mother of God had so many names - 'The Virgin Mary', 'Our
Lady of Good Hope', 'Our Lady of Sorrows', 'Star of the Sea'.
Wherever she was needed, she was named for. It was a consoling
thought. The White Virgin, it was said, pure as the driven snow
from which she appeared, brought safe passage to voyageurs and coureurs de bois, cut off from the world for months at a time in
the far trapping-grounds of Canada.
And she thought of Stephen Joyce. She had been wrong to judge
him so harshly and had only begun to relent in her opinion when
driven to do so by his terrible story. That was not true charity when
there had to be a reason. She resolved to be more tolerant
this coming evening. Her mind went ahead of her. The rapparees,
the Catholics who had committed such atrocities, she wondered
to which 'Our Lady' did they pray? Everybody - even butchers prayed
to some God, some Our Lady.
She blessed herself, sorry to be leaving this haven, the Chateau
des Messieurs, but anxious lest she be late again for him.
She arrived as he did. He was fully himself, as of old, she thought
- almost. His concern for 'how she had been today' was genuine,
lacked that air of peremptory enquiry she had previously detected.
Oh, she should stop this . . . this tick-tacking at every nuance of
speech and manner. Resolved 'that it be a more joyous occasion',
he called again for the Comte de Champagne, clinked glasses with
her. She smiled.
'What is it?' he asked.
She didn't tell him. But somehow out of the ring of the crystal,
the voice of the mild-mannered Monsieur repeated itself. His
admonishment to her concerning the twin perils of alcohol and
'single company' seemed framed in mid-air between them.
'I'm damned, doubly damned,' was all she would say.
He listened with rapt attention as she relived her day, images
of the city spilling out of her, ribboned with colour and sound and
windows.
'You are in love, Ellen - with Montreal,' he laughed.
And she was, with this swirling, spinning top of a city. But she
wanted to hear more of him. His story of the previous night had
been stopped short by her own revulsion at it.
'Are you sure?' he asked.
'Yes!' she said, confident of her new state of mind.
So he told her of how, over the generations, his family had
become 'more Irish than the Irish themselves'. How he had seen
the injustices visited on the people and how, at Trinity College
in Dublin, he and others of the 'landed class' had resolved to do
something about it. 'Love of one's country is not in the exclusive
grasp of the Catholic population,' he reminded her.
There were two Irelands, Protestant and Catholic. Rich and poor. That was the divide. That was the way it had always seemed
to her back in the wet-acred West. That idea was easy to grasp,
easy to accommodate. Now, sitting across from her on the far side
of the world, this disturbing man was telling her it was not so.
Thoughts of Ireland brought home to her how incongruous it was
to be sitting there drinking champagne. She a peasant woman, her
people in their thousands still suffering, she who once had drunk
blood taken from a cow's neck in order to stay alive. It was a great
sin, worse than any she had confessed at the 'priests' farm'. She put
down her glass, let him go on.
So a band of them, poets, Protestants, and Trinity nationalists,
had come together and joined with O'Connell, the Catholic Emancipator.
They split with him again when the 'great man' sold out
to passivism and nepotism, as they saw it. They were the Young
Irelanders, prepared to use force if necessary to sunder the Union
with England. The French, whom they looked on as allies, had
betrayed them. In a last-ditch effort in the Tipperary foothills, their
damp squib of a revolution at the Widow McCormack's house had
gone all wrong and been extinguished.
'The Crown, as ever, was cleverer than we were . . .' he went on.
'Juries were packed, convictions gained. But rather than hoisting us
on a scaffold, the British banished us, knowing that nothing moves
the Irish as much against the Crown as an executed martyr.'
'You were spared because you were "gentlemen",' she said
plainly. 'Had you been peasants you would have been hanged.'
She saw his face twinge at this. She had followed reports of the
uprising, subsequent trials and deportations, on an almost weekly
basis in the Pilot. 'And had you been truly of the masses then the
revolution might have succeeded. You failed because you were
"gentlemen" - a different class and creed. The people would not
follow you - your Young Irelanders raised false hope in them,' she
stated, in as non-accusatory a fashion as she could muster.
'Freedom is not a finite moment in time,' he answered her. 'The
moment we seized was but one in a long march of moments, each
gathering its own momentum until, together, they become an
unstoppable army. There will be a time for freedom, of that I
am sure.'
'But it is not now,' she cut in, 'not here. Why waste your life on such dreams?'
He leaned towards her, warming to the debate. 'Without dreams,
Ellen, we have nothing - we are nothing!' he said, the light of
dreams smouldering in the dark of his eyes.
'No, Stephen, you are wrong; dreams are for those who have
nothing else but dreams,' she countered.
'What is your dream, Ellen Rua?'
She ignored the slip with her name. 'My dream is no dream at
all!' she answered. 'It is to live in the world. To do, to see. To
make do. To put some order on the everyday things of life.'
'While we do not dream - and love - we are dead.' The dark
eyes now shone fully with the passion of his belief.
'That's only poet's talk, imaginings, it is not how the people live or
die,' she countered, adding the old saying, 'When hunger comes
in the window, love goes out the door - and dreams too!'
He considered this for a moment, a quixotic curve on his lips.
'What about dance and song, are we to be dead to them also?'
'They have their place,' she answered, carefully choosing her
words, 'but it should be a little place, to the side of living, not
at the centre. Like dreams, they too are only shallow conceits distractions.'
She knew her reply would not please him.
'Ellen,' he said, 'it is strange to hear you talk like this, like a
Boston Brahmin, concerned only with squirrelling away for their
baby Brahmins.'
'Squirrelling away, as you call it,' she retorted, 'providence for
the future, is not to be sneezed at. It is a trait many of our own
countrymen would do well to foster.'
'So we should trade our slavery to a famined soil for slavery to
the Yankee dollar, swap one form of bondage for another?'
l'Fonds d'artichaut, madame?' the waiter interrupted. She looked
at her companion, wondering what the question was.
'Artichoke hearts; try them,' he said, the intensity leaving his
voice.
As the waiter retreated, she continued the argument.
'The reality is that it is the women, the "Bridgets", not the
dreamers, who have "squirrelled away" and sent home a million Yankee dollars, "biddy-money" to free their families from the
slavery of the soil. Yes, the "Bridgets" are slaves here, but slaves
by choice '
'But yet slaves,' he interrupted.
'Slaves?' she challenged, her voice rising. 'The "Bridgets" are
the real heroes, the foot-soldiers, the revolutionaries. By doing,
not dreaming, they are changing the way Ireland at home and
Ireland in America will for ever be.'
'Why are you so engaged with this, Ellen?' he asked her. 'Is
it because you are neither "Bridget" nor dreamer, but caught
somewhere between?'
He was right. She had sought to deny her previous life, her wild
imaginings, her delight in the elemental. How she used to dance
above the ground - the wind and the rain spinning her - the dark
waters of the Mask spitting and seething, for her daring to dance
on its shores. She had even shut out the whispered mysteries of
her father's voice. In the din of Hub City, she had little space for
whisperings or wonder.
She kept her gaze on the stream of bubbled air surfacing from
some invisible space at the bottom of her glass. She was the cuvee - the blend - of all things past, outwardly the calm surface, inside
her, though, like mousselet rising.
'I changed my name,' she said, as if that answered anything. He
had waited, watching her while she went through it all.
'Nothing changes the way we are, Ellen. Nothing!'
She looked at him, leaning forward towards her, no harshness
in what he was saying. Irritated by his perceptiveness, she lifted
the glass, laughed and inclined it towards him. 'To the way we
were and the way we will be,' she toasted, feeling the wine dance
on her tongue.
When the violinist approached them, she didn't understand a
word he said to her, except that it was French. She thought
she caught the word 'musique'. He had flashing eyes and a
drooping moustache. This undulated up and down as he spoke
in his rapid-fire French, revealing underneath a near-perfect row
of pearly white teeth. All was set off by a colourful patriot's tuque, atop black, shoulder-length locks.
Stephen came to her rescue. 'What he is saying is, "Would madame like to choose a piece of music to dance to - to celebrate
the happy occasion?' He nodded towards the champagne. 'He
thinks we are newly married!' Stephen laughed.
Ellen was unsure whether to believe him or not; he wasn't much
given to humour. But before she could say anything, he had spoken
to the musician.
'Madame voudrait une valse irlandaise'
'Non monsieur, non.' The musician shook his head, looking at
Ellen, but talking to the 'monsieur'. ' Une valse, oui? Mais une valse
irlandaise - non.' He now directed both look and speech at her, his
arms outstretched, as if she should understand everything. 'Pour
vous, madame, ca doit etre une valse on un quadrille quebecois "La
Valse du Coeur Glace":
Ellen waited for an explanation from Stephen; the musician
obviously seeking some direction from her, arms raised again in
mild exasperation.
'He would like to play for madame a piece of music from Quebec
- "The Waltz of the Frozen Heart",' Stephen explained.
She looked from one to the other of the two men. '"The
Waltz of the Frozen Heart",' she repeated, 'for me?' She saw
the funny side of it and started to laugh. 'Tell him,' she directed
her French-speaking companion, 'that madame wishes him to play
his damn Quebecois waltz then.'
Whatever way her wishes were translated, it seemed to please the
musician, who removed his stocking cap, curtsied in front of her,
and extended his bow towards an open area of floor behind him.
Before she fully comprehended what was happening the back of
her chair was being held with Stephen saying to her, 'Madame . . . la valse.'
'The Waltz of the Frozen Heart' was exquisitely beautiful.
She was conscious of the other people who remained in the
room watching them, thinking they were honeymooners perhaps.
Mostly, she was conscious of the nearness of her dancing partner.
Tall and sinuous, his arm a guiding pressure on the small of her
back, he moved easily, if with more formality than she was used to.
The strict Protestant upbringing, she thought. Going into a turn, he pressed the heel of his hand into her spine, the wheel of the dance
inadvertently pulling her closer to him, causing her cheeks to gain
colour. She hadn't danced since her wedding-day, but how quickly
it all came back, the body needing only the touch of the opening
note to awaken its dormant rhythms. She had known nothing
of the music of Quebec - its Acadian melodies a pot-pourri of
mellifluences which wended and wetted intricately, until you were
not outside listening, but intertwined within. The waltz, looser in
three-four time than its Irish equivalent, was neither as predictable.
The melody, travelling one path, would twist off, serpent-like, into
some less certain by-way of runs and slides. Clipped beats, missed
beats, major to minor - and all the way back again. It took her
breath away.
As she turned she glimpsed the fiddler watching them through
half-closed eyes, the moustache drooped low, almost touching
the strings, locked with them in this menage-a-trois. 'The Frozen
Heart', she imagined to be locked in the icelands of the Far North,
red, unbeating. Stilled in the white bosom of the deepening snow,
awaiting the release spring would bring.
Or was the tune the voice of the human heart? Unloved, unused,
frosted over by pain or timidity? A heart suspended, awaiting the
release only true love could bring. 'Listen to the music!' she said to
herself, she thought. But as if in response, the man pulled her closer,
until his sunken cheeks brushed her hair. And the notes wrapped
around them like a skin of silk, lightly but surely, binding them
into the dance. Then she felt the great wound within the music.
It was a heart betrayed, she was sure of it now, for ever frozen,
a prisoner to itself. Afraid to be freed, safe where it was within
its own wastelands.
'It is the same cry as the cries of the souls in Hell . . .' she
whispered to him. '. . . for ever denied the love of God.'
It frightened her and she told him she was retiring.
She didn't see him the next morning.
Jean-Baptiste Frontignac, he of the flourished pen, and one of
the fils of Frontignac Pere et Fils, expressed great pleasure at seeing
her. He conducted her on an extensive and educative tour of their
cellars, introducing her to some clarets from the higher terrains of
Bordeaux, of which she was hitherto unaware. While expressing
himself pleased with the degree of business 'madame and Boston'
had brought to the family concern, the foppishly dressed younger
Frontignac wondered, ever so politely, if Boston could provide
'further possibilities'.
By way of reply, she presented him with her latest set of orders,
showing a substantial increase. In return, after private consultation
with Frontignac Pere, Frontignac Fils agreed a modest discount.
Further, they would convey goods to her by the railroad from
now onwards, ensuring better continuity of supply. Her meeting at
Frontignacs, having been successful, she was happy at the prospect
of returning home to Boston.
Any separation from her children and Lavelle was not to be
desired. Besides, this journey had been unsettling. The coincidence
of everything. This man from her past on the train. The hotel . . .
the dance . . . the beautifully wounded music of 'The Waltz of the
Frozen Heart'. She still could not fathom her reaction to it all. It
was like when, in the past, she had sung particular songs, her soul
had seemed to leave her body, be at a removed vantage - hearing
and seeing herself. This was something the same. While in one
body, she was there in the dance, it was as if also she inhabited the
space beside the violinist watching herself and the man perfectly
cadenced in rarefied motion. Almost, as if she were the tune
itself - it pulsing out through her in quavers and semi-quavers from wherever it lay, in the ice-mountains of the singing Arctic.
It was dangerous to have one's emotions disordered by music. She
trembled at the remembrance.
The journey homewards was uneventful, and the tall welcoming
spires of Boston seemed another world from the one which her
thoughts had recently dwelled. They had all been glad to have
her back, excitement running high, wanting to hear all the news
of her journey.
Later, she had been reassured by Lavelle's lovemaking and her
own response to it, and while she told him about the encounter
with Stephen Joyce on the train, she did not tell him of the later
events. Thinking about it while Lavelle slept, she wondered about
this, feeling some guilt at her omission. A guilt undeserved by the
events themselves, she told herself, before finally turning to sleep.
She invited Peabody to dine with them at Christmas. Jacob had no
family here in Boston that she knew of and she often sensed in him
a feeling of loneliness. He himself was partly to blame, inclined as
he was towards irascibility and pepperiness. His customers, she
imagined, liked this quirkiness of character in small doses but
only when engaged in purely commercial transactions. Peabody
added to the general spice that was Quincy Market. But, on a
level of social intercourse, his idiosyncratic character might be the
ruination of an otherwise well-toned evening, Boston society being
fine-tuned as it was to matters of politeness and manners. These
qualities in others were equally an irritant, if not a challenge, to
Peabody himself.
Recently Jacob had been full of the fact that 'Boston was getting
true religion at last' with the news that 'the city's first synagogue,
only the second in all Massachusetts, will open here by next
March'.
'Pray, Ellen, that it will not be on the seventeenth of that month,
else we will have to call it St Patrick's!' he had mocked. She knew he
was not part of the regular Jewish community; but he had hinted to
her on more than one occasion about 'declaring' himself.
Lavelle, she knew, was not all that keen on Peabody joining
them. She, on the other hand, liked his querulousness and the way
he half-said a thing, letting it hang there. He was such a relief from
the ordinariness and orderliness of much of her daily life in Boston
nowadays. Jacob had seemed mightily pleased by her invitation,
touched even.
A week before Christmas, Lavelle asked if 'we have room for
another at table?' When she enquired who it might be: 'It is our
friend, Mr Joyce.'
'Thank God we have invited Peabody!' she said, recovering
herself. 'There will, at least, be somebody for me to converse
with on a topic other than the "Great Irish Revolution".'
'He is a friend, Ellen, a compatriot,' Lavelle pointed out. 'Like your
Peabody, he is adrift in Boston. It is the least hospitality we can offer
to one who has risked so much for the freedom of our people.'
She was surprised herself at how she had responded. It was a
presentiment; Peabody and the man from Montreal at the same
table. She didn't like the idea, but she wasn't sure as to why.
She loved Christmas, the stillness brought on by the snow; the
seasonal excitement; the bells and baubles; new clothes for the
children; the sense of anticipation at the coming of the Saviour - all
of it. The preparations, which added to the extra work in ensuring
the many-layered cellars of Boston were well stocked with ample
bottles of 'Christmas cheer', did nothing to daunt her spirits.
Lavelle, however, was agitated. 'They've gone and elected Seaver
as Mayor!' he rushed in to tell her. 'You know what that means?'
She knew, but did not see how it would unduly affect them.
'Benjamin Seaver is a "Know-Nothing", Ellen.' Lavelle stressed
the words.
'I know!'
'You know! Eighty thousand Irish Catholics in Boston and we
get an anti-Catholic, anti-Irish Mayor. We'll have convent-burning
and "Pope's Nights" all over again - it will set us back years,'
Lavelle protested.
'If we stick to minding our own business, it won't affect us one
bit,' she chided him. 'We're not Irish any more,' she continued,
'we're Americans and we have a Constitution to protect us,
Know-Nothing Mayor or not!'
'Sometimes I cannot fathom you at all,' he said. 'Should we
not be concerned, if not for ourselves, then at least for the
thousands pouring into this city from Ireland?' he challenged.
And for the thousands already here trying to get a foot on the
ladder of the American dream, only to be shaken off like rats by
the Know-Nothings?'
The Irish have their own to look after them - the Church,' she
said, wishing the conversation to be over.
'Ellen, we are their own. We are in a position to reach down,
pull them up that ladder.'
He walked around the room at his wit's end trying to get her
to understand.
'Lavelle!' she said, annoyed at him now, always having these
arguments when she was up to her eyes. 'It is fine for you men
with your mist-covered dreams of a just society, wanting to change
the world with your meetings and secret organizations. That's all
fine . . . but . . .'
'But what, Ellen?'
'We are not so secure here in America as you might think.
The children have still to be schooled. You would risk all that for
someone else's quarrel?' she charged him.
'No, Ellen! You know I wouldn't, but it isn't just someone else's
quarrel. It's ours! We can't just live our lives as if we were separate
from it all. I'm sorry for rising you but it bothers me.'
She embraced him. 'That's all right, forget about it now - for
the Christmas.'
Lavelle was so passionate about issues; always was. Like she
used to be, she supposed.

At Christmas, when Stephen Joyce arrived he kissed her hand. This
time it was 'Mrs Lavelle'. She smiled to herself. In Montreal he
had called her 'Mrs O'Malley', before that, 'Ellen Rua'. Now it
was 'Mrs Lavelle'. Three names, three different sides to her; like
the Holy Trinity.
When Peabody arrived he was in high spirits, announcing that
he was 'here to celebrate the company, but not the Feast'. She
hoped Jacob wasn't going to be difficult. She was on tenterhooks
enough as it was. Peabody had brought some gaily-wrapped gifts
for each of the children, which he refused leave to them to open
'until we have dined'.
However, her other guest, on presenting her with a rather heavy
box 'in gratitude for the hospitality of mine hosts', insisted she open
it there and then, hoping 'its contents would add to the gaiety of
the evening'.
The contents revealed themselves to be champagne - Taittinger, the same they had shared in Montreal. She felt the colour drain
from her cheeks, then return again, making her hot and clammy.
What was he doing, trying to unnerve her in her own house? Damn
him, she thought.
'I know that bringing champagne to this household is akin to
bringing ice to the ice-fields,' she heard him saying, as if trying to
lessen his effrontery.
It seemed an age before anyone else said anything and she
wondered if Lavelle had noticed her state. Maybe she should
have told him. But what then if Stephen had done as he had
just now done, how would Lavelle have regarded that? He had
taken the risk that she had not told Lavelle. He had known. She
was troubled at his presumption that she had something to hide.
Later, while the men and Patrick remained in conversation and
she, Mary and Louisa prepared the meal, she tried to recall all of
the events in Montreal. Everything was clear, their conversation,
the setting of the table, the champagne, the violinist. How, from
being merely a tune for her pleasure, it had turned into dancing
with him. Then, the evening had become a swirl of music and
movement set against the slow motion of his voice. A voice,
like another instrument, between the sounds, saying things to
her. Things indefinite that she now couldn't remember. Peabody
came up behind her, startling her.
'Don't do that, Jacob!' she said, fraught that he had caught her
unawares.
'I just came to help - the Revolutionaries are in full swing!' He
nodded towards the dining-room. Annoyed, she wiped her hands
and cast aside the cloth she held. 'You are not yourself, Ellen,'
Peabody began, when Mary and Louisa had left for a moment.
'Haven't been for a long time - but this evening '
She had no time for this now and brushed past him for a ladling
spoon. 'Mary, can you help me with this?' she called into the
other room.
'Your guest . . . you knew him before?' Peabody was intent on
aggravating her. She never acknowledged his question. 'Interesting
fellow - not really one of you though, is he?' he persisted.
She continued to bustle around Peabody ignoring his prattle.
God, it didn't take him long to find out things. 'Here, Jacob,
make yourself useful, carry this in for me!' she ordered, landing
the sauce-boat with thick brown gravy into his flapping hands.
'Be careful, it could scald you!' she said, half-wishing it would.
When she re-entered the room, she noted that the conversation
to which Patrick had enthusiastically attached himself broke off.

Ellen was seated between Lavelle and Stephen with Jacob across from her. Then beside Jacob, Patrick, with Mary and Louisa
squeezing in at the end corners of the table. She should have gone
ahead and purchased a new dining-table rather than sticking to
her surprise plan about the pianoforte. Mrs Brophy had such an
instrument, and had informed her that 'both your girls show great
interest in the pianoforte when they come to visit', her daughter.
So Ellen had started both of them with lessons on Tuesdays. When
Miss Wigglesworth, their tutor, reported that 'the progress of both
would be much accelerated with regular practice', she had decided
there and then to start putting by. It would take a while, but then
Harriet Brophy had been in Boston long ahead of them and had
only in recent years acquired a pianoforte. She had gone once to
Miss Wigglesworth's to hear Mary and Louisa play and to be sure
both showed great promise, she thought. Mary deft and precise,
Louisa more awkward of style but more ready to explore her own
expression of a piece. They could make do with the table for now,
be squashed at the end of it for one day. She smiled down at them,
her two angelitos. They would have their piano, soon.
'To have Jew, Protestant and Catholic at the same table must
be an unusual combination for many, if not all of Boston's homes
this Christmas,' Peabody launched out.
'It will, Mr Peabody, be the common way before the century is
out,' Stephen Joyce replied, adding, 'and German and black and
whatever other combination one can dream up!'
Despite her fears Stephen made no reference directly or indirectly
to their meeting in Montreal. Nevertheless, she was acutely aware
of his presence so close to her at the table. She was glad when,
having eaten, the children had left. It provided more space, more
distance between her and the man. A few times she felt Peabody's eyes on her. But then, even when she was in his company alone,
he was for ever inclined to try and dissect her thoughts.
The conversation ranged far and wide, eventually arriving at
the continuing controversy over slavery and the freeing of fugitive
slaves by Abolitionist mobs.
'Where will it all lead to?' Peabody posited. 'What with relations
between the cotton Whigs of the Northern States and the slaveholders
of the Southern States continuing to deteriorate. That's the
nub of it - commerce, nothing to do with the rights of man.'
'If the black man in the South is liberated then they will swarm
like locusts over cities of the North which espoused their cause, like
Boston,' Lavelle answered. 'They will flood the mills and factories
and tunnels - working for nothing,' he continued. 'The Irish will
suffer. They will be the new slaves chained to unsupportable wages.
The Irish will be the new blacks.'
Ellen entered the conversation. 'No, Lavelle,' she countered, 'it is
an issue greater than an economic principle. All men and women,
black and white, should be free. It is an absolute principle, it speaks
to the spiritual not the corporal, the soul as much as the body.'
'Spoken like a true Bloomerist, Ellen!' Peabody applauded.
'I agree with Mrs Lavelle that freedom is an absolute principle.
Whether one wants it or not, one should get it!' Stephen added.
'If there were to be war between North and South, to which side
would you two gentlemen be disposed?' Peabody inserted, changing
the whole generality of the conversation to a consideration of
specifics.
'I would declare for freedom, and the North,' Stephen said out
clearly, as she knew he would.
'And you, Mr Lavelle?' Peabody asked.
'I would be with the South,' Lavelle answered, 'until our own
people have risen out of their poverty. They have suffered far longer
than the slaves of Alabama, who enjoy a better existence, are better
red and better housed than the free peasants of Connacht.'
'You see - that is how it will be . . .' Peabody seemed pleased.
"lend against friend, father against son, brother against brother.
Irishman against Irishman. Houses and countries divided against
each other in America's cause. Maybe even Jew against Jew, though
we are thin on the ground below the Mason-Dixon line.' he joked.
'And you Ellen, seated as you are between North and South. How
do you say?'
'I say it will not come to war - that this is only the talk of foolish
men,' she answered.
'Then let us talk of women,' Peabody rejoined, relishing his role
as mischief-maker.
'And what would you know of women, Jacob, except foolish
women?' She couldn't let the chance pass.
The two other men laughed, and Peabody himself smiled, goodhumouredly
conceding her remark. 'Indeed, Mrs Lavelle, but
leaving personal experience aside, I have heard it said often that
it is the women of Boston who are effecting most change on the
city, not the men.'
'How so, Mr Peabody?' Lavelle asked.
'Firstly, take the mill girls,' Peabody outlined, 'and the needlewomen
- thousands upon thousands of them driving the petticoated
engine of Massachusetts industry. Now that they have
organized, they hold sway everywhere.'
'That is hardly revolutionary,' Lavelle intervened.
'Perhaps, but if the women were to withdraw labour Massachusetts
would crumble,' Peabody argued. 'Secondly, beyond that, the
Catholic "Bridgets" clean, feed and,' he stressed, 'educate half
the children of Boston's elite. Think of that effect on the minds and
disposition of the upcoming generation - tolerance, eradication of
religious bigotry. For will the city fathers of tomorrow turn on the
hands that nourished and nurtured them as children today?'
'You exaggerate the case.' This time it was Stephen.
'No, I do not!' Jacob was quick to his own defence. 'It is the
women, the women of Ireland, who are building America, not you
Irish patriots! The women build it by stealth, but build it they do,
just as surely as do pick and shovel.'
Ellen was enjoying this. Lavelle and Stephen were not, she could
see. 'Go on, Jacob,' she encouraged him, 'you're doing well!'
'Is it the women or the men who travel in greater numbers to
our shores?' he asked her.
'The women,' she answered.
'So, you are superior in number,' Peabody continued, ignoring
the two men. 'And here also you are single, rejecting the chains
of matrimony, choosing when to marry, if at all. You have shaken
off the old taboos, become free.'
Ellen was fascinated. Peabody would have been as at home in the
learning halls of Harvard as he was in the city's market stalls.
'So!' Professor Peabody concluded, putting out a hand to Lavelle
and Stephen. 'While Irishmen in general are fractious, given to
intoxicating liquor and wandering throughout America, Irishwomen
stoke the industrial hearths of America, and the hearts
and minds of its young.'
'But it has always been so, Mr Peabody,' it was Stephen, 'and
yet the fair gender have so far failed to lead society forward, as
men have.'
'Yes, yes, yes - but here in Boston the women talk to each other,
that is the difference. Have you not seen the "Bridget Conventions"
at the edge of the Common, meeting regularly, with their prams,
to discuss all matters? Women are meeting everywhere in Boston.
Am I not right in believing that Mrs Lavelle is a member of such
a gathering?'
'Yes, Jacob, you know that I am.' She didn't like it when he
turned it personal to make a point.
'The Daughters of the Commonwealth?' he asked.
'Yes,' she said, a little curtly.
'And what are your discussions centred upon?' he asked.
She thought for moment, running her mind over the various
topics. 'Everything, I suppose - the future,' she answered for
simplicity's sake, conscious of Stephen's presence, and their 'differences'
at one such discussion.
'There, you see!' Peabody said triumphantly. 'Then each goes
home and discusses the Bloomerist view. of "the future", if not
with husband, then with sons and daughters who will shape "the
future"!'
It is a damned petticoat conspiracy, Jacob,' Lavelle said, in mock
seriousness. 'Will it ever succeed?' he added.
Ellen was reminded of the 'petticoat whalers', those doughty
women who followed their wayward husbands to sea. 'We did it
on the whaling ships; better than any priest or parson, reformed
the low level of living on those floating palaces of sin,' she said,
half-seriously.
'Chastity - that's it, that's what gives women their power,'
Peabody put in, 'Mrs Lavelle has cleverly brought the conversation
to the central issue!'
'Chastity?' Lavelle and Stephen echoed together.
'Yes, chastity - it is the greatest of all the virtues,' Peabody
lectured. Ellen was sorry she had given Jacob the opening. 'For
if a woman is chaste,' he went on, 'then she is likewise strong
in all other virtues. If, on the other hand, she has a weakness of
virtue in this respect then she is blemished in all respects.' She
watched him as he spoke, casting about the room like a pulpited
Sunday preacher - Peabody the grocer, the professor; now Peabody
the priest. 'Chastity is woman's greatest power - it entrusts the
young and innocent to her. It brings her a moral elevation which
allows her to admonish her husband, and it empowers her with
the courage and fortitude to be a guiding light for the society in
which she finds herself.'
'Well spoken, Mr Peabody. It is a subject dear to you?' Stephen
framed a question.
'And you will know,' Peabody continued, ignoring him, 'that
the daughters of Erin, the daughters of the "Virgin Isle" as it is
referred to, are among the most noble of all women in this respect.'
He inclined his head slightly towards Ellen.
She did not like this turn in the conversation. She knew Peabody
of old, and was sure that he would try to reduce everything to the
particular and the personal.
'No matter how low their fortunes sink, through circumstance
or illness, there is a line below which they themselves will not
sink. They are hardly ever, if not never, to be found among the
ranks of those bedaubed and bedizened women who until recently
inhabited the third row of our theatres.'
This was not the conversation for a Christmas table. She was
glad the children had been excluded from the company. She made
to get up.
'Mrs Lavelle, I am almost complete,' Peabody pleaded. 'Apologies for my inconsiderateness.' She had no option but to wait until he
was finished. 'Why is this?' he continued. 'Is it because they uphold
the influences of the "Old Country" regarding the sacred duties of
wife and mother, or is it because the darkness of the confessional
is the ultimate deterrent?'
'Really, Peabody, you go -' It was Lavelle.
'No, Lavelle,' she interrupted, knowing what Peabody was at.
'These are questions which obviously tax Mr Peabody's mind.
They are quite fundamental to society - fear or duty. If you ask
me, Jacob, and I know you do, my answer is that it is neither fear
nor duty. It is a sense of self - our bodies are the temples of the
soul,' she said, flintily, flashing him a smile.
'A good answer, Mrs Lavelle,' Stephen said. 'But I have one last
thought on the subject, then perhaps we should let the matter rest.'
She was glad of his intervention, wondering what his last thought
was. 'Is it humanly possible for passion and chastity to coexist?'
the poet-patriot posed to the table.
'Plato, my friend, Plato had the answer . . . I' Peabody jumped
in, eager to keep the conversation going. He was in his element,
Ellen thought. Unfortunately so.
'No, Mr Peabody, I think not,' Stephen, in turn, interrupted,
in his definite way. She was pleased to see Jacob taken down
a peg. 'The question is,' Stephen continued, 'not concerning the
relationship between two people, whether platonic or otherwise,
it is the more interesting one,' he paused, looking around at them,
'the one concerning the conflict which the co-existence of passion
and chastity might cause within the person, and which, if either,
of these two "virtues" would be the victor.'
She rose, calling for Mary and Louisa to help her clear the table.
It was a curious note on which to conclude, she thought, Mr Joyce,
surprisingly, having the last word over Jacob.
Later, when they bade their farewells, she was glad to see the
back of both of them.
The doings of Christmas took her mind away from all other
thoughts. But the new year of 1853 was scarcely ushered in
when, like January snows, the old feelings of restlessness set in
on her again. She didn't know what caused them to rise, only that
of late they rose with more frequency. Nor did she have a remedy
with which to assuage them. They just came and went of their own
accord, filling her with a feeling of helplessness at her failure to
control them. The restlessness was temporarily broken only by the
arrival, the following month, of the upright pianoforte with three
brass pedals. No one she knew of in Ireland had one. The house
rang with its music, Mary and Louisa continuously jostling for
position on the brocaded stool which accompanied its arrival. It
was a joy to her - their animation, their love of the instrument.
The infection of their enthusiasm, the fumbled pieces finally
falling into perfection, caught up not just the practising duo but
the whole household. Lavelle took a keen interest in their playing,
once or twice taking down his dusty fiddle and rosining his bow,
trying to cross his jigs and reels with Bach's baroque style, until
they all threw up their hands in despair and laughed.
Patrick, too, would linger and listen, wondering aloud when
his sisters were going to learn 'some Irish airs'. But after a while
Ellen found that even the uplifting charms of Bach or Handel
seemed only to occupy her mind for the duration of the piece.
Indeed, after a while, far from staying the growing restlessness
within her, the music seemed only to encourage it to feed upon
itself. The constant practising by Mary and Louisa jangled on her
nerves, the melodies resonating through the house mocking her
own internal dissonance. Then she would flee from home, so as
not to be cross with them, walk up and down the Long Path or sit under the gnarled boughs of the Great Elm, seeking the answers
that would unloose her. She had no reason, she told herself, to
be as she was - no 'why'. She was assiduous at churchgoing,
regular to the confessional. Once, she broached the topic with
her confessor.
'It is the soul pining for God, yet turmoiled by the Devil.
Attend regularly the sacraments. Fulfil all your wifely duties,' her
confessor advised.
And she did - fastidious in all things, delighting in some.
The rosary beads, which from habit she always carried, she now
used more frequently, fingering them for solace, silently muttering
the Hail Marys and the Glory Be's. Then at Mass, at that most
holy of moments, the Consecration, when all others bowed their
heads, she would watch over the edge of her arms as the priest held
aloft the chalice. As the sacred mystery of transubstantiation was
enacted and the wine became the Blood of Christ, she would join
herself with His ultimate sacrifice. 'This is my Blood . . . offered
up for you.'

'Acceptance, or lack of it, in your case,' Peabody advised, was her
problem.
She argued with him. 'But Jacob, how could that be? In every
role I carry out all that I should; I am happy here. Boston has been
our saviour after what we once suffered '
'Ah!' he cut in. 'Suffering. We all seek to flee it. Yet, when we
leave it behind us we wonder what is missing from our lives. We are
born to suffer, Ellen, not be free of it,' the merchant philosophized.
'I know that, Jacob, but it is as if a malaise is upon me. Why,
I don't know, but the lifting of which I deeply desire.'
Peabody gave one of his wicked little laughs. 'Is it the sallow
man at your Christmas table?' he taunted.
'Of course not, Jacob!' she said, annoyed at him. 'What nonsense
to come up with when I am seriously seeking your counsel.'
He always did this - threw up some personal effrontery, some
searching probe.
am sorry,' he quickly apologized, 'I am merely exploring all
venues. We men do not have the nose for such things as the gentler
sex does. I am afraid I am of no help to you. You must be your own
salvation,' Peabody said, washing his hands of her problem.
And so she determined to be. It had been a mistake to instigate
the discussion with Peabody. Between his poets, his philosophers
and his insufferable games of entrapment, he was too clever by far.
She needed someone to talk to who understood this mi-adh - this
malaise - that was on her. Maybe it was a woman's thing. Would it
be a topic for discussion by the Daughters of the Commonwealth,
she wondered? One topic they had discussed was 'Should Women
Learn the Alphabet?', and it had opened up into a lively two hours
debate on learning and intellectual thought. Something like that
maybe, perhaps 'Should Women Have Feelings?'. Or even more
specific, 'The Restless Spirit - a Woman's Malaise?'. But how could
she bring it up? What if none of the others had experienced what
she was experiencing? She would be exposed, look foolish, selfish
in her own preoccupations, have Mrs Brophy confiding in her on
the way home that her feelings were 'nothing more than an attack
of the vapours'!
She could almost talk to Lavelle about it. He would be concerned,
listen to her. But then, by even raising it, would she be
betraying a disloyalty to him? Perhaps his mind, like Peabody's,
would jump to the most unlikely of conclusions? No, she would
not risk causing any doubt to rise in him. She loved him too dearly
for that.
And even if she did raise it with Lavelle, she still couldn't tell
him about Montreal - the dance. Part honesty was worse than
no honesty, for under the guise of revealing a thing it strove to
conceal its core. But by not telling him was she acknowledging
some untowardness on her own part? Some slight betrayal? Yet,
if she did tell him, now, after all this time, would it not also signal
to him that by delaying the telling she felt she had strayed, however
briefly, from wifely propriety? That the truth might be disguised
by distance. She decided she couldn't risk talking to Lavelle, or it
would all come out.
In desperation, she tried to summon up the Maistir He would
understand, he always had, about wonder and the heart's yearnings.
He never listened to her with the ear only, but with the ebb and flow of the spirit, until her worry washed between them,
tidal, unspoken. But she could not get a clear image of her father.
Even that was failing her now. This was part of her problem; her
disconnection from him, who once had been always such a living
presence. She sat under the Great Elm, fighting to hold back the
tears, turning her head back over her shoulder as if looking away
at something, so that the 'Bridgets' wheeling their prams would
not see her and talk about her, when they gaggled together with
news of the 'doings' on the Hill. In a while they would disperse
again with their blue-blooded charges to behind the purple-paned
windows of Chestnut Street.
'An oversight,' Peabody had jested, when first she had asked him
about the windows, 'resulting from an excess of manganese during
their manufacture in the real capital of Beacon Hill - London.'
The residents apparently considered them 'distinguishing', leading
Peabody to further scorn them. 'The kernel of the problem being
not so much an excess of manganese but an excess of vulgarity!'
Ellen herself liked the purple glass. The way the springtime light
glanced against the world less ordinary hidden behind the purple
divide, then bouncing back again, multi-spectrumed, to light up
the more ordinary outside world. She had to find her own purple
divide, one where her inside world did not interfere with her
outside world - the children, Lavelle, her day-to-day functioning.
She should have no need of trying to draw up old comforts like
the Maistir, then worrying why they would not come when bidden.
Life had to be lived - to be inhabited. It wasn't too long a time since
she had spared out potatoes, rationing them like indulgences, an
extra one for Michael, one fewer for herself. Then, cutting out the
purpling, rotting pieces, swaddling them in straw, mollycoddling
them like new-born babes, because all that was between themselves
and the grave were those miserly few lumpers. She had much to be
thankful for now. So much.
'Lord, remember the dead,' she prayed. 'And thank God for the
living!'
She stirred herself, headed homewards. That would be an end
to it now. She would talk about it no more, to Lavelle, confessor,
"Peabody, nobody. This peering into herself would have to stop.
In the run-up to Easter, Lent had to be faced. A solid forty days
and forty nights to eliminate these panderings into which she had
allowed herself to slip.

On Ash Wednesday as she shrouded over the piano with Mary
and Louisa, Ellen was in good spirits. The piano would remain
covered until Easter Sunday. Then, like Christ from the tomb, it
would be resurrected, unshrouded, and sing again its song while
the sun danced. Now, it was right to silence it, in remembrance
of His Passion and Death. Like a monk in a monastery the piano
was, robed with the brown covering cloth she had stitched together
for it, the arched legs already covered with sackcloth, which in turn
was tied with string ribbonlets. This had been at Mrs Brophy's
insistence, and was a custom of Victorian England imported into
Boston, 'lest the lewd curvature of the supports give rise to scandal',
her neighbour had told her.
Ellen was unsure as to who it was Mrs Brophy thought the
shape of the legs would scandalize. But, nevertheless, she agreed
it was a right thing to do, wondering, at the same time to Mrs
Brophy, why they 'were so shaped by the wood-carvers in the first
instance?'.
'Lutherans!' Goodwife Brophy whispered back through the little
aperture between her lips and tucked her chin chicken-like into
her neck. There would be no more said about it, or the satanic
motivations which drove 'Lutheran' woodcarvers.
Lent, as Ellen had hoped, provided some relief from the lack of
ease with herself. It was a time of 'spiritual mortifications', Bishop
John had preached, 'a time of fasting, abstinence, and penance a
time for the recollected life'.
When, on Ash Wednesday, she had knelt and the priest thumbed
the sign of the cross on her forehead with ashes - 'Dust thou art
and to dust thou shalt return', a sprinkling of ash had fallen on
her nose. She had reached to brush it away, then withdrawn her
hand. If she accepted, truly accepted what her Bishop was saying,
a speck of ash on her nose didn't matter. Wouldn't her nose, her
face, all of her one day, be dust? And maybe soon enough too?
That moment had seemed to her to be a turning point, a symbol
of her determination to succeed.
Daily, with rising hope, she travelled the Way of the Cross,
shuffling around in silence, bending the knee at each Station. At
the Twelfth, 'Jesus dies on the Cross', she would kneel, united in
grief with Mary the Mother of God, and Mary Magdalen. The
latter, a sinner of low virtue, had washed the feet of Jesus, dried
them with her long hair and then stood watch with His mother,
while He carried the cross to Calvary. She had wept as those same
feet were nailed, one over the other, into the wood of crucifixion.
Ellen was much drawn to Mary Magdalen and how the fallen
woman had ultimately risen herself on the road to redemption.
Each day around Ellen, other shawled and bonneted figures rose
and fell in genuflection, redeeming themselves with words, 'O, my
Jesus, forgive us our sins . . . save us from the fires of Hell . . . lead
all souls to Heaven . . .'
Each of them, like herself, had held a hand to the hammer,
hammer to the nail. Every day she knelt, imagining her own sin,
whatever it was - ingratitude, idleness of mind - a thorn flying
from her soul to pierce the forehead of the dying Saviour.
Weekly, she attended confession, rooting out imperfections one
by one; uncharitable thoughts about her neighbour, Mrs Brophy,
impatience with her children, her little vanities in hair and dress,
her wilfulness, being vexatious to her husband, on every occasion
running through the Ten Commandments like a cargo listing from
the Frontignacs. Ticking them off one by one, bottle by bottle, in
case she had missed any, or broken any more. It satisfied her, but
only until the following week. Every sin she could find she confessed,
and the more she confessed the more she found. Yet every
week the sin she wanted to confess above all others seemed to elude
her. If she could only name it, label it like the other sins. Maybe it
was greater than all the others? Sometimes she became distracted,
so she would again run through the Commandments, searching
for what she'd missed, wanting to pin down this final flaw.
'First, I am the Lord Thy God, thou shalt not have false Gods
before me ... Third, keep holy the Sabbath day . . . Fifth . . . thou
shalt not kill . . . Sixth . . . thou shalt not commit adultery.'
Peabody, who never missed an opportunity, had told her once
of an early 'Irish? bible, whose instruction for the Sixth Commandment
was 'Thou shalt commit adultery' - the missing 'not'
a printer's error. The bible was withdrawn, 'Otherwise,' he had
laughed and taken her hand, 'the world as we know it, Ellen,
would come to a standstill with fornication!' She concentrated
her mind again - Peabody could be such a distraction. Ninth . . .
not covet thy neighbour's wife . . . Tenth . . .

Sometimes during Lent Mary and Louisa would accompany her.
Some days it was Mary alone; other days, Louisa. Now, here
in the church, she stole a look at Louisa, praying beside her.
Louisa worshipped her, Ellen knew. After school, days Mary
would remain behind to help the Sisters, the girl still ran to
her with a squeeze-the-life-out-of-you embrace. Then they would
clasp hands, arms swinging between them with happiness, two
schoolgirls at walk.
The girl was intent on the figure bowed down with the weight
of the cross, face etched on the towel held by one of the women of
Jerusalem. She turned to Ellen, pointing to the scene, quizzically
scrunching up her face, wanting to know who the woman was.
'That is Veronica who wiped the face of Jesus . . .' Ellen started.
Louisa shook her head, circling her finger in an anticlockwise
motion, urging Ellen to repeat what she had said more slowly.
'Ver ... on ... ic ... a,' Ellen whispered, breaking the word into
shapes, instead of syllables. 'We ... to ... nic ... a,' she repeated,
stressing it differently. She was about to start again when Louisa
pressed the fingers of her hand to Ellen's lips, halting her. She
understood.
The Sixth Station was Louisa's favourite, the one where they
lingered longest and the girl would gaze on this small act of
compassion, as if for her this, and not the crucifixion itself, was
the central moment. Ellen could only surmise that it related to
Louisa's own experience, when years previously she herself had
stopped along the road to Louisburgh and taken pity on the
famished waif the girl then was. When they had completed the
Stations, as always they sat in silence together.
Louisa was fifteen now, maybe sixteen, Ellen thought, and had
shot from a gangling twig into a well-sprung sapling with the
nourishment the New World had brought her. She wasn't yet
quite as tall as Ellen herself, but she would be before long. 'I bend
while you grow,' Ellen would say to her. Louisa carried herself well - no sense of snawvauning about her. What would she do out in the
world in another few years or so, Ellen wondered? There wasn't
much work of any consequence if you couldn't speak, much less
for a woman who couldn't speak. Louisa liked learning and music
- maybe one of the universities - but then what? Still, with God's
help, it would all work out.
Mary, who would be fourteen this year, was already clear that
she herself wanted further study, 'if it was not a great burden on
the family'. Whatever the burden, Mary would have it, Ellen had
decided. 'To be somebody', especially as a woman, you had to
have an education. After that, Mary could decide to marry well,
if nothing more. Though Ellen doubted, given their conversations
about 'settling for a beau, a dress, and a pudding bowl!', that
Mary's horizons would rise only to the marriage life, and no
further.
Ellen loved seeing the two of them together. Mary, with her
shock of red hair, a wildness in it like her own once had, Louisa's
straight to the shoulder, dark as a nut, and as shiny. Arm in arm
around each other like real sisters, sparkling together in the flower
of youth.
Lavelle had been wonderful about the children, not only with
regard to Patrick and Mary, but Louisa, too, and reared them as
his own. She was particularly pleased that with Patrick, Lavelle
had struck a close friendship. More so as the boy grew older
and became more radical in his thinking in relation to Ireland.
It was something she had hoped Patrick would grow out of here
in America, but to her dismay he had not. It was the one element
of their family life that disconcerted her, especially as he was now
of an age, 'a man', as he kept telling them, that he could attend
Lavelle's various meetings. Still it was good that the boy had this
bonding with Lavelle and she would do nought to sever it.
The men in America, she noted, lived more separate lives than
the small communities back home allowed them to do. Here
among the Irish, there was 'men's business' and then there was
'women's business'. 'Men's' was out of doors, 'women's business'
very definitely confined to the inside of the hall door. The threshold
between those two worlds was seldom crossed. In their own case
she was an exception, combining both male and female lives.
Lavelle, for his part, accepted that, while Bishop John, for all
his liberal views, did not. Women should make the home, not the
money was the Church's view. No matter how much self-denial she
engaged in, she doubted if it could extend that far. She was indeed
fortunate that with her temperament and Lavelle's understanding,
she had the freedom to move between both worlds. She offered a
prayer for him before she and Louisa left the church.
Peabody she had avoided as much as possible since undertaking
her Lenten 'renewal'. Without arousing any suspicions in Lavelle,
she had managed to substitute him for herself on a few occasions
in visiting the merchant. Everything was tidy, in its place. Her
confidence in her own ability to deal with her malaise grew
with each passing day, each Stations of the Cross, each little
lessening of self.

St Patrick's Day, in the middle of Lent, was like an oasis in the
barren desert of penance and abstinence leading up to Easter. It
was a wonderful day, with High Mass at the cathedral, followed
by the parade. The whole of Boston, it seemed, was greened and
festooned for the celebration. Obligations of fasting and self-denial
were lifted for the festivities surrounding Ireland's national saint.
However, she resolved privately to hold to her daily routine to
further advance her self-discipline. So it was wholly against her
better judgement that she agreed to later accompany Lavelle to
a 'special meeting at which ladies who support the Irish cause
will also gather for a discussion on the un-American Principles
of Education in Boston'. This was part of the diocese's ongoing
assault against the anti-Catholic bias of Boston's public schools,
for which Patrick's case provided so much momentum. The ladies
had requested her presence, would have a private room. She, on
the other hand, desired no such public involvement, and even less so, the raucous St Patrick's celebrations which would follow the
meeting.
'Lavelle, I see no necessity for my going. It's over. Changes have
been made,' she argued.
'Have you not heard Bishop John from the pulpit say that while
outwardly there is change, there is little change of heart?' Lavelle
contended.
'You can't change people's hearts if they themselves don't want
to,' she responded.
Despite Lavelle's entreaties, she resisted his arguments to
accompany him. It was not until Patrick intervened, saying, 'And
what will my friends think if they find out you refused to go'?' that
she at last relented.
The crowd parted silently as she supported Lavelle out of the
Windjammer. She wanted to be well gone before the Night Watch
arrived. If only she'd followed her instinct, not gone near the
place. Even at the last moment, as soon as she had heard the
din of untuned fiddle music and the rum-filled raucousness of its
inhabitants, she should have turned on her heel, gone home. Why
the ladies, or the men for that matter, had to hold their meeting
in such a den was beyond her.
Now her husband hung on her shoulder, bloodied by a knife
wound. And behind them on the tobacco-spewed floor of the
Windjammer, a man lay dead. Never mind that Lavelle was
not seriously wounded. Never mind that the man behind, his
opponent, had died accidentally, fallen awkwardly on a splintered
bottle, a weapon in one of his own hands - in the other a knife not
through any direct act of Lavelle's, or that her husband had
not initiated the aggression. She could have saved it all for them,
if only she had been firm in her resolve. Then the remark about
her person would not have been made, Lavelle would not have
remonstrated with the man about the slur on her honour; one
thing leading to the other until the knife was produced, Lavelle
assaulted, forced to defend his own life. They made it home, no
one taking too much notice of two more drunken Irish staggering
homewards on St Patrick's night.
Once there, she bandaged his wound, put him to bed then burned
his clothes and her stained dress. The last thing they wanted was
trouble with the law. Lavelle would be imprisoned; it would be
the end of everything. She was still shaking after the incident. The
mannered life she now lived in Boston had long removed her from
the brutality of her previous life. She clambered into bed trying to still her quailing, trying not to waken him, wondering when the knock would come to the door. But he was still awake and turned towards her, grimacing with pain.
'Oh God, Ellen, I killed a man, killed him with my own two hands,' he said, distraught.
'It was an accident - he would have killed you,' she said simply.
He dug his head into her shoulder, racked with remorse. Tenderly,
she pulled him to her. She had to help him, get him to forget about it for tonight, sleep and get his strength back. Tomorrow would be a new dawn. He would be more able to cope.
'You're such a good man, Lavelle,' she said, dabbing the soologues of perspiration from his forehead.
'Oh Ellen, if anything ever happened to you,' he answered, 'it would be the end of me.'
'Nothing ever will, while I have you to protect me,' she whispered, 'and to love me.'
'I couldn't do much for you now,' he replied, straining a smile.
'Oh yes you could,' she laughed deep down in her throat, the tension still high in her.
She tried to move him into position alongside her. It was awkward, he being unbalanced, unable to put weight on his injured arm. Somehow she managed, Lavelle scolding her for being 'wanton',
while he was 'almost drained of life', talking the words into her mouth in little gasps. In a while she felt the spasms of his pain become one with hers, the bandaged arm beneath his chest, crushing her, taking the breath out of her each time he rose and fell. Violently she responded, needing her own easement. Over his shoulder, she saw the older scars of the flogging in Australia. Embers from the past, always reddening into life during their passion.
'Oh, Christ, Ellen! Oh, good Christ!' he cried at the highest point.
She barely felt him sink his teeth into her shoulder, the soft part near her neck, didn't know about it until afterwards. Nor did she realize until she had helped him off her that his wound had opened, seeped through the protective bandages, little globules daubing her breasts and ribs. Now, as he slept beside her, she sat
up, watching the blood, mesmerized, at how it splayed out over
her belly, held for a moment in the dark pool of her navel, before
deep-reddening the hair below. As if she herself had been severed
from thorax to bowel. She shivered, thinking of the knife that had
reefed him, imagining what it must be like, before rising to wash
herself.
Then she sat there an hour or two, watching over him, reminding
herself that she would have to admit in the confessional to her lack
of abstinence on this terrible Lenten night.
Wondering if the night itself would change everything.

In the days following the Windjammer 'incident', as she referred
to it, she was rushed off her feet between tending to Lavelle and
the children and the task of single-handedly running the business.
She hired a man to help her with the heavier work. A surly enough
fellow, Sullivan from Knocknagoshel, who didn't like taking orders
from a woman, and whom she could scarcely understand with his
high-hilled Kerry accent. Still, he did the work - after the first
tongue-lashing she gave him.
It was better being busy; it kept her mind occupied. Too much
wondering about things, like too much religion, was a bad thing.
She had cauterized Lavelle's wound herself, coagulating the severed
tissue to stop the bleeding, not wanting to bring a doctor for fear
word would get out and he be arrested. Miraculously, no knock
came to the door. Yet, she imagined, someone must break silence.
Not the 'tars' from the whalers. No, they would want no truck with
the law, only to hurry back aboard their floating gin-palaces, set
sail again for the whaling grounds and accommodating wahines
of the South Seas.
Lavelle's Repealers would also hold fast - not give the Nativist
Night Watch any whisper that would have them on his trail. It was
common knowledge that any 'Paddy' falling into the clutches of
the Night Watch would receive short shrift. The Irish would hold
together, not be informers.
She cautioned the children against speaking about the 'incident',
and told them as little as possible, although Patrick was hard to
restrain from wanting to know more about it. She found the boy visiting with Lavelle more than she would have liked. Now they
were both heroes, bonded in blood. Both her men. She fought
back within her what she considered to be an inappropriate surge
of pride.
Neither did she have time to spend dallying with Peabody, which
was a blessing in disguise. While she enjoyed their 'philosophical
discussions', on previous occasions he had consciously provoked
her in what she felt was a very personal way, with his talk of 'love
and death'. And what was it he said she possessed - or more rightly
it possessed her - 'the Element of Fire'? She could do without all
that now. The first time she did visit him, he asked about Lavelle.
When she told him that Lavelle was 'not well', Peabody was all
concerned.
'No danger to life or limb, I trust?'
'No, Jacob, my husband is but mildly indisposed,' she lied,
wondering if he knew anything.
'And . . . the boy, your son - Eliot School - how fares he?'
Peabody enquired.
'Oh, he's fitting in quite well now, Jacob - thank you for asking,'
she answered politely.
'Courageous - a bit of steel to his backbone. Well, I wouldn't
expect less,' he complimented her. 'It is amazing,' he continued,
'more than circumstance, I suspect . . .'
'What is, Jacob?'
'Like moths to a flame, Ellen, that's you. You attract . . . shall
we say . . . attraction. I don't think I have ever met anyone quite
like you. The harder you try to avoid it, the more it seeks you
out.' She hoped he wasn't going to start his meanderings. She had
yet to finalize his order. '"Maidens like moths, are ever caught by
glare,"' he quoted. 'Byron, Ellen. You should study Byron. He is
the poet of passion and fire.'
'Jacob, never mind Byron. The Bordeaux . . . ?'
'Never mind Byron?' he interrupted, throwing out his hands in
mock despair. 'Ellen, my dear, you display your origins. Byron is the Bordeaux, the Grand Cru.'
You couldn't win with him, she thought. ' "The best of life is
but intoxication,"' he continued, off again on one of his whirls.
'Bordeaux, beauty, Byron, love . . . "In her first passion woman
loves her lover, In all the others all she loves is love."'
'Jacob, stop it!' She had had enough of him. 'To hell with you try
selling bottles of Byron to your customers! I'm leaving!' As she
fired out the door to the marketplace, she heard him call after her.
'If not Byron then perhaps closer to home - Whittier? "Love
has never known a law, Beyond its own sweet will."'
She heard his mad laughing following her until the sun glancing
off the gold-domed cupola of Faneuil Hall seemed to drown
him out.

The week before Holy Week, the knock at the door she had feared
finally came.
She was distraught when they took Lavelle, pummelling the
arresting officer's chest, shouting at him. 'It was self-defence . . .
the man wronged me!' She didn't know what she was saying. It
didn't make any difference, they still took him, roughly handling
him so that she saw the tell-tale stain creep through his shirt.
'He's wounded, can't you see? Let go of him!' she continued to
berate them.
They restrained her, but she followed them through the streets,
running to keep pace with their prison cart, damning them with
her shouts, until it drew away from her, and she was left standing,
railing after them like some tricked harpy. She hadn't managed to
see him, not even a glimpse to know that he was all right. Dejected,
she made her way homewards. She had thought that with the lapse
of time he would be safe, that the incident would be forgotten.
If only she had followed her instinct, not gone with him to that
place; kept to what she had planned - away from the Irish. Then,
none of this would have happened. Thinking of him, flung there
in a Boston prison cell, she recalled to her mind the Westport
workhouse. 'Once in, the only way out was a shroud,' they
used to say.
She was sick to her stomach. It had been her fault then too.

The children and Mrs Brophy were awaiting her when she arrived
home. She knew by the stricken looks on their faces that they had already heard the story of Lavelle's arrest. She embraced them,
one by one, whispering some empty solace.
'He'll be all right, Mrs Lavelle. He's innocent of any wrongdoing.
He'll be all right. Please God!' Mrs Brophy comforted, making
some black tea for her, fussing about the place, grating on her
nerves. 'It's a terrible thing, a terrible thing, and Mr Lavelle such
a fine upstanding man - I won't delay now, Mrs Lavelle, but if
there's anything . . . anything at all?' Mrs Brophy offered, backing
towards the door, Ellen thanking her, trying to get around her to
open it as quickly as possible. 'Don't you bother yourself, Mrs
Lavelle, I'll let myself out!'
When the woman had left the children closed in around her.
'We should get Bishop John - he'll help us,' Mary put forward.
'Mr Joyce,' Patrick butted in, 'Mr Joyce, he could do more, he
knows about the courts . . . things like that. He'll stand by us.'
Louisa came and stood in front of Ellen, her two hands joined,
mouthing shapes, intently looking at Ellen, telling her something.
'Pray!' Ellen said, that's what the girl was telling her. 'That's
what we should do first, pray for his safekeeping. Louisa is right.'
So, like when they were children, they fell on their knees around
the kitchen table and prayed the Five Sorrowful Mysteries - being
as it was the Time of the Cross.
Lavelle's incarceration distracted her from her previous preoccupation
with herself. She went to see Bishop John, who received
her well, expressing his concern. He would do what he could do, he
said, qualifying this with, 'Even today, Mrs Lavelle, it is not freely
permitted for the Catholic clergy to visit their flock in any of the
State institutions.' This didn't encourage her. 'However,' he added,
'I will make my concerns for your husband's situation sufficiently
known to the authorities.'
She thanked him, and left. However little the Bishop could do,
it was a help.
She didn't know where to begin to search out Mr Joyce. He
could be anywhere in America or Canada, even back in Ireland.
Patrick, too, had offered to make enquiries, but she didn't want
to be dragging him into it. In any event she was of two minds
whether to try to contact the man or not. They had been drawn
too closely together in Montreal. Sometimes, even at her Stations,
she found her mind distracted from prayer to that time.
Louisa and Mary now came more frequently with her to do the
daily round of vigil, during the lead-up to Easter. One day, early in
Holy Week, Louisa alone had accompanied her, Mary remaining at
Notre Dame to help the nuns with some preparations for the feast
day. After they had completed the Stations, she and Louisa had sat
in silence at the hack of the cathedral, a flickering candle-wick their
sole illumination. The church had temporarily emptied of other pilgrims
of the cross. She loved it when there was just themselves.
'I am still in Thy presence, O Lord,' she said, inwardly. 'Speak
to me ... in Thy wisdom deliver me.'
What if after Lent, after Easter, everything was the same with
her? If the Lord had not delivered her of her malaise? This past
week or so, since Lavelle's arrest, it had seemed to recede. But it had
not gone away, of that she was sure. At the same time she was riven
with guilt that she should be so preoccupied with herself, instead of
with Lavelle, languishing in prison. Even though she knew he must
be proven innocent of the grievous charge against him. She turned
to find Louisa staring at her. Could the girl know? It was said that
those deprived of sight had improved use of hearing. Could the
opposite be true? That those who had no sound had increased sight
- inner sight? She took Louisa's hand, keeping her voice down.
'You understand, don't you?' she asked, their faces close together. 'I
don't mean the words - maybe that too - but you have understood,
I think, for some time. I am tormented with myself, Louisa,' she
continued, in the voice normally reserved for the confessional, 'as
much by lack of understanding, as by the thing itself. Till my knees
are bruised with genuflecting, till I have worn the varnish off the
wood in these pews.'
She paused. It wasn't fair, she knew, to unburden herself like this
to Louisa, who couldn't ask her to stop, this girl whose saviour she
had once been and to whom now she was looking for solace.
'I shouldn't be . . .' Louisa lifted her hand, holding out her
index finger, rotating it slowly. She wanted her to go on. Ellen
grabbed the girl's hand, stopping its motion.
'Oh, my child, my dear child - you do understand.'

Good Friday morning was as sombre as the day itself. Black clouds
gathered over the bay, sheeting down grey 'penitential rain on
Boston, as if its hapless inhabitants alone were responsible for
the death on Calvary.
It was a bad day to be setting out to visit Lavelle. She hoped,
as she prepared, umbrellaed against the day, that he would soon
be out; that it was all some mistake, and she thanked God that
Patrick hadn't been with them on the night.
She would be back in time to take them to Holy Cross at three
o'clock for the Stations, three o'clock being held as the time at
which Christ finally died. Oddly, the thought struck her as she
stepped out into the downpour whether it was the 'three o'clock'
in Ireland, or in America, that was the correct 'three o'clock'. She supposed it didn't matter.
She hated the thought now of the place she was to visit. Peopled
mainly by the Irish - the dregs of Boston life. However, all thoughts
of institutional life and low-living compatriots were banished when
she saw the tall figure of Stephen Joyce rise to greet her in the
waiting area. She hadn't seen him since Christmastime and now
she was jolted, discommoded by his presence here.
'Ellen.' He smiled, came towards her and took her arm. 'I am
sorry we meet again under such circumstances - word came
to me.'
She was aware of the firmness of his grip, something in his face
at seeing her again. 'Stephen ... I ... I'm glad you're here. Lavelle will be ... thank you,' she got out.
'I have arranged legal representation and will personally post all. We will have him home to you without delay,' he told her.
He continued to hold her arm until she withdrew it from
him. Immediately she thought her action unnecessarily impulsive
ungracious of her. He was here to help her and had already done
more than she would have asked.
'Thank you . . . thank you, Stephen,' she said again.
'You have been drenched with the rain,' he said. 'It is a dangerous
time of year.'
'Yes, quite - I'm sure I'll be . . .' She wasn't sure what she was sure of.
'My lodgings are close by. When you have visited with your
husband, I will take you there; I have a dry cape.'
She had agreed before realizing it. 'I have to be home before
three, to take the children to church,' she put up defensively.
Did he - the Presbyterians - commemorate Christ's Passion in
the same way?
He smiled, the dark eyes intently taking in her words, her
concern. 'Of course. I haven't had you late yet.'
She flushed, as he meant her to, remembering her own tardiness
in Montreal.
She left him, straightening herself before she was shown in to
Lavelle, who was in a small cell with two other men. Before she
could speak, one of these came to the bars jabbing a finger at
her.
'Is this the missus . . . patriot?' he said to Lavelle, turning to
guffaw at his cohort, who answered, 'Anamandhoul, Festy . . .
wouldn't like to layve her too long on her own on the outside would
you?'
The jailer who accompanied her, a stout, able man from the West
of Ireland, rapped his nightstick across the bars. 'Get downside you
two harpies,' he threatened, in his best Connemara English, 'or
I'll overhaul the both o' ye thieving wharf-rats,' he added, 'bilkin
them what's arriving from the old country with nothing.' He left
no doubt in Ellen's mind as to in what condition 'overhauling
would leave the two 'harpies'.
Lavelle was overjoyed to see her, reaching out to her through
the bars. She grabbed his arms.
'I'm sorry, ma'am, you can't do that - regillations. I'm sorry,
Connemara said gruffly, embarrassed by their show of intimacy.
'It's all right, officer,' Lavelle said.
He looked well, she thought, slightly strained, the lick of hair
normally swept back off his face now dangling in the middle of his forehead, giving him an even more boyish look than usual.
'Did you meet Stephen outside?' he asked her.
'Yes,' she said, wondering why it seemed such a hard question.
'He'll explain everything. It's hard to talk here with these two; they'd sell their souls, and mine, for a dollar,' he whispered, his face close to the bars, close to hers.
'Will you be out soon?' she asked, seeking confirmation of what Stephen had told her.
'Soon, very soon, I hope, Ellen . . .' He paused, as if about to say something else to her. 'How are they all at home?'
'They're worried for you - praying for you - but they're well,' she reassured him. 'You're not to be worrying yourself, do you hear? Everything will be fine,' she added.
'I promise I won't. Listen, Ellen, you should go. I don't want you in here with the likes of these two, they're a disgrace to the name of Ireland. Connemara here, he's all right,' he said, nodding towards the guard, 'a different class of a man.'
She wanted to talk more to him - just to stay there, despite Festy and his fellow 'harpy', Losty. She needed time. It was all too quick, too sudden. Lavelle behind bars, the visit, the man outside waiting for her. It all made her jittery inside, like she was before Lent began.
'Lavelle . . .' she began.
'Ellen - go now!' he said.
She wanted to tell him that she loved him, that she'd be back tomorrow, bring the children on Easter Sunday, wanted to talk about all the safe reinforcing things in their lives.

Stephen Joyce took her by the arm, holding the umbrella over her with his free hand. He never spoke a word except 'this corner . . . cross here! . . . careful!' Neither did she speak. It was as if the rain eating down on them, drumming them into silence, said it all for
them. Like when they had danced, she couldn't think straight, focus on what this was all about: Lavelle's lick of hair, the gruff

guard from Connemara beating the bars, the two others, watching
her like caged animals. The Stations at three o'clock, the cape, the
dance . . . What had they all to do with one another? With her
malaise? She had felt it there in the prison, back worse than ever it
was, like a wave sweeping over her. Good Friday, the end of Lent
and she was no further on. It had defeated her.
'We're here!'
He let her in. She heard him shake out the umbrella behind
her. She turned, fumbling for the top button of her coat. He took
her hands away, undid it. Then, one by one, the rest. She stood
foolishly watching the top of his head descend as he bent to reach
the lower buttons.
Her own hair lay smathered against her forehead, little rivulets
of rain running from it, down along her nose, down her cheeks droplets
falling on to his black and already soaking head. Those
that did not fall on him found the space between the high-necked
paisley print she wore and her neck, cooling her shoulders and
her breasts, so that she never moved when he rose in front of
her, unlaced her black bonnet and let it fall away. Down her hair
fell, down over her face like a wet veil, dividing him from her.
When he unshouldered her thick coat she thought the absence of
its sodden weight would lighten the pressure she felt. Instead, the
only relief she felt was a shiver as the last of the Good Friday rain
evaporated into the warm place halfway down her back. When
the shivering had taken over her whole body, she didn't allow him
even to undress her.
She had this far drowned - would not be denied any longer the
delirium of the depths to which she had delivered herself. Baggaged
up on the bed, her hair blinding her, she pulled at him, urging him
for release, sucking in mouthfuls of hair, wondering if she would
suffocate before she had done or in the doing itself. She scarcely
felt him inside her, as if her body had dislocated itself, disengaged
from him, was a thing unto itself, beating about in the air. Her
hands found the brass headrail and she clung to it for dear life,
imagining it must snap, crash down on his head. He looked up; her
thoughts, wild and scattered as they were, somehow transmitted
to him.
'Ellen, your eyes,' he said, straining a hand to them, 'you're
weeping!'
Only then, in the wiping away of them, was she aware of her tears. Above her hands, somewhere on the wall, where part of her was, a church-bell tolled the praying hour.
'Oh, sweet crucified . . . Oh Jesus!' she cried, as she sacrificed everything.
Calling out with the ecstasy of the damned for her lost Saviour, Lavelle, and the children who waited at home for her.

They were waiting for her, worried. She was never late.
'I was delayed, but your father's all right,' she blurted out. 'I
had better fix myself. We'll get some of it, the Adoration of the
Cross at least!'
She dashed upstairs, tidied her hair, threw on a fresh coat and hat
and was ready, when she noticed the purplish bruise on her lower
lip. 'Oh, God!' She panicked, thinking it worse than it was. Her
eyes unclear, still filmed over, she daubed some powder above the
lip-line, half-concealing the bruise. 'Bit it while running ... Bit it!
Bit it!' she panted, convincing herself, her heart racing. She closed
her eyes and sighed . . . remembering . . . part euphoria, partly
hysterical with remorse and fear. Her heart still palpitating, she
herded them out the door ahead of her.
'Come on now, let's hurry!' she ordered, relieved at the mantle
of bustling their lateness provided.

When they got there the cathedral was already crowded. She
ushered them in, urging quietness. The altar was entirely stripped;
no altar cloths, candelabra, or cross. Bishop John was shrouded
from shoulder to foot in the long white alb of purity. Around his
waist, securing the alb, the girdle, symbol of chastity; about his
neck and shoulders, the white-lined amice, signifying restraint. The
stole, black for Good Friday, symbol of immortality and innocence
regained, was looped around his shoulders, crossed at the breast,
like a garment a woman might wear.
So crushed were the pews with sinners, they were unable to sit
together, Mary and Patrick finding seats further up on either side
of the nave. She held back to the rear - couldn't have borne the
closeness of them squashed up against her. Louisa squeezed into the pew in front of her. It was the Sixth Station. Thank God,
she was behind Louisa, wouldn't have to face the girl when
the congregation turned to genuflect towards each Station. She
hadn't thought of any of this beforehand. Now it all seemed so
important.
'The Sixth Station - Veronica wipes the face of Jesus,' Bishop
John pronounced. To her dismay, Louisa turned around, gave
her a little smile. She did her best to return it. 'My most beloved
Jesus . . .' Bishop John began the prayers. '. . . Thy face was
beautiful before . . . now wounds and blood have disfigured it.
Alas, my soul also was once beautiful. But I have disfigured it
since by my sins.'
She couldn't focus on the prayers, would only get so far in
the response, 'Oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins . . .' and then be
lost to it.
Again, the drowning, her whole body slipping into a kind of
post-delirium state, she trying to resist it until the delirium oozed
over her once again, mixed with her sweat and the rain, the saliva
seed of her sin. Even the sream that had filmed her eyes like a
second skin still remained. Like a chrysalis imprisoning her sight.
She blinked, trying to unblur her vision, trying to see the faces of
the women of Jerusalem; Veronica, full with pity and compassion,
Mary Magdalen, the adulteress, now at the foot of the cross, her
sins shriven. Snatches of the drone of the prayer floated in and out
of her sea of drowning. '. . . As Christ died for us so too must we
be dead to sin.'
And so it went, Station by Station.
'Let us pray' - the Bishop. 'Genuflect' - the Deacon. 'Rise up' the
Subdeacon. The constant genuflecting helped, was like rising
up out of her sea to the surface, a chance to breathe. At times, she
had to grip the elbow-rest to break her unsteadiness. She thought
she might have to leave. Would it never end - the 'let us prays',
the 'genuflects', the 'rise ups'? Would Christ ever be buried - the
stone rolled over against His tomb?
She felt a hand on her glove. It was Louisa. The Stations were
over. Now the row in front of her was emptying into the nave, a long
shuffling line, to approach the altar for the Adoration of the Cross.

'Behold the wood of the cross ... on which hung the Saviour

of the world.'
She had dreaded this moment. What was she to do? Unlike
Communion, which required no stain of mortal sin on the soul
in order to receive the Body and Blood of Christ, every sinner in
the place would now file out of the pews, and up to the altar,
where the large crucifix held by the Bishop would be kissed. How
could she march up, bold as brass, at one with the rest of the
congregation after what she had done? She considered sitting it
out, hunched there, head in hands. She would be the only one,
but she could have had a momentary weakness, a dizzy spell. Who

was to know?
Those beside her started to rise. She hesitated, unable to move,
caught between Heaven and Hell. Her mind was made up for her
when Louisa stood back, waiting for her, at the far end of Ellen's
pew. Now she had to move, fall in with Louisa, not give rise to
scandal.
The procession inched up the centre aisle. She moved within its
impetus, eyes down, not wanting to see anybody. A hand touched
her arm. Startled, she looked up. It was Mary, who having adored
the cross, now sought readmission to her pew. Ellen stood back,
head lowered, feeling the flush of betrayal rise in her. She, Mary's
mother, was worse than a Mary Magdalen, who had fallen but
then was redeemed. She herself was fully unredeemed, in such a
state that she wasn't even sure she sought redemption. In front
of her, Louisa's brown hair, neatly braided beneath a prim little
box hat, swung from left to right with every step in a tiny
precise motion. Like a hypnotic pendulum, the braid of Louisa's
hair drew Ellen forward until she was next to kneel before the

cross.
She averted her eyes from Bishop John, fixing them instead
on the alabaster white body of Christ, head hung on His chest.
Somehow, she got to her knees trembling over His near-naked
body. Bent to deliver her Judas kiss. Some kissed His face, some
the gashed side, some His nailed hands and feet.
'Behold the wood of the cross.' Bishop John proffered her
Saviour to her.
She wished it could have been a plain wooden cross instead
of a crucifix. It was almost beyond her to kiss any part of
His body with her stained mouth. She brushed her lips against
Christ's furthest extremity - the blood-dripped toes. The moment
seemed to last for ever, the fever in her lips against the cold
plaster incongruous, unholy. Still bent, she was gripped by an
over-riding fear that her crucified Saviour would open His eyes
speak . . . denounce her. That fixed by His denunciation she would
be unable to rise. Then she was rising, Bishop John wiping
away from the feet of Christ the smudge of powder she had
left there.
Later, when they returned to the house, she told them about
her visit to Lavelle. They wanting to know more, she wanting
to tell less. Finally, she reached the sanctuary of her room,
douched herself thoroughly, filled with panic, wondering again
what she would have done if Lavelle had not been in jail. If he had
been there.

On Holy Saturday her whole body ached. Her legs and arms, her
neck and back, every joint and sinew, it seemed, ached in a hollow
of longing. No matter how busy she tried to make herself this ache
was not assuaged.
She went to church on her own for confession, dreading it,
needing it. Otherwise, in a state of mortal sin, she could not
receive Communion on the following day. With her husband in
prison, that omission might cause some tongues, notably Mrs
Brophy's, to wag. In the confessional she went through all her
litany of other sins, putting off until the end her reason for being
there in the first place.
'Is that all, my child?' enquired the priest, knowing from years
of listening that it was not.
'I have sinned against the Sixth Commandment, Father!'
She heard the silence fall. A pause and then: 'Are you married
or unmarried?'
'Married . . . Father!'
'Married,' he stated. In the dark beyond the screen which separated
them, she sensed his shoulders ease, his misunderstanding
granting her a momentary respite. 'With your husband' - he paused
- 'or on your own?'
She did not know how to answer this.
'Well, child, with your husband - did you waste the seed?' He
laboured the question, already beleaguered by a long stream of
penitents.
'No ... Father.'
'On your own then - the solitary sin?'
The tone was quite impatient now. He pushed his head closer
to the grille. She bit into her lip before saying it.
'It was with . . . another man.'
'Adultery! Adultery!' he said, as if not believing what he was
hearing. 'You committed the sin of adultery?' He turned his face
full on to her.
She wanted to tell him to speak lower - if by any chance the children had followed her, and were outside.
'Yes,' she whispered, withdrawing her face from that of her
accuser.
'Speak up, woman!'
'Yes, Father - adultery.' In the darkness, she could feel the wrath
rise in him.
'You committed the sin of Mary Magdalen - the mortal sin of
adultery with another man.' Each word was a nail in her heart.
She could only nod.
'And is he married, this . . . man?'
'No, Father.'
'Thank God.' She heard the expulsion of breath; something
saved, she thought, grasping at straws, knowing worse was yet
to come. It came with his next question. 'Does this man attend
the sacraments?'
She paused, steeling herself. 'No, Father, he's . . . not of our
faith ... a ... Protestant.'
She wished he'd turn his face away. They weren't supposed to
look at you, know who you were; maybe for adultery it was different.
She pulled her head further back into the penitential gloom.
'An English Protestant!' he emphasized, scarce believing what
he was hearing, damning her with each syllable.
'No, Father.' Her voice was shaking. 'He's Irish!'
'Irish? Irish? He's Irish, this man?' her confessor thundered, until
she thought all outside must hear her sin.
'Yes, Father,' she said, stricken into further submission.
'And pray tell me, what is a good . . .' he paused, reviewing
her status, '. . . an Irish Catholic woman like you doing carrying
on with a Protestant in the first instance, whether he be English
or Irish?'
She didn't want to say he was a friend of her husband's, incur
a further outburst, even louder questions. She fumbled for the
answer.
'He ... ah ... helped . . . helped my family in the past ... in
the bad times.' She managed to get it out, trying to make it sound
as heroic as she could, as if she had some excuse.
But her confessor was having none of it. 'And now he exacts his
reward - is that it?'
'Oh, no, Father! No, it wasn't like . . .' She leaped to the defence
of Stephen - this black Protestant, who was the occasion of her
downfall in the priest's eyes. 'I ... it... it was my sin ... I -' She
stopped herself.
'This man is evil,' he warned, accepting no exculpation from
her on the Protestant's behalf. She held her breath, waiting. 'There
are those about of the opposite faith who are seducers of our
womanhood, who prey on the weaknesses of your sex. You must
not see him again. Do you understand?'
She wanted to argue with him. It was she who was evil, had
given in to herself, to the weakness of her sex, as he had put it.
Instead, she found herself agreeing.
'Yes, Father.' She wanted to be rid of him, to be out of there, now
that the worst was over and she had confessed. But he wouldn't let
her go that easily.
'Are relations . . . normal with your husband?' he asked, more
restrained now that she had resolved not to see the man again.
'Yes, Father.'
'Then why did you find cause to go outside your marriage?'
'I... I don't know, Father. I was weak ... I succumbed to temptation,'
she answered, knowing it to be untrue. She hadn't been
tempted that she was aware of. It had happened, just happened.
She thought of the Sulpician monk to whom she had confessed in
the chapel of Our Lady of the Snows. The warning he had given
her about the 'occasions of sin', a warning she had not heeded. She
wished he would stop asking her all these questions, had thought he
was on the point of doling out her penance, giving her absolution,
letting her go. There must be a score of people outside at this stage,
waiting, wondering - as she often had.
'Do you have children?'
'Yes, the two, Father.'
'Hmm ... a small family,' he reflected, asking, 'you are still of
child-bearing age?'
'Yes, Father.'
'Then, to save yourself from further sin, you must pray to God to
grant you the blessing of more children - with your husband,' he
added quickly. 'And you must never see this man, this Protestant
man again. Never - is that clear?' She said it was. 'For your penance
- the Stations of the Cross - twice,' he said curtly. 'Now, make an Act
of Perfect Contrition and ask the crucified Saviour for forgiveness.'
She closed her eyes, praying with all her resolve, damping down
the intruding signals from where her body still remembered him,
the words of contrition pushing back the small twinges of delight,
crucifying them into the high dark corners of the confessional.
'Oh my God ... I am heartily sorry . . . detest my sin . . . firmly
resolve . . . never more to offend thee. Amen.'
He gave her absolution at last, mercifully, the back of his white
hand held up in blessing, slicing away her sin in the darkness. She
had to control herself from pushing out the door of the cubicle
before he had swept across the purple curtain over the latticed
screen which divided them.
As she came out into the light, her eyes adjusting to it, the
crowd gathered in the confessional pews, studiously kept their
heads lowered, resisting as best they could the temptation to look
up, take in this scarlet woman the priest had kept for so long. The
woman who had caused him to raise his voice, who had delayed
them, making them even more fearful of the wrath of God. If they
had looked up, the way they did when people came out who had only small sins and short confessions, it wouldn't have been so
bad. This way was worse. Now it was as if they all knew, as if
the livid mark of mortal sin was stamped on her forehead, not
even other sinners wanting to witness it.
She fled the church. Unable to do her penance now, slinking
from Station to Station, whispering and genuflecting, everyone
there knowing it was her; sneaking their sly little looks at her as she
stood at the end of their pew for the Station above the confession
box - the Carrying of the Cross. She would come back later.
But how? She had to visit Lavelle - if only she hadn't told him
she'd come back today; let it wait till tomorrow. But how could
she have known? She must visit him. She had confessed, resolved
never to sin again, been given God's grace. It was a mortal mistake,
but it was behind her now. She had come through adversity before,
much worse than this, than her own weakness.
Neither could she go home now and come back later to the
church. The children would wonder, want to come with her. For a
moment she considered that if they did, she could pass it off; extra
prayers for the not-yet-risen Christ, or for Lavelle's safe return. But
then, the second round of the Stations. How could she explain that?
But she must do her penance, otherwise her sin was not absolved.
She knelt at the back of the church, agitated, putting it over and
back in her mind - one or two seats up and in a bit, so that those
leaving would not pass too closely by.
In just twenty-four hours, everything had become so complicated,
so topsy-turvy Whatever way she turned she was trapped
by the everyday normalities of her life. She had stepped out of the
ordinary and now the ordinary was closing in on her. Her given
life, as it should be, defining the boundaries of who she was, of
what she could and could not do.
She just sat there, not praying, her thoughts in a maze. Finally,
she resolved that she would first go home, then visit Lavelle,
returning home once again. She would bring the children with
her back to the church. By that time the queues of penitents
would be cleared. She would make one round of the Stations
with the children, the other round some other time. She worried
about attending Communion the following morning if she hadn't
completed her penance. And when, if not today, would she make
the other round anyway? People didn't make the Stations of the
Cross after Easter Saturday - there was no need. Christ was risen
then. She would stick out like a sore thumb if she were to go
round the Stations on Monday, or Tuesday, be considered to have
taken leave of her senses. There was nothing for it except to do
her penance now - both rounds. It would avoid complications
afterwards, telling more lies to the children. She got up and walked
the length of the cathedral to the first one. Why couldn't he just
have given her the Stations once?
'You don't look yourself, Ellen,' Lavelle whispered through the
bars to her.
'Oh . . . I' she said, putting her hand up to her face.
'You're not to be worrying about me. Did you get a wetting
yesterday?' he asked, continuing to look at her strangely.
'No, I'm fine, nothing's wrong. You're the one in prison.' She
laughed nervously.
'Did Stephen explain everything to you?' His face was close to hers.
Connemara watched them, and from back in the cell, Festy
and Losty, forewarned to behave themselves for the lady visitor,
watched their jailer.
'He did, yes. You shouldn't be long in here,' she said brightly,
trying to make the connections clearly in her mind.
'No. He's a good man, Stephen, to have on our side,' Lavelle
said, each word having a potency for her beyond what he intended.
'The education always stands to a person - you always said that
yourself, Ellen.'
She smiled, making a little noise with her mouth.
'Yes, I know it's hard to talk with the two behind here.' Lavelle
nodded backwards, misunderstanding her reticence. 'Maybe they'll
be moved by tomorrow. You'll bring the children? Connemara
here says it's all right.'
She hoped that Festy and Losty, repulsive as they were, would
not be moved. They were a distraction, something for Lavelle to
focus on other than her alone.
'Yes, they're looking forward to seeing you,' she answered
positively, glad to be truthful about something.
'And you, you yourself, you're sure you're fine? You look tired,'
he asked again, casting his eyes over her face.
She prayed that he wouldn't notice the guilt she felt was written
all over it, or the fading powdered bruise. If he did either, he didn't
say, he let his concern rest.
'Yes . . . yes, of course I'm fine - don't worry,' she answered.
It further grieved her that he was concerned over her. His own
situation was bad enough. If only she'd told him yesterday what
she had intended to say - that she loved him. Maybe it was as well
she hadn't. Then it would have been a worse betrayal.
Outside, she half-expected Stephen to be waiting. Half-glad
when he wasn't, but half-disappointed too. Stupidly disappointed.
She wondered where he was, what he was doing, what did it all
mean to him? She must follow the priest's advice - not see him
again. She had thought his solution almost childishly simple, but
simplicity was what was called for, no ifs and buts. And if by force
of circumstance, until Lavelle was freed, she must see Stephen in
that respect, then she could meet with him only in that context,
not be with him in any other situation.
Holy Saturday was kinder of climate than the previous day,
lifting her spirits, as if fore-weathering the glory of Easter. She
slowed her pace slightly once out of the jailhouse - out of the
maelstrom of that hunted feeling, of having to think faster and
faster, think ahead of herself, almost. But it would not be wise
to over-dwell on the events of yesterday. The why of it, for
instance, her complete readiness, it seemed, for it to happen, and
without a word spoken between them. How did they both know,
like two rivers confluencing, coursing into one? Then her abject
abandonment of all decorum, all that was virtuous in the marriage
act. She turned her mind from the thought. She was certain it was
connected with her malaise of spirit; as if her person, aware in
advance of how far she was fated to fall, had slowly drawn the
veil of melancholy upon her. Now that she had fallen - gone to
the pit - she would be free.

Easter morning was glorious. She rose early and watched for the
sun rising out of the depths of the Atlantic like a saved soul. Lumen
Christi - the light of Christ. It was one of the few concessions to
her previous life that she had retained. In those times, she would leave the cabin early and from the leac - her high-rocked place
- near the Crucan, would wait for the sun to appear over the
fields beyond the area on the far side of the Mask known as
'Little America'. She smiled at the tongue-in-cheek nature of the
name, now that she had seen 'Big America'.
There, the sun, which came to them from the east, from England,
where it never danced, her father had told her, splayed down from
Dublin across the plains of Leinster and into the far stoned outposts
of Connacht. She remembered how it sparkled and danced, greening
the fields out of their darkness; sprinkling down into the Mask,
then like a fiery serpent seeking out the sanctuary of the darker
waters of Lough Nafooey. She always knew, as she watched the
sun, couldn't but know that the Saviour had indeed risen.
Here, in Boston, she had no Crucan, no high place. But the
Easter sunrise was still a source of wonder for her, the first gap of
light opening on the eastward walls of the tall buildings, expanding
upward until each windowpane in turn became a dazzling crystal,
throwing back to the streets below the light of redemption.
'Glory to the Risen God,' she prayed, lifted up by wonder, raised
out of her fallen humanity.
She dressed, more eager to meet the day than she could have
hoped for, and furled the hair back from her temples, pinning it
quite severely. Then she plaited it across, but above the nape of her
neck, finally interlacing both sides of it into a fusion of red crochet.
Her fingers felt its symmetry, knowing that her new bonnet, as
yet untried, would perch perfectly on top of it all. When she
had walked to Boston's most fashionable hat shop, tucked away
between Washington and Tremont, she had already decided not to
keep with her favourite green. Delargy, the milliner, had demurred,
advising that 'nothing suits better an existing glory than it be
crowned with a contrasting one'. She was not for moving, instead
going for navy; but a blue navy, not a dark dreary navy.
Now, as she secured it with a neat little bow beneath her chin,
she was pleased with her navy-blue bonnet. Pleased, too, to note
the bruise on her lip had all but disappeared. There was something
about a new, blue bonnet.
Mass was a riot of celebration, the statues and crucifixes
undraped from their Good Friday mourning, the radiant white,
'first-class' Easter vestments in stark contrast to the penitential
purple of Lent. The bells carolled out the good news of Resurrection
- alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Children scrubbed shiny as apples,
boys in their new breeches, girls in their fresh frilly dresses, jittery
with excitement, accompanied 'shushing' parents, the starched
fathers upright with new canes, mothers newly bonneted. 'Jesu,
Joy of Man's Desiring' never sounded as sparsely beautiful and
that morning, He truly was her desiring. The circular, yet ever
ascending melody of Bach's cantata rose like an invisible ladder,
the higher notes seeking Heaven's angels, the heavier basso ones,
the footfalls of God, redeeming the earth.
She stole a look to either side. Mary, to her left, was radiant
with happiness. Music had become so much part of Mary's life,
as much as it once had been of her own. On the far side of
Mary was Louisa. She, sensing the movement, turned towards
Ellen. The girl's face was in rapture. They were angels, the
both of them, pure and beautiful angels in the sight of God.
Her angels, and Patrick, to her right, her dark archangel. They
were her treasures, all that mattered. Almost of an age now to
make their own way without her. But not to be divided from
her because of her actions - that would be unbearable. She
glanced at them again. Louisa, still watching her, smiled, as if
knowing her thought, reassuring her - the child, mother to the
woman.
Outside, after the Mass, it was the same; Exultate - rejoice,
rejoice - and 'Happy Easters', flying like angels between them
all. Many sympathized with her about Lavelle. But when the
priest sought her out, the same one who had heard her confession,
she was truly mortified. She said as little to his enquiry
as politeness permitted. If he did recognize her voice, there was
no acknowledgement of this in his manner or speech. She spotted
Mrs Brophy, bedecked in some gaudy bird-yellow creation, making
for them. Ellen was glad of the intervention, despite the woman's
opening proclamation: 'She hasn't been herself at all, Father, not
since they took in poor Mr Lavelle. Such a fine man - hasn't been
herself - have you, Mrs Lavelle?'

Later, before she took the children to visit Lavelle, she warned
them of the 'two noxious characters named Festy and Losty who,
when not in prison, normally reside in the tenements of Half-Moon
Place, and whose language is as foul as the place they inhabit'.
'Are they Irish?' Mary asked.
She replied that they were.
'We were Irish once - like them,' Mary stated simply.
'No, Mary,' she answered her daughter, 'we were Irish and poor,
but we were never like them. We never lost our dignity.'
'We were Irish!' Patrick picked her up. 'We still are - even if you'd like us to lose it!'
She was annoyed at him, always correcting her. 'Patrick, you
know that's not true,' she began. 'We'll always be Irish, but you
all will, in time and by geography alone, become more American
than Irish. You must be prepared for that, not be looking backward
to what is dead and buried . . .' she regretted her choice of words,
'. . . to the past, I mean.'
'I'll never be American,' Patrick protested.
'If one day you get married, your children will be. Then what
will you say?' Mary challenged him, in her own quiet way. This
halted him momentarily.
'I could be back home in Ireland by that day. Things will
have changed there and maybe I'll have helped change them,'
he answered back defiantly. 'At least there we were something,'
he added.
'What do you mean, Patrick - "something"?' Ellen took up the
issue, resenting the implication of what he had said.
'Well, we're nothing here. The real Americans despise us, and
you,' he directed the word at Ellen, 'you despise the real Irish getting
fancy things and pianos, trying to be like the Yankees and
covering up the feet of them, in case anybody would think we're
still "Micks" underneath it all.'
'Well, Patrick . . .' she started, but he kept going.
'You never mix with any of your own. Never speak a word of
our language or sing the old songs - only up with that Mrs Brophy
and your Daughters of the Commonwealth, talking raimeis about
notions and the place of women in society and '
'And what's wrong with that, Patrick?' she said angrily, flabbergasted
at his attack. The way he had begun to back-talk her
of late, she felt like slapping his face, something she'd never done,
to any of them.
Before Ellen could continue, Mary interjected. 'We do have a
place in society and a right to our own minds, not just to be
traipsing after you men!' she said firmly.
'See!' He jabbed his finger at Mary. 'You wouldn't be talking
like that back home,' he accused. 'This place has changed ye to
be even talking like that. That was the plot of the English all along
- to drive us out of Ireland to another England. Only here it's not
called England, it's called America.'
'Drive us out to do what, Patrick? Sure we have a much better
life here?' Ellen had had enough of him. She had made a mistake,
letting him mix too much with Lavelle's Repealer friends, at
his age.
'But that's the price. We end up being like them, so we'll never
rise up against them. So we'll forget.'
Ellen couldn't believe her ears - was this some of the nonsense
that went on at Lavelle's meetings?
'But,' Patrick continued, still defiant of her, 'there's some of us
will never forget - like me and Lavelle and Stephen Joyce!'
She wasn't going to hear any more of this. 'Patrick, Mary, shsst
now the two of you! This is not the day nor the time for that kind
of talk. Get the feet under the pair of you!' she ordered them.

Lavelle was in good spirits and to her great relief was much distracted
by the presence of the children. Mary and Louisa huddled
up close to him, unsure of what being in prison could do to a
person, nervously delighted at how normal his condition seemed.
'Is it awful in here?' Mary asked, in a hushed voice.
'Well, if it wasn't for these two behind me - it's not such a bad
place and the cooking is almost as good as home,' he laughed,
catching first her hand, and then Louisa's, mockingly examining
their fingers - as if he'd know. 'You're both not practising as much
as you should be; I can tell,' he said, adding, less whimsically, 'I
miss the music in here.'
'We said a prayer for you in school,' Mary said. 'Didn't we,
Louisa?'

Louisa reached through the bars and put her hand up to his
face, drawing it slowly downward over his skin. Ellen watched,
a turmoil of emotions battling within her. How they loved him,
and he them, and she . . .
'And you, Patrick, how are you? Keeping the side up?' he asked
of Patrick, who hung back a little.
'He don't look a bit like you.' Festy shuffled around the back
of the cell.

'Not a one of them do, Festy,' chirruped in Losty and the two of
them broke out, guffawing and grunting, and poking each other in
the chest with the fun of it all. She saw Patrick's face flush, his fist
clench. He would be embarrassed in front of her that they were
like this - and Irish.
'Don't mind them, son,' Lavelle said, pointedly. 'They're only
gadabouts, parasites living off their own.'
Patrick squared up to the bars. 'I wouldn't take any lip from the
likes of those two '
'Take it easy now, lad.' Connemara stepped forward. 'They'll
get their own comeuppance one of these days.'
Patrick was mollified somewhat by Lavelle telling him, 'You're
the man of the house now - look after your mother and sisters.'
Then Lavelle told Ellen he had been earlier visited by Stephen
Joyce to say that he had secured the legal representation sought.
The man, a Mr Erastus Jellico, would wish to speak with her.
Stephen would call on her to make the necessary arrangements.
This set her in a panic. She did not want him calling on her.
What would she have to say to him; could what had happened
between them happen again? It couldn't, it could never happen
again. But what was she to do? To demur would raise questions
and, after all, if it helped expedite matters, secure Lavelle's release,
then it was all to the good. He would be home more quickly. Then
everything would return to ... as it had been before - normal.
She could keep one of the girls at home, so that she would not
be alone when Stephen called. But on what day would he present
himself? Anyway, what reason could she use to keep either of them
with her? As in everything to do with this . . . this awful business,
every twist, every turn, every connivance, led only to further twists
and turns, to further convoluted connivances. There was nothing
for it but to resort to her own resolve and the grace of God. It was
as simple as that, and involved drawing no other person into her
schemes. Simple was best.
Monday he did not call.
Tuesday morning she had a visit to make to Peabody. She left a
note, in as steady a hand as she could muster, and tied it to the
door handle in case he should call and she missed him.
Peabody, who had obviously heard the news from some quarter,
was all concern about Lavelle, enquiring after his health and
worrying about 'the deleterious effect of even a short stay in such
a low place'.
'And your own spirit, Ellen - how is that bearing up?' he asked,
scrutinizing her features. She assured him it was fine, but he kept
badgering her, when all she wanted was for him to just settle his
account - he would have done well with the cognacs running up
to Easter. 'Do I detect a certain, let me see . . . lustre in you, not
present in recent weeks?' he enquired, stringing out the words in
a way that alarmed her.
She looked at him. '"Lustre", Jacob? With all that's . . . ?'
'Yes,' he interrupted, ignoring the surprise in her voice.
'I suppose it is the high point of your Christian year,' he went on,
trying to fox her, she knew. 'The scriptures have been fulfilled, Christ
is risen. You have done your forty days of sackcloth and ashes, so
you are all redeemed with new life?' He threw his hands out as if
he'd worked it all out to his own satisfaction.
'Jacob, I haven't the time, nor the inclination for your "philosophizations",
or whatever you call them. I have to be back for '
She caught herself.
'For what, Ellen? Ah, I can tell ... a secret?' He moved to stand
beside her, eyes wide with mocking. She had never noticed before
the patch of pink pate starting to show through the fine white
strands of his hair.
'Jacob, your hair is thinning admirably,' she said, hoping it
would deflect him.
He laughed, loving it when she bit back at him. 'You are in a
hurry, Ellen, I can see. No time to talk to old "balding'' Jacob
today.'
She made to move. 'Yes, Jacob, I'm sorry. Some other day.'
'You have an assignation,' he trumpeted, not asking, stating.
'I can tell by your heartbeat,' boldly placing his hand above her
bosom. 'Yes, yes, I'm right!' he said, like a crowing cock, the
white-crested comb of his head tilted up at her.
She didn't flinch, was used to him by now. 'Yes, Jacob, you are
absolutely right,' she said, as straightfaced as she could. 'I have an
assignation with a lawyer, and when he has finished securing my
husband's release, I shall direct him to turn his attentions towards
you for committing a felony on my person!'
He drew back, laughing. 'You are a wicked woman, Ellen Rua,
as wicked as I am! What a match we would make in wickedness.'
He continued to laugh, rubbing his hands in relish. 'Tell your
lawyer to leave Lavelle where he is. I have flours and grains and
hams and spices here, but not a bar-mitzvah in sight. While you you
are still a young woman and could bear me a brace of sons,
a couple of fiery-haired Irish Jews, Paddy and Shamus Peabody.
In no time they'd have the running of the whole market!' He was
beside himself with mirth at the notion.
'God forbid the thought, Jacob,' she fired back at him. 'And forgive
you for thinking it. Pay me now so I can go,' she demanded.
He paid her, watched her thread her way through the crowds.
'Ah! Paddy and Shamus Peabody,' he laughed more quietly to
himself.
As her head bobbed out of view, Jacob Peabody still wasn't
convinced. She was too cocky by half today, had over-engaged him.
And he was right - she had a lustre to her, something indefinable
he hadn't seen in her before. 'The Element of Fire,' the proprietor
of Peabody's - no heir to his prized hams and grains and spices
mused.

Pleased with how she had handled herself with Peabody, Ellen
hurried homewards. It was important to her that she had given him no suspicion that anything was amiss. He would pry that
suspicion open, unlocking it further and further until it became a
book of evidence against her. Unlike with his other games, this one
she could not win, were he to discover her flaw. Sometimes Jacob
displayed a possessiveness towards her which his banter hid, as
if he imagined they inhabited some special world between them,
which she supposed they did. However slight this trait now was,
who was to tell how it would manifest itself, if he were able
to find the chink of her guilt? Jacob was best kept at a long
arm's length.
He was standing at her doorway, waiting, note in hand.
'I did not know which way to read it. Whether you were hurrying
back and I should wait, or whether you were not at home to me?'
He smiled, waving the note at her.
She hurried him inside, did not want anybody seeing him outside
her house, waiting for her with her husband in prison. Straight
away he came to her and put his hands to her face.
'Ellen, it has been an agony '
'Stop, don't say it!' She tried to push him away. 'We ... it must
not re-occur, Stephen,' she remonstrated.
'Ellen, it was not as you seem to refer to it - an unseemly urge.
Since first I saw you all those years . . . I . . .'
'No! It's impossible . . . no!' She broke back from him. 'It is
madness. I have confessed our sin . . . my sin.' She had repented,
resolving faithfully never to consent again. 'You have to leave,
Stephen. Give me your message and leave - my children will be
home!'
He raised his hands. 'Tell me that I am mistaken, Ellen; that you
have not harboured such thoughts - for I have ever felt them in
your company.'
How could he have? She didn't even know herself until ... it

happened.
'No! You're wrong!' she denied. 'It was a different thing - a
malaise, a lingering malaise in the face of all my happiness and
good fortune since coming to America.' She tried to explain it
away, that it had nothing to do with him. That it wasn't he who
had altered her feelings, distorted her life.
She saw him withdraw, stung by her words, felt the hollow
longing rise within her. The seeping realization that perhaps Good Friday was not after all the purging of her malaise, not the razing
of it, not the end, gripped her. What if its consummation, the
carnal celebration of it, was only the beginning? The terrible truth
dawning on her, she moved to him, took his face in her hands,
stretched out her fingers over the bone and hollow of his cheeks,
and kissed him deliberately for all the years he had loved her.
She met him again on Wednesday at his quarters, this time
allowing herself to be naked beside his long body, surprised at
how unsqueamish she was.
'We are both damned, you know,' she whispered, Eve-like, into
his ear. 'Damned to high Heaven - Stephen Joyce, or McCoist, or
whoever you are. It was a rue day you crossed my cabin's door.'
He didn't laugh with her. 'Damned to Hell, Ellen,' he corrected.
'You're too serious,' she said. 'To Hell with seriousness and to Hell with damnation - there's enough of both in this life,' and she
bounded up in his bed as if to make her point.
'You, on the other hand,' he smiled, reaching to touch her
shoulder, to uncoil her back down beside him again, 'are more
unrestrained than I had ever imagined.'

On Thursday, he escorted her to the offices of Erastus Jellico.
Throughout, though they were never alone, every fibre of her body
seemed to be set in contrasting extremes with itself.
Once in the street again, she turned to him. 'He unnerved me.
Do you think he suspects anything?'
'Mr Jellico? I am sure he does not,' he reassured, but she wasn't
as convinced as she would have wished.
He took her arm, hurried her along through the streets, the breath clutching at her throat so that she could not even ask him
where it was he was taking her.
Soon she had forgotten about Mr Jellico, forgotten about everything.
In the suspended moments of the after-stillness, he asked her, 'Do you remember Montreal - the waltz?'
He reached over, running a finger along the stretched silk of her side.
And the frozen heart,' she responded. 'I wonder if it is yet loosed?'
He made no answer, encircled her with his arms, danced in the
gossamer time with her, until she saw it pinned to the sky outside
his window, lighting the heavens and the earth.
The rest of her life had now become nothing more than the time
in between the occasions when she could see him. Outside those
meetings, whatever else she had to see to she dealt with in a frantic
state even when she didn't need to, trying to claw back the time
spent away from him. And if life before had been vacuous, and
she in a state of suspended animation, now it was a flurry and a
frazzle, she always readying and busying. As if her over-industry
was a store of pardon she was building up - plenary indulgences
for her sins. Besides, she could not bear to be idle, to dwell on
their last intimacy, to let every pore of her body rage for the next.
When the children looked at her askance, she offered 'your father's
upcoming trial' as an excuse, knowing that she was fraying their
nerves as well as her own. In the rare moments when logical
thought afflicted her, it all made no sense.
She prayed to God that Lavelle would be acquitted, be home to her
and everything back to normal. His release became a beacon for her
own salvation. She took food only in snatches, yet her blood raced,
her body prospered. She was indestructible, surging with energy
enough for two people. For the two lives she was now leading.
Everybody complimented her on how well she looked. Inquisitive
Mrs Brophy - Ellen checked herself. She must learn not to
keep thinking of her neighbour in such a manner. Mrs Brophy
was blameless compared with her own actions.
'Why, Ellen, I think it suits you to have your man in prison,' the
woman twittered to Ellen from behind her hand. 'Gives you a rest,
I dare say! I wish mine would take such a spell.'
She made a note, mentally, to tell Stephen of the encounter when
they were next together. All the little banalities of life took on a
new importance for her, if connected to their liaison in even the
remotest way. As if they had become the building bricks of the
secret life between them.
At night she would lie awake imagining him: his dark intense
eyes, the macula, the peculiar twist of his lip - a 'Protestant
twist' she called it, 'from Trinity . . . handed out with gown and
degree'. How in retaliation at this he would turn her, slap her
rump, imprinting her with his long, articulate fingers. Unable to
sleep with her imaginings, her body would become turbulent, until
she quelled it, damping down its fire within the cup of her hands.

The night Lavelle was acquitted her joy was unbounded. She
received him with all the gratitude and love at her disposal and
all the fury and passion his absence demanded. She watched over
him as he slept the sleep of the innocent, and prayed to all that
was good and holy to release her from her affliction. Thankful she
was too, that in their first intimacy since she had betrayed him,
she had displayed no uncharacteristic act or urgency to disquiet
him. Again she besought her God to remove this predicament of
the flesh from her.
She had told Stephen that 'when my husband is released, I cannot
see you again', deliberately naming him as her 'husband' and not
'Lavelle'.
He had agreed, knowing she was right. Adding that, because
of his own connection with Lavelle, 'My own honour is greatly
tarnished and I should take myself away from this place and from
you. How I do not know, Ellen, but I must.'
She did not want never to see him again. 'We could be as
friends, as before - nothing more.' The words sounded hollow
and unconvincing, even to herself.
He had disagreed. 'We are a danger to each other, Ellen, like
fire and ice. One will extinguish the other, or each both,' he had
warned.
'You are right, Stephen. God knows, I know you are right.' She
hated the admission of it.
'I should visit once with you and Lavelle,' he had answered, as
if contradicting his previous thought. 'Else it will seem at odds,
that I was in your company in his absence, and on his return, I am absent. After that I must travel again to Canada, then perhaps
to Ireland . . .'
'Montreal?' she interrupted.
'Yes. How I will bear it on my own I do not quite know.'
Nor could she bear to imagine him there without her. 'I will go
too.' She had said it before she could stop herself. 'It will be our
last time together, the dance will end where it began.'
It was as if another voice had spoken out of her. Not the voice
of her reason - she had gone through the arguments a hundredfold
in her head. Not the voice of the repentance which she had daily
promised herself. But it was her own voice. She had quaked at this
reversal in her, quaked the more that he might refuse her.
He had begun to. 'Ellen . . . you . . . we cannot or it is lost to
us for ever,' he said as if damned by the thought.
'No . . . Stephen!' It would be their last time, their very last.
'It will be complete then, consigned properly to history. I have
always wanted to walk openly with you, stand on a hill, watch
the stars come down. Let that which is everybody's be ours . . .'
She paused at the enormity of what she was suggesting, the way
she was seeking to put a grand finale to their deceit, dress it in
the heroic, like some great Greek tragedy. '. . . to celebrate the
ordinary of life would be a fitting goodbye.'
It had to be finished between them. But equally it could not be
left unfinished - furtive, between the gaps. She wanted to spend a
whole day with him, two, even three - to put their grand passion
to the test, but also to anchor it in the detritus of daily living.
'Montreal will be a step too far, Ellen - it will be a bridge of
sighs - but I cannot refuse you ... or myself,' he had answered.
They had decided to wait a respectable length of time after
Lavelle returned home. Now she was in a state of constant but
sublimated elation, fearing at every moment that her turmoil was
as visible externally as it was present to her internally. Somehow,
she kept her conscience at bay, rationalizing that this last act was
the clearing out of her errantness, that Montreal would be the final
purging of her malaise. That by sinning more, her sin itself would
be rooted out.
Whilst in prison, Lavelle's wound had received some medical
attention and had healed well so that now he was able to engage
in some light work, so as not to be idle. Nevertheless, they kept on
for a while the youth who had been assisting her during Lavelle's
incarceration, as the bullocking of freight was heavy work.
She felt that they needed additional help on an ongoing footing,
that there was still more capacity for expansion in burgeoning
Boston. Lavelle still was of the view that they were too much
dependent on Peabody. Latterly she had come round more to
his way of thinking on this. Jacob, with his three stores, gobbled
up most of their time and effort, and stocks. She had become
increasingly aware of his foibles, concerned by his preoccupation
with her. They were very much at Peabody's mercy should anything
go wrong.
To balance out Peabody's influence on the business required
them to expand. This in turn required further expenditure, further
capital, further risk. They discussed the options open to them.
She, more conservative, was against borrowing from the banks
or the credit agency of R.G. Dun. They resolved that in limiting
their exposure to Peabody, they should also confine the risk of
overstretching their borrowings. This they felt could be achieved
by approaching the Frontignacs, suggesting the French-Canadians
take a stakeholding in the company, thereby binding them in as
partners. In return for their investment the Frontignacs would have
an already established entree into New England. This all presented
her with an appropriate reason for travelling to the Northern city.
In any event it was fast approaching a year since she had previously
visited the Frontignacs - too long an interval.

Stephen had called to visit Lavelle, the first time when she was not
there - a Monday evening. By design, she knew; it was her evening
for the increasingly irritating discussions of the Daughters of the
Commonwealth. On the second occasion she was present.
It had not been as difficult as she had imagined. She left them to
talk on their own, joining them for only small periods of time. The
sight of them, locked in earnest conversation, seemed to put them
at some remove from the common bond she shared with them herself. She loved them both . . . loved one . . . desired the other.
Now, as she breezed into them it brought a rush of something to
her body, and for that moment, she saw no contradiction in the
idea that they in turn, but individually, would similarly regard her.
That they both loved her.
Louisa and Mary had both played their Bach cantatas for the
visitor in the good room. He had complimented them on their
own beauty and their 'beauty on the instrument'. Nor was Patrick
ignored, brought into the conversations on politics and the growing
'abolition of slavery' movement, 'conversations befitting a coming
young man', as Stephen had called him; much to Patrick's delight,
she observed.
Apart from this, she hadn't seen Stephen at all. She had left it a
decent time, she thought, since this last visit, three weeks, before
furtively depositing the envelope at his lodgings. Inside, the details
of their final assignation in Montreal - the date on which she would
fly to him on the singing rails of the Grand Junction Railroad.

She hoisted herself on to the train full of exhilaration, yet feverish
with trepidation that something would go wrong. That he had been
away, not received her note, that as a result he would not be there.
She would then be denied drawing it all to a close, in a kind of
Montreal Paradise Thus, unresolved, it would be a never-ending
claw to her gut, giving her no ease until the grave.
As the train jolted her away, she was filled with panic. She had
not been steadfast before. What if Montreal was not the grand
denouement she had imagined? What if, instead, it served only
to advance her addiction? And it was an addiction, this craving
within her. This . . . she hesitated to give it its rightful name . . .
this lust, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, deadly because it was so
obsessive, with no end to it. She shuddered with repugnance at the
idea of the creature she had become.
It could not be such a base element as lust. She loved him.
With great passion, it was true, but she loved him. With him
she lived outside herself, in the air, disconnected - the old Ellen
disintegrated, the new one, a phoenix rising, lifting its wings. When
she arrived in Montreal, she flung out the carriage door and stood
on the platform, searching for him over the heads of the hustle
and bustle.
But he was there. Waiting, at a discreet distance, raising his hat
in welcome, making her heart dance.
Montreal was everything she had desired; it was indeed her Montreal
Paradiso, two days and three nights of paradise.
Strolling together with him, she linked his arm, like a lady and
her beau should, with little fear of recognition to constrain her.
That evening they dined at the Hotel Fond du Lac, as before. She
wanted to dance, but to her disappointment there was no music.
'The dance is over,' she said wistfully, 'the frozen heart caged
once more.'

He read less into it than she did. 'It is only the musician's night
off- perhaps he is meeting his lover!' he teased, making her laugh
at the irony of this.
For hours they lingered in conversation, talking of the great
and the little wonders of the universe: life, pre-destiny, the nature
of love; the transcendence of love over sin; the conspiracy of
boundaries - those small rituals which hem and fence and define
a life.
'This could never have happened in Ireland,' she mused, thinking
of her life before.
'No,' he said, mistaking her, 'we are creeds apart. The union
of Protestant and Catholic flesh would be an abomination. Here,
we are the symbol of a New Ireland, not merely disunited from Britain, but united within ourselves. When we lie together we
consummate the past,' he said with a little laugh, adding, more
wickedly, 'the sword of the Boyne is blunted in the bower of Kathleen Ni Houlihan. It is the way it should be!'
'It is the way with men,' she sighed, but thinking how less serious
he had become since she had first known him.
'What is?' he asked.
Then seek to change what they love, to exalt it, to make the
loved one different from what she truly is, while a woman '
'While a woman loves not the object of her love but only love
itself!' he interrupted.
'No - not at all!' she countered, 'a woman will love a man as
he is, his blemishes and failings, not imagining him changed by
her love '
'But scheming for it!' he interrupted again.
'Yes, Stephen,' she laughed with him, 'but that is a different
thing - a female prerogative.'

Later, while she lay waiting for him, she wondered if perhaps he
was right, if it was her desire for love itself was the malaise which
had brought her to this. Peabody and his poets would have held
it so. But she had loved Lavelle, was sure of it, and in return was
loved by him.
He smiled, seeing her lying there, like the peau-de-soie - the
skin of silk - the fiery diadem of her hair splayed out; below the
darker, downy pubescence; she a pale and vivid offering, of fire
and ice.
She knew what he was thinking and smiled back, the dreamlike
substance - the sream - filming over her eyes. As he arched over
her, she could not think of him as anything but the ultimate object
of all her feelings.
Her every sensuality filled, her body ebbed and flowed to his
slightest touchings. And if no great waves crashed down as before,
flinging her breathless and broken on the shore, then she was
caught in swirling eddies of pleasure. They, like the ever-constant
ripples of calmer seas, swept endlessly over her.
Afterwards, he read to her: Donne, 'To His Mistress Going to
Bed', from the Love Elegies.

'License my roving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my new-found-land . . .'

She let the words float over her, before, behind, between, above,
below, sensuously following the course his hands had taken, reawakening
her parts. Was she his 'America', his 'new-found-land'?
Poets were always describing women as lands. He continued reading.

'. . . Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be,
To taste whole joys . .'

Words, powerful, easy words of seduction, as if he had any need
of them for her, she thought. She would have another poem - a
shorter one - before she set the book aside from his hands.

'Twice or thrice had I loved thee,
Before I knew thy face or name;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame,
Angels affect us oft . . .'

It was their story. Written two hundred years before them between
'Air and Angels', as Donne called his poem - the space
she now inhabited.
It was no mystery to her as to why Stephen had chosen this poem,
the loved one undefined, except as a 'shapeless flame'. Unclothed
by form or human characteristics.
'It makes love, or the idea of love, the greater, the loved one,
the lesser,' she whispered aloud, unravelling it for herself. 'But it
is the opposite of love - to create an illusion, a deception for one's
self. . .' She turned her head to him. 'That way, I suppose, one is
never disappointed?'
'I am never disappointed in you, Ellen,' he said with passion.
'Perhaps you in me?' She looked at him and reached out, touching
his love-spot with her fingertip, like a child unsure of what the
touching would release.
'In you I taste only whole joys,' she said, paraphrasing a line he
had read to her. She put the book aside from him. 'I have had
enough of words for now.'
Wordlessly then, from the far dark corners of her mouth, she
created her own love poem for him. In tongues, as eloquent an elegy
as any fashioned by the seventeenth-century Dean of St Paul's.

me spun out before them like a silken thread, unhemmed, unbounden, unchimed. One hour was like the next, and no hour
called them to be somewhere else. Maybe, after all, in this timelessness
these were the selves they were meant to inhabit from time
immemorial. Or maybe it was the French thing he had told her 'absence ni le temps ne sont rein quand on aims'' - 'to those who
love absence and time are as nothing' - up here in the suspended
time-oceans of Canada. Alberta, Alaska, Arctica. First named of
the alphabet, ancient, primal. As different from New England as
Ireland was from Old England.
Her only indebtedness to the world of New England, and one
she must repay while she was here, was to call on Frontignac
Pere et Fils. To impress upon them the opportunities she and
Lavelle could present for them in Boston and beyond. With the
financial backing and the superior variety of wines the Frontignacs
could supply them with as business partners, she and Lavelle
could employ salesmen to travel the ever-increasing network of
railroads, thus taking their wines well beyond the confines of
Greater Boston.
So, she sauntered along Dorchester, Montreal's most graceful
boulevard, with its fashionable Italianate mansions thick with
vineries, the horse-chestnuts alive with humming birds. She was
confident of convincing the Frontignacs as to the merits of her
plan, invincible in her conviction that it was a good one. A lover's
weakness, she imagined. But she must be careful to listen, take
cognizance of their reservations, embrace their ideas too; not just
parade out her own and Lavelle's.
She had not breathed a word to Peabody. Her plan should not
have any effect on their dealings with the merchant of Quincy,
but you never knew with him what way he would react. Having
concluded her business at Manoir Frontignac she would hurry back
to Stephen. A surfeit of happiness suffused her at that thought.
They had enquired about the musician and for tomorrow night,
their last in Montreal - their last ever, she reminded herself - had
been assured he would be in attendance. Her disappointment at his
absence on the first two nights was put aside. It was more fitting
he be there as they made their goodbyes.
As she mounted the impressive granite steps to Manoir Frontignac,
palisaded on either side with hardwood and still thinking of Stephen, she felt the flush of expectancy rise in her again, the
roof of her mouth go dry. 'Tasting only whole joys' - the poets
had words, even for the unmentionable.
That evening she leaned over the table to him, fork still in
her hand.
'I believe it is their intention to themselves set up in Boston, their
firm intention!' she stated.
'Merely because they did not approve your plan at this juncture
does not mean that, Ellen,' he pointed out to her quite logically.
'No - but it's not logical, Stephen. It was the words in between
the words. I sensed it. They are so polite, the Francophones, but
something is at the back of it.' She'd had the feeling the moment
the large French oak-panelled door had swung open to admit her
to Manoir Frontignac.
'Were you not introduced to the Frontignacs by a mutual friend,
the priest in Quebec?' he asked. 'They will hardly betray his friendship.'
For all his education at Trinity College, he could, at times, be
frustratingly pedantic. She put down the fork, aware that she had
started to shake it at him. Nothing could be proven; it was her
sense of what had occurred, an intuition.
'We should talk of betrayal!' she answered. 'It would be a fine
irony indeed if it were the Catholic merchants of Quebec Province
who closed me out of business and not the Ulster Scots of Boston!'
she said stingingly.
He refused to be drawn by her. 'You still have Peabody - is he
not the largest retailer of fine wines in Boston?'
'Peabody?' she exclaimed. 'If the Frontignacs set up in Massachusetts
they will seek to deal directly with Peabody. Jacob will hold out
against them for a while - because he is made that way - but in
the end he will have to go with them.'
'If you believe this to be true, the only answer for you is to find another supplier while you are in Montreal,' he pointed
out.
'No!' she answered him, defiantly. 'This is to be our last occasion
together. I will not spend it tramping the streets of Montreal,
searching out bottles of claret. Maybe you are right, maybe it is
not as I see it after all,' she rationalized. 'I can come here again
- at another time - if needs be.'
'Later may be too late. It is for only you to decide, Ellen,' he
said, knowing she already had.
For her part she didn't want to talk about it any further.

However, the business with the Frontignacs weighed on her for
the next day. She was as angry with them for its intrusion into
her sacred time with Stephen as she was for any imagined threat
to the New England Wine Company. An emotion, she decided,
which would make no earthly sense to anybody but herself, but
it was still how she felt.
Determined though she was to put all thought of the episode at
Manoir Frontignac behind her, not letting her Montreal Paradiso
unravel any further, the impending sorrow of their parting now
rose up before her. As the day wore on, she and Stephen spoke
less and less to each other, sharing instead the unbroken intimacy
of the growing silences, as if in preparation for the longer silence
which awaited them. She clung to him like a soul adrift, seeking
comfort in the physical, consoling herself that she would for
ever enshrine these moments in some hallowed place within her
memory, hold them there frozen for all eternity. At times unthaw
them, let them breathe, put flesh on them, melt them into her own
life. A well of memories - she for ever drawing cold comfort from
its depths.
She wondered if her skin would remember. She had never before
regarded the skin of her body as being separate from her other
Parts until she had been with him. Now it seemed to have its
own memory. When he touched her, roved her with his hands,
each place on her skin seemed to have a distinct response - it
remembered. It wasn't the same as the memory of her mind. It Was to each part local, this memory of skin.
'All other things to their destruction draw, Only our love hath
no decay.' She mouthed the words to herself; Donne - 'The
Anniversary'. She would decay, she knew, without him, wither
into middle age, forgoing pity, substituting duty, but decaying
nevertheless. Would this memory of skin he had awakened in her,
would that too dry up with time?
'The element of fire is quite put out, The sun is lost and th' earth.'
She said the lines knowing that was how it would be. It was as
if the priest-poet, Donne, had seen into her life. She remembered
Peabody using the lines, playing with her, prophesying her life.
'You were named for fire . . . Ellen Rua.' Now they rang with a
fatalistic aptness. It was all so far removed from what she had
known. Where love was simple, often a 'match' made by others, it
came with a 'cow or a sow', a bargain made for the cost of keeping
a woman. Not many fine rhymes then. Too much living, surviving
the next winter.
Yet here in America, Stephen and Peabody, these two men
having such an influence on her life, spoke to her - about her in
rhymes and images - lines composed by Englishmen. Neither
Michael nor Lavelle ever spoke to her through other people's words, and she had never felt the lesser that they hadn't.
Yet, it was she herself who had reached out from that world to
the world of poetry and music - and ideas. She wanted it for her
children, she had thought, now realizing she had not thought much
on them in the last few days. She imagined them safe and well but
in that other world. They could not co-exist with her here, be in
her mind, a party to her sin. She had stepped outside their world
in an attempt to define her own. What chasm between them had
now developed from that step?
After tomorrow, when she would attempt to step back inside it
again, it would not be the same world, its boundaries would be
irreparably broken. A growing part of her now wanted tomorrow
to be over, this Montreal madness put behind her, purged out of
her. She would redouble her efforts towards Lavelle, the children,
the business. The slate would be wiped clean - confession, reconciliation
with God and man.
She was filled with excitement as she dressed. Tonight, everything
would be right, all misfortune banished from her mind. There
would be time enough for all of that and the sorrowing dullness
on the long train journey home, and in the days and months
thereafter. She wondered what Stephen was thinking of. Was it
likewise with him - parallel thought?
The realization hit her then that she was guilty of the same sin
towards him as she accused him of towards her. If she was his Kathleen Ni Houlihan, his vision of Ireland, then she too had
made him into some kind of mythic deliverer, some romantic
poet-warrior, whom she had dredged up out of the past. She had
invented a self for him as different from his person as she was from
the 'Heaven-Woman' which he had sought to turn her into.
'Ellen!'
She quickened at his voice, set the last lock of hair in its place,
ran to him and kissed him fiercely.
'Fionn!' she said, her face alight, naming him for the legendary
leader of the Fianna, ancient god-like warriors. 'Slayer of monsters,
magician, poet,' she laughed.
He looked at her, bemused. What was it that had now intoxicated
her mind?
'You're "Fionn"!' she said, laughing now at the look on his face.
She shook him to emphasize it. 'Fionn MacCumhail!'

The evening was everything she had hoped her Montreal Paradiso
would be. She remarked how resplendent the Hotel Fond du Lac
looked, far raised above the wilderness place - the 'Base of the
Lake', from where a century earlier by a duo of 'Nor'westers' who
had made good, had brought home the name. It had been much
improved since the days when it rang with the old songs of the voyageurs, and the entrance hall stank with the smell of stacked
pelts. Now, the large hall, papered with imitation white-veined
marble, boasted female figurines in sequestered niches. A slab of
real black marble lay mantelpieced between a yawning fireplace and a large gilt-framed mirror, in which she fleetingly caught
sight of themselves. The dancing area, a polished parquet floor
of native wood, hosted a large rosewood table. To either side ofit dark-leathered mahogany tall-backs sat regimentally arrange,
while to each end of it even larger spindle-backed carvers remain
regally empty.
This table had never been occupied, she sensed. Like the extra
setting she always laid on All Souls' Night for some wandering
soul to sit at, it lay in readiness for the souls of those wandering voyageurs, who would one day return.
The maitre led them to a discreet table by a window hung with
long chintz curtains which glazed and spattered with variegated
silvers and golds.
'It is like a palace of old, Stephen - was this what you were used
to in Dublin?' she asked.
'No,' he laughed, 'the peasantry would never take up their
pikes if it were known that revolutionaries frequented such
places.'

'Indeed they wouldn't, and shouldn't,' she sparked back at him,
unable to decide whether or not she liked the place, whether it was
only the occasion dulling her senses.
And it was as if the chef had excelled himself for them. Oysters
in aspic were followed by a roast of wild game. Then, the piece
de resistance, a meringue pyramided with assorted fruits, its foundation
a glace bed of strawberry and citron ices. And of course, the
Taittinger. It really was sinful, she thought, but then it was only for
tonight - a 'Last Supper', she said blasphemously.
Afterwards, when the moustached maitre de musique waved his
magician's wand over them, she sparkled and spun, dancing away
tomorrow's darkness. Stephen held her close, folding her around
him when they twirled. Almost as if by accident insinuating his long
dancer's legs between hers when he curled her backwards; impaling
her against the climax of the ascending arpeggio. Held her then,
suspended between one pulse and the next, until the descending
music caused him to release her again. Bending, yielding, swaying,
in perfectly motioned flechissement.
Then, the joueur de violon played the 'Valse du Coeur Glace'
without her asking. When she later asked for it again, he flicked
back his shoulder-length hair, raised the drooping moustache into
a smile and knowingly obliged.
And they danced, floating between the white air and the angels
a place which had no centre.
When they retired, she brimming from the evening, Stephen bade
her wait a moment then disappeared.
When he returned he made her close her eyes, holding her hands
in front of her, like a child.
'A parting gift,' he said, dropping the neatly wrapped parcel into them.
'A book!' she guessed, before opening her eyes again, fingers
fumbling to loosen the silken string with which it was bound.
It was a book. Donne's poetry, including the have Elegies, which
he had somewhere found for her in Montreal. She clasped her arms
around his neck.
'Thank you, thank you,' she said, 'for this... a treasure trove of
memories.' She fanned through the pages, glimpsing familiar lines.
'Is it the same as yours?' she asked.
'Yes, it corresponds exactly,' he replied. 'Why?'
'If I could, I would have your copy - that from which you read
to me?'
They exchanged the books like vows, sealing their love in the
eternity of verse.
He undressed her then slowly, delicately, as if unfolding a flower
of paradise, lest in haste he damage it. She put her hand to his face
- a gesture of thanks. Their lovemaking would be the lovemaking
of grieving.
Afterwards, they lay separate from each other, in silence.
Expressed, yet the inexpressible weighing upon them. Elated,
yet the long hunger of the soul, as ever, unfulfilled. 'La petite
morf - 'the little death' - Donne had written of the depression
that descends on the soul after the body has climbed to the ecstatic
state, as theirs had.
Her religion had taught her that only at 'la grande morf - 'the
great death' - would the soul be at last fulfilled, united with the one
true object of its desire, God. She thought at that moment that she
would ever be denied that ultimate unity. She had sacrificed the 'grande' for the 'petite'.

'Ellen!' Stephen called into the space above them, 'sing
to me.'
Since the time on the train when she had brushed him off he
had not asked her. She said nothing, raised herself from the bed
crossed to the window. Outside the quebecois moon was occluded,
brooding behind some dark cloud. Out there too, beyond the city,
the fertile plains of Montreal, nurtured by the St Lawrence, the
river which had first brought her to this country. Beyond the St
Lawrence to the north were the great Canadian wastelands, to the
east the great wastelands of the Atlantic Ocean. South was Boston
- and Lavelle.
Stephen watched while she put her fingers to the windowpane,
connecting with the outside, saw the white flesh of her back
expand as she breathed in to begin. 'O my fair-haired boy . . .'
She sang, turned away from him, the notes curving along her spine,
down her bare legs into the wood, singing themselves through the
floorboards to where he lay.

'All joy is gone that we once knew,
All sorrow newly found . . .'

His eyes followed the rise and fall of her shoulder-blades, the
melody seeping out of her body.

'Let no sad tears now stain your cheek,
As we kiss our last goodbye.
Think not upon when we might meet,
My love, my fair-haired boy.'

She paused before the final verse, the moon emerging from behind
the cloud to bathe her in its light, fixing her breath like a white
rose on the windowpane. She half-turned to him, the moonlight
edging her contours, sifting her colours.
She had not sung since her wedding-day, for Lavelle. But it was
not this song then, that Michael, her dear dead Michael, so much
loved her to sing. She had always thought of it as his song only.
But it wasn't. It was hers. Now she sang it for herself, as much
as for Michael, or Lavelle, or ... Stephen, who had summoned it
from her.

zoo
'And there will grow two hawthorn trees,
Above my love and me.
And they will reach up to the sky,
Intertwined be . . .'

He watched, rather than listened, as she poured forth her elegy for
lost love.

'And the hawthorn flower will bloom where lie
My fair-haired boy and me.'

She stood motionless. More than the act of love, the act of singing
had transported her into another space and time somewhere
beyond the great wastelands. Now, she needed time - a moment
of earthly time - to come back, be present to him. To restore the
absence of centre, lost to her in the song.
She it was who spoke first. 'O mo dhuchas - from my tradition,'
she said quietly, as if that explained everything. It was the first of
the old tongue he had heard her speak in the New World.
Neither of them slept until they parted into the ordinary
Montreal morning it had become.
Sweating and steaming, drumming out its own monotonic tradition,
the Grand Junction Railroad train drew her ever homewards.
At first its rhythm dimmed and dulled her sorrow. Now,
each rolling mile was a steel rod, pile-driven into her heart.
How could she face them? What would she say to them? That
she missed them, when she had striven instead to drive all thought
of them from her mind? When they asked again of Montreal could
she describe it without investing it with the wonder and
myth of a lover's eyes? And Lavelle - when they were alone and
he reached for her? How could she ever give him her Judas kiss,
let alone her Mary Magdalen love? Her body would betray her,
as it had already betrayed him.
She prayed, trying to make an Act of Perfect Contrition, discontinuing
it when the cadence of the words fell in with the rhythm
of the tracks, mocking her.
'O My God,' clacketyclak, I am heartily sorry,' clacketyclackclacketyclack,
'for having offended thee,' the clacketyclack,
clacketyclack, echoing her hypocrisy down the line ahead of her
to Boston. She flicked open the pages of Stephen's book but found
no respite there. The once tactile words were devoid of all flesh
and blood, arid. Her eyes rested on 'Good Friday, 1613. Riding
Westward', one of the Divine Poems, Donne's later works. 'O
think me worth Thine anger, punish me, Burn off my rust, and my
deformity.' She had deformed her soul for love, or its phantasm,
contorted her mind into thinking that it was some higher calling;
perverted virtue. But she could not deny her emotions; they were as real as sin. She would not let the guilt of what she had done
transform itself into yet further guilt - the guilt of denial. Good
Friday 1613, or 1853, it was all the same, Donne, like herself
oppressed by sin ... he now obsessed with death and the uncertain
invincibility of salvation, yearning for his God.
She stared out of the window. The moon hung lifeless in the sky,
suspended between the earth and the heavens, between two worlds.
Salvation . . . damnation? She too had no answer, as the iron horse
plunged her between them.

Boston was a melee of welcome, of calls and answers, doffed
hats, outstretched arms, hand-clasps, embraces. Lavelle, a wide
smile on him when he spotted her, ran to her, swept her up,
twirling her in his embrace. He kissed her neck, his face buried
in her hair.
'You're welcome home, Ellen.'
She was glad to be home, relieved to see him, to be swept back
into their used-to-be world. He peppered her with a mixture of
questions and news, and she gabbled back at him with her own
mix of answers and questions. He thought she 'looked strained by
the journey, but as fine as ever'.
Later, the excitement continued as Patrick, Mary and Louisa,
each of them all a-fluster, plied her with more welcomes. Even
Patrick, not normally given to such demonstrations, was patently
pleased to greet her. Her homecoming was less of a trauma than she
had anticipated, the exuberance of the occasion sailing her through
it. Still, the knot of dread in her stomach never left, wrenching her
insides more and more as the evening wore on.
She went up ahead of Lavelle and dressed quickly for bed,
skipping her prayers, not wanting him to see her full naked,
not wishing to replicate what had gone before. As if in her
nakedness she would be exposed, the handprints of adulterous
love on her breasts, between her thighs, signposting each act 'Before,
behind, between, above, below'. Unbidden the words flew
into her thoughts, her body, despite herself, remembering. She tried
to banish them, changing her mind about the prayers, kneeling to make an Ave. 'Hail Mary, full of grace . . . Holy Mary, Mother of
God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death . . .'
At the 'Amen', she was already clambering into bed.
Half-dozing, facing away from him, she felt his tug at her nightdress.
It had twisted behind her. Now, instinctively, she moved to
free it for him.
'Oh Ellen . . . I' She heard the quivering in his voice, the surge
within him quickening her to wakefulness. She turned to face him.

'Oh, Lavelle, I love you ... I truly love you!'
She meant it. She wanted to love him even more, to the exclusion
of everything, everyone . . . herself. For a moment she panicked
that the state of liquefaction in which her body was, its additional
fluency, would give her away. Bizarrely, she wondered if their two
seeds would mix within her, intercoursing, become one?
Lavelle's wanting to kiss her shook her out of these aberrations.
She resisted his kiss, guilty or afraid of this intimacy - somehow
more intrusive, more revealing, than the most intimate act she now
consummated with him.
While he slept she thanked God. He had not turned His forgiving
face from her. By not revealing her to Lavelle, He had given her a
second chance. Feverishly, she sent up to Him Acts of Contrition
and Thanksgiving, mouthing them under her breath so as not to
awaken Lavelle. Now there was hope, the chance of a new life
for them both. She did not mind, now, how the Almighty might
punish her transgressions.


And it seemed there was real hope of a new life for her.
In the days and months that followed she appeared to have
shaken off her old lassitudes, her 'malaise' as she called it. Her
spirits were uplifted - even the children remarked on it - and she
found a renewed zest for living, and for love.
'Like fresh-scrubbed apples, the pair of you' was Harriet Brophy's
observation. 'All rosy and shiny, and ready to be eaten!' her
neighbour had whispered to her.
It had taken her a while to work up sufficient courage to risk
confession. Only then did she go, avoiding the cathedral in Franklin
Street, to St Mary's Church in the North End. It was almost
her undoing. Her new confessor was every bit as inquisitorial
as her previous one. He asked her about that confession and
if she understood 'the true nature of repentance'. Finally, he
made it abundantly clear that if she presented herself before
him again 'and had continued in that most grievous sin against
Holy Matrimony', he would refuse her absolution. Furthermore,
at whatever other confessional she might attend, she was to inform
her confessor there of this admonition. This did not trouble her
greatly, the fervency of resolve in her mind convincing her that
such a banishment would not be called upon.
Peabody, too, noticed the change in her, and although she was
now more readily prepared to enter into verbal combat with
him, he seemed less inclined towards pugnacity than before. This
newfound conciliatory manner in him almost tempted her to unveil
her thoughts about what plans she suspected the Frontignacs had
in mind. But she didn't, she held her own counsel.
Glad she was that she hadn't raised the hare with him when,
throughout the following months, she experienced no problems of
either credit or supply from the Montreal merchants. She decided
it must have been her 'heightened state' while in Montreal that
had led her to such unfounded 'imaginings'. Business too, with
Peabody and their other customers, continued to grow, but at a
pace posing no threat to their own stability.
Stephen, true to his word, did not 'darken her acquaintance'
and though she knew Lavelle met with him on occasion to discuss
'Ireland', she expressed only a passing interest in those
affairs. Their paths did not cross the remainder of that year,
and she forced herself to think about him less and less, following
Peabody's dictum about her old life - 'Not to forget, but to
remember less'.
Boston itself continued to prosper, its main hub, the harbour
with its two hundred docks, now handling over half a million
tons of cargo each year. Some work, too, she noted, as 1854
glided outwards, was being done to assist the pauperized Irish,
often reported as displaying a 'listless indifference to their fate'.
Societies like the Charitable Irish Society and the Irish Emigrant
Society, which helped place emigrants out West, as well as locate
lost relatives, grew in numbers and strength. The St Vincent Female
Orphan Society in the South End, established many years previously
by the Sisters of Charity, and, she had to admit, generously
supported by Yankee Protestants, now housed up to three hundred
young orphaned girls, many Irish. For homeless boys the House
of the Angel Guardian in the North End, newly founded in 1851,
provided a 'moral restaurant' for short-term inhabitants.
She contributed whatever she could afford to these societies,
acutely aware of their need. She had been appalled at the poverty
and deprivation she had witnessed in the North End, when she
had gone to confession at St Mary's, thinking the situation of the
tenement Irish there to be by now somewhat relieved. But she had
been wrong. They still flooded the city tenements, poverty-ridden,
diseased, often more dead than alive.
There were, too, other growing tensions within the city. Abolitionist
mobs had begun to set free runaway slaves from the Southern
States, spiriting them out of the country to Canada. Slaves arrested
by federal troops now patrolling Boston's streets were returned south bondage, amidst widespread outcry. During one such occasion
abolitionist mob murdered a US Marshal, bringing violence associated with the slavery question to a new level in Boston. While
the liberation of black slaves in the South greatly occupied the minds
of liberal Bostonians, in stark contrast the ever underlying venom
against the Catholic Irish was once more whipped into action.
In 1854, another Know-Nothing Mayor, J.V.C. Smith, was
elected. The new Mayor actively encouraged feelings of hate against
a large proportion of the citizens he represented - Catholics. The
Irish, some Catholic leaders suggested, because of the scale of
intimidation, 'should keep low, avoid the polling booth - be like
guests in someone else's home'.
Lavelle was furious. 'Those shoneens are trying to turn us into
lily-livered lackeys. We tugged the forelock long enough in our
own country, we're not going to do it here too.'
She pleaded with Lavelle not to get involved in the disturbances,
also taking Patrick to one side and cautioning him, fearing that
his earlier stance at the Eliot School might make him a target for
Nativist groups, such as 'The Sons of Sires', founded 'to protect our
country from the insidious wiles of foreigners'. 'Insidious wiles',
she knew full well, meant the Catholic Church and all its teachings.
One evening Patrick arrived home excitedly waving a handbill.
'Those are being given out on every corner!'
She took it from him, some unexplained terror gripping her as
she read it that the sentiments expressed were going to embroil
them all in some great calamity.

Americans to the Rescue!
Americans! Sons of the Revolution!!
A body of seventy-five Irishmen, known as the 'Columbian
Artillery', have volunteered their services to shoot down
the citizens of Boston and are now under arms to defend
Virginia in kidnapping a citizen of Massachusetts!
Americans! These Irishmen have called us 'cowards and
sons of cowards'!
Shall we submit to have our citizens shot down by a set
of vagabond Irishmen?

The Columbian Artillery was one of a number of ad-hoc Irish militia companies formed mainly for pomp, parade and after-dinner
speeches.
'The Irish were called in to protect a slave from being freed
who was being sent back to Virginia!' Patrick told her.
'Shame on them!' she remonstrated. 'Sending a man back to his
slavery, and they not long, themselves, out of theirs.'
'He was a runaway!' he argued with her.
'And so were we, Patrick, so were we!' she said angrily.

But the Irish got ahead, forcing an expansion of Boston's municipal
services. As Lavelle put it, 'All against a background of Know
Nothings and credit agents like R.G. Dun, who describe us as
nothing else "tricky" or "too fond of horseflesh".'
She was glad she had never to seek the approval of the all
powerful R.G. Dun and the inevitable commentary on her sex
and race, which followed such an application; to be told you were
'good for nought credit' - to be marked that way.

The 'Bridgets' were another phenomenon of Boston life.
'The Boston Bank of Ireland', Lavelle called them.
'Without the "Bridgets", the economy of rural Ireland would be
sunk.' Mary, ever interested in the contribution of Erin's daughters,
supplied the facts. 'Last year alone more than one million pounds
was sent back to Ireland by the "Bridgets". Without them, many
would never have escaped Ireland. The "Bridgets" made the "Daisy
Chain".'
Ellen understood what Mary meant. The 'Daisy Chain' of female
emigration, 'Bridgets' bringing out more 'Bridgets', all bound for
either the 'loom or the broom', in the mills and mansions of
Massachusetts.
'If it wasn't for the "back-door Bridgets",' Patrick piped up, 'and
the priests creeping round taking their hard-scrubbed pennies, half
the churches in Boston would never have been raised,' he added,
much at odds, Ellen thought, with his stance a few years ago at
Eliot School.
They were all taking shape. Mary, the thinker, studious, given the facts and figures of life, passionately interested in the role of her own gender. Building up in her mind some catalogue of the
'silent and steadying contribution' the 'Bridgets' and mill girls and
needlewomen made to life on both sides of the Atlantic. A store of
knowledge, Ellen had no doubt, Mary would one day put to use.
Then, Patrick. Politically aware, always rebellious, resistant to
'the weight of Church and State bearing down on the small man'.
And then the 'Bostooning of the Irish', as Patrick called it, worse
in his eyes than 'all the English betrayals'. 'The Irish now betraying
themselves, colonizing their own countrymen, in the name of being
American.'
In each of them she could see the disparate parts of herself.
At night she prayed that neither of them would fall prey to the
vagaries of mind and emotion to which she was once given.
And Louisa. Louisa was her silent angel, a kind of touchstone
for all of them, and most of all for Mary. She and the girl were
inseparable. Not only that, but Ellen had long ago noticed how
ably they seemed to communicate with each other. By touch and
look, and something extra. Their favourite recreation was to play
pieces of music for each other in a tit-for-tat musical game, much
loved by Ellen.
'Music between soul-friends,' Ellen had said to Mary. 'That's
how you two talk to each other, like the way you and . . .' She
paused, at the remembrance. 'Like what you and Katie had,' she
continued.
'It's something like that, Mother,' Mary had replied, 'but nobody
will ever be Katie. It's like she's never gone at all, that she's here
still - inside.'
Ellen understood.
Like 1854, the next twelve months continued Boston's Golden
Years, the city flourishing on every front. For Ellen too it was
a better year. Memories of Montreal, once such a deep wound within her heart, had with time begun to close. Until now, almost
healed, the wound itself would never be re-opened. She worked at
sealing away the past as she had sealed away Ireland, to be both
forgotten countries in the wasteland of memory. Soon it would be
frozen there, have no pulse at all, be unable to speak, to trouble
the present, or the future.
But she could not yet sever the past completely. In moments
of melancholy she would take out his book from among the
skirt-folds in her bottom drawer, escaping with it to the sanctuary
of the Great Elm. There, she would read - and remember 'To His
Mistress Going to Bed' or 'Farewell to Love', slowly brushing her
thumb over the unresponsive words. Sometimes, when strollers-by,
hopeful lovers taking the Long Path, were at a safe distance from
her, she would hold the page to her face, imagining it still held
some scent of him, as if the words might preserve some faded
sensual remnant. Then she would put the book away again for
months, bottom-drawered, out of harm's way.
Once, she had laid the book on the piano when Mrs Brophy called,
summoning her, as of a sudden her husband had been taken ill.
Ellen was gone longer than anticipated. When she returned, she
was horrified to find Louisa seated at the piano reading the Love
Elegies. The girl closed the book and without handing it to her put
it back where Ellen had left it. Louisa then commenced playing
from 'Cantata Sheep May Safely Graze' - a favourite Bach
piece of them both.
She didn't know what to think, wondering which of the poems
Louisa had read. Maybe the girl wouldn't make that much of
them. The words had no living meaning for Louisa, other than
in themselves. She waited by the piano, the music lulling her worst
imaginings. When the playing stopped, she took the book calmly.
'Thank you, Louisa. That was truly beautiful!'
The girl smiled in appreciation, moving onto Cantata As
Ellen mounted the stairs, Love Elegies in hand, the circular rhythm
of 'Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring' rose with her. As she put the book
away into its safe and rightful place, she wondered what message
it was Louisa sent to her through the music.

Two days later, Lavelle appeared through the door with Stephen
Joyce in tow. She welcomed him, as steadily as she could, her heart
pounding the life out of her.
How could he have come here? With no warning . . . breaking
his word to her? He apologized almost immediately.
'I am sorry, Mrs Lavelle, to arrive in on you like this, unannounced.'
He smiled. 'But your husband insisted and he is a
convincing man.'
'Yes, Ellen,' Lavelle added, 'and I have insisted he stay for the
evening. We have much to talk about of events, and have seen too
little of him of late.'
'Yes, of course you must stay!' She heard herself echoing Lavelle's
words, little of herself in the sentiment. 'And take some supper with us later.'
He demurred, but Lavelle would have none of it, so she excused
herself to go to the grocery store. 'Now I have caused a commotion
in the household,' she heard him say as she buttoned the coat
about her.
She had to get out, get away from the confines of the house,
from him. Once away from the house she felt better. Somehow,
the clack of her shoes on the pavement, leaving them both behind
her, was a reassurance, albeit a temporary one. How was she to
get through the rest of the evening?
Her mind went in circles, searching out possibilities for absence.
Too late to call on Peabody, or any of their other customers. None
of her meetings to go to, and she had only recently called on Mary
and Louisa's piano tutor. Then it came to her - a visit to Mrs
Brophy and her sick husband. Dear Harriet, always to be relied
upon. That was it. Immediately they had finished supper, she
would announce it, make her apologies and leave. It would be too
late to cancel the arrangement then. She would see to that. By the
time she returned he would be gone. Well pleased with herself, she
travelled homewards, laden with provisions; but the more weighty
burden of his visit now seemed to weigh less on her.

'The biggest problem hindering our advancement in America is
not Nativist, the Orangemen of Ulster, nor the "blue-bloods"
of Beacon Hill - it is black,' she heard her husband argue on
her return.

Stephen did not agree. 'Only two thousand are here in Boston,
mostly in run-downs on Nigger Hill. They are not a threat, Lavelle.'
She smiled to herself at the familiar Trinity twist of his accent.
'I think it is the Irish themselves,' Patrick piped up. 'Too many
Irish running after the same jobs, driving down the wages. Even
the blacks are against us, signing petitions to keep us out of their
neighbourhoods.'
'Exactly,' Lavelle interjected. 'And if Boston Yankees free more
Southern slaves where will they flee towards?'
'To the North, where the Irish are,' Patrick answered.
She thought they were all arguing the wrong point. 'Whether
they come here or not doesn't make it right to keep them in chains
- deny them freedom,' she stated.
'What freedom, Ellen?' Lavelle turned to her. 'Will it be freedom
for the Irish with four million free Negroes swarming the docks,
the tunnels and the railroads? Look at the South,' he continued.
'His master will not risk the Negro's life in a tunnel or a canal bed
while there are Irish with shovels to be found.'
She was about to interrupt him, stop the words he spoke.
'But it is the South which supports repeal of the Union of Ireland
with Britain,' Stephen said ahead of her. 'Is that why you, Lavelle,
go with Southern slavery?'
She was becoming exasperated with both of them. 'Are we to be
used as pawns from across the Atlantic, when the real question is what shall our future as Americans be?' she demanded.
'Whatever happens between the North and the South will determine
that future, Mrs Lavelle.' It seemed so cold to her the way he
kept referring to her as Mrs Lavelle, so cold . . . and correct. 'But
if the South is defeated,' Lavelle cut in, 'black slaves will trample
over the "free" Irish and the Know-Nothings of Boston will help
them. Because in their minds, Paddy is only a "turned-inside-out
nigger".'
She wondered as they spoke, if somewhere in Stephen's life
now there was someone else for whom he saved his words of
love, words so far removed from these words of war. He had
not exorcized the old devils in the blood, handed down from
generation to generation. Devils of children on bridges, forced to
jump into Portadown waters, devils of birthing mothers sliced like
Peabody's Virginia hams. Virginia - in the South.
Stephen was speaking. 'But if the South is defeated and the North
aided in that defeat by Irish militiamen, then at last we will gain our
recognition as Americans. Both we and the blacks will be liberated
- become white.'
She listened as the three men she most dearly loved, each
followed a different path to his own truth. 'Whether it benefits
this "Irish-America" or not, no man, or woman, should be in
another's bondage,' she said in contradiction to all of them.
Her pronouncement, and the hiatus it produced, provided as
good a time as any to make her departure. Although Stephen's
presence had not been as fraught for her in the manner she had
feared, it had unsettled her in other, less predictable ways. Her
plans, however, were thwarted in the worst way imaginable, when
Stephen suggesting that he had overstayed his welcome said he
'would escort Mrs Lavelle along the street'.
Lavelle thought it a good idea, adding, 'I notice my wife
snares a common interest with you, Stephen.' She looked up, alert, earlier fears resurrected. 'In a book I have previously
seen in your possession, a copy more recently in this house. It
Will give you both some light relief from talk of Abolition and
War.'

Ellen felt a pang of alarm, yet Lavelle had made the remark with
no guile. 'What book is that?' she asked, surprising herself by her
lightness of tone.
'A book of poems, on the piano some days past; Love Elegies and other metaphysical questions - I hadn't noted it before. Is
it only recently arrived at the Old Corner Bookstore?' he asked,
without anything more than common interest, she thought.
'No,' she answered truthfully, yet lying, 'my copy is from
Montreal.'
'Well,' Lavelle smiled, 'though I hadn't noted it before, I thought
you must have had it a while - it seemed well-thumbed, some
pages more so than others.' Then to Stephen, he said, 'Strange
subject matter for a clergyman to be writing upon, don't you
think?'
Ellen was conscious of Louisa watching her, then the girl's gaze
switched to Stephen, as he answered.
'I think not, Lavelle. The clergy must understand all human life
if they are to be its shepherds. Donne has as much to say about
love of God as he has to say of human love. I read him regularly
- I did not know Mrs Lavelle had a similar taste,' he said boldly,
fixing his full gaze on her.
'It appears she has,' Lavelle answered, bidding him farewell.
In the street she held on to his arm for dear life. 'Do you think
he suspects?' she asked him.
'There is nothing to suspect, Mrs Lavelle, is there?'
She grew angry at him - she was deeply concerned. 'You know
what I mean!'
'I genuinely think not, Ellen,' he replied, more solicitously than
before. 'Your husband would not play so cruel a game on you. It
is not in his nature. He is a good man.'
'Yes, he is,' she answered, 'and we have sinned terribly against
his goodness. You, as his friend, I, as his wife.'
'There is not a single day on which I do not reflect on it,' he
replied.
'Do you read the Elegies?' she asked.
'Yes, frequently - they are the pale glass through which I see
you,' he answered, asking in turn, 'and you?'
'Yes, but as infrequently as I can,' she answered truthfully.
He fell into silence until she spoke again. 'But you are locked
for ever deep, here,' and she put her hand above her breast.
He placed his hand over hers for a moment. 'In your frozen
heart?' he asked.
'Yes, Stephen. It must remain so - of necessity, not of choice,'
she said gently.
'Then mine, too, will be for ever frozen.'
'You will be too busy fighting wars to remember,' she laughed.
'You men always need ideals for which to do battle, to die for,'
she added, remembering how he had spoken.
'I would die for you, dearest Ellen.'
She knew he meant it, and slowly removed her hand, dislodging
his.
'Ellen, is that you?' The voice of Harriet Brophy calling from an
open door startled Ellen. But it saved her from the indiscretion of
speech or act she felt compelled to commit by his last statement.
'I thought I recognized you from my window - and bring over
the handsome gentleman escorting you! Do I recognize him?'
Ellen started to say something, stopped, then waved a hand at
her neighbour. The last thing she wanted was for tongues to start
wagging now, long after everything.
He bade her 'good-bye' quickly and made his way along the
street. She hadn't had time to part properly from him. Maybe it
was just as well. She gazed after him for a moment, before turning
to cross the street. Something about his tall, angular figure, the
steadfastness of his gait, made her wonder if she would ever see
him again.
Her first inkling that something was amiss was when Peabody sent
a boy to summon her to Quincy Market 'with all haste'.
She, or Lavelle if she couldn't, called on Jacob regularly. Any
matters regarding orders, delivery, price or payment were dealt
with on these occasions. Now she wondered what commanded the
'haste'. Perhaps he'd had some breakages and needed replacements
urgently? Perhaps a complaint? A rare enough occurrence, since
Frontignac Pere et Fils selected their growers with great care,
but serious enough if it came from an important customer on
Mount Vernon Street, or the literati of Louisburgh Square amongst
whom word of a poorly-nosed Burgundy would spread with great
alacrity.
As soon as she had fixed her out-of-doors self, she hurried along
to see their important customer.
'What is it, Jacob? It sounded urgent and you look grave,' she
said, noting that the customary sparkle he always had for her was
absent.
'It is, and I am,' he said brusquely. 'Look at this!' He came from
behind the counter and took her by the arm, but not in his usual
flirtatious way. 'You had better sit while you read it!' he said,
wiping the top of a tea chest for her with the front of his apron.
She took the letter from him, her heart already in a sunken state,
anticipating bad news, and started to read. 'Dear Mr Peabody, We
beg to advise, that as from the twenty-first proximo, our newly
acquired bonded warehouse in the city of Boston will be available
for your inspection
She read, eyes widening in disbelief, right down to the end to
the flourished signature of Jean Baptiste Frontignac. Below it, the
dark red waxen seal of the French cockerel, the one she had seen so many times on deliveries, that which guaranteed their intactness.
She read the letter again, slowly; '. . . the full range of our
extensive selections of grand cru from the Chateaux of Bordeaux,
Burgundy, Cognac and the Champagne district as well as exciting vins nouveaux from the emerging regions ... all deliveries without
of warehouse, two days only within the Greater Boston area.
Pricing list attached
'When . . . ? What . . . ?' she began, not knowing what she
wanted to say. All questions were redundant, all answers devoid
of hope.
'Today, Ellen!' Peabody supplied. 'I sent for you immediately. I
am sorry - had you no intimation from them?' he asked, his hand
resting on her shoulder.
'No, nothing,' she whispered, crestfallen. 'Yes . . . yes!' She
changed her mind. 'In Montreal. A feeling . . . nothing said.'
'They never do, the French,' he said quietly, obviously as surprised
at this unexpected turn of events as she was.
'Let me see the pricing list, Jacob,' she said, wanting to confront
the worst.
'No, Ellen,' he answered, 'it would serve no purpose now. I am
sorry to be the bearer of such bad news. It was a bolt from the blue to me, but I'd rather you heard it from me first. . . from your
Jacob.'
'Jacob, I want to see it. Now!' she demanded, angry, not so
much with him - it wasn't Jacob's fault - but with them.
Reluctantly, he shuffled back inside the counter and, reaching
underneath it, produced a small sheaf of papers, which he
brought to her.
'Here you are, Ellen, but I think you should wait, not cause
further upset to your person today.'
She took the sheets from him, thumbing through the listings of
wines and spirituous drinks. It was vast, beyond any stock she
and Lavelle could hope to carry. Her eyes scanned the prices
or vineyards whose names she recognized. Almost to a bottle
they were ten cents in the dollar cheaper than the prices she was currently paying to Frontignac!
ey are out to ruin me, Jacob!' she said. Peabody remained
silent as she went through each page of the lists he had received
in that morning's post. At the bottom of each page was printed
in bold lettering, as if to further affront her, 'Deliveries over One
Hundred Dollars, F.O.C. Greater Boston Area'.
'Free of charge!' she said aloud. Her mind raced for solutions,
ignoring the obvious. 'Jacob, it's not all black is it? I can overcome
this?' she asked, desperate for any glimmer of hope he
might offer.
He put his arm around her. 'Ellen ... my dear,' he began
carefully, as if not wanting to extinguish all hope. 'Before this week
is out, I imagine, every fine liquor store in Boston will have received
one of these missives. You can survive for a while. Frontignac is big
- you are small.' He paused, before delivering what he knew would
be the coup de grace. 'Firstly, they will likely stop supplying you.' He let this sink in for a moment with her. 'But if you had another
supplier, and the prices compared, you could possibly survive. But
you will need capital too to finance the additional range of stock,
in order to compete with the Frontignacs.'
She took in every word he spoke, the grim picture of the future
he had painted, and was grateful to him for painting it with
the truth.
'Thank you, Jacob, my good friend,' she said, resolutely adding,
'I am going to fight it. Damn them, Jacob, I'm going to fight it!' she
swore. 'I will go to Montreal, to France itself, wherever necessary,
to find new suppliers." She turned to face him. 'Jacob, will you
stand by me?'
She saw him hesitate a moment, open out the palms of his
hands.
'Ellen,' he began tentatively as if not wanting to say to her
what he was about to say. 'My accountant has long since told
me how bad a bargain I made with you at the start.' He smiled
a little ruefully. 'Especially now my custom in fine wine is well
established. This agreement we have between us, wherein you
sell to me at your cost from Frontignac and I pay you only
when I sell, splitting the profit, is not now as advantageous as
it was.'
Her heart dropped; what was he saying?
'But it works -' he carried on, 'I have the benefit of extended credit
and you take the risks - as I have explained to my accountant . . .
and,' he added, 'as I have also explained to him the very excellent
attention to business which you offer to Peabody's.'
'Jacob,' she started, disbelief in her voice, but he went on more
quickly now, his tone changing as if he had given her too much
the wrong impression.
'Besides all, Ellen, we are friends. We argue, you hide your secrets
from me - but we are friends, dear friends.' He reached to encircle
her shoulder again, still soothing. 'Friendship is more important
than profit. Accountants do not understand these things, they have
no souls ... as we have.'
She did not like this round-the-counter talk and shook off his
arm. 'Jacob, out with it!' she said fierily. 'Don't hide behind your
accountant!'
'Ellen . . .' he began in the same silvery tones as before, but
she pulled away from him, saw the ingratiating smile wane from
his face. 'All right then, have it your own way. I am trying
to accommodate your new circumstances with Frontignac. It is
an unfortunate coincidence that events should collide together
like this.'
Maybe she was too abrupt with him. It wasn't Jacob's fault,
how the Frontignacs had moved against her at this time. Peabody
continued, helpful, understanding her plight.
'I will extend to you a further six months on the present
arrangement. After that, of course I will continue with you, Ellen,'
he affirmed. 'But it must be exclusively a business arrangement
not based on friendship.' He hastened to add, 'Not meaning we
will not be friends; we will be that, always.'
That, always, she thought with sarcasm, but she would not give
it to him to see her any more defeated than she was. 'You are
right, Jacob - Boston is built on business first, friendship second.
We should be no different.' She stood up and stuck out her hand
to him. 'Six months, then, Jacob - that's fair notice!'
He took her hand, clasped it warmly, seemed relieved it was
this easy. 'Six months, Ellen,' he repeated.
'Oh,' she held on to his hand, keeping him close to her. 'What
did you mean, Jacob, "hide my secrets from you"? You are my
trusted confidant - I have no secrets from you.' She could play the
old fox at his own game; buried standing up is right, she thought
to herself when the French had already betrayed her! - as Lavelle
said of the Jews.
Now Peabody seemed uncomfortable, but she refused to let go
of his hand. She saw the little red spark rise in his glinty eyes, then
be masked. This man, this Job's comforter, who under the guise of
comforting her distress, merely aggravated it - he would not give
her six months. Despite their clasped hands, their 'dear friendship'.
This was his Judas kiss.
'Oh, nothing, Ellen,' he said, the white eyebrows steady and
inscrutable underneath her gaze, 'just one of my teasing phrases,
as you call them. Just that you have changed - as any woman would
in rising circumstances. Not as reliant on old Jacob as you once were
- a good thing,' he added quickly. 'That's all, nothing more!' And he
shook her hand to release his own. She held it a moment longer.
'Jacob, you know I couldn't have survived without you. How
could I have? For that I will be for ever grateful to you,' she said,
before disengaging her hand.
She knew he would be watching her from the door, so she pulled
back her shoulders, looked up at the New World skyline ahead of
her, and headed homewards. She felt betrayed. Betrayed by those
smooth-talking Frontignacs in Montreal. She had given them their
entree into Boston and now this. They had led her up the garden
path, timed their moment well and then set about the ruination
of the business she and Lavelle had built up over years. She should
have listened to her instinct in Montreal, then gone to see other
suppliers as Stephen had advised her to do. Any business person
exercising prudence would have done so but she had talked herself
out of her fears, allowing herself to be distracted by his presence
there; she had sacrificed the future of their business for fleeting
hours with him.
Another instinct had told her that Peabody would at some
stage betray her. Out of some petty vindictiveness, some imagined slight, or the jaded jealousy of an old man. She had ignored that
too, despite Lavelle's frequent warnings, thinking Jacob would
never do such a thing to her, castigating Lavelle for being so
mean-spirited. Even so, for Jacob to seize his opportunity now
in which to do it.
And what secrets did Peabody imagine she was hiding from him?
He never said anything without cause - either to gain an effect, or
to promote a response. It didn't matter anyway, the die was cast.
Her mind tried to focus on solutions, if indeed there were any,
but the force of the twin blows she had been struck proved too
much for rational thought. She decided she could not go home
and burden Lavelle and the children with the news, unless she had
some plan, some way out.
Her feet led her to Holy Cross. She sat there for an hour, huddled
into the corner of a pew. Churches were so different without the
pomp and ceremony, and the crowds of worshippers. Now, apart
from the odd set of footsteps slipping away from the city's hub,
seeking a few moments of respite and reflection, the big cathedral
was silent and empty. But not empty, either; she could feel a sense
of Presence there. She prayed to that Presence, offering contrition,
seeking deliverance from what lay ahead, aware that what she
was now facing was the real penance for her sin. Lavelle, Patrick,
Mary, Louisa, they too would suffer. Would pay the price of her
fall from grace.
Eventually the place in which she was imposed some calm
upon her. As if its great arches, high altar, tall perpendicular
stained-glass windows and the sheer stolidness of its slabbed
granite, overpowered the smaller human components of flesh and
fibre huddled within its interior. Maybe it all just came down to
sin and retribution - that most fundamental of all relationships,
between creature and Creator. She the creature had sinned, He the
Creator had punished.
Had her God deserted her? She had deserted Him and come
back - but perhaps not fully. She remembered her last encounter
with Stephen, when they had walked from her house: his touch,
his voice, his nearness. Had she been alone somewhere else with
him - in Montreal - she knew she would have relapsed. Even five
minutes from her own doorway, if it hadn't been for Mrs Brophy
calling her, she would have done or said something, let her resolve
slip. She had been prepared, she knew, to have chosen him again
over her God.
She left the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, more confused than
ever, heading home to face them without any way out of their
calamity.
'It's not your fault, Mother!' Mary said, full of concern for her.
'You couldn't have foreseen this and you mustn't take it all on
your own shoulders.'
Lavelle's anger was reserved for Peabody. 'His true colours are
at last showing - I never liked the man.'
'It's not the first time the French have betrayed the Irish,' Patrick
stated, 'and as for the Jew, he is never to be trusted. This is what
we are up against here.'
Louisa, clearly not understanding what all the commotion was
about, but knowing from Ellen's manner that it was something
serious, was visibly distressed, and came and stood by her mother,
embracing her.
When the initial burst of feelings had subsided, Patrick and Mary
each offered to give up their schooling and engage in whatever
profession - high or low - the situation demanded.
'We'll get through this, one way or another. There are still
plenty of tunnels needing digging in this country and I'm still an
able-bodied man!' Lavelle added supportively.
Ellen's spirits were greatly uplifted by this demonstration of their
combined love and goodness. She could get something herself, mill
work, anything, but first she was not prepared to let go of what
she and Lavelle had built up without a fight.
As they broke up Louisa tugged at Ellen's arm, bringing her to
the piano. It was not really the time she wanted to listen to anything,
but it seemed Louisa wanted to play, to express something
to her. She waited as Louisa moved behind the keyboard. But the
gin did not sit down. Instead, she crouched, turning the palms of
her hands outwards towards the instrument, miming a pushing
movement. Ellen wondered what the girl was doing. Then Louisa
straightened up again and with the finger of one hand pointing
towards the doorway, with the other hand caught her mother's
arm, putting her face up close to Ellen's in an attempt to make
her understand. Ellen watched carefully as Louisa tried to shape
the words with her lips.
'The piano to go? The piano to go, Louisa? Is that what you're
trying to tell me?' Ellen asked.
The girl wanted her to get rid of the piano - sell this great joy of
her life. Helpless at being unable to offer any suggestion of work,
this was her way of sharing the burden on the household.
'Oh no! No! Louisa . . . my dear child. No! They'll carry me out
of here first before that piano goes,' Ellen said, more defiantly than

she felt.
The girl looked at her, shaking her head from side to side,
disagreeing, tears rising behind her silence. Ellen embraced her.
'Don't worry, Louisa dear, it will be all right, I promise. We've
come through a lot together - just pray for me,' she asked, knowing
prayer itself was not enough to save them.
Louisa seemed to understand. She withdrew her head from
Ellen's shoulder, then, taking her mother's face in her hands
tenderly, exquisitely, she kissed Ellen on the lips.

After further discussion between Ellen and Lavelle, it was decided
she would return to Montreal, to first see the Frontignacs and then
seek out other suppliers. Lavelle had wanted to accompany her,
but she was uneasy about him coming to Montreal, as if somehow
his presence there might uncover her. She talked him out of it.
In any case he was needed in Boston, lest there was any further
deterioration in the local situation. He had asked her about other
potential suppliers in Montreal that she might have come across
during her visits there. She had had to be vague in her reply.
He came to the train to see her off, kissed her and wished her
well, saying, as she boarded, 'I will be waiting all the hours till
you return.' Then he shouted something after her about 'not
spending too long in those Montreal bookshops!' in an effort to
lift her humour. He was a fine man, such a fine, fine man.
Three train journeys, same destination, but this one so different, no gloss of excitement rising from the grinding wheels, the
rhythmic clacketyclack, once sensual, lulling, now an ungainly
thud of wheel against track. She, having no sense of travelling
hopefully, only wanting the journey behind her, and life- as they
had known it, preserved.
Rather than stay again at the Hotel Fond du Lac and dredging up
past memories, she considered Dillon's Hotel on the Place d'Armes,
close to Notre Dame. Eventually she decided against Dillon's, fearing
the popular hotel would be filled with 'big bourgeois' members
of the Beaver Club, which met there. These big bourgeois, once voyageurs and fur trappers, now barons of Montreal, still played
at being Nor'westers. She didn't think she could stomach their
songs, their noisy exuberance, their campfire boisterousness.
At the Fond du Lac, they gave her the same room she had shared
with Stephen. She peered into it before entering, as if her story was
still being unfolded there, waiting for her to re-inhabit it. Then she
sat on the bed looking around the room: the floorboards with the
unplanned gaps between them, something she hadn't previously
noticed; the door betraying an ingrained griminess above its handle
- seigneurial grist from the mill owners of the Saguenay Valley who
stayed here. Perhaps deposits from hands resined by lumber or
furred by the soft under-coat of beaver pelts.
She thought she could detect the stale whiff of tobacco, the
tell-tale slightly soiled lace on the curtains and wondered if, after
all, this could be the same room? She rose, and from where she had
sung to him, stood by the window, searching the sky for a sign.
Looking over her shoulder back towards the bed, to where he
had lain, she was sure then that it was.
The Frontignacs refused to see her, at first pleading prior engagements
until she threatened 'to remain darkening the doorstep from
now to Kingdom Come if I have to!'
At the possibility of an unseemly scene at Manoir Frontignac,
prior engagements seemed to become mysteriously disengaged and
it was now Frontignac Pere who glided out to meet her, all charms
and smiles, behind his luxuriant but well-sculpted beard.
'Ah, Madame Lavelle, bonjour, pardon the delay, unavoidable,
but inexcusable - what brings you back to our lovely city?'
'This does,' she snapped, pushing the letter to Peabody at him.
He raised his eyebrows. 'Ah, the letter!'
'Yes, the letter, letters - why didn't you tell me?'
'But Madame Lavelle . . . come, come, if we told you, then
you would know,' Frontignac Pere said plausibly, as if it were
all self-apparent.
'And . . . ?' She wanted to hear it from himself.
'Then you could make, shall we say, alternative plans - which
is, I suspect, why you are in Montreal now?' he said, the essence
of politeness, the hint of a smile tracing his lips, unperturbed by
whatever she might attempt to do.
'So you, Monsieur Frontignac, did it, shall I say . . . underhandedly?'
'Dear Madame Lavelle - "Lavelle",' he paused as if her name
had now taken his interest, 'it is a French name, n'est-ce pas, "Le
val", of the valley, perhaps?'
'Yes, it is,' she said, not batting an eyelid, 'and so is "bhastaird"'.'
He looked at her, the leonine head raised quizzically, the tailored
beard at a tilt towards her. She didn't explain to him that 'bastard'
was the same in any language, thinking he had caught the drift of what she had said. Frontignac Pere chose to carry on as if he
hadn't.
'In business it is a rough-and-tumble world even for our gender,'
he replied, picking a speck of dust from his sleeve.
'It is a great mystery to me, Monsieur,' she fumed, 'if I should
call you Monsieur Frontignac, that you should know what gender
you belong to. Being on the one hand not man enough to be open
and proper with me, and on the other lacking in any virtue and
honesty common to my sex.'
For the first time she saw his face darken, the bemusement
which played on his lips disappear, but she had more yet to say
to Monsieur Frontignac Pere.
'We have a word in our language for your likes - stagun.' She
spat out the insult to his masculinity, spun on her heel and left,
fluttering pieces of the letter in a trail behind her. Outside, she was
glad at what she'd done. He was too polished by far, standing there
like a little oily Napoleon, maneuvering her, talking down to her
about her 'gender'. Now that she had burned her bridges with the
Frontignacs, she had to build new ones elsewhere - and quickly.

'Carrier et Charbonneau maison fondee en 1763)' looked promising.
Large and well-stocked, it was obviously a company of some
substance. However, the most fundamental of problems beset her
- language. Carrier et Charbonneau, it seemed, catered to an
exclusively Francophone clientele. The only person there with a
smattering of English was a packing clerk, who was summoned
to try and make sense of what she was saying. She tried to explain
as best she could the object of her visit. He translated to either
Carrier or Charbonneau, she wasn't sure which, dress and bearing
decreeing him one or t'other. She picked up the words 'Boston'
and 'Frontignac', and saw the frown cross Monsieur's face.
'Non! Non madame.' and then Monsieur disappeared, leaving
the clerk to show her out.
At Maison Barthelemy Richelieu, she had better luck as regards
the language, but the response was still the same. 'No, madame, I
am sorry, I could not go against Frontignac - here in Montreal we
"ave an arrangement - Boston is too difficult for me.'
Later that day she found Jacquemart et Fils. As elsewhere the
Frontignacs had prepared the ground well and another polite 'Non. greeted her ears.
As far as the wine merchants of Montreal were concerned,
Boston was a closed shop. No one would supply her.
Originally Lavelle had suggested they write to Father McGauran
in Quebec who had, in the first instance, arranged the introduction
with the Frontignacs. She had been against drawing the priest back
into their problems. In any case, with what she had learned from
Stephen during her last visit, she was suspicious of the Catholic
Church here, which derived from the old French aristocracy,
and for a century or more operated a seigneurial system of
land government. Acting like Irish landlords, he had told her,
these Seigneur-priests had extracted tithes from their tenants, in
turn building up trading monopolies and ensuring the Church
controlled Canadian commerce in every respect. She had been
fascinated at how abreast he was of every nuance of local history.
The Seigneurs didn't like the Paddy-Irish. The Shiners and other
Irish rioters had seen to that. The Shiners, who sailed from Cork
and Connacht in their 'shiny' silk hats, had for two decades
fought openly with French-speaking workers along the lumber
camps of the Ottawa Valley. The continuing contretemps had
become known as the 'Shiners War'. Montreal's Irish also liked
to 'celebrate' Queen Victoria's birthday. A little arson, some
stone-throwing, cudgel-fighting and other such party games in
the city's streets, ensured the monarch was 'given a good day'!
Like the Shiners War, this over-exuberance by her race was not
overlooked, nor forgotten.
Now the Seigneurs of Montreal had flexed a muscle or two
against her - Irish, and a woman. A troublesome speck of dust
on a frock-coat, she had been firmly and effectively shut off from
the Francophone merchant princes of the city. Her choices now
were limited. She could go to France itself, but she would need an
interpreter. Stephen - he could speak French, the thought flashed
in her mind - but she extinguished it again as quickly. It was out of
the question. France in any case would be a costly journey, perhaps
necessitating up to a month there.
Australia? The wines could not compare with the French, no raffinement, and it would be difficult to convince the refined taste
buds of Boston to change. In time, perhaps, but it would be a
long haul, full of risk. As always Frontignac Pere et Fils, Quebec,
Montreal and now Boston, would be there like a giant shadow,
smothering her every move.
Dispirited, she trudged back to the hotel, took dinner in the
shabby gaudiness of the dining-room, noting that the variegated
silver-grey chintz curtains were not at all suitable for a room
impaired by age, needing an infusion of life. The joueur de violon recognized her and approached in his greasy way.
'Madame is alone?' The moustache lifted a semi-quaver, then
full-quavered into a flash of teeth. 'No with Monsieur this time?'
She gave him a watery smile, hoping it would dampen his enthusiasm,
make him go away. It didn't. 'Ah ... is no good.' The
moustache drooped again in empathy with her solitude. 'I make musique - you no be alone?' The moustache rose, revealing a
greater pearliness than earlier.
She shook her head. 'No, no music,' she answered.

It was all so faded, she thought as she mounted the stairs, so very,
very faded. She undressed and lay on the bed, on what had been his
side. When he had asked her to sing it had been a strange moment,
he lying there making no sound, watching her silhouetted against
the window, drinking her in note by note. She had physically felt
it, felt the flow out of her body towards his. That's what it was
- the love act. A distant intercoursing. Some songs should always
be sung in full nakedness.
She stood up and went to the window. It was bright. She folded
her arms around herself, the light yellowing her goose-flesh and
body-hair. In an outside corner of the window, golden-threaded,
pure gossamer carat, a cobweb. Its inhabitant, feverishly working against the moon, spun out the sticky fluid from its spinnerets,
the light seeming to transform the liquid extrusion into an ever
widening entrapment.
She wondered how one small body could create such an endless
labyrinth. Where was it all stored? Or was what it spun merely
streams of spider-thought, solidified by contact with the outside
world - moon-yellowed into life?
She put her palm against the windowpane, watching mesmerized
as the web grew like magic mist around the tips of her fingers,
turning them into long hairy stamens of spiderwort plant. A busy
little fellow. She put her lips close to the glass, making her own
hoar-frost, remembering when she had sung to Stephen and the
moist white rose her breath had formed on the window.
Deciding that it spun in 'jig-time', she started to lilt the lively
'Round the World for Sport' to the spider's workings. Nobody ever
sang to a spider - she would be the first. And this one's industry
deserved a song.
She liked the notion, the naked madwoman who sang to spiders.
Lavelle came to meet her, and knew by the tentative way she
alighted from the train that it had been a wasted journey. He held
off asking any questions until she herself was ready to tell him.
'They have it all sewn up. No one will go against the Frontignacs.
But the Frontignacs will certainly go against us after . . .' She told
him the story.
'You were right!' he affirmed. 'I'd have given him worse!'
'I never intended saying what I did, but Frontignac got me so
angry.' She paused, admitting, 'We badly needed some stay of time
from them.'
'It's not the end of the world, Ellen, and I'm glad you didn't let
off that jumped-up little Francac without a tongue-lashing such as
only you can give,' he added to cheer her up. 'People deserve what
they get,' he further added.
She thought for a moment on his last statement - how it applied
to their own situation.
'Sometimes,' she said, looking at him.

With the situation now blackening, there was nothing for it but to
reduce their outlays. They had previously dispensed with Sullivan,
and she had thought if there was any little crumb of consolation
to be gleaned from the sorry state of things, it was from ridding
themselves of the surly 'hill-topper', as Lavelle referred to the
Kerry lad. Now they would have to sell off existing stock and
then rid themselves of the warehouse. In this latter respect at least
things fell their way. Their lease was up for renewal within four
months. As they were required to give three months' notice of
quitting, they would in effect only be at the loss of one additional
month's rent.
'It could have been nine or ten months,' Lavelle said, trying to
take a bright view of the situation.
The stock, however, would have to be cleared within that period
of time. Some of their other customers who had also been contacted
by the Frontignacs took what they could at its full price. Indeed
paying her more quickly than usual, protesting that if she could
find a supplier elsewhere, they would 'stick with her rather than
the Frenchman'. However, she still had quite an assortment of
wines to get rid of.
Cornelius Ryan was a disappointment. Ensconced behind the
counter of his Emporium, he folded his arms, asking her, 'How is
the childer and the boy what stood up to the Orangemen?' Then
he told her, 'The Bordelaux isn't selling too good around here,
missus! True as my word as a Tipp'rary man, other than that I'd
take some of what you have left off your hands.'
She said nothing. No flies on the Tipp'rary man, she thought,
and thanked him.
'Not at all, missus! Not at all - anything to support our own!
A pity about the Bordelaux.'
She had no option but to go back to Peabody. Of them all he had
the largest capacity, with his three outlets, to clear the remainder
of her stock.
'Of course, Jacob,' she said, business-like, when reservedly he
expressed an interest - if the price was fair to both of them, he not
wanting to take any advantage of the position in which she found
herself. 'Of course, I will sell it to you at a special price to clear!'
He would have to come to the warehouse to 'see with my eyes
what I would be taking on'.
He duly did, walked around with her noting everything. He then
made what she considered to be a derisory offer.
'Jacob, I said a special price, not a give-away one!'
'Ellen, you know that I am already well stocked and this,' he
swung out his hand, 'this is a lot of additional stock to carry for
an indeterminate period.'
'Jacob, you know the prices,' she said, tempering her speech. 'I
am prepared to offer you this lot to clear for one-third below cost,
seeking nothing beyond that by way of any profit you make as per our normal arrangement. You, on the other hand, are offering me a price which is two-thirds below cost! That is not business, Jacob . . .
it's robbery!' she said, her eyes flying wide at him.
'Take it or leave it, Ellen.' He shrugged. 'I'm trying to help and
it's the best I can do.' He was treating her like some sort of shiksa, trying to get her to beg.
'Jacob, do you want me to go on my knees to you, is that it?'
she attacked him.
He smiled. 'You have a genteel way of putting things, Ellen. That
is well past... for me at any rate,' he added after a pause. He had
purposely mistaken her meaning, as he always did, but this time it
had a different kind of barb to it. She was not going to ask him
what he meant. Certainly she was not going to haggle with him
now. She wanted done with him.
'It's a deal!' she said, and extended her hand to him.
His face registered a fleeting surprise, but he said nothing. He
took her hand and squeezed it for a moment, looking at her with
some expression in his eyes.
Then he let go of her hand. 'I knew it would be.'
Lavelle was again furious when she told him of Peabody's
offer. 'It was a bad thing, Ellen, to be dependent on the likes of
Peabody and those French. One worse than the other, but both
true to form.'
'You were right - right all along - I didn't see it,' she answered.
'A leopard doesn't change his spots, nor a Jew his money pouch.
You're far too trusting of people,' he stated.
And she was, she knew, too reliant on how she could win people
over. Maybe it would have been better if all along Lavelle had done
more of the dealings with Peabody and the Frontignacs. He would
have kept things clearer, been less distracted by Peabody's clever
conversation. Now it was too late for that.
She did not tell him about Peabody's innuendo and the fact that
she believed something else, other than mere profit, lay shrouded
within his behaviour. Some sexual jealousy against Lavelle ... or
another! Some imagined betrayal in which she had engaged. She'd
never know now. Peabody's behaviour puzzled her but there was
a much bigger question on the horizon - their very survival.
Every outgoing was looked at, every non-necessity pared back.
Milliner and dressmaker alike were stricken from her list. Charitable
offerings to the causes of orphans and street urchins were
suspended. The purchasing of newspapers and magazines, even
the Pilot, was discontinued, severely restricting her reading. There
were no more visits to the Old Corner Bookstore for her - anyway,
she told herself, she'd had little stomach for books of late.
Of these early deprivations, the one which most grieved her was
the cancellation of Mary's and Louisa's pianoforte tuition. Both
had continued to develop in aptitude and love for their music.
Lessons were eagerly looked forward to each week, and there
was joy on their faces when they burst home with a 'new piece',
taught to them by their tutor. Their practice sessions resembled
musical duels, each one seeking to outdo the other. The good
Miss Wigglesworth had offered to 'keep them in tuition with a
moratorium for the time being on fees'. Kind as it was, Ellen could
not accept such an offer and politely refused. At least Louisa had
her regular Sunday-afternoon practice in the cathedral, with the
organist, who professed her to be 'showing much promise for
sacred music', though Louisa hadn't, as of yet, been allowed to
play on any formal occasion.
The girls had taken the loss of Miss Wigglesworth with great
grace, but she knew how much both of them missed the lessons.
She tried to comfort them, saying it would be 'a temporary arrangement
until such time as things improve'. The hoped-for 'temporary
arrangement' with the piano lessons took on a distinctly longer
term and darker shade of meaning when some months later they
were forced to return the piano itself.
In the intervening time their lives had taken on the semblance
of slow death. In her mind, Ellen paralleled it with that time in
Ireland a decade previously, when she was forced to ration their
daily portions of potatoes in ever-diminishing numbers, knowing
there would come a day when none would be left to divide. It was
not that same life-or-death situation now, but to her it had that
same inexorable impetus.
Bit by bit life, as they had known it, was being deconstructed.
The conspiracy of boundaries was at work again, boundaries which were now no longer static, which no longer merely defined
the position of the compound within which they were all held. Now, the boundaries had become an ever-reducing and compressing
force. Ever-reducing the options available to them, ever
compressing their lives - closing in on them.
The first deconstruction was watching Lavelle remove the
racking and shelving in the warehouse, the same fittings he had
so enthusiastically constructed when they had first come here.
When it was all dismantled, they tried to sell it, but finding no
takers were forced to burn it. All that they had built up, now
going up again, this time in smoke.
Then the sign - the New England Wine Company. The sign that
proclaimed they were ready for business, and was a statement of
their survival from the Old World, of arrival in the New. Now
with Patrick, she held it steady, both of them perched on borrowed
ladders, while Lavelle, on another, clawed out the supporting nails.
She and Patrick finally had to let it crash to the ground when they
could no longer take its weight.
She cried for the death of the sign.

They had considered what else they might do, while they still had
some remaining funds, before Lavelle would 'take up pick or
shovel', herself 'the loom or the broom'. He never criticized her,
was a tower of strength, solid as she knew he would be, wanting 'to
go West for the better wages'. But she wouldn't let him. Now that
her 'restlessness' was over she feared that if he went he might never
come back, that she would lose him like Michael. . . like Stephen.
There was still hope for them in Boston. The city was always her
dream, her saviour. She wouldn't give up on it yet, wouldn't give
up on herself and Lavelle.
Despite a strong Temperance movement and the visit of its
'chief apostle' from Ireland, Father Theobald Mathew, Boston
had more than fifteen hundred establishments selling liquor to
its thirsty citizens. Of these, two-thirds were Irish-owned. Despite
the best efforts of the Nativist legislature to eliminate 'Rome,
rum and robbery', replacing it with 'Temperance, liberty and
Protestantism', the sale of 'intoxicating beverages' was still big
business in Boston. Many of these establishments, however, were
no more than rough groggeries, where whiskey, ale and porter
flowed freely, inflaming men's passions into loud and often riotous
behaviour.
A grocery store, they decided, would perhaps be a safer bet. Many
of such stores run by the Irish opened up and shut down again with
alarming regularity. Often first started in the corner of a room in
one of the many tenement buildings, where the Irish swarmed, they
required no great initial investment or continuing overhead cost.
'That is their problem,' Lavelle said, 'they are too easily set up,
too many dogs at the same bone.'
She and Lavelle had walked the city looking at the better-placed
stores, their vegetables freshly laid out in boxes, their barrels brimful
bright with apples and fresh fruit. Beef and lamb were kept inside,
away from the spoiling sun. Outside, under the stretched canopies,
starch-coated grocers carefully scrolled 'Today's prices' on the standup
pavement signs. Some, more vocal, proclaimed their wares to
passers-by, singing the praises of 'green cabbages, rose-red apples
and ripe juicy pears', all in the same luscious mouthful.
In the right neighbourhood, away from the fly-by-night vicissitudes
of the 'tenement Irish', they could, she felt, over a period
of time develop a decent grocery business. Patience, hard work,
sufficient capital to start with and a tight rein on credit would be
the four cornerstones to success. Having some, but not sufficient
capital, Ellen, it was decided rather than Lavelle, would approach
the credit agency, R.G. Dun, they both fearing Lavelle's brush with
the law would disadvantage their request for a loan.
Everybody knew of R.G. Dun, what hopeful or perspiring
businessman didn't? It would be a process of questioning not
dissimilar to the one she had undergone with Mr Jellico, a situation
she had disliked intensely.
She felt as if on trial for her life. The agent of R.G. Dun, a
rotund little puffed-up man with a notebook, probed into every
corner of her existence, then pompously informed her, 'Intellect,
industry and integrity of character are the three sine qua nons for credit with this company. Qualities not widely found in your
countrymen, I regret to say, Mrs Lavelle.'
Him not regretting one word of it, she thought.
He quizzed her about the children, their ages, their schooling
and 'the suitability of her gender being absent from the marriage
hearth'. He queried Mr Lavelle's absence, wondering if 'that name
hath hitherto crossed before me?'
Then, in his primped-up little way, he asked her, 'And your . . .
eh ... previous business experience, Mrs Lavelle?'
So she told him the story.
'And what provision did you make against such an occurrence
as you have described?'
'Well . . .' She fumbled for the words. '. . . I had no cause ... I
never expected ... we had such a history of business . . .'
'In business, as in life, Mrs Lavelle,' the R.G. Dun man admonished,
'we must expect the unexpected and provide against it.'
She felt the whole discussion was going nowhere.
'Mr Peabody? Mr Jacob Peabody?' he enquired at the name,
when he asked about her previous clients. 'Now there is a provident
man, close and shrewd, with a keen and grasping intellect. Three
stores he now has, I believe, all primely located.'
'You know him?' Ellen asked.
'Peabody is known to me, as are many of Boston's business
fraternity,' he replied in lofty tones, writing something in his
well-guarded notebook. The dust would hardly be settled after
her, she knew, before he would be scurrying down all puffing and red-faced to Peabody. This convinced her all the more that
she would get a 'good for o' recommendation from R.G. Dun and this toadeen of a man before her. She hated being made to
squirm before the likes of him. However, she sat it out until he had finished interviewing her.
'Well, Mrs Lavelle.' He closed his book and twined a rubber- band around it. 'We'll wait and see what we can do,' he said
patronizingly.
She didn't need to wait and see. She knew they would not be entering Boston's grocery trade or any other trade which required borrowed capital. The word from R.G. Dun would go out.
Troublesome of her race and gender. Good for o.'
And so the boundaries tightened further about them, constricting
their present choices, limiting future ones. While, all the time, their
assets dwindled.

This process of the disestablishment of their lives was at its most
heartbreaking for Ellen when she was finally forced to sell back
the piano. Getting it in the first place was a luxury, she knew. It
was also a powerful affirmation of how far life had advanced for
them from the penny whistles and gut-fiddles of Ireland. Now she
ran her hand along its grained brown top - it was a substantial
instrument and would leave the room looking bare in its absence;
but more than that.
She lifted the lid, looked at its hammers and clampers and
metal strings snuggled within, waiting to give voice. It was like
opening a door into some wonderful world, framed by cantatas,
fugues and concertos, instead of the barefooted world of jigs,
reels and hornpipes. She loved the Italian words of this new
musical language she had discovered for her children here in
America. Oratorio, andante, allegro, largo - they had such a
swing to them, and a reverence for the thing they spoke of like
at Mass. She tinkled a few of the notes - yet it hadn't
been something for her. She felt she could have mastered it,
lost herself through it, in those long nights of the soul, when
nothing could comfort her. Still, that didn't matter. The doorway
into the refining world was for them, Mary and Louisa. She had
opened it for them. Now by her own actions, she was closing
it again.
The evening before the removers came, the family gathered
around it for the final time. 'For the parting tune!' Lavelle said
it was. One of the leg coverlets had slipped its tie. Now it lay,
sagged on the floor like a discarded dress. She reminded herself to
remove all of them before it was taken. It was such a silly prudery,
anyway; so like Mrs Brophy.
When she had faced them with the news, both Mary and Louisa
had been stoically brave, understanding how her having to tell
them was as grievous for her as the loss of the piano itself was
for them; that it was her defeat too.
She had later happened on them comforting each other, Mary telling Louisa, 'We will always have the memory of it - the
memory of tunes. We can still play them ... in our heads, can't
we Louisa?'
Louisa had simply nodded, this evening now would be their
last memory of it.
Mary played first, her favourite piece, and Ellen's, 'Jesu Joy of
Man's Desiring'.
Louisa stood next to the piano, hand resting on it as Mary played.
Ellen closed her eyes, as she did when she herself would sing, at one
with the singing soul of the music. Even with her eyes closed she
would have known which of them it was. Mary played the piece
full of the hope that the 'joy of desiring' brings, accentuating the
absolute magnitude of its brightness. When Louisa played it, she
on the other hand drew from the piece all the longing of desire
unfulfilled, the recognition of loss sustained, rather than the hope
of Heaven gained. She watched them as they exchanged places,
smiling, touching each other. What would be Louisa's choice?
What message within the music, for them, for her?
The girl composed herself, looked first at Mary, then at Patrick
and Lavelle, finally at Ellen, her face softening into a distant smile.
Then she commenced playing.
Ellen had never heard the piece before. She looked to Mary, but
Mary was too engrossed in her sister's playing to notice her.
Louisa must have practised it at the cathedral in anticipation
of this evening to surprise them, giving the piece its once-only
recital.
It was slow. What was the word . . . largo. Incredibly beautiful
- the notes so delicately falling like angels' dewdrops in the light
of Heaven, clear and bright in the sad dawn of the minor key;
shining for one brief moment before Louisa's fingers melted them
away into little trills and fragile, faltering triplets.
She played, eyes closed, the utmost serenity on her face. Unhearing
now, unseeing, except only in the sound and light of the soul. It Was Bach, Ellen knew, Louisa's left hand rising and reverentially
falling like the footfall of God, shepherding the melody into the
souls of all who listened; the Good Shepherd watching over His Child as she played the lost and broken melody.
When she had finished, all were still, brought into her silent world. As the lingering echo of the last chord hung there, like a life unresolved, the girl closed the lid over the keys for the last time and came to Ellen. Her tears, when they came, Ellen knew, were as much for her - for the closing of life as they had known it - as for anything.
Lavelle's reputation as a 'fightin' man' led to his encountering
difficulties in his search for employment. He picked up some
casual labouring work as a forehand and stableman, enough to
stem the more rapid erosion of what they had put by, but nothing
more consequential than that. The money from the sale of the piano
had helped. But in the end, she wondered if the pitiful few dollars
they got for it were worth the grief of losing it.
Ellen's own choices were also narrowing further. Married women
were not common in working life, the myriad single women,
many her own countrywomen, swamping what available work
there was, driving down the wages, as Patrick had once pointed
out would happen. 'There has to be something better than being a
needlewoman or a "Bridget",' she confided jokingly to Mary. 'I'll
end up either blind in one job or befuddled in the other.'
She had that day seen three of the countless needlewomen in the
city, wearing dark blue glasses, creeping 'like mice at dusk' through
the Common. Three blind mice, as she had unkindly thought of
them. Their blindness caused no doubt by Boston blue-bloods,
respectable behind their purple-tinted windows on Beacon Hill,
who kept these unfortunate women chained to their machines in
dimly-lit sewing shops.
On the other hand, to be one of Boston's two-thousand-strong
army of 'Bridgets' normally required one to live in, behind those some tinted windows, in order to lessen the chance of bringing
'moral contamination' into the home. As well, a 'Bridget' had to
be on call twenty-four hours a day. Pay was docked for such crimes as 'breaking tea-cups', 'pilfering apples' or even 'spoiling a dish of
Prunes', as reported in the Pilot. In some newspaper editorials Such misdeeds were seen as part of a 'conspiracy' by the Papist

Church against Yankee Protestant homes where the unfortunate
'Bridgets' were alleged to have been 'put up to it by their priests'!
Whatever solution Ellen would find, neither taking up her needle
nor a broom would be it.

It was a Tuesday in early October of the year 1855. Mary was
sixteen, going on seventeen, Louisa maybe a year or two older.
Ellen would never forget the day. Clear as crystal it was, but a
hardy day, crisp as a crab apple, the browns and yellows and
reds of fall bringing an illusion of warmth to the Common. She
still brought Mary and Louisa there, not that Patrick came with
them any more. And they would stroll arm in arm, talking of
the day, or the doings in Boston, even just watching the leaves
do their slow dance to earth. She never burdened them with her
own worries when they had these 'precious times' together, as
she thought of them. Another year would see their schooling
complete, all of them, even Patrick. Then, who knew what way
the world would scatter them? She would get them through
the next year, no matter what. At least she would see to that
properly, despite what she had brought down on them all. Beyond
that. . .
Patrick, she knew, wanted to 'enlist in an army', a thought that
always sent a shudder over her, but he seemed set on the idea and
she wasn't the only mother to have to live with such a cross. It
would, she thought, at last make a real American of him - in the
uniform of his adopted country. She worried that he still harboured
deep-rooted grievances against England and talked about 'rising
an army of the Irish in America to fight the Crown!'. She prayed
that when the time came for him to enlist, these sentiments would
be drilled out of him. Louisa would need thinking about; she was
bright, winsome too, but she would still need some shepherding.
She couldn't just be let out in the world like another could.
Mary was a different story. Mary would make her way anywhere,
but it was always Ellen's hope that Mary would go on
to higher learning - she thought it was Mary's hope too. Now
it began to look more and more as if that wish would never be
fulfilled. Anyway, all that was a year off yet and God was good.
Whatever thoughts lay on her own mind this Tuesday, there was
something too on Mary's mind and on Louisa's. The two seemed
to be on the edge of telling her something ever since she had met
them after school, looking from one to the other, an excitement
on them mixed with nervousness.
'Will we sit a few moments under the Great Elm?' she asked.
It was as good a place as any for secrets to be shared. But they
wouldn't wait long, the pre-winter nip already in the air.
They sat, the girls not flanking her, as was usual, but both to
the one side of her, Mary nearer.
'Mother . . .' Mary began, an unusual tremor in her voice,
'Louisa and I ... we've got something to tell you.'
Ellen waited, wondering what all this schoolgirl drama was
about. Mary delayed the telling, looking back at Louisa, half
hidden from Ellen behind Mary's shoulder. It was obviously some
prank or scrape involving the both of them.
'Louisa is going to be leaving . . . and . . .' Mary managed to
get out as Ellen looked at Louisa, alarmed. Had someone come
for her after all this time? '. . . And ... me too!' she thought she
heard Mary say, through her bewilderment. 'We are going to be
nuns!' her child said, reaching for her hands.
'Nuns!' Ellen repeated, as if the giant tree had pronounced its
worst sentence on her. 'Going to be nuns . . .' she said unbelieving,
needing to hear the words again. She looked from one to the other
of them. 'But . . . ?' she started to ask.
'Because it's the right time, for both of us,' Mary answered
simply, as if that were all there was to it. Ellen felt a sickening
emptiness. She was losing them to God. Her mind flashed back
over all the little things, the signs that now made sense.
Louisa's devotion to prayer; the image of Veronica wiping the
face of Jesus; the music; the organ-playing. It was all there. Only
she was too blinded by her own inward-looking gaze to have
noticed it.
'Are you sure, Mary? Louisa?' she heard herself asking. It was a fruitless question.
Louisa gave a soundless little laugh of happiness, nodding her head up and down, throwing her arms around her mother's neck.
Within her, Ellen felt a huge gap of loss opening up. It seemed
no length of time since the famished waif she had grown to love
so much had first appeared alongside her carriage door. Now, as
silently, mysteriously, as she had come into their lives, she was
leaving again. With them for only a short time, a borrowed angel
called back to her God.
And Mary - she reached to embrace her other child, confused,
caught between their obvious joy, her own sorrow. Mary had
flourished so well here in Boston, developing a social consciousness
and a compassion for others. She had of late begun to let her hair
grow longer, as Ellen's had once been.
'All those one hundred strokes I gave it, Mary, every time before
Mass,' Ellen would say to her, 'do you remember, when you were
small?'
Now here Mary was, long beyond those years, a full woman
almost. The world at her feet, throwing it all away.
'Oh, Mary!' was all Ellen could say.
'A Mhamai. . . aren't you happy for us?' Mary answered, falling
back into the old language.
Ellen pulled herself together. 'Of course I am, oh yes . . . but to
lose the two of you . . .' She couldn't see it any other way. 'Why
now?' she asked, as if reason or time would lessen the blow.
Mary paused a moment. 'I have thought it to be the life for me
for some time, and I knew, too, that Louisa did - she's much
holier than me,' she added, like a little girl. 'God called us now
and the way things are, a Mhamai, it seemed to be a good time
to answer Him.'
That was it. They both had decided to go, deeming themselves
to be burdens - burdens because of her. Now they were giving up
their lives for her sins.
'I've let you all down so badly,' she confessed, 'I've caused all
of this.'
'No you haven't, a Mhamai. You could never let us down.
You've done so much for all of us against everything. You've
always put us first, always.' Mary hugged her so tightly.
'Jesus wept,' was all she could say in reply, and cried bitterly
As she held the two of them, she thought of the futility of loving another human being. It was such a secondary, dispensable thing,
quickly dashed in the chaos of life. Like everything else, Mary
and Louisa were now being stripped from her like bark from a tree, stripped away from her by God. Heart-broken, she felt
Louisa press against her.
'When you played that piece, you were telling me, child, weren't
you? You were telling me, Louisa,' she whispered to herself.
It was Louisa's going-away gift to her, the only way the girl knew
how to tell her - through music - and she had delivered the piece to
its final perfection. She rocked them then, like the children she still
wanted them to be. In her turmoil she imagined Louisa would enter
an enclosed order, where her silence would be revered, a normal
world at last for her. Mary would go with her. As they had been
in the outside world, so too would they go to God, silenced away
together contemplating the face of the Saviour.
Once they entered such a convent all contact with the human
world would be broken. Their only release would be in leaving
this life, bound for the higher glory.
'We are entering the novitiate of the Sisters of Saint Mary
Magdalen,' Mary whispered as if reading her mother's thoughts.
The import of what Mary was saying almost passed Ellen by, so
locked was she within her own imaginings.
'Saint Mary . . . The Magdalens . . . It's, it's not enclosed!' she
said, a rush of joy taking over her speech. She held them both back
from her. 'I never thought ... oh thank God! I thought we'd . . .
I'd ... never see you both again!'
Later that evening, when Lavelle returned, she told him.
'They're doing it for us, Ellen.' He was adamant. He summoned
the two of them.
'Now, Mary, Louisa,' he began, 'I am not your father and it is
not my practice to interfere in matters of the household, so I will
say only this. Whatever vocation you may choose, it is yours alone
to decide, but I do not want you to go because of recent events,'
he said, concluding with, 'I will leave it to be discussed between your mother and yourselves. Listen to her - she won't put you
wrong.'
It was the longest 'speech' on domestic matters he had ever made.
Now it was over to Ellen. She was, he had reminded them, their
moral guardian, who would not advise them wrongly. The words
rang inside her head. How could she rightfully shape their thinking,
when her own was so tainted? She found she had no need to, Mary
taking the lead.
'If the coming of the call coincides with the needs of the family
then it is the will of God that Louisa and I should answer
it now.'
That was it. The will of God. The call and the answer. Mary
had put it beyond discussion.
Albeit that their dwindling resources had been augmented somewhat
by the sale of the pianoforte as well as a finely crafted walnut
dressing-table, which Lavelle once had bought for her, the will of
God would now much more significantly ease the burden on the
household.
Ellen and Lavelle had recently decided to vacate their present
accommodation, it being at a high rent, and move to a lesser
neighbourhood. She was aware of how much of a reversal of fortune this was, in the sense that the Irish who were rising into
consequence, not falling from it, were leaving the area into which
they were now about to move.
When Mary and Louisa would depart the household for the
convent, something even smaller again and thereby cheaper would
be sufficient for just the three of them: Lavelle, Patrick and herself.
The following month the girls were both gone. She missed them
around the house. First she went about tidying their room as if
they were still there, making up the bed, pounding the pillows
with her hand, putting a comfortable shape on them, and fingering
their dresses once designed for the lovely bodies of young women.
Hanging there lifeless now, replaced by the sombre habit of the
Brides of Christ, shapeless, sinless. She was glad the piano was
gone; she wouldn't have been able to bear looking at it, standing
there waiting to be played, the dust of years gathering on it, a
constant reminder.
When they moved to a smaller dwelling on the fringes of
the West End, its compactness, the nearness of everything walls,
doors and windows - only served to emphasize the girls'
absence, contrasting with the bustle that had once accompanied
their comings and goings, the music of lives once mixed with
hers. While she tried to be happy for them, she mostly failed to
be other than profoundly sad at their not being there.
Their absence was more than non-presence, seemed much greater to her than a mere physical withdrawing; it had to do with almost
not existing without them. Lavelle and, to his credit, Patrick, did
their best to be around her, consoling her, putting to her the bright
side of 'them being called to God'. Mary and Louisa, she thought,
would at least be able to sublimate their own feelings of absence,
tie it to the higher good, offer it up like a chalice. She couldn't.
Christmas was their bleakest yet in Boston. Guests for the
Christmas dinner were not even a consideration. Strange how they
too had evaporated. Stephen, Peabody - not even the goodhearted
but meddlesome Mrs Brophy dropping by for a sweet sherry or
with some 'newses' that couldn't wait the telling. It was just herself
and Patrick and Lavelle, the meal itself penitentially frugal for a
Christmas feast - no trimmings except memories of Mary and
Louisa, full of the joy of the season, flapping about under her skirts
like chickens round a mother hen. She felt older this Christmas,
older than her thirty-six years. A lot older.

She was reminded again of Jacob Peabody, shortly into the New
Year, in a manner unexpected, yet one which filled her with some
indefinable apprehension.
'I knew it! I knew it! Didn't I tell you, Ellen, that Peabody
was at the back of it? Read this.' Lavelle slapped the letter into
her hand.
It was from Father McGauran, in Quebec. Lavelle, despite her
protestations, had written to the priest enquiring as to why, after
all these years, the Frontignacs had moved to ruin them.
Now, in his reply, the priest was most upset at the turn of events
and had gone directly to Montreal to see Frontignac Pere. 'Monsieur
Frontignac admitted under my severe questioning,' Father
McGauran wrote, 'that they had only acted as they did, having
first received intelligence from Boston of a nature warranting their
actions.' Frontignac Pere had not revealed to the priest the 'nature'
of the 'intelligence' from Boston, or if he had then the priest had
considered it to be sub-confessionem, and had in turn not revealed
it to Lavelle.
She read on, her heart pounding. 'They, although at this stage
unable to reverse their decision regarding commencement of business
in Boston, would nevertheless be prepared to enter into some
form of partnership with Mrs Lavelle and her husband, despite
"voiced differences"'.'
She couldn't believe it! It was an eleventh-hour miracle, brought
about by the priest who had first introduced them to the Frontignacs.
She had misjudged completely how Canada's Catholic Seigneurie would react. She looked at Lavelle, who, filled with delight, grabbed
her, swinging her off the floor.
'Now R.G. Dun will be fawning all over us to advance credit,'
she said, loudly banging her fists on his back.
Lavelle had been right all along, right to involve the little priest.
She was wrong on that, and wrong about the Frontignacs too.
They had been gracious well beyond what she could have expected after what, with gross understatement, they had called her 'voiced
differences'. She hoped Frontignac Pere hadn't informed the priest
how shameless she really had been, like a screeching Jezebel.
'It's the girls, Lavelle, it must be Mary and Louisa - their
prayers,' she gasped, still fully unable to accept this turn of fortune.
'How else could this have come about now?' She thanked them
silently in her heart, thinking that at last things would now be
reversed, the effects of her sin lifted from their lives.
'Well, somebody is watching over us,' he said, more grimly
adding, 'but it's no thanks to Mr Jacob Peabody.'
'Lavelle, you've no proof it was Jacob who caused the trouble.
Just let it be,' she said, though the certainty that Jacob was
somewhere at the back of things was like a jagged edge, razoring
up and down her spine.
'It had to be him, Ellen!' Lavelle shook her by the arms. 'Intelligence from Boston! What intelligence? Supplied by whom?
Peabody is stamped all over it, Ellen, and I am going to have it
out with him at last.'
Her mind raced furiously. The last thing she wanted now was
Lavelle confronting Peabody. Something was wrong, but what,
she didn't yet know. Monsieur Frontignac could merely have
been covering up for his own profiteering, pretending something
had happened in Boston without specifying anything in particular.
Peabody's name was not mentioned anywhere in the letter.
She wouldn't have been surprised if somebody like that slieveen of an agent from R.G. Dun had taken it into his head to contact
Frontignac directly, in the hope of attracting the business to
Boston. This in turn would position R.G. Dun to 'validate for
credit' all potential customers of Frontignac.
'You can't go to Peabody!' she again remonstrated with Lavelle,
accusing him of something of which you have no proof. Besides,
we're going to have to deal with him again,' she continued, 'and
he's too important a customer. We have much other work to do to
establish the nature of this "partnership"; if necessary, to reclaim
the warehouse, if it is not already let. Peabody is only a small part
of it all.'
But he would not be shaken this time. 'I listened to you last
time, Ellen . . .' He didn't complete the sentence and put her at
fault. Instead he said, 'What if Peabody repeats his actions? We
must know if it is him, or if it is not him.'
The jagged edge at her spine scraped more furiously, filling her
with deep dread. She mustn't let him talk to Peabody. Some awful,
terrible result would come of it.
'Jacob will deny it in any case,' she said, fighting to find a
solution. 'The answer is not with Peabody, it is with Frontignac
- only he knows what this "intelligence" is - if it exists at
all!'
'Then I will go to Montreal, I will have it out of them,' he
asserted.
'No, Lavelle!' she countered. 'I must go. I have done damage
there and I must repair the situation with Monsieur Frontignac . . .
and apologize.'
'They're the ones who should apologize,' he argued. 'They
moved behind our backs on the pretext of some flimsy information.
If it wasn't for Father McGauran, I'd shortly be bending
my back to some Mid-West railroad track and you'd be
praying for the sound of the whistle to vacate your loom in
Lowell!'
She was at her wit's end. She just had to over-ride him. Lavelle
in Montreal filled her with as much dread as the thought of his
having it out with Peabody.
'Lavelle!' she said, raising her voice in one last desperate attempt.
'If you are to replace me in dealings with either Peabody or
Frontignac, then you will undermine my standing with them.
They will never revert to dealing with me, a woman, again. I
will be perceived to have been the cause of the difficulties.'
She had never spoken to him like this before, never unfairly
brought her sex into it, never brazened the lie to his face. She saw
the start in his countenance. He took a moment, then a breath,
before replying.
'Have you ever considered that you might have been, Ellen?'
he asked. She knew the way he meant it, yet was surprised, even
so, that he had said it at all. But she knew also that he wouldn't
now interfere, would leave it to her. He came to her and held her, saying softly, 'It's a day for celebration - what are we at each other
for, Ellen?'
And she could never tell him.
She had not been expecting to ever travel again to Montreal.
This time was eating into their meagre reserves. This time, even
though she should have travelled with a lightness of heart at their
unexpected reprieve, she did not. In March when she tramped
through the snow to Manoir Frontignac, she had no difficulty
with gaining admission. Nor were there any other engagements
requiring cancellation before she could be seen.
Frontignac Pere received her again and was all of a fuss, making
fulsome references to 'our friends in Mother Church'. It was, as she
had suspected, old liaisons, the workings of an old, longstanding,
but still functioning tradition, one stretching back to an old country
- France. The fracture between herself and the Frontignacs was
now healed and sealed with the blessing of 'Mother Church'.
But the fracture itself?
Frontignac was vague. She let him talk without interruption,
waiting for the 'water-under-the-ground-words' to surface. And
surface they did. Not as a stream but as tiny tricklings, here
and there, to the main flow of his careful non-denouement. Words like 'merchants' . . . 'trusting heart' . . . 'better an open
enemy'.
'You have heard of Les Maximes du Due de la Rochefoucauld? Frontignac Pere asked her, stroking his beard.
She had not, she said.
'Le Due was a man who understood men . . . and women
too of course, Madame Lavelle!' Monsieur Frontignac explained,
as if there had never been a bad word between them. '"The
height of cleverness, is to conceal one's cleverness,"' he quoted.
'Rochefoucauld had a reflection on all things, Madame Lavelle. ft
would be well to read him if, in the United States of America, you can ever find a good English translation!' he said, in a manner
making her doubt that she ever would.
She said she would try.
'And what does she read, la belle madame?' Frontignac Pere
continued, calling for 'English tea' for her.
'The American novelists and the English poets,' she answered,
'but sadly nothing in French.'
'Oh, but you should make the endeavour. I could teach you.'
He smiled benignly, like some longtime friend. 'Rochefoucauld has
as much to say on love, for example, as either Byron or Donne.
Consider the aptness of this: "Jealousy is always born with love,
but does not always die with it."' He looked at her. 'Would you
agree, Madame Lavelle, an aphorism well worth remembering?'
He never once mentioned Peabody's name directly, spoke only of
'growing opportunities in Boston for us all'.
But all the while she felt that in everything he said, despite its
charm and carelessness, it was as if he were drawing her a map.
But it was a map of a country foreign to her, unsignposted, needing
something more so that she could understand its terrain.
'The letter, Monsieur Frontignac - can I see it?' She spoke
out boldly, seeing the surprise register for a moment on his
face.
'Ah . . . dear madame, We regrette.' he said apologetically. 'There
is nothing written in it that is not already written in your heart. I
would be breaking a confidence to a friend - or an enemy!'
She said nothing, waiting. So there was a letter, 'intelligence from
Boston', but she still didn't know from whom, or what 'intelligence'
it contained.
'Don't you think, Monsieur Frontignac, that I have the right to
know? I'm sure le Due has something to say about such matters
as justice?'
He laughed at how she attempted to turn the tables on him. 'I
am tempted to, for you, madame. But again I remember le Due
- "The intellect is always fooled by the heart" - and I am as a fish out of water, when not in love.' He laughed again. 'But for Once, I must try and prove le Due incorrect and not let my heart be swayed, even by you, Madame Lavelle.'
Then he kissed her hand most punctiliously as he bade her 'adieu' at the door, again calling her 'Laa belle Madame Lavelle'
She left, finding it hard to feel any antipathy towards Frontignac
Pere. He had a vigour and charm scarcely impaired by age and
when she had tried to apologize for her insulting outburst on the
previous occasion, he had brushed it away with a wave of his hand
She had learned enough from him. So, it was Peabody who had
written to him. But what had Jacob put in the letter still held by
Frontignac? And more to the point - why?
'The height of cleverness is to conceal one's cleverness.' That
maxim certainly fitted Peabody. 'Better an open enemy than a close -supposed friend?' Peabody again. 'Jealousy is always born with
love, but does not always die with it.' Who? Love of her? Jealousy
of whom? Try as she might, she couldn't fit Peabody with this
particular dictum of le Due. Maybe it was something Frontignac
had just thrown out to divert her attention. It wouldn't be beyond
him, she knew.

Travelling homewards on the train, she considered it all again.
Peabody didn't, couldn't, love her. She had never given him any
encouragement apart from the odd flirtatious banter, maybe let
him paw her hand too long at times. But she was sure Jacob
behaved in like manner with other females of his acquaintance,
that all his amorousness was not totally reserved for her. And the
thing about jealousy not always dying with love - where did that
come into it? It was all a pishogue, a nonsense, the bearded old
charmer playing games with her. It seemed to be a way with old
men. What dictum did le Due have about old men and younger
women, she wondered?
Whatever, she was somewhat relieved. Montreal had gone well if Frontignac Pere hadn't lulled her into a false sense of security.
They were prepared to enter into an arrangement with herself
and Lavelle to manage the business in Boston, expand it across
Massachusetts. It was as she and Lavelle had originally envisaged
it. She didn't reveal to him how desperate they were, but she
supposed he knew; his 'intelligence from Boston' would have
informed him. But he wasn't going to hear it from out of her mouth. Is binn beal in a thost - it's a sweet mouth that is silent. And a safe mouth too! The Irish, as well as the French, had their own 'maxims'.
She had noticed that of late she had started to fall back into some
of the old Gaelic expressions. Remembered, too, how Mary had
begun again addressing her as a Mhamai, before she and Louisa
had entered the convent. She hadn't minded it then, not like on
the boat leaving Ireland. How Mary had reacted - as if cut off
from all she had previously known - by being forbidden just those
two words: a Mhamai But it had been a necessity, a symbol of
leaving the old life behind, of cutting ties. Strange how they both
had fallen back into it.
She wondered what life would now be if they had stayed in
Ireland. Ground-down peasants, she supposed, trying to get out,
scrabbling together the money for America. Maybe just Mary
would have escaped and become a 'Bridget'. Droned away, day
in, day out, under the backbreaking workload, taking all the
abuse, the insults, the 'thick-as-ditch-water' remarks. Mary, she
knew, would have suffered all that to get the money to send back
- to start the 'Daisy Chain', bring the rest of them out.
Peasant life, pshaw. She had heard them talking in Boston
about the 'old Ireland', dewy-eyed and all dreamy, as if it were
some Tir-na-nOg, filled with green fields and red-haired maidens
dancing at the crossroads. It sickened her craw, all that stuff, and
then the 'gi' us wan o' th' ould songs' kind of talk. That's why she never sang them any more - keening and ochoning the old times
and them with plenty in Boston hanging their lace curtains and
buying pianos, as she had done, to show how they had 'upped'
themselves.
She remembered what it was really like, grubbing around in the
filth and the muck for the odd lumper that might have been missed;
the cabin so small they could all hardly stand up in it together.
Then, at night, huddled together for warmth on straw, like animals.
That was the real Ireland, the one most of them had left behind.
Stephen and his lot were just as bad. Except, in their Ireland,
the fair maidens came to them in visions, instead of dancing at
the crossroads. And all the fair maidens were virginal 'Mother
Irelands' - if you could have such a thing, she thought. She
wondered if Stephen was still waiting for his 'vision virgin' who
would lead the Irish out from under their bondage to the rapacious
John Bull. God help the lot of them, she thought, but those Trinity
bucks at least should know better - they were educated, the
Connacht hill-farmers weren't.
Instead of them all getting on with life in America, their lives
had become one big mixum gatherum of past and present, impeding
progress, the swamp of history clogging up all of their futures. AH
of them infected with a kind of miasma of memory.
And the longer they were in America the worse the miasma
would get. Be handed down from generation to generation like
a noxious, enshrouding vapour, polluting their children's minds,
holding everything at a standstill within its cloud. An insult to those
who never made it, who didn't get out. Keeping them as they once
were - for ever preserved in some sacred wasteland of memory.
She looked out as the train clacketyclacked through the vast white
terrain of Quebec, an Ireland, she thought, for ever suspended in
time like a great frozen heart.
She rarely let her mind wander like this any more. She put
it down to the Frenchman's meanderings and Les Maximes du
Due. Maybe trains had something to do with it - your feet being
off the ground. Rhythms, sounds, clackety clack, clackety clack,
clackety clackety, clackety clack.
She fell into drowsiness with the soporific rhythm of the train,
dreaming of angels and dewdrops falling from fingertips in a
minor key and the frozen hearts of the red-haired maidens
dancing. . . clackety clack, clackety clack, clackety clackety clacketyclack.
A Mhamai, a Mhamai, clackety clack, Jesujoyofclacketyclack,
Jesu Joy, Jesujoy, Jesu-Jesuclacketyclack . . .
She marched right in on Peabody.
She had turned it over and back in her mind a hundred times
on the homeward journey to Boston.

'Jacob!' He was surprised to see her. Surprised that she was not
slinking in the door to him like the shiksa he thought she was.
'Intelligence from Montreal to Boston.' She went straight
into it.
His face turned ashen, his hair barely a shade whiter. But the
hardness was in his eyes, something she had only noticed the last
few times she had dealt with him.
'So, Mrs Lavelle has been travelling again,' was all he answered.
He stayed behind the counter, no rushing round the end of it to
greet her, falling all over her. Barriers had grown between them.
He would give her nothing.
'Well, Jacob, it was you, wasn't it?' she accused, making straight
for him around the counter.
He made no reply, turned to face her, stood his ground.
'Set out to ruin me - why? For money, for greasy dollars, was
that it, Jacob?' she demanded.
His reply, icy, unflinching, made her recoil. 'No, Ellen, I had no
need to ruin you - you ruined yourself!'
She knew then all that would follow. First, here in his porkloined
little store, before it would spread to her world outside
of it.
'Walking in here like the Queen of Sheba! Thought you had all of us fooled, thinking you were someone - a jumped-up, red-haired
Biddy with your fine wines, instead of slopping out lane-ways on
Nigger Hill with the rest of your kind.' The onslaught staggered

her, but Peabody scarcely drew his breath. 'Aahh . . . but Jacob
Peabody helped you, held out a friendly hand when none else
did,' he said in a voice steeped with bitterness. 'Oh, yes! Don't
think I didn't know the amounts of shoe-leather you left after
you on the streets of this town, the places you were run out of,
before old Jacob gave you a break. You and that fool of yours,
Lavelle.' He poked his finger into her chest, prodding home each
word, forcing her to retreat. 'Then, it was all sweetness and smiles
and shiksa-smarminess. But all that soon changed when you found
your footing, got above your station.'
She could hardly believe what she was hearing - the venom
thickening his slightly accented way of speaking, the accumulated
litany of accusations against her, long-harboured.
'Next, you wanted "ediccatin" as you called it then, and
"litterture, Jacob", and again it was more sashaying and flashing
green eyes and "come to Christmas dinner, Jacob",' he mimicked,
'to cover for your fancy man - your Irish patriot.'
She knew it. Somehow, she had given it away to Peabody. It
wouldn't have taken much. She started to protest, but it was useless
against all that he had stored up.
'Am I blind, Ellen? I saw it the minute I set eyes on him and
you, doe-eyeing him like you used to do in here, when you wanted
poetry and philosophy, wasting my day. A Trinity Protestant and
you a good Catholic girl from the Virgin Isle - Hmmm! the man
you had not good enough for you - no "poetry" in him. Setting us both up to be fools with your journeys to Montreal.'
How could he have known? Had they been seen - Frontignac?
She started again to say something.
'Don't!' he silenced her. 'I saw it all - first when you availed
yourself of my listening ear to sound out your own feelings. Then,
when you were seeing your paramour, you were like one of those
books you took to reading - all on the page.'
She remembered Jacob watching her at that time, feeding her
lines from poems, gauging her reaction. Was it all so obvious?
And if to Jacob, then to others too? Lavelle?
He continued to upbraid her as if it were him she had deceived
and not her husband. 'How you kept an honest face on you, when brazen as a hussy, you allowed a discussion at your table on the
virtues of your race and gender, I do not know. Seated there in
the company of your lover with your cuckolded husband and your
despised Peabody. I resolved then to do what I must, before we all
were tarnished.'
'He wasn't . . . Then . . .' She started to defend herself then
stopped. She was astounded. Everything at Frontignac's now
seemed clear. So, it wasn't just business, more profit for Jacob,
as she had thought. It was some crazy notion he had that he and
she inhabited some make-believe world, cocooned here within
his precious grains and spices. A world filled with poems and
imaginings, suspended from the noisy commerce of the market
outside. He had mistaken her affection, her genuine interest,
her allowing him to be both her protagonist and mentor, for
something more. He, Peabody, the little intellectual peacock,
fanning his feathers of knowledge to impress her. Spurned
once in some past life, twice when she had married Lavelle,
thrice-spurned when she had flown away to Montreal to be
with Stephen. Damn him, she thought. She rounded on him
fiercely.
'The letter, Jacob - what did you put in the letter - what did
you say?' she demanded.
'I said nothing but the truth,' he answered, his head tilted back,
righteous as a whitecock's feather. 'That you had disgraced your
sex, fallen into low virtue with a compatriot of your husband, thus
tainting my own business and the House of Frontignac with the
sordid affair,' he said defiantly.
'How could you, Jacob? How could you do such a thing?'
'Because it was true, Ellen. I hear no word of denial from
you . . . ?' he said, challenging her.
'I don't deny it, Jacob. God knows I don't deny it,' she admitted
vehemently, adding, 'and regret it every living minute. But to shout
it from the rooftops, like you did . . . What else did you say?' She
fired the question at him.
He smiled, a strange waxen smile. 'Having presented Frontignac
with the problem, I then offered him a solution which would occasion
him no loss. I would discontinue with you, but would give him
my business directly on terms of mutual benefit. Naturally he agreed.'
So that was it.
'Jacob,' she said, lowering her voice, 'you accuse me of having
despised you. You are wrong, I never despised you, never, Jacob
- but I despise you now!'
It was the end. The end for her, for the business. The Frontignacs
would never again deal with her - how could they? It had all been
a charade to mollify Father McGauran and his more powerful
superiors. Frontignac Pere had released enough information to her
to deflect any blame from his business - to point her back towards
Peabody, knowing that by doing so, the discovery of the contents
of Peabody's letter would silence her. There would be no more
ruffling letters to the priests of the Catholic Church in Canada.
Nothing to disturb the old Seigneurie. She had been forestalled at
every turn, blackmailed by her sin.
Peabody seemed shaken by her words. She looked down at him.
He was a pathetic figure. 'You are a Jezebel, Ellen, unfit for the
role in which life has cast you. Once . . . every time . . . when you
walked in, it was like the sun had lifted the gold from Faneuil Hall
and placed it ... here.'
She remembered days like that when she would sit and talk to
him and he would quote Byron and Whittier and Donne. But that
was it - pleasant times only - no more to her, not like when she
was with Stephen. Was that what Jacob had desired?
Now, he looked around. Bewildered. Holding out his hands over
the open grain bags, the cured sides of ham in dampened cloths, the
tea chests from the Assam Valley, the wine-racks built by Lavelle.
All the things that made up his merchant's world. As if they had
once been something else, something golden, now transformed
back again to something less: themselves. He looked at her, the
cold draining out of his eyes.
'Why did you do it, Ellen? When everything was in its place
- why?'
Everything had been in its place, she thought, looking at him,
noticing how the apron, always before on its peg, now strangely
sat around him, binding him like a white amice. He had been her priest; she had confided in him, given him more trust with her
feelings than her own husband, let him take her hand, counsel
her about the world, about herself. Was that love to him, she
wondered? Before her eyes Jacob seemed to crumple, shaking in
disbelief at all he had said, crushed now by his cruelty to a loved
one. His waxen hands scrabbled in no-rhythm against the stained
wiping-place of his apron, one hand trailing the other. He had said
it all, she knew. Was deflated, the bile building inside him for years,
fuelled by an old man's imaginings, spewed out of him now. His
own miasma of memory, some old love in a far-off Hebrew village
of the mind, that somehow she had replaced. Some Byronic love
object he had imagined her into.
His own Yiddisher vision-virgin.
'I don't know, Jacob,' she answered, her anger at him subsiding,
'why we act as we do. Once, do you remember, you told me that
we are neither the masters nor the mistresses of our own affections,
only the ministers.' How true, she thought, not only in relation to
herself, but also in relation to the decaying Peabody. 'The Element
of Fire, I think you called it another time, Jacob. Apart from that I
just don't know, but I'm sorry, truly sorry,' she said, as gently as
she could.
'"The sun is lost and th' earth,"' he said faintly, in reply.
She left him there repeating the line, hands trailing against his
apron, trying to make some sense of it all.
She didn't go home.
She couldn't, else she would blurt everything out to Lavelle the
one blameless person in all of this. Instead she walked to the Common. Touched the bark of the Great Elm, then went on up to
Louisburgh Square. Why she didn't know. Back again, down State
Street across to the Long Wharf, down to its very end, ignoring
the cat-calls of its longshoremen, down to look at the sea.
It was a calm bright afternoon, the blue of the water edging out
to where it met the sky, beyond the islands. She thought she still
remembered their names: Deer Island over on the left, Noodles
Island to the right of it, Apple Island, Pudding Point . . . and the other one, what was it? Spectacles Island. It didn't seem to fit
with the rest of the names, the 'food' islands. She wondered if
Spectacles Island had been named for the needlewomen of Boston.
She imagined not. And still the ships came to the many wharves,
ploughed low in the water, heavy-laden.

What could she now say to Lavelle? It was broken with Peabody.
There would be no more business with him than there would
be with the Frontignacs. Lavelle himself would go to Jacob or
Frontignac, to discover what had gone wrong, and this time
there would be no resisting him. Frontignac would again play
the innocent, send him back to Peabody. Jacob, once recovered,
would be again filled with the venom with which he had inveighed
against her, and reveal everything to Lavelle.
How would she face him then? Beg forgiveness, or lie to him
that she was sorry, when she knew in her heart that her weakness
still remained? Lavelle would desert her, and who would fault him?
She and the children would be shamed; what she had done was unheard of. Mary and Louisa, their reputations tarnished, would
be expelled from the convent, denied their calling because of her.
Patrick would be held up to ridicule - his mother a harlot - the
pope's whore. The Pope's own Church would shun her, her sin
the greater for it being with a black Protestant. Wasp-tongued Mrs
Brophy would wring enough discussion out of her downfall to fill a
month of Mondays for the Daughters of the Commonwealth. She
would be reviled everywhere. Lavelle, or Patrick even would then
seek out Stephen.
She closed her mind to it. There was only one course of action
she could take; to spare them all sharing her shame, from being
dragged down with her.

She knocked at the door of the convent. Sister Mary Lazarus
answered. 'Mrs Lavelle - are you all right?' she enquired solicitously,
seeing her distressed state. 'Won't you come in, sit down?
I'll get you some water,' the Sister offered.
'My children - I want to see my children.'
'Mrs Lavelle, they are at prayer, at Vespers!' Sister Mary Lazarus
said. 'It is impossible for you to see them at all until they are
professed. You must remember they are no longer your children.
They are God's children now, and He will look after them.'
Ellen said nothing, turned to go.
'If it is important, some calamity?' Sister Mary Lazarus enquired,
'I am sure Mother Superior will allow a message to be passed
tomorrow - if it is of importance,' she repeated.
'No, Sister, nothing of importance,' she said, turning again,
leaving the House of Mary Magdalen.
She reached for the wheel, turned it in reverse until the needle rose
out of the feeder-plate, only then took her foot off the treadle.
'Damn it!' she said.
These new-fangled Singer sewing machines couldn't keep the
needle threaded, no matter what you did with them. She wished
she had her older Howe machine. Maybe it was herself, she
was tired, so tired. She lifted the guide foot and winkled out
the bobbin with her finger. The thread had gone all tangled.
Maybe her tension wasn't right; she thought Clegg had set it
too loose anyway. That way it became slack and when she put
her foot down on the treadle for another burst of sewing, the
slack snapped up too quickly. But that was the way the bosses
wanted it - eight stitches an inch; more would cost time. She
thought the seam needed ten stitches, maybe twelve per inch, but
in the Massachusetts Cordwaining Company, with its working
environment of 'stretchouts and speedups' - workers stretched
to the pin of their collar to operate extra machines and then the
speed being constantly cranked up - it was quantity that made the
bosses smile, not quality.
'You, "lace widow", you lost your thread again?' she heard
Clegg, the Closing Room foreman's voice, shout above the hum
of the machines. 'Anything to swing the lead - you Irish niggers!
he said, in an accent thick as Lancashire fog, and loudly so those
around her would hear.
She ignored him.
'Here, get off the machine. No wonder your husband up and
died on you for lack of proper threading,' and 'Peg-Leg', as the
women workers called him, laughed suggestively.
Roughly, he bundled her off the wooden stool, tossing the narrow cushion she had made for herself on to the ground. She
picked it up, cradling it against her chest, and waited while he
fiddled with the machine, all the while muttering epithets under
his breath.
'There, it's set for you, and if I get back one more shoe
from Finishing ruined by needle holes, you're fired, Irish! Do you
understand? You're fired!'
She nodded and sat down again, carefully easing the two pieces
of leather under the needle. She bent her head in close to see where
she had already punctured the leather, back-tacked her stitch,
securing it, then filled the empty needle holes with thread.
Libby Corrigan called over to her. 'Peg-Leg's got it in for you,
Ellen, or at least he'd like to,' the woman laughed. 'Why don't you
let him, the once even? It would make life easier for all of us!' she
suggested.
Libby was from Wicklow, or 'Wickla' as she pronounced it. A
'widow', like Ellen, and deserted by 'himself - 'a long dose of
Wickla buttermilk that scalded himself off to California at the
first smell of gold!' Not that Libby was sorry to see himself go,
although he left her with 'a parcel of children - the most of them
reared by now'.
'It wasn't going to work out from the start,' the woman had
confided in her, when first Ellen had come here, two years ago,
in March, after Paddy's Day, as Libby Corrigan referred to the
feast-day of the National Saint of Ireland. 'Didn't I hear his father
tell my father,' Libby had rejoiced in telling her, 'when they were
fixing the dowry: "She might make a good wife all right, but she'll
never make a pretty one!"'
'And what did your father say, Libby?' Ellen had asked.
'He was every bit as bad,' the pixie-faced woman crackled back.
Says my own father back to him, "Faith, then I'll make her pretty
- with cows," and he did. Three fine heifers it cost to make me
Pretty - and look at me still!' She had laughed, adding, 'All the
cows in the world wouldn't make a whit of difference on me!'
Ellen liked Libby Corrigan. Since she had started here in this
ramshackle five-storey building, Libby had kept an eye out for her.
what must she have looked like when she came here at first, Ellen
wondered? Her hands soft and white, genteeled by a different life to that of the cordwainers. Their lives were filled with the whiff of
leather, their hands scarred with thread burns, misplaced fingers
punished by puncturing needles or nicked by clicking knives, sharp
as razors. Hands used to shaping the tough hides of leather-bearing
animals to put shoes on Massachusetts.
Whatever about being made 'pretty with cows', Libby Corrigan
was one of those gritty women who kept going at life, even when it
wasn't that much of a life. And she kept those around her going too
with her sharp Wickla tongue - 'a tongue that could cut butter', as
she herself said. It was that tongue, Ellen had learned, which had
christened Clegg the foreman with the appellation Peg-Leg, from
the habit he had of leaning over behind the young farm girls from
New England when fixing their machines. 'Sticking it in between
their shoulder-blades, and them not knowing whether it was an
awl or a small-handled screwdriver or what,' according to Libby.
But Libby knew, warning Clegg: 'Keep that thing away from me
or I'll give you eight stitches per inch - and it wouldn't take the
too many more than the eight either!'
But Libby was an industrious worker, never soiled her bib that
way, and the foreman used her to train in the 'green hands' of
Irish girls fresh from the wharves 'who otherwise wouldn't know a
needle from a haystack', according to Clegg. In that way, Libby had
become a kind of spokeswoman for the Closing Room girls, but
kept them in order too, her sharp tongue being a kind of two-edged
sword, as often useful to Clegg as it was used against him.
Apart from Clegg, Libby didn't seem to have much time for
men in general, telling Ellen that having been 'dowried for cows,
I had a great mind to go to America ever after that. It wasn't "the
hunger" that drove us out or anything, but me that kept nagging
at himself - I knew once I got here I'd easily shift him and be me
own woman,' she had said, not putting a tooth in it, cool as a
breeze.
'And what about you?' she had then asked, cocking an eye at
Ellen. '"Lace widow", arriving here all in your fine green dress.
What's your story?'
Ellen had held out against telling her then. 'He passed on young.'

before we had any children,' was all she would commit to, some
truth in both parts of her answer.
'I don't believe a word of your mouth,' Libby had said. 'But if
you don't want to tell, then I'll not ask.' And neither had she.
Now, when Clegg was out of earshot Libby said over to her,
'Would you marry again, Ellen, or did you make a bad bargain
too?' adding between the bursts of sewing, 'No girl back home
now will settle for marriage until all hope of America has faded.'
'I know,' Ellen answered, keeping her head down.
When she had eased the leather around and was sure her corner
stitching was even, she did answer the second part of Libby's
question. 'No, Libby, it was he who made the bad bargain,' she
said, laughing it off.
Libby laughed with her, vowing, 'Well I wouldn't go near the
altar again 'less he had a hundred acres of New England farmland
- and a bad heart to go with it!' she added, wickedly.
Ellen heard the 'zuzzz' of Libby's machine; the woman could run
up a seam like a Wicklow hare could run up a mountain, while she
herself would still be trying to gauge the three-eighths of an inch
seam allowance. Libby turned, depositing another dozen pairs of
stitched shoe uppers in the bin between herself and Ellen.
'I bet he did get a bad bargain,' she said, referring to her earlier
question. 'You have a temper like a Lucifer match, when it's ris.
You'd be great in the Sisterhood,' she added.
Libby always wanted her to join in some cause or other, mainly
the 'Sisterhood of Toil' - the women's trade union movement, for
which Libby was a leading proponent.
'You're right about the first, Libby, wrong about the second,'
Ellen answered, not entertaining the idea at all. 'It's people like
you they need. Strong and clear-headed, and not afraid to speak
out - I'd only be good for starting trouble, not finishing it.'
'The Lucifer match women are needed too, Ellen. Someone has to start the fire in people.'
'I don't want any more fires, Libby. I've started enough already,' she said, leaving the widow from Wickla all the more wondering
at her.
Ellen hated it here, but it was all she could get, where she could
disappear into a crowd far removed from Boston's West End and Quincy Market, and anywhere else she could be recognized. Once she had made the decision to 'disappear herself, two years ago
she knew she would have to stay 'disappeared'. She had taken little - the clothes she wore, the few dollars in her purse alongside
her rosary beads, the crucifix from over her and Lavelle's bed and
Stephen's book.
Lavelle would have got on with his own life by now. Initially,
she supposed, he would have gone looking for her, when she
hadn't returned from Montreal, having found the note she had left for him and Patrick; a note explaining how she loved them
both, but had to leave their lives, praying for forgiveness for the ruin she had brought and putting a bind on them not to seek to
find her.
Lavelle would have then gone to Peabody and Jacob would have
told him the whole story. He would have been shocked beyond
belief, understood then why she had disappeared. For a while, he
would have been angry, his pride wounded. Finally, she hoped,
he would have put her behind him.
Patrick: she wondered about him. He was a man now, almost
twenty-one years, out in the world making his own way, not needing a mother like her. Patrick had been slow to forgive her, if
ever he did, for 'deserting' them when they were children; then, for
having 'a fancy man in America' - Lavelle. Patrick would consider
that she had run true to her character. He would never forgive
her, she knew. Men deserted their families for fame or fortune,
or neither, it was part of the Irish disease in America. That was
the way. But it was not the way for women. Except, how could
she have faced them, gone back, brought all that shame on them?
Patrick, too, would have found out in time that she had tried to
contact Mary and Louisa, but not him or Lavelle - a further
betrayal.
When she had first left, she had grieved that she hadn't seen
the girls, then thanked God that they hadn't been available to her
Even if she had said little to them, just that she was going away,
they would have guessed. Louisa would have known - looked a her with those large brown all-seeing eyes of hers. That would have been worse, not having to defend herself, not even to be
able to ask forgiveness. And Mary, what would she have said to the mother who, she regarded, 'could never let us down - always
put us first'?
But she had let them down. She had put herself first.
Yes, the girls would have known, if she had seen them.
Perhaps they had already suspected something about her; women
sensed things from each other. The thought often struck her,
whether that had been the real reason they had entered the
religious life - that they already knew, and wished to spare her
that acknowledgement between them. At least in the convent they
were cared for, safe. It would be another few years before they were
professed, allowed out in the world. Maybe they didn't yet know
about her, wouldn't have been expecting to see her. She prayed
that this was the case.
And Stephen? She had many times wondered what had happened
to him. Had Lavelle sought him out? Maybe he had returned to
Ireland, or gone elsewhere within America, on whatever particular
cause was in current vogue, feeding off the romanticism of the
'scattered' Irish. At one point she had thought she should try and
find him. She was exposed, had ruined her life and that of her
family because of him, and thought that at least she could then
be with him. But in a moment of clarity it had come to her. If she
went to him, then her self-imposed banishment would be set at
nought. She would be embracing that for which she had exiled
herself and hers would be no true act of repentance. Still, it did
not stop her from thinking of him.
Here at the Massachusetts Cordwaining Company she had
spun them the story about being widowed. The other women
thought she was deserted, a common enough occurrence masked by assumed widowhood, which drew a more sympathetic response
than desertion. She had earned the name 'lace widow' because of
the initial finery of her clothes, compared with the homespun smocks worn by most, and her air of general refinement. It Was, too, a sly reference to the circumstances into which she
had grown, but was now fallen from, 'the lace curtain Irish',
those who had 'upped' themselves. To others she was the Widow
Malley, a needlewoman, like themselves. She had reverted to her
former name for fear of being traced.
The cordwainers of Massachusetts had long campaigned for a
ten-hour working day and better pay. No legislative improvement
had been gained but the thirteen-hour day had, for a period, been
reduced to eleven. However, the thousands of young, mainly single,
Irish women and men who flooded into the Bay State needing work
kept wages down. And by the sheer weight of their numbers in
competing for the same jobs, they had also allowed the bosses to
push up the hours again to twelve. It earned for the immigrant
workers the name of 'Irish niggers' from the farm girls of New
England, who had left the land in favour of the loom and the last.
So from sun-up to sun-down, six days a week, Ellen worked nose
to needle in the unremitting drudgery of life as a shop machinist.
Eye-straining, arm-aching, mind-numbing work of set and stitch,
turn and stitch, crank and stitch. Stitch, stitch, stitch, the tiny
fibres of hide, tanned for the feet of America, flying to escape
the punch of her needle, filling the air, clogging her nostrils and
mouth with an itching dryness. She would suffocate or go blind
if she remained here.
She threw aside a pair of un-skived uppers. It would break her
needle to attempt to sew the un-thinned leather. The last time she
had been day-dreaming this had happened. Her rhythm had been
broken and the forefinger of her left hand had slipped under the
descending shaft. She well remembered the pain of the stunted
needle-head piercing her skin, crushing tissue and bone beneath.
She was so in shock she had been unable to crank back the machine
with her free hand to reverse the steel out of her finger. By the time
Libby had come to her rescue, she thought she would pass out with
the agony of being nailed to the needle-plate. A rough, untrained,
matronly woman, 'Nurse', had dressed the throbbing forefinger.
Company rules allowed for the first three of such injuries to be
dressed free of charge. After that, deductions for medical attention five
cents for each injury - would be made from the already meagre
wage packet she received. She couldn't afford to have that happen.
As she continued to think of Stephen she set up a fresh pair of
uppers, these with the edges skived down to the right thickness.
She fed the machine, watching the needle rise and fall, its eye
disappearing each time the leather received it, lock-stitching the
parts together in one unbroken seam. Then the next . . . and the
next . . . and the next, her life lock-stitched before her into an
unending eight stitches per inch.
At night, when she crawled home, weary-boned, to the tenements
of Half-Moon Place, sandwiched between Broad Street
and Fort Hill, she had no thought for lost love, and no malaise
afflicted her except tiredness. Her only thoughts before she fell
asleep were prayers for the needs of her children, prayers for her
loves, Michael and Lavelle and Stephen, and a prayer to be at her
machine next morning before the whistle blew.
On Sundays, her one rest day in the week, after Mass at
St Vincent's on Purchase Street, to the south of Fort Hill, she
sometimes took out Stephen's book of poems. Even then she
could not be seen with it by any of the other needlewomen, lest
she suffer on Monday - 'the lace widow and her notions'.

The Massachusetts Cordwaining Company had hundreds in its
employment. Men, women and children, some as young as nine
or ten years old. Pattern-graders, clickers with their small curved
blade clicking knives, eyeletters, bottomers, lasters and stitchers
like herself who seam-stitched, top-stitched, bottom-stitched and
every-which-way-stitched.
She had never thought of boot-making as such a manifold job
when, before this, she had laced on her own. How times had
moved on from the solitary cobbler tacking at his last, to this.
The bosses were always trying to find new methods to 'break
down' the assembly operations. Now, instead of the machinists
having to slowly learn every stitching operation and make-through
a complete shoe, they had only to learn a few. Soon, she thought,
the assembly of boots and shoes would be so broken-down that
as Clegg put it 'even the non-Irish niggers from down South' could
be put on machines. It was her first taste of industrialization and
she didn't like it. De-skilling meant de-humanizing. You became
an extension of your machine, rather than the other way round. But to young Irish girls, it was simply a job in America, money
to buy food other than potatoes. They had not, as yet, aspired to
any higher rung of the ladder of their needs above the bottom one
of survival.
Nor were any such higher notions close to Ellen's mind. A year
ago, the Great Panic of 57 had struck and her wages had been
slashed to fifty cents a day. She had hardly been able to survive
the Depression, skipping meals, taking up her needle when she
went home at night - and, God forgive her, on Sundays - doing
homework. The shop-floor girls hated the homeworkers, who
undercut their wages even further. Generally the Irish women
would not take work into the home, trying, however ramshackle
it was, to maintain some dignity there. Homework was left to
the Jews, 'making sweatshops of their bedrooms', or the Italians,
in whose houses, according to Libby, 'You'd like as not get
bolognesed shoe-laces served up to you quick as spaghetti!'
After the Great Panic and with the advent of further speedups
and stretchouts from the bosses, a new militancy had crept in
amongst the workers with Libby urging Ellen all the more to join
the Sisterhood of Toil.
'American ladies will not be slaves - why should the Irish be?'
she had challenged Ellen, who still resisted all such rallying cries.
She understood the underlying philosophies, had discussed them
many times in her previous life with Mary: 'work to live - not
live to work.' But while in her heart she supported these ideas, she
had avoided attending the workers' meetings, increased in numbers
since the previous year. Anonymity was what she craved, not
reform.
The Abolition of Slavery cause was also strong among the
cordwainers of Massachusetts, who adopted as their own the
Abolitionist slogan: 'Power concedes nothing - if there is no
struggle there is no progress.'
Whatever her thirst for anonymity, Ellen couldn't help but be
excited by this new enthusiasm for the abolition of all slavery;
human bondage for black slaves, industrial bondage for white
workers. She, like the other cordwainers, now had the whiff leather in one nostril and the whiff of a new dawn in the other,
a potent mixture if ever there was one.
'Women will be in the front line, Ellen - wait and see,' Libby
proclaimed. 'Arm in arm, black women and white women, the
Irish, Jews and Italians too, joined with the American ladies.
There will be no division of colour, creed, or sex. It will be a
New World, made by women.'
Ellen thought it would be - maybe not as easily, and as harmoniously,
as Libby saw it - but things were coming to a head on
many fronts; of that she was sure. How it would affect her own
life didn't much matter to her, but she wondered, and worried,
about how it would affect the lives of those she loved and had
left behind her.
If Libby Corrigan's vision of a new world, linked arm in arm across
the colour and gender divide, had some hope of being realized
among the needlewomen of Massachusetts, it had no possibility
of ever happening in the place where Ellen now lived.
Since she had come to Boston in 1848, over ten years ago, Ellen
had experienced little of the other side - in fact the main side, as
she had since discovered - of Irish life there. She had deliberately
eschewed all Irishness, wanting to be American. So she had given
a wide berth to ceilis - gatherings - and the groggeries and
dramshops where her people congregated. The few Irish she knew
were like Mrs Brophy; the 'coming Irish', those who had 'upped'
themselves to be 'of wealth and standing', Boston's commercial
Irish. Not the potato peasants, like herself.
Now, as she picked her way under the arch and into the long
passageway of sub-divided warehouses, having to step around the
privies and water hydrants that obstructed the way, it was as if
life had grabbed her by the throat, turned her around, and hauled
her back to where she should have been. Back among her own,
back to being a 'tenement Biddy'. 'Sheds, shanties, and tottering
rookeries'; Half-Moon Place had been well described. Only the
rooks themselves wouldn't even rest here. She held her nose against
this sink of pollution on every side, the backwater of drains flushed
out by high tides.
Children, ragged, unshod, played in the filth shouting at one
another, 'We don't want to be the Protestants this time!' Flinging
any garbage to hand at each other, in a 'Battle of the Boyne,
Boston-tenement style. She dodged some rotting evil hurled her
way. It mashed against a rickety staircase behind her, dripping & sludge from step to step, to be later squashed by the bare feet of those same children. Not that anyone would take much notice,
she thought.
'Is that you, Ellie?' a voice called out to her. Blind Mary. The
woman always sat on her stoop at that doorway looking out. At
what, Ellen didn't know, for Blind Mary was a casualty of the
sewing trade and had the 'needle blindness'. 'Them childer have
me tormented, Ellie,' the woman complained to her, 'with their
shoutin' and throwin' things, knocking skelps off one another me
poor heart's not able for it.'
'Don't mind them, Mary, they're only playing, having fun,' Ellen
said to her.
'Well they should be learnin', that's what, ediccating themselves.
If I had me sight that's what I'd be doin', readin' books and learnin'.
Here, take a drop,' and she pushed the gin bottle out from behind
her skirts at Ellen. 'It keeps body and soul together . . . keeps me
alive, until hisself comes back.'
The gin, indeed, did keep Blind Mary alive. Half of the basements
in Half-Moon Place had been turned into illicit dramshops, and
in half of the other half, the women ran little sidelines in gin to
supplement the borderline or no wages their husbands earned.
With Mary blind, permanently on the brink of starvation, her
'gin trade' was a necessity. How she managed, being unable to
see, Ellen couldn't imagine, with a clientele which ranged from
that of the sailor dance halls, set up in other basements, to common
night-walkers and tricksters of every kind.
'Ah, he wasn't a bad man when he left, not a bad man!' Blind
Mary said, referring to her Dan, who had upped and left her.
"Twas the forges, Ellie, the furnaces in them forges, Ellie. Sure
the heat o' them melted the poor man's brain.'
'I know, Mary, I know.' And she did, after more than two years,
she knew Blind Mary's story by heart.
'Then comin' home here to this hell-hole, not a streak of light nor a Puff of air,' the woman continued regardless, 'sure, bad and all as
the forges was, it was the only sunlight the poor man saw, those
roaring furnaces,' she explained, nodding her head up and down
towards Ellen, 'and it melted his brain - dried up all the juices in it. ut I know he'll come for me, Ellie. Down that passageway, under
the arch, I can see it in me mind's eye, and him running down
scatterin' them little bastards that's been dannoyin' the head o'
me, and him calling out me name - "Mary! Mary!"'
'I'm sure he will, Mary, I'm sure he will,' Ellen said to her her
own head 'dannoyed' from listening to the woman.
Blind Mary fumbled out her hand, caught Ellen's arm and pulled
her in close to the doorway. 'Ellie,' she whispered, 'it's the niggers
I heard tell one of them's gone into my Dan's job at the furnaces'
the head was nodding furiously, dannoyed at the niggers now, 'and
the black man won't melt, Ellie - black as the Divil at the gates
of Hell - he won't melt. What will we do at all when the war
comes and they let them all out of the cages down South, and
good young Irish boys killed freeing them. Well, Ellie, what will
we do at all then?'
'I don't know, Mary, I don't know what we'll do.'
She didn't know what to say to her. The woman's mind was
half-gone with gin; it was no use arguing with her. Yet Ellen knew
she was only saying what a lot of them down here thought. Here
there was no table-talk like that she remembered with Patrick and
her own Mary and Lavelle, discussing the merits and demerits of
Abolition - the moral issues. Here it was survival. As Blind Mary
had put it, 'the black man won't melt'. Whatever work the Paddies,
'the turned-inside-out-niggers', could do, then the 'smoked Irish',
the blacks, could also do - and cheaper.
She went on up the passageway - the state of this place they all
now lived in. These people, her people, peasants from the hills and
valleys back home; bad and all as it was there, they never lived like
this, never behaved like this. In the mountain villages, no matter what, in the worst of the Famine, in the blackest of the black potato
years, some semblance of dignity and humanity remained with the
people.
Here, three thousand miles away from the correcting eyes and
tongues of the village, all restraint had been loosed. The same
upstanding, God-fearing villagers were now the froth and scum,
the backwash of Boston. The old 'conspiracy of boundaries' of village
and church, even of landlord, was smashed and smithereened.
Now there were no boundaries, nothing sacred or decent. Even the air itself was foul and feculent, redolent of the life the Irish here
led. Here no cooling breeze whipped up the Maamtrasna valley.
Here in the basements there was no light, no windows to look
out. Even if you did have a window above the ground or in the
cramped attics - a mere two to three feet high - you had neither
field nor valley to look out on to gauge the mood of a day. No
certain mountain, only the flap of half-scrubbed washing, which
hung from pillar to post at every corner. No sound of a bird, only
the 'thwack' of Jacob's Ladders against the outside walls. These, a
rumpled knot of life-threatening rope and wood, she wouldn't put
a step on for love nor money. No scent of the wild honeysuckle in
Half-Moon Place, only the wretched smell of diarrhoea and cholera
and dysentery hanging on the air, waiting to drop on them.
She rounded the corner. Biddy Earley, streelish as ever, door
stepped her. Biddy didn't like Ellen, and she, in return, didn't
like Biddy Earley. It was not so much the unkempt look of her
circumstances; most here couldn't help that. But Biddy was an
agitator, about anything and everything, and moreover, wasn't
happy unless everyone else shared her agitation. 'The rack-renting
landlords and middlemen, our own the worst!' - 'the mill-owners
taking the flower of Irish youth, imprisoning it from dawn to dusk'
- 'the state of this place, the Land of Liberty me arse!' And, in
particular, 'them niggers'.
Biddy had recently told her, boastfully: 'I had a house mobbed,
down there,' she had pointed through the archway, "cos there was
a blast o' blacks living in it. Living there just like white folk - just
like us!' she had added, indignantly sweeping back a greasy lock
under the neckerchief she wore on her head.
'And why shouldn't they?' Ellen had said.
"Cos they're not fit to live with us, spreading in here from
Nigger Hill, bringing down the neighbourhood,' Biddy had said
contemptuously.
'How far down is down?' Ellen had replied acerbically.
'I could tell you were a nigger-lover, you're not like the rest of
us down here, widow-woman. You don't fit!' She had prodded
Ellen with her finger. 'Like a bit of liquorice in your bed now
and then? Believe all this stuff about them being just "smoked

Paddies", do you? Well they'll be "smoked Paddies" before the night is over!'
'What do you mean, Biddy?'
'What I mean, Widow Malley, is this - fire and brimstone, the wrath of God on the heathens! It's all they understand. Now, shut up and listen,' she ordered Ellen, 'you're lucky I'm telling you after the way you cut me last time!'
And Biddy Earley proceeded to tell Ellen that there was going to
be 'a smoke-out for the smoked Irish' that night, down at the end
of the tenements where Ellen lived - in the single shanties. Ellen,
like the other Irish, was to light a candle in her window. That way
the so-called 'Irish Fire Brigade' mobbed-in for the job from 'further
up Fort Hill' would know which shacks not to torch.
Ellen was aghast. 'This is madness! People will die - it's murder,
Biddy!' she accused the woman.
'Murder? Sure they have no souls - isn't that why they're the
way they are?' Biddy answered her, as if it was as plain as the
nose on Ellen's face. 'How could it be murder? Anyways, sure
they'll scamper away like monkeys out of any harm, get a bit more smoked maybe, that's all,' she laughed.
'If the fire spreads . . . ?' Ellen started.
'The lads in the "Fire Brigade" know what they're at, they've
done it before, sure; anyway, it's a still night. So just go home,
widow-woman, light your candle and keep your trap shut!'
She left Biddy and went home. What was she to do?
Two doors up from Ellen lived Maybelle Tucker, a black woman
with two children, 'runaways' from Alabama. Her husband was
still in hiding after a few years of having escaped. Perhaps,
Maybelle had told her previously, he had even been spirited out
of Massachusetts to Canada on the 'underground railway', as the
escape route was known. Ellen often spoke with her across the
washing lines at weekends. She was a fearful woman, wondering
when they'd be discovered and forced back South under armed
guard or when she'd be 'mobbed by dem white niggers - dem Irish'. She was also afraid to move; how would her husband find
her if he returned? And movement could provoke discovery. Life in the 'free' North didn't provide much freedom for her, Ellen
thought. 'Only dat dey is no chains here, Miss Ellie.' This form
of address discomfited Ellen. Unlike the chains, Maybelle seemed
unable to leave this deference behind her, even though Ellen had
often spoken to her about it.
So far Maybelle and her two children had been left alone.
Indeed, some of the Irish in Half-Moon Place mixed freely with
the blacks, and some of the Irish women but not the men, had
taken to marrying them. Given time, it would all work out, Ellen
thought, but before that it would split the country in half, and the
Irish too.
If the Irish and the blacks fought each other for low-paid jobs, then
they'd both always be ground down, exploited by the bosses who
didn't care whether you were a white nigger, Irish - or smoked-Irish,
which they called the blacks. Although one sign she had seen in a
window requiring household help which specified 'any country or
colour except Irish' made her even wonder about that. But work was
what both races needed, dangerous, backbreaking, brain-melting
labour of any sort. There was no way out of that, just as there was
no way out for her with regard to Maybelle Tucker and her two
children. If she didn't put a candle in her own window she would
be burned out, like Maybelle; mistakenly, maybe, but burned out
nevertheless. If she warned Maybelle, then Biddy Earley would
know it, and then what would the consequence be for herself?
Maybelle would still be burned out by the Irish Fire Brigade at
another time and, as likely, herself too. That would be the end of
her - out on to the passageway.
She had sunk low, very low, because of her own failings, but
she was surviving. Hadn't she one room, one window, a small hard
bed and her own door, enough money for a bit of food and wood
in the winter? At last, by her prayers and the penance of the life
she lived, she had begun to fall back into God's grace, feel some
Peace of mind. If she became homeless, with the few possessions she now owned gone up in smoke, she would have nowhere to turn to- Not even the charities - for fear of being discovered. Maybelle Tucker, at least, would get by. The anti-slavery charities would help her and the children, and as long as no one got hurt . . . He agonized and agonized over it, turning it this way and that in
her mind, went out into the passageway on her way to Maybell
then turned back. Why did it have to be just her - couldn't it be
someone else? Others had been told as well. Was she the only on
who felt differently from Biddy Earley? The only 'nigger-lover' in
this whole higgledy-piggledy hive of human misery? The impatient
rattle of knuckles on the door startled her.
'Come on out here, widow-woman, into the light, and read this
for me!' she heard a voice demand.
It was Biddy. God blast the woman, she thought, what did
she want now? Hadn't she caused enough trouble already with
her agitating? She went out.
Biddy hardly gave her time to pull back the flimsy wooden door.
'It's about the niggers - in the Pilot. I cannot make out what it's
saying. Read it out loud to me, widow-woman!'
Ellen took the crumpled page of the Pilot from her, started to
read the lines of a rhyme from Boston's weekly. 'When the Niggers
shall be free, To cut the throats of all they see . . .'
She stopped, scarcely believing what she was reading, what was
printed in front of her.
'Go on! Go on, read it, widow-woman! That's not me saying
them words, that's the Church, our Holy Roman Catholic Church.
I'm tired of tellin' you - one of these mornings you'll wake up with
your own throat slit!' and she snatched the paper out of Ellen's
hands. 'Blind Mary'd read better than you!'
When she had gone Ellen sat down on the bed, head in her
hands. What was it all turning to?
The Pilot was their paper, and ran news from the 'Old Country',
railed against the Know-Nothings and the sectarian bias in Boston's
schools, and defended the 'Bridgets'. The defender of the poor and
oppressed Catholic Irish had now become the oppressor of the poor
and enslaved Negro, with the blessings of Holy Mother Church.
It was wrong - all wrong. Maybe they were right about the
four million freed slaves that would swamp all over the Irish like
a black plague - just as the Irish had swamped Boston. She had
often heard Lavelle say so, and Patrick too. If there had been one scatterin of the Irish fleeing from the blackened praties of Famine,
then there would be another scatterin of the Irish, this time from the black Southern plague. But it was still wrong. Worse still, was the Catholic Church kindling the flame of hatred, succouring the
likes of Biddy Earley and her Irish Fire Brigade mobs.
She took her candlestick, crooked her finger through the loop of metal, lifted it to the window. The Lucifer match flamed into
the gloomy interior and she held it to the wick.
Lucifer, the fallen angel.
Later, she waited, listening for the commotion outside, wringing
and unwringing her hands like Pontius Pilate.
She would go out when the Fire Brigade had done their foul
deed. Extinguish her candle, make sure that Maybelle and her
two children got out safely, give them shelter for the night. Put
the children in the small bed, herself and Maybelle up on the edge
of it, keeping watch. That much at least she could do.
She sat, and sat, and waited, watching the candle in case the night
wind down the alley should snuff it out - and they would mistake
her shack for Maybelle Tucker's. She prayed that it all wouldn't
go terribly wrong, asking forgiveness for her cowardice, the cold
eating in at her bones, shivering the fear further into her.
Then she heard them. First, just a distant tremble in the ground,
causing her to sit bolt upright. Then closer footfalls, whispered
voices from Kerry and Mayo, echoing down the passageway the
Irish Fire Brigade at their work. Next, the flicker of a torch
across her window. A face for a moment, looking in, checking,
then gone. She padded across the floor, barefoot, half-crouched
like some hunted animal, and waited behind the door, petrified;
relieved that they had passed her by, terrified they would return.
She was tortured by the thought of what she was part of; a
mobbing; worse - a burnout. But they'd be all right, Maybelle
and her two children - what had she called them - Magnolia, and
the little one with the big eyes, like Louisa; Blossom? Called them
not after saints like the Irish did, as she had her own children, but
after flowers; Blossom and Magnolia.
How would she ever face their mother again and ask about them,
listening to Maybelle Tucker talk about 'dey is trouble abrewin'
in dem cawnfields' or 'de black blood is gonna be runnin' outen dat white cotton', nodding and agreeing with her that it was a
terrible thing, just because a person was born in Carolina instead of Castlebar and was black instead of white.
Then the shouts and the whoops told her the deed was done.
She heard the crackling noise of fire and saw the passageway
outside flicker into life, purged of its darkness. The faint pleasant
smell of smoke seeped in through the gaps and cracks of her door
and window. The sound, the sight, the smell assailed her every
sense, suffocated her with the enormity of what she had washed
her hands of and allowed to happen.
Outside, the sound of running feet. A yell: 'Smoked Irish!'
Laughter. She yanked open the door, ran outside, almost immediately
felt the thump of a body send her reeling backward. A mobber
fleeing, shouting at her: 'Stay indoors, missus!'
It took her a few moments to recover, to scramble to her feet.
Across the passageway from her she saw the candles, one here,
one there, now guiltily snuffed. No one else came out. Desperate,
she stumbled to Maybelle's door. Already the flames were licking
the sky above the woman's shanty. There was no sign of Maybelle
and the children. Panic-stricken, Ellen saw that someone - one of
the Fire Brigade - had rammed a stout stick against the outside of
the door, held into the ground with a rock.
They were still inside. Frantically, she knocked away the stick
shouting, 'Maybelle! Maybelle! The door!'
God, they'd be burned alive - the children! With her hands,
she tried to grasp the smoking doorframe where it was offline.
But the wood was hot and burned her fingers. The stick . . .
somehow she forced the knob of the stick into the gap and
wedged it open with all her might, but the whoosh of heat
that met her drove her backwards. No matter how she tried she
couldn't get in.
She shouted again. 'Maybelle! Maybelle! Oh my God, what have
I done?'

Then she fell in a heap on to the lane-way, beating down its
filth and its evil with her fists and cursing the evil in men's hearts.
Sobbing at the harsh realities of life and death in this Half-Moon
Place, and her own despair. She didn't know how long she was

there, half-lying, half-sitting, head sunk on her breast, blackened
with grime and smoke.
'You can go home now, Miss Ellie; we're safe,' she thought she
heard a voice say - her conscience, salving her guilt. 'Miss Ellie!'
Startled, she looked up. Before her stood Maybelle, holding the
hands of Magnolia and Blossom. She shook herself in disbelief
and looked at them again. Maybelle standing, looking down at
her, the children's big sad eyes on a level with her own. They were
alive. Somehow, miraculously alive. Someone had warned them,
helped them get out. It didn't matter. Only that they were safe.
Ellen staggered to her feet. 'Oh thank God! Thank God, you're
safe, Maybelle, all of you! Oh thank God - you can stay with me - it's not much . . .' she gabbled on deliriously, her burden lifted.
'Until you get '
The woman moved back as she made to embrace her. 'No, Miss
Ellie. De children an' me - we's gonna make ou's own way.'

She was questioned, by the Night Watch, like all others in Half
Moon Place, but no arrests were made. When it had quietened
down Biddy Earley came to her all brazen and smug-in-the
knowing.
'You told her, didn't you, widow-woman?' she accused.
Ellen never answered, let her think what she liked.
'You'll see, widow-woman!' Biddy pointed her finger up over
the sprawling rooftops. 'When up there, when Beacon Hill is
swarming with black "Bridgets" and there isn't a place to be had
for a decent Irish girl, you'll see then, widow-woman, you'll see
then I'm right.'

For months afterwards Ellen was on her guard, for fear of reprisal,
but it never came. It would have been better if it had. She deserved
it, not for the telling, as Biddy imagined she had done, but for the
not telling. She wondered who it had been, who had warned the
black woman? Which of the women - she was sure it was a woman had given the word to Maybelle? However, in the close-by-the
wall stoop life of the passageway, no clue was forthcoming and
she knew the whole rotten gallery of them thought it was her.
She told Libby Corrigan what had happened, saying how
ashamed she was at her cowardice. If she was expecting pity,
she got none from Libby.
'You've a right to be ashamed, Ellen! But, at the same time, I
don't know what I would have done!' she said forthrightly.
'You would have done the right thing, Libby,' Ellen said,
convinced. 'You would have stopped them! Like I would have
once. I should at least have warned the woman.'
'Who knows what the right thing is when your own roof's in
danger? There's one law in thinkin' things, another in livin' them,'
Libby said, having previously in her head worked out all such rules
for livin".
After this Ellen decided to throw in her lot with Libby and
commenced attending her Sisterhood of Toil meetings.
Early in 1859 Ellen's eyes began to give her trouble at last. First
it was tiredness, a winter tiredness brought on by harsh, bleak
light, everywhere caked white with the cold. Next it was the odd
headache; then a more constant one. Even into the light-giving
summer, she had some difficulty. So that more and more often at
her machine she pierced her finger with the needle until the crown
of it bore the raised shape of a continuous welt, dark and bluish
and purple. Eventually she got the blue glasses. They helped the
headaches and her purple finger. Now she could laugh about being
one of the three blind mice, remembering the three needlewomen
she had once seen, creeping homewards along the waterfront.
Less and less could she read her book of poems. All of that,
Stephen, Montreal, seemed so irrelevant now. Still she held on to
his book - a small, dimming comfort. Whenever she did read a few
lines it was rarely from the Love Elegies any more. Now edging
past thirty-nine, it was as if growing older, like the poet himself she
was inclined more towards Heaven than towards Earth. She found
solace in Donne's Divine Poems, like 'A Hymn to God the Father':

Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year, or two, but wallowed in a score?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done, For I have more . . .

And she dwelt on the words, as if they were her own. Putting
flesh on her sins, sins of the flesh itself, sins of omission - things
she should have done and had not - Maybelle Tucker. There, in
the solitude of her spartan sanctuary.
Sometimes Blind Mary came up to her 'for the company', tired
of sitting on her stoop by the doorway 'looking out for himself
tripping home to me at last'. She had a fund of the old stories
and songs, mainly from the south-east coast of Ireland and East
Munster, which were strange to Ellen's ears. Songs Ellen had not
heard before, like 'The Connerys', about three brothers transported
to New South Wales for the attempted murder of a landlord's man.
The song threw a curse on those who informed against the brothers
and ended with a hope they would soon be returned home again.

Is a'gui chun De,
Ar na Connerys a thabhairt saor abhaile cbugainn New
South Wales.

And praying to God,
The Connerys to bring home safely, from New South Wales.

At first, Ellen had trouble with some of the words; it was so long
since she had spoken or heard the language. It made her feel
ashamed, especially with Blind Mary telling her, 'Sure, you have
the best of Irish, coming from the West. It's a grand thing to have
one's own language, what with all them foreigners that's here!'
Ellen agreed with her. 'Read another piece o' the English rhymes
to me - the one about the eyes,' Mary now asked. Ellen read from
'The Message': 'Send home my long strayed eyes to me . . .'
Blind Mary waited a moment, nodding to herself. 'He was a
priest, Ellen?'
'He was,' she answered, wondering what the woman was thinking
of.
'He had such soft words for a priest,' Blind Mary said.
In this way they shortened the tenement nights for each other,
trading songs and rhymes. The blind woman with the old sure Gaelic,
the red-haired woman with the soft words of an English priest.
Then, one evening, Ellen went to look for the book, to find it
gone. She kept it always beside her bed, and knew it had been
stolen from her; there was nowhere within the narrow confines of
her room for it to be misplaced. Nothing else of the small parcel
of her belongings was missing. She grieved over the book. It was

as if the final vestige of her old world had been stripped from her
the last link with Stephen.
'Maybe it'll come back, a stor,' Blind Mary said, offering some
forlorn sympathy, as if the book had its own life, its own motion.
'God is good,' she comforted, 'maybe it'll come back, Ellie - you
have to have hope.'
Ellen knew differently. The book going from her was part of
a pattern. Like the candles in the passageway, going out one by
one on the night Maybelle Tucker's house was mobbed, so one
by one, had the candles in her own life too gone out - Stephen,
Lavelle, her children, the business, her sight, the book. All candles,
light-offering, snuffed out by her sin.
'It's gone, Mary,' she said, 'gone for good.' The book would no
more 'come back' than the poor woman's Dan would.
'I'll look out for it for you,' Blind Mary replied, and Ellen knew
she would, would keep looking out for it, as she did for her Dan.
Blind Mary had hope. It was all she had, hope and gin and a
handful of old songs.
She, herself, had no hope. It was better that way. With no hope
there was no extinguishment of hope.
Each day was then the same as the next, the same as the last
one, no better or no worse - to be survived. Her life had become
a round of survival: rising, going, stitching, coming, sleeping,
rising again, like the round of a jig or a reel. You always knew
the tune would turn, come back to where it had begun with
wonderful certain monotony. Not like Bach, who took you off
to the sky, weaving you in among the clouds' lining, until you
never knew when again he would land you safely back to earth.
Bach's music was air-music, floating on hope and desire. Irish
music was earth-music, grounded, safe. Her life now demanded
earth-music, that repetitive round of certainty. She mustn't lose
the earth - Heaven could wait.
Not that she ever thought of Bach much nowadays. The missing
book was her only connection to all those notions she had, all
that rising above herself. The book was her forbidden treasure,
her pearl of light, among the stitches-per-inch of life, and the
drudgery, sewage and garbage of Half-Moon Place.
What was it Mary had once said to Louisa before they had come
to take away the piano? 'We will always have the memory of it
_ the memory of tunes.' At the time she thought it such a wise
thing to say. Now, with her book gone, she too would only have
a memory - the memory of words.
There was so much of life that was just a memory. How much
could one memory preserve, she wondered? Not that she was
creating any new ones. And if she ended up darkened like Blind
Mary, then her memory would need to hold pictures, as well as
poems and tunes.
That thought preyed on her, so that more and more as the decade
turned, she found herself looking at her face in the fragment of
mirror glass she kept, touching each part, committing it to the
memory of skin, for the time when she could no longer see it.
The memory of skin . . . like when she and Stephen had touched.
Even when he wasn't there, and for the time back then which
followed the not-being-there time, her skin had still remembered.
So that when she was undressed and put her hand to her body,
where he had gone - 'Before, behind, between, above, below' - it
was not her hand, but his.
Then she would put the mirror down, close her eyes, remembering,
and touch her hair at the line where it met her forehead. Still
golden-red like the sun, but now streaked here and there with a
small but definite seam of whiter sun-fire.
'Ellen Rua, how do? Soon it will be Ellen Ban.' She smiled to
herself, thinking how once she had wanted to lose the 'Rua' from
her name; Rua - red. 'Rua for fire,' Peabody had once said to her.
She wondered about Jacob - if he had found love, or just more
money. That white-cocked plume of his hair, unless he had lost
it to age. He must be the sixty, she thought. Strange the way he
had worn the white apron, the last time, when she had had it out with him. As if he had known, as if putting a distance between
them, once he had ruined her, a boundary line, white and shop
soiled, something to rub his hands into, degrease them. She remembered
his hands against the apron that last time. Like crippled Wings they were, flapping and beating against it, wanting to lift him up again, give him flight out of the bitter-beaked world. Yes,
she thought, Jacob was more to be pitied than anything.
Still, with eyes closed, her ringers followed the line of her no
to her lips, spread out across the extent of them, each side fro
the dividing central furrow. She then picked up the glass, repeating
this exercise of exploration, this time mirroring the visual reality
against the touch-memory. 'I don't know which one of you I best
like!' she remarked to the mirror.
Once she had undressed, she stood with her body buttocked
against the rough grain of the wooden wall. Raised her arms
out either side of her like a crucified Christ. 'Full nakedness!
All joys are due to thee, As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed
must be . . .' She stopped herself before the words '. . . To taste
whole joys'.
That now was a not-to-be-remembered reason for bodies to be
so unclothed. She continued the remembering exercise, first turning
her upper body and stretching her right hand over to her extended
left arm. With her eyes marking each movement, each memory
place, she traced her fingers back along her forearm, elbow and
upper arm to the sinews of her shoulder.
There they felt the raised, but long-healed ridges of munggaiynwun - the cutting of the body - the 'sorry cuts' she had inflicted on
herself at Annie's death all those long years ago. Three times she
had dragged the jagged quartzite knife across her skin, so great
her grief was in the Coorong on Australia's southernmost coast.
That memory her skin, her whole body could never forget. Annie
would have been fourteen by now. Maybe if she had still had
Annie to rear, maybe she, her miracle child, would have saved
her from all that preoccupation with wanting to 'up' themselves,
all her chasing after poems and preludes ... all that thinking about
herself. Stephen had asked her once about the scars. When she
had told him the story, that it was the custom of the Ngarrindjeri
women after great loss, he had gentled his lips along the course
of each scar. Sealed the memory. His long Trinity tongue tracing
down her shoulder, underneath to its moist pit. Drawing it back
then towards her face across the cavity of her chest. Quickly she
banished the thought of him, moved away her hand. Some wounds
would never be sealed.
Next, she extended her right arm in the Calvary position and
repeated the discovery with her left one. Still flexed against the supporting wall, head now on her chest, she followed the descending
path of her hand over breast and rib, releasing each part from
the tension in which it was held, as it was committed to the sum of
memory. Pelvis, vulva, each crease and fold, each purple-grained
ridge of skin stretched by birth-giving, as the purple potato rot
had insinuated itself into the once-white bodies of the tubers. She
had no regrets about the disfigurements of birth.
Here was where the mewe was - the life-source, the energy
centre. Again, she remembered Wiwirremalde, the medicine-man
of the Ngarrindjeri people, placing his hand there, telling her: 'You
have good mewe,' when she had asked him to do 'bad mewe' anything
to save Annie. She wondered now, where all her good mewe had gone? How had she lost it?
She stood for a moment distracted by her thoughts of Annie,
suspended, motionless, then let herself sink to the floor. This was
not good mewe, trying to store up memories against a sightless
future. No matter how little she had left, no matter how much she
had been stripped of, it was all of her own doing. This memorizing
of her body was treating it like a hollow temple, trying to freeze its decay into middle age, making it the for-ever-to-be-desired body of
a one-time lover.
The miasma of memory.
It was all to do with pride. Her deadly sin was never lust,
or 'great love', as she thought it then to be, but pride, putting
herself at the centre of everything. Being the redeemer of her
children; building up the business, her way. Shaking off her
Irishness, wanting to be 'upped' - the new-American lady, with
her German music filling the house, and the pernicious poetry
of a lascivious English cleric, her head. Now here she was again,
displaying such vanity, trying to preserve some immaculate image
of herself.
Disgusted, she threw on her clothes, then her spectacles. Not
that she really needed them for outdoor use . . . yet. But they had
another purpose to fulfil - anonymity.
She stepped out into the passageway. Strange, how in blue,

the effluent, the fly-infested faeces, the garbage all took on a
different dimension, a mysteriousness of hue. Whatever the hue
of the tenements her spectacles granted, their unremitting stench
was invested with no such redeeming feature.
Since the onset of her creeping blindness, it had long been in
her mind to do what she was now about to do, but fear of being
discovered had held her back. She had long been gone from her
old haunts. The Long Wharf, Quincy Market, the Cathedral of the
Holy Cross in Franklin Street, the Common - all were no longer
within the geography of her world. She had never gone back, not
once crossed the boundary she had imposed on herself. She had
sought flight in her disgrace and could not undisgrace herself, as
it were, by returning.
Through the days and weeks and months and years, she had tried
to develop a distance of thought from all the events and places of
her previous life. It had been a difficult battle. While she had fallen
into a new routine of life, she still constantly wondered about her
children, and Lavelle - and Stephen. Oftentimes she had wanted
to go back and hide somewhere, try to watch them. It had been
a temptation hard to resist, but she had resisted it.
Now she wanted to see them once again. Not approach them just
know they were all right, have one last picture of them in her
mind before the blindness set in.
She was older, and it was safer now. There was less chance of her
being recognized, now that she had the bent gait of a needlewoman,
her hair no longer the crowning glory it once was. Her eyes, dulled
by leather, no longer sparkled with the water-dark green of the
Mask. Now bespectacled in blue they would help pass her off as
one of Boston's myriad blind mice. As she went down the passageway,
Blind Mary was in the doorway, perched on her stoop.
'Ellie, is that you? Where are you off to? I think today might
be the day!' she said, her voice full of excitement. 'Himself
always liked the fine crisp day to be out in,' Blind Mary went
on. 'He didn't like it too hot, the way the sun would be melting
his brain.'
Ellen didn't want to be delayed, but stopped anyway. It was a
hard station for the old woman, this blind waiting, sitting on her
stoop, nodding away, the children 'dannoying the head of her' a
kind of nodding-speak-stoop life, looking out for her Dan with
little hope of her ever seeing him, even if she had the sight.
'Here, Ellie! Have a drop of this for your journey.'
Blind Mary proffered the bottle. She took it, swallowed a
mouthful, felt the perfumed rawness tear at her throat. It would
give her courage.
She went first to Holy Cross in Franklin Street. Sunday afternoon
was practice time for choristers and organist. Taking her place
quietly to the rear of the cathedral, head bowed in prayer, she
held a faint hope that somehow the organist might be Louisa.
A sound like geese flapping made her look up. A brace of nuns
flitted by intent on being somewhere else and quickly. She lifted
her head to see their faces, but instead saw only the distinctive
white-winged head-covering of the Daughters of Charity, flying
blue-tinted, beyond her vision. Disappointed, she waited.
This cathedral had been many things to her. Her consolation and
refuge, a place of devotion and the place of her condemnation. She
looked around at the Stations of the Cross - still hanging there, as
they had been, as they would be, long after her. Her eyes rested
on the blurred Sixth Station . . . Louisa's Station. Veronica, all in
blue, wiping the face of the blue Jesus. She sat there, silent as a
church-mouse, wrapped within her blue world. Eventually, she
heard the shuffling of feet in the organ loft behind her. When the
music started she did not recognize it.
It wasn't Louisa, or even Mary, playing. She was sure of that. But
it was years since she'd heard them - they would have advanced, or
maybe had to relinquish their playing altogether. She didn't dare
turn around to look up at the choir gallery - just in case anyone
above should look down. It was a bad idea coming here and as
unrealistic as Blind Mary waiting to 'see' her Dan. However, Ellen
continued to wait until the rehearsal was complete, to her chagrin
not recognizing any of the pieces - no Bach.
She shouldn't have built up her hopes like that, but yet still
she remained until the sound of feet leaving the gallery had
faded away. She darted a look behind her then crept out into the cathedral porch, using one of the great stone pillars for cover,
from there she watched them disperse. There was no Mary, and no Louisa.
It had been too much to hope for. A forlorn hope, born
of desperation. She returned inside the cathedral and with all
humility offered up her deep disappointment to her blue-crossed
Redeemer.

On leaving the cathedral, she started out for the Long Wharf, going
via Washington Street, still with its patchwork of buildings. She
stopped for a moment under the sheltering Old South Meeting
House, across from the doorway leading up the four flights to
their first home in America. In it, she pictured Lavelle and herself
that Christmas night, she holding the door for him as he left and
Lavelle checking her with, 'You know, Ellen, we should get married
after Lent.'
She saw herself, giddy as a girl with the thrill of it all, call after
him, that she had the same notion herself, then he crunching
homewards haloed by falling snow, whistling the white length
of Washington Street, because she had said 'yes' to him. Ah,
poor lovely Lavelle, he got such a bad bargain in her. Such a
bad bargain.
At the Long Wharf she knew the New England Wine Company
would be no more, and only hoped the sign she and Lavelle and
Patrick had taken down would have been replaced by Frontignac
et Lavelle - like one of those French companies in Montreal.
The names ran well together - Frontignac et Lavelle. Or, at
least, something to signify that a kernel of the business, however
small, had remained for Lavelle. She found their old warehouse,
refurbished, re-signed, now home to an ice-exporting company.
She left the Long Wharf, nervous lest she might be recognized by one of the many longshoremen, who would have known the
tall and red-haired 'Irish' of old. The only comment made to her,
however, was a respectful, 'Ma'am, mind you be careful down here of those slings and pulleys!' After the thousands of times she had
been up and down this pier! It must be the blue glasses, she thought, he decided to give the Quincy Market area a wide berth. There
The Magdalens, she remembered, however much they rejected the world, the flesh and the devil, could not become fully-fledged
Sisters of the order. For that, a young woman must be of 'spotless
character', like Mary and Louisa, and of a family who had a
'blameless reputation'. She stopped. What of her own reputation?
If it were known how far she had fallen, how much 'blamed' her own reputation was, then Mary and Louisa would be banished.
They would never become Sisters; at best, they would be condemned
to the cloisters as mute Magdalens, silenced by her sin.
It was her constant worry over the years; maybe they already had
been? If, by the grace of God, they had not, her presence here was
putting them in the gravest of jeopardy.
She had come this far hoping for even the briefest glimpse
of them, to clasp this last memory of them, like a locket, to
her heart.
She took a faltering step, tired, confused by her need, frightened
of its possible consequences. Her need - it was selfishness again,
what she wanted. Pride, not trusting in the Jesus who had once
forgiven Mary Magdalen to mind them, to gather them unto
Himself. That was it, she was unable to leave a thing, even in
the hands of God. She had always to do and see for herself always
be a 'doubting Thomas'.
She would never be whole again until she drove that mote from
her eye, died to self. She should leave them as they were. They
were after all Brides of Christ, safer in His arms than they ever
could be in hers. Reconciled then, she gave one parting look at
the convent and turned away, each footstep leading her further
along the pathway of purification of the spirit.
Foot-weary and heart-weary, at last the arch of Half-Moon Place
greeted her. She relaxed. It was what she knew. Out there, beyond
the arch, she felt exposed, uncertain. Here, she could fade back into
the din and the smells, the rookeries and the rickety stairways - the
secure underbelly of shanty-Irish Boston.
She was hardly in the door when Blind Mary scratched at the
outside of it.
'You've had a long day, craythur. A long day - here, swallow a
dram, it'll ease whatever longing aches you.'
Ellen threw back her head, tilted the bottle, felt the welcoming
kick of the malted grain in her mouth, the dark purple bite of the
juniper berries.
'It's the prickly leaves,' she heard Blind Mary say as she caught
her breath.
'What's that, Mary?'
'The prickly leaves . . . the juniper, what gives it the sting.'
She wondered how the blind woman knew. She hadn't heard talk
like that since back in the valleys, in the time of Sheela-naSheeoga,
and her herbaceous mixtures. They sat there in the dark, Ellen not
bothering to light the candle, passing the bottle between them.
When it was finished, they sat in silence with nothing now to
connect them. After a spell, Blind Mary spoke, in her kind of
nodding-talk.
'Did it help you forget what it was you couldn't find, Ellie?'
she asked.
Ellen never queried the woman as to what she meant or how she
knew. 'It would take the full of Boston Common of juniper berries
to do that, Mary,' she whispered back, her voice unsteady.
'Well, if the gin can't do it, the next best thing is prayin'. God
forgive me for puttin' it that way!' Mary crackled with laughter.
'We'll make a novena to St Jude, the patron of hopeless cases 'cos
that's what we are, Ellie - hopeless cases the two of us,' and
she started up the novena with the opening petition: 'For the safe
return of my Dan, and your own special intentions, Ellie '
'Will you stop it, Mary! For God's sake stop it! All the praying
in the world won't make a blind bit of difference to either of us St
Jude, St Anthony, nor the whole litany of them.'
She was sorry as soon as she said it, but Blind Mary bit
back at her. 'Well, maybe it won't, Ellie, but what else have
we got, except melting our minds with the gin?' She added,
'And I'll have no more o' that till tomorrow, when the gin-man
comes.'
'It's all trina cheile, Mary, everything is . . .' she fumbled for
the explanation, 'trina cheile,'' she repeated, failing to find one.
'There's no blasted English word for it!'
'"Mixed-up-together", Ellie - it's all the one whether it's in
English or Irish - trina cheile, "mixed-up-together" - it's all the
one to Blind Mary,' she muttered.
'Is the dark different, Mary?' Ellen asked, her mind gin-jumping
on to something else.
'It is - it's not as hard on the eyes!'
Ellen was about to ask what she meant when the woman burst
out laughing. Laughing at her own blindness, mocking Ellen for
asking questions about it.
'No, Mary ... I don't mean ... I was wondering what it'll be
like . . . for me?'
'Have you the spectacles, Ellie? Well put them on and I'll tell
you,' the blind woman instructed.
Ellen did so. She never wore them at night; there was no need
to filter out the dark. The woman before her took on a different
bluish hue, paler than the darker shape of her nodding head,
making waves of light and dark - an Aurora Borealis between
them - as she talked.
'Now, Ellie, move the spectacles out from your nose a bit.' Ellen
did so and the black-dark moved in on her again, filling up the
blue-dark.
'Now take them away from you altogether,' Blind Mary ordered.
'That's how it will be, Ellie; the blue will all go and there will only
be dark. Blue-dark by day, black-dark by night - but all dark.'
Ellen wasn't frightened by it, as she thought she would be,
visualizing her blue-darkening blindness the way the blind woman
described it.
'The black-dark tastes different in your mouth, Ellie, like dark
berries instead of brighter ones - you'll know it all right,' Blind
Mary said consolingly. 'You'll surely know it!'
Ellen was glad when Blind Mary scratched out through the door
again. She was tired. Tired even before the gin, tired and foolish.
What a seafoid - a nonsense - everything was, her journey a wasted
one - a turas in aisce.
She hadn't seen sight of one of them.
She cursed herself for getting up her expectations. What did she
think? That on this particular day, at that certain time, in the
exact place she was, they'd be there, where she wanted them to be, waiting for her? Their lives held in suspense, so she could peer
into them? She was growing into a foolish old woman. As foolish as
Blind Mary, holding up her doorway, day in and day out, waiting
for her Dan to come snawvauning down the alleyway, back to her.
Or instead offering up her cracked novenas to St Jude.
She put on her blue glasses, looking at the ceiling, laughing
and cursing in her first tongue. Into the blue-dark, while she still had it.
Her sleep, when it came, was fitful, filled with visions of a black
St Jude, astride Crucan na bPaiste, calling down on the smoked
Irish peasants in the blue-valley fields to repent and give him back
his sight. And she, among the souls of the damned, dark-purpled
juniper berries on the waves of Lough Mask, dancing, ignoring the
brown-penitented pleas from the Magdalen-priested shore.
In the morning, not even the stench of the new day could rouse
her for work. It was the first day she had ever missed.
She lay there, temples throbbing, the roof of her mouth dry as
tindersticks like it was twined with thatch. Disoriented, waiting for
the work-whistle, knowing that if it didn't sound it meant some
impending doom for her.
But she just couldn't face the noise, the needle-weary repetitiveness
of it all. She would probably damage more uppers than
she stitched. Run that God-blasted needle into her finger a dozen
times before the day was over. She was better off here, ginned to
the gills as she was.
Outside the rain pelted down.
She dreaded the rain. Somehow she pulled herself out of her
skimpy cot, placed the knotted lump of cotton Maybelle Tucker
had once given her against the gap under the door. The passageway
would soon be a river of sludge, if it kept up like this, slushing
anything and everything in its path under the doorways, down into
the basements. She pitied those in the basements, even Biddy. How
did they survive at all? No wonder cholera had ripped through the
place a few years ago. She got back into bed. The sound of the rain
drummed into her skull like a marching band, its lambeg drums
unrelentingly clatter-thumping her soaked brain.
She remembered rain - Good Friday rain.
It had all been so different then, so sensual, beating down on her
skin, throbbing into her, drenching her, and him. Her hair raining
down over him as he unbuttoned her, coming between them in her
mouth that very first kiss; the heat rising off her body like steam
from a pavement, needing the cooling Good Friday rain.
She shouldn't even be thinking like this. The gin had her tormented. The rain had just kept on falling, pouring down agony
and passion on them. He was damp and wet when she tore off his
shirt, her fingers slipping on his back, needing to dig into him.
Eventually, her hands clinging to the long wet tail of his hair,
twisting it around her ringers to hold on, wrenching his head back,
long-necked, like a great white swan, as he beat down on her.
Oh God. how she wished those lambegs would stop pounding in
her head! She closed her eyes against them. But they were already
in there filling her up with sound. Thumping against the inside
of her skin, making her remember. She never remembered like this
any more, had long since chastened herself. Frantically, she put her
hands to her head, trying to dampen out the sound. But it kept
on burrowing deeper, louder, moving down and away from her,
escaping.
When she thought she had finally found it again, trapped it
with both her hands, the sound had gone strangely quiet, silently
pulsing out from the deep core of her body. She remembered the
quickening pulse from the same deep core when she had arched
him back on Good Friday, his face gaunt and pale, his white-ribbed
bone searing through her red feather-down, impaling her while the
crucifixion bell tolled. The lambegs swelled into sound again. She
couldn't: control them any more, didn't want to now. Just wanted
them to be at their killing loudness, when the white rush came
and he shouted out her name. The fierce drums, resisting confinement,
pushed against her hands, it all exploding inside her at
once - the bells of Calvary, the clattering lambegs and the rushing,
releasing torrent of the Good Friday rain.

Blind Mary called on her again, that same night - the night of
the rain.
'It was the Famine, Ellie,' she started, after producing the bottle,
saying the gin was 'only for the cure, mind!'
'The Famine? What, Mary?' she asked, bewildered, still not the
whole of herself.
'The Famine changed everything - for the women!' Blind Mary
began. Ellen, wondering where all this had come from. 'It drove
us out because we were only a burden and with no chance of
a dowry, on account of the potatoes being sickened. Then, over
here, if we did get into marriage life itself the priest got into the
marriage bed with us, interferin'. They were never like that before
the Famine, Ellie?' she asked, but having it already worked out in
her own head.
'No," Ellen replied, 'they weren't. I suppose afterwards there
were less of us and more of them. It gave them more of a grasp
on the people.'
'But the priest is much worse here than back home,' Blind Mary
interrupted, winking her useless eye, as if she knew it for certain.
'Only here the women isn't rushing like sheep to get into marriage
life!'
Ellen agreed. The woman paused for a moment, giving weight
to what she was about to say.
'If himself was dead - and even if I knew it for sure - I
wouldn't do it again, Ellie.' Another pause, no nodding now.
'Would you?'
Ellen was almost on the point of telling the woman the truth,
that she wasn't a widow-woman or a deserted wife, none of that.
What harm could a doddery old blind woman do, who never went
further than the lane-way? But she didn't tell her, answering her
instead with another question.
'Why should we women give up what we have here in America?
The men don't.'
This seemed to please Blind Mary. 'But it's the men what rules
the Church and the Church what rules the marriage bed!' she stated
matter-of-factly. 'That's the start and finish of everything.'
Blind Mary was right. Once the marriage bed was ruled, then 'God's
plan' worked. God's plan for a woman, according to the Church,
being 'to perpetuate the human race and minister to the happiness
of her husband. Never to undermine his position as provider by
going out to work. Instead to bring up her children in line with
the Commandments of God and the edicts of the Church.' Blind
Mary, who didn't see, saw enough.
'You're right, Mary, the Church has colonized us, just as sure as
the Crown did,' she said. 'Put sin and children around our necks
in equal doses,' she added, 'and what do we do? Only continue its work, producing a whole new generation of gasurs, who are
tied to its teaching, keeping it powerful. Keeping it still to rule
the marriage bed!' Ellen found herself nodding now, emphasizing
each point. That was how the nodding-talk started, she supposed.
Talking to yourself in the dark, no one there listening, but nodding
to them, pretending they were. 'We've made slaves of ourselves,
Mary!' she concluded.
'Faith, that and we have - slaves and breeders!' Blind Mary
laughed. 'And if they could hear us talking now, Ellie, we'd be
hanged on Boston Common like the witches of old. Why is it
always the women, Ellie?' she went on to ask.
'Because they're afraid of us. Deep down, the men are afraid of
us, of our bodies!'
'Our bodies?' the blind woman asked.
'Yes, Mary, the power of blood frightens them. We are unclean,
the temples of sin, but the temples of pleasure - men's pleasure!'
'That's quare talk, Ellen!' Blind Mary nodded, gone into herself
again, working it out.
'Is it, Mary? Think about it! And we can withhold that pleasure,
be apart from it. That frightens them too. A man cannot be apart
from his pleasure. His pleasure must end - ours need not.'
'Holy God, Ellen!' Blind Mary said, blessing herself hurriedly,
twice. 'I think you have it right - but no one ever says it.'
'No, they don't, Mary. But they think it when they hang witches
- and they'll think it when they hang you and me, Blind Mary!'
she added, bursting into laughter with the other woman.
'They won't need to hang us, will they, Ellie, the way we're
going?' Blind Mary replied more soberly, shaking her bottle at the dark. 'Even the dancing . . .' she started off again, back on the
Famine, '. . . it was different, you know, Ellie, before the Famine,
wilder. You could hit against the young men, feel the "scythe
stones" in their pockets.' Mary laughed at the remembering. 'After
the Famine, it was just the feet . . . not the dancers themselves, just
the feet that danced. No swinging of the scythe-stones.'
'Scythe-stones - I haven't heard that a while, Mary,' Ellen
answered, thinking of the valley girls and Peabody. And Stephen.
Scythe-stones, she thought now, was more earthy, more substantial,
more full of the frolic of happenstance. Not so sure as the arrow
of love, the fleche d'amour as Stephen and the French had it. 'But
you can't lessen a sin by setting it to music, Mary,' she mused
out loud, recalling a sermon she once heard railing against the
'carnal pleasures of the waltz'. The waltz . . . the waltz had been
her downfall.
'But you can heighten it for sure!' Blind Mary chirruped.
'That you can, Mary, that you can,' she answered, 'especially
the waltz.'
They were both silent then, thinking of different dancing days,
and how it was, as Blind Mary had said at the start of the conversation,
that the Famine had changed everything for women. Ellen
wondered if it all was just 'gin-talk'. Or did other women talk like
they did? The Daughters of the Commonwealth discussed wider
issues - 'woman's place in society'; 'the economic role of women';
'the refining role'; 'the reforming role . . .' All very interesting, in a
dried-up kind of way, but the discussions always skirted around the
basic issues of female functions and feelings. Were women afraid
of blood as well, she wondered?
With Blind Mary she could discuss everything. Dancers in the
dark, the both of them.
Libby met her next morning.
'Are you all right, Ellen? The cramps, was it?' she asked, concerned.
'I'm
fine, Libby - something like that,' she answered, wondering
if the woman could smell the gin.
'It's a curse, every month!' Libby said, not seeming suspicious.
'It is.'
'Peg-Leg was like a bull yesterday,' Libby warned her, 'so watch
out for yourself; there's a bit of a backlog at your machine.'
And indeed there was. Stacks of uppers in bins piled sky-high
waiting for her. She threw on her overall, keen to get at them. She
would already be docked a day's pay, almost a dollar. It would
leave her tight for the week, less than five dollars in all. With two
for rent and thirty-six cents for fares, what was left wouldn't go
far. But that was the way it was, and it was her own fault lying
on in bed full to the gills with gin and 'lambeggin' herself.
Clegg bided his time. He caught her by the arm in the washroom
shared by both male and female workers. She had held off going
for as long as she could, trying to catch up on the work. Tried
to gauge when too many of the men wouldn't be in there - the
clickers were the worst! Each day she and the other women ran
the gauntlet of their lewd remarks, and being felt for quality and
width, like sides of leather. Despite complaints from Libby and the
Women Workers' Union, the factory bosses refused to segregate
the toilets.
'Wouldn't even buy separate drinking mugs for us,' Libby
referred to the beer-stained and tobacco-spittled mugs they were
forced to drink from in the summer months, when the place was
like a dry oven.
'Back to work you - Irish,' Clegg said to her, 'no fanny-break
until you clear that work-jam!' He jerked her arm until it hurt
'Where were you yesterday?' he asked, pushing his face close to
hers. 'Don't tell me, I can smell it. Just like the rest of them.' He
jerked her arm again. 'Lace widow, my sainted arse. Come down
a bit in the world since we first came here, haven't we? You're no
different, a jumped-up shanty-Biddy. Get back to your machine!'
he ordered.
He pushed her back on to the shop floor, wiping his hands as if
they had held something odious between them. Until the midday
break came she thought her kidneys would kill her. Clegg watched
and watched her but she wouldn't give in to him, held on somehow
banging out the God-forsaken uppers until she had made a dent in
the backlog, and the mountains of cowhide on every side of her
had diminished.
Libby approached her in the washroom. 'I saw that bastard,
Ellen. We have to do something, take a stand - what do you
think?'
In the heat of the moment, she agreed, later regretting it.

'What do I want, getting into all that?' she said to Blind Mary.
'I've been fighting half my life just to stay alive. Now I'm tired
of it - just want to be left alone, no notice taken of me,' she
added.
'Who'll do it, Ellie, if the likes of you what's ediccated won't?'
the blind woman asked, adding, 'The likes of me wouldn't know
nothin' about them rights and things - just do the little I can while
I'm waiting for himself to come.' She paused. 'That ediccation is
a great thing and shouldn't be let go to waste, Ellie.'
There was something about the way Blind Mary spoke that
caught Ellen's ear. She looked at the blind woman, her head
nodding up and down, the thin scrawn of a neck on her, loose bits
of hair, like spiderwort, hanging about her face.
'It was you, wasn't it, Mary?' she said quietly. Ellen felt the woman go still, the nodding stop.
After a while, the question. The? What, Ellie?'
'It was you who warned Maybelle Tucker, the night she was mobbed out, wasn't it? You saved their lives,' she insisted, now
more sure than ever.
'What are you talking about, girl?' The nodding started up again.
'I didn't have the courage to do it,' Ellen told her. 'I was fearful
of what Biddy and her Fire Brigade might do to me,' she continued,
'but thank God, somebody had more courage than I did and
warned the poor woman in time.'
'Ellie, you know I don't have no time for them niggers. They
moved in and took my Dan's job at the forge, soon they'll be
crawlin' all over the place with their quare talk of "dem, dat, dese
and dose". The troops is readyin' to try and keep them held back
and good luck to them is what I say.'
'But you still did it, Mary?' she asked again.
'Will you stop at me, bad cess to you, and take a drop o' the
gin,' the blind woman said, angrily. 'Sure, no one knows who it
was - else that Biddy be after 'em!' was all she would say on the
matter.
Ellen decided not to pursue it. But she was sure she was right
about Blind Mary and was filled with admiration for her 'unediccared
an' all', as she referred to herself. Blind, hating the
black people, afraid of what might happen to the jobs in the forges
and everywhere else if the coming war was lost. 'Free the blacks and
blacken the Irish - that's what'll happen,' as Mary saw it. Yet the
human spark lived in her, the spark that would have lived in the
valleys and villages back home, but had been all but extinguished
in the mad scramble for survival here in the rookeries
and basements of Boston. She would have picked up wind of the 'mobbing-out' along the passageway. Must have crept then,
by dark probably, feeling her way along the walls to Maybelle's
house, and warned the black woman. No one would have suspected
her, Blind Mary stuck on her stoop, waiting for her
Dan.
'Biddy has been awful quiet lately, Mary,' Ellen said, thinking
back on that awful night.
'She has. Biddy has her own troubles . . . like the rest of us. God
help her!' the woman answered mysteriously. The head began
nodding again, the hair-spiders jiggling with it, in their own kind
of nodding dance.
'Well, she makes enough of them for everybody else,' Ell
replied.
'She has her reasons,' Blind Mary said, without revealing an
of them. 'Some people just bring trouble on themselves and when
they have it brung down, want to set it on everyone else around
them, too!'
The woman could have been talking about Ellen's own life instead of Biddy Earley's. Though Blind Mary always knew a
lot more than she let on, Ellen had been careful to keep her past
life closely guarded. She felt the woman was somehow chiding
her for her remarks about Biddy, though Mary was also saying
something about the woman, but in a strange, 'sure, God help
her', protective way.
Ellen wondered if she herself had judged Biddy too harshly. She
had gravely misjudged Mary, who, while apparently supporting
one course of action against the blacks, had taken another and
saved Maybelle Tucker's life and those of her children. Had she also misjudged Biddy? What were the troubles that Biddy had
brought on herself? What had caused her to be the way she was,
do the things she had done?
For the next three days the rains hammered down on Half-Moon
Place. At least, she thought, as she wrung out her sodden doorstop,
it would clear the air of the reek of urine and excrement. Even if
in doing so, it washed some of it down on top of the unfortunate
wretches who were the basement dwellers. With only one privy
for every one hundred occupants and the constant backwater
from overflowing drains, those who lived in the tenements were
in constant companionship with a host of diseases.
That year alone, Blind Mary had told her, seventy children
under the age of five had died. Some from 'arsenical wallpaper',
some from disease brought on by the mix of fresh and stale
milk sold from unwashed barrels by McGinty, the milk-dealer.
Some had died, unable even to swallow McGinty's milk, their
throats closed by life-squeezing mucous membrane - the scourge
of summer, diphtheria.
Some of the mothers along the passageway who nursed their
new-born were in such straits of ignorance and poverty that they
fed them anything they could lay their hands on. Beans, cucumbers,
and other half-cooked, sun-spoiled vegetables, washed down with
mother's milk if it was to be had, McGinty's if not. Even Blind
Mary's gin, watered down, became the liquid sustenance of many
infants.
'It was a miracle,' Ellen said to Blind Mary, 'not that so many
children died, but that any survive.'
The shortness of tenement life did not apply solely to the
very young. 'It's the older young, in their twenties, who are
perishing too!' Blind Mary told her, nodding seriously. 'We're
a perishing class, that's what we Irish are, Ellie, a perishing
class.'
Yet the ships still came, ferrying in more of the perishing class
to replace those already perished. Ellen herself had now been in
Boston almost twelve years. On average, Irish lives in the city, she
knew, did not exceed fourteen years, and although she was only in
her fortieth year, she was already in decline. Everything about her
life pointed to it.

She knew by Biddy Farley's face there was trouble; normally dour,
that cross craivmogne of a nose on her, the woman's eyes now held
something else - panic.
'Can you come, widow-woman, come quick and help me?' she
asked, a previously unheard pleading in her voice.
Ellen's first response was to have nothing to do with her. She was only trouble, and had done terrible things. Now, what difficulty she
had got herself into God only knew. Blind Mary's words about the
woman came back to her - 'she has her reasons, her own troubles'.
But why come to her? Hadn't she all her cronies, her 'mobbing-out'
gangs and her Irish Fire Brigade? Why her? Unless Biddy had fallen
out with the rest of them?
'Please help me, widow-woman?' she said, grabbing Fallen's
hands, beseeching her to come.
Ellen followed her out into the passageway, Biddy hastening
ahead of her. Down they went into the gloom of the basement
in which she lived. Ellen had to steady herself more than once;
slime had been washed down on to Biddy's stairs from the sink
of the lane above.
'Take your shoes off!' Biddy called back to her.
Ellen ignored her. What notions the woman had! Seeking her
help, then afraid she would dirty the floor of her basement. But she
wasn't about to filthy her feet on the contagion that was underfoot.
Her eyes not yet accustomed to the cavernous darkness, Ellen
took the last downward step with a shock, her foot landing in
water. The whole of Biddy Farley's basement was a pool of dark
mucus-like water.
'Oh!' she exclaimed, feeling it swill around her legs, a foot or
so deep.
Biddy didn't answer her, but made some sound and then called into the gloom. 'C'mere to me, where are you, you little black
bastard?'
Her eyes at last becoming accustomed to the dim light of the
basement, Ellen could make out the shape of Biddy's bed in the
corner, cobbled together out of flimsy wood, tea-chest material
maybe, the water lapping at the edge of it. Articles floated on
the membrane of the water: a pot, bits of firewood, a few sodden
vegetables, and a shoe. Something smooth touched her leg.
She dreaded to look down, fearing the worst, and hurriedly
withdrew her leg from the water, stepping back up the slimy
staircase.
Biddy's basement was a veritable cesspool, filled with the flotsam
and jetsam of tenement life. She saw Biddy grab for something - a
box, floating around the room like a small boat.
'C'mere to me, will you?' the woman repeated.
Then Ellen saw what the object was. It was a makeshift coffin,
the lid not yet on it. Just another piece of flotsam in this
flooded crypt. She then saw that there was something within the coffin-boat. It was the body of a small child, maybe two years
old . . . motionless . . . black.
'Oh my God, Biddy!' she started to say.
'It's my Patrick,' Biddy said. 'Patrick Joseph Earley, my little
black bastard, and he's almost gone, widow-woman.'
Dumbstruck as she was, Ellen waded over to where Biddy stood,
relieved that at least the child wasn't dead. But he wasn't far from
it - hardly a giog out of him.
'I put him in the box to try and keep him dry,' Biddy explained.
The child's dark forehead glistened with fever. When Ellen put
her hand to it he made a small whimper of a noise.
'He's fevered, Biddy, I don't know what - we'll have to get help,
get him out of here. Bring him to my place, it's fairly dry,' she
said, all in a panic, not knowing if anything she did would save
the child.
'No! No! We can't bring him out. No one knows . . . that's why
I came to you,' Biddy said, trying not to raise her voice.
'But he'll die, Biddy, unless we get a doctor!' Ellen entreated.
'He stays here!' Biddy said, defiantly. 'I had him here in the darkand he's never been a day outside it since. Nor will he,' she added,
'until the lid goes on him!'
This was more like the Biddy she knew - the agitating Biddy.
But she was also frightened, Ellen knew.
'I won't breathe a word to a soul, Biddy. I'll wait with you, if
that's your wish,' she said.
So they sat, the two of them, keeping vigil, Ellen on a step of the
stairs above the water, Biddy on the partly submerged bed, rocking
the coffin-boat. Ellen wondered how much longer the wood could
hold out the fetid water.
'One little nigger less in the world,' Biddy said, to no one in
particular. 'I hated him when he was born,' she continued, 'all
black and blue and bloody, like a forest animal. But he grew on
me, the little savage. And a quare thing, widow-woman, when he
started his gruntin' little sounds, he made them just like us - like
he was Irish!'
Ellen didn't know what to say to her. Biddy hated the black
people with a vengeance, yet here she was, despite herself, forced
to love one of them. One of them out of her own body, and who
fashioned sounds like her. It must have altered her mind, that, her
own flesh and blood - hating and loving it at the same time had
made her the way she was.
'It must have been hard on you, Biddy?' she said, after a while. 'Hard on me, widow-woman? You don't know the meaning of
hard. I cooped up here with him, trying to keep him hid, with
his big hungry eyes . . . wantin' feedin'. Me thumb stuck in his
mouth to stop him crying. But I couldn't put him to me breast.
I just couldn't do it!'
Ellen said nothing.
'I prayed the Lord would take him, but He didn't. He was
hardy, God love the little bastard,' she said, Ellen knowing it
was probably the nearest Biddy would ever get to a prayer for
her 'little bastard'.
Outside the rain had stopped. If it held off a while, the water
would gradually subside, leaving behind whatever debris and detritus
it had brought. Leaving behind Ellen, and Biddy, and the dying
child. They were the real debris, she thought, all of them down here in Half-Moon Place and in Fort Hill and the North End too, raised
and lowered on the tidal backwater of tenement life. Eventually
discarded, in basement hovels and makeshift coffin-boats. Her and
Biddy and Blind Mary, all with their secrets, all of a muchness.
And Blind Mary, with the dream of her returning Dan, her
crazy novena'd dream. Three blind mice they were, poking about
in the under-dark. Creeping and scurrying through the alleyways
of life, keeping each other company with nodding talk
and stoop-life gin, until one by one, each of their tails would be
cut off.
'I had to stop them!' Biddy broke into her thoughts. 'I had to
stop them in the end, widow-woman. But they were too worked
up by then, so I let them - but it wasn't her fault,' she said.
'Who, Biddy?' Ellen asked.
'The nigger-woman. It wasn't her fault, it was her runaway
husband ... I had the drink on me,' she added. 'And . . .' she
looked down at the child, 'so I upped and I warned her!'
'You warned her?' Ellen couldn't keep the amazement out of
her voice. 'But you ... I thought it ... you blamed me.' she said,
more angrily now.
'I know. I had to, otherwise ... I did you a wrong . . .' Ellen
had never seen Biddy Earley so lost for words. 'I'm sorry about the
trouble I brung on you, widow-woman!' she eventually got out.
Ellen didn't know what to think. She had assumed it was Blind
Mary who had warned Maybelle Tucker, and that the woman
had only been parrying with her by not admitting to anything.
Never in a million years would she have thought of Biddy herself.
What turmoils the woman must have gone through, with her
black child, her dark secret which she had to keep hidden - her
'smoked-Irish' child.
'It's all right, Biddy,' she said, her annoyance subsiding, 'you
had your own troubles, it's all right, and your secret is safe,' she
reassured the woman. 'But I have one question,' she added.
'Ask away!' Biddy responded.
'Was it you who took the book - the book of English poems?'
she asked.
'I'm no common thief,' Biddy said angrily. 'What would I be
doing with them pernicious English poems, any more than them
poisonous dime novels? You know I'm not well-got with the
readin',' she stated.
Ellen had thought that Biddy had taken the book out of revenge
believing that it was she who had warned Maybelle Tucker. But
with what the woman had just revealed to her, that could not have
been her motivation. If Biddy was telling her the truth, then who
was the 'common thief, that the woman didn't want to be labelled
as, who had taken Ellen's book of 'pernicious English poems', as
Biddy called them?
The two women sat and waited, didn't say very much after that
both engrossed in their own thoughts. The water dropped an inch
or two, not much more. Biddy still held the side of the coffin, from
which now no sound emanated, peering into it every so often, as if
expecting some sign.
'Do you think he's gone?' she asked after a while.
'I don't know, Biddy,' Ellen answered, and made to get up to
have a look.
'Stay there where you are, widow-woman!' Biddy ordered, and
pushed out the coffin-boat towards her. It was like something
out of a dream, and reminded her of a story her father used
to tell about Hades and Charon, the boatman of the Underworld.
The
Styx, he had told her, was one of the five rivers of Hades,
over whose infernal waters Charon ferried the souls of the dead
for an obolos - a farthing - placed in the corpse's mouth. If the
boatman was not paid then the dead became lost souls, never
reaching Elysium, the abode of the blessed. Left to wander eternally
on the Stygian shores.
She went down a step to where the water level had dropped and
caught the coffin-boat. Patrick Joseph Earley, his dark curly hair
dampened with fever, lay there, his eyes open, some last whimper
framed in his mouth. She laid her hand on his forehead. While
beads of perspiration still remained, there was no heat in them
now. He was gone all right. Gently, she closed the child's eyes and
mouth.
'He's gone, Biddy,' she said, blessing herself.
'Push him back here to me till I get the lid. There's no point in
praying for them, they don't have no souls,' she asserted.
'What about the half-soul he got from you, Biddy?' Ellen
asked.
'Well, if he did, itself it's as black as me own for what I done. As
black as his own little savage's heart!' Biddy said, still defiant.
Ellen looked at the 'little savage's' face. It was just the fresh
formed face of a child in sleep. Whatever fine looks it held had
come from his father, not from Biddy Earley, she couldn't help
but notice. She said her own prayer for the safe journey of the
boy's soul to the Elysian fields, then pushed him back over the
divide between herself and his mother.
Later, under cover of darkness, she helped Biddy carry the coffin
boat down the passageway; they placed it in the burned-out ruins
of Maybelle Tucker's house. Visible, so it would be found before
the tenement dogs would shred the frail timbers. She offered to
let Biddy stay at her place until the waters went down, but Biddy
refused.
'This don't change nothin' between us, widow-woman!' was
how she put it.
For the few remaining hours that night, Ellen lay awake trying
to work it all out. Was nothing as it seemed with people? And
Biddy - was she a good or a bad person? She was sure the woman
herself didn't know. And, if Biddy didn't know, did it really matter
if anyone else did?
She was getting like Peabody now, addling her brain with questions
that had no answers. Still, she supposed, it was important to
raise them, now that she had the time. Life, if it was just a journey
from here to somewhere else, was not about working, or doing, or
sleeping, or eating. It was about questions - peeling them off like
the skin of an onion till you got to the next one to be asked, then
peeled that question back, and so on.
Eventually, before you left life, you perhaps got somewhere close
to the core of it, and were ready to take the next step - out of
life. Then, there would be no more questions, only the face of
God. That sight she was beginning to more and more hunger
for every day and every night, but she was not ready yet. She
had to peel away her own skins first, root out the imperfections,
her attachment to things of this life, like the book; she was still
wondering what had happened to it - but did it matter? And the
much worse attachment - remembering, holding on to forbidden memories, however infrequently she entertained them. Going back,
creeping round Boston like a wraith, looking at the past, that was a
grievous relapse. That was not the path to spirituality, the path to
the real life, to her redemption.
But then again, maybe the real life was no more than simply
puncturing a series of holes in endless shoe-leather without managing
to pierce her finger; accepting her lot. And did it really matter
which life was which? She couldn't fathom one, couldn't escape
the other.
'There's going to be a war, Ellen!' Libby Corrigan stated categorically
a few days later, during the time of Advent. Ellen thought
minds should be more turned to the coming of the Saviour's birth

than to war.
'A time of great change is coming in America and it's going
to be our great chance too, for workers and for women,' Libby
enthused, no thought of Christmas appearing on her horizon.
'I don't see anything exciting about war, Libby,' Ellen replied.
'Eat difference it'll make to you and me, except longer shifts maybe,
making marching boots.'
'It's time now before that for the Sisterhood of Toil to start the
struggle,' Libby said, her voice laced with something Ellen remembered.
A zealot's voice - Stephen. 'If there's no struggle there's no
progress, you know that, Ellen. Boss-power gives nothing without
labour-power taking it.' Libby beckoned her closer. 'The men are
ready - Washington's birthday, in the New Year!'
Ellen looked at her. It was like going to war for Libby. All
worked up she was, like Stephen used to get. Did everyone always
need a cause, to be going against something? Fighting for some
freedom or other: Ireland, the blacks, the workers, women? Once
she had thought 'causes' only afflicted men. She looked at Libby,
the small pixie-like face shining, the sing-song of her Wickla
accent, flattened and hardened now, three thousand miles away
stirring up the women of America.
'On February twenty-second next, the biggest march in the history
of the United States is going to happen - here in Massachusetts,
in Lynn,' Libby laid it out like a military plan, 'otherwise we'll end
up back to fifty cents a day like three years ago!'
Ellen well remembered the '57 depression. She, Libby, and thousands of other workers had barely survived it. Since then, the
Massachusetts cordwainers had become more and more militant,
pushing for increased wages, reduced hours and a minimum set of
working conditions. If they didn't hold together now, up the pace
of the struggle, the pressures of the almost-inevitable civil war
would be used to squeeze them down again. 'Patriotism' would
demand that they do more for less.
Her heart wasn't really in it. It was a distraction from her own
path, a further lack of acceptance. People always wanted to change
things. But Libby had stood by her from the start when things
were tough.
'All right, Libby, I'm with you!' she said, not sure what she could
contribute to Washington's birthday.
Libby Corrigan's face lit up, so that Ellen was glad she had
thrown in her lot with her. 'Good, we need women like you.
What's going to happen,' Libby explained, 'is that thousands of
the men are going to march on the factories and hand in their
tools. In the following weeks the machinists will strike. Then,
before St Patrick's Day, we'll take to the streets. We'll show them
what fanny-power is all about!' Libby said, full of it.

Ellen agreed to help with the making of banners, each night,
by hand, laboriously stitching in the words of Wickla Libby's
banner-cry.

American Ladies will not be slaves

Give us a fair compensation

And we will labour cheerfully

It was slow tedious work, further aggravating the welts on the
fingers of her left hand. The poor light and her own failing
sight causing her to misjudge time and again the exit point of
her stout needle. But she persisted, offering it up against time in
Purgatory.

'Bottleneck!' The word went around the Closing Room at the
Massachusetts Cordwaining Company.
'Bottleneck' was the signal for the women to bring the factory
to a standstill. But in a manner in which nobody could be blamed
because unlike a strike, there would be no downing of tools. The
opposite, in fact, as Libby had put it.
'We work out of our skins until we've emptied our own section
and clogged up the next with shoe-leather,' she explained. 'We'll
have nothing to do and the finishers will have too much. Peg-Leg
will go mad seeing us sitting here, and Bull Jenkins in the Finishing
Room - wait till he charges in here blaming Clegg.'
Ellen couldn't help feel a tremble of excitement at the notion of
causing trouble for the foreman.
'Next,' Libby went on like some pint-sized general marshalling
her troops, 'Peg-Leg will slump off to the Cutting Room looking
for more work. But the clickers will examine every hide twice for
"flaws" and "bad-grained leather", delaying us even further. Then,
with no work now coming from us, Jenkins will be back in again,
bullin', that now his section lies idle. It won't be long before the
bosses are down and they'll all, Clegg, Jenkins, the whole lot of
them, get it in the neck. Except us - we're only tryin' to work as
hard as they'll let us!'
It was a master plan, Ellen thought.
'It'll dawn on them eventually,' Libby concluded, 'that there's
more to needle-life than boss-power! This is just to give them a
taste before the Christmas of what's waiting for them after it,' she
said, relishing the thought.

If leather ever flew, it flew that week. Ellen had never worked as
hard. Clegg couldn't believe his luck at how the output from his
section set new levels of production, and how few 'fanny-breaks
there seemed to be. It was the best Christmas present he could
get, and given all the unrest that was abroad, he could pride himself that his section, at least, was trouble-free. However, his
natural Lancastrian cautiousness kept him alert. There was a lot
of talk going around and the place was infested with Biddies
and Bloomerists, neither to be trusted. The Irish the worst, well
schooled in skulduggery of every sort by their Popish Mass-men.
When Jenkins came he came at him like a bull through the line
of machines, just as Libby had forecast. 'Clegg, what in Heaven's
name are you at?' the other foreman demanded. Ellen, Libby and
the rest of them strained their ears to hear it all. 'Trying to show
me up, is it? Piling it on to my lasses?'
Peg-Leg defended his 'lasses': 'Well, get back bloody up there
and get them to work as hard as mine!'
Jenkins thundered off, to the continuing clamour from his own
girls about thread problems, feeder problems, loose bobbins and
uppers not properly bound, until like little hillocks of leather,
the work piled higher and higher at every workstation under his
supervision.
Next, as Libby had also forecast, the supply of work from the
Cutting Room to the binders slowed down. Bundles of work, when
they did arrive, came unskived and mismatched so that Clegg was
now forced to go to the Cutting Room foreman complaining about
these delays and claiming that 'my lasses' who 'are breaking their
backs' now had 'no work' due to 'slackers' in the Cutting Room.
And so the bottleneck spread from one area of production to the
next. The Bottoming Room, and Lasting, Eyeletting, Topstitching,
until finally the checkers started to send work back wholesale,
complaining that 'the speedups' ordered by Clegg and Jenkins had
caused the quality to plummet!
By the end of the week each floor of the five-storey building was
in complete chaos. Partly-finished shoes and boots lay everywhere.
Half-filled boxes jammed the stairways, everybody blaming everybody
else, while empty dispatch carts were stacked up one behind
the other waiting for goods to fill them at the loading bays.
Libby was ecstatic. Ellen, too, felt exhilarated that after years of drudgery, they had somehow 'gotten back' at the avaricious
bosses, proclaiming to Libby that it was 'the best day's sport
since I stepped foot in this place'.
Bloomerism worked.
However, she was having second thoughts about taking to
the streets in March. Appearing in public was different, inviting
discovery and the risk of raking up all that she had managed to
keep buried for the past four years, since she had 'disappeared'.
Still, it was good to be part of something she had always believed
in before it had any names like 'Sisterhood' or 'Bloomerism', or
even Libby Corrigan's 'fanny-power'!

Blind Mary took great interest in the banner-making, getting Ellen
to describe it to her - what the words said, even the colours of
the threads. Then she would feel the raised rump of the stitching,
running her finger around it, nodding her head as if the banner
itself were talking to her.
'Oh, it'll be a fine banner, I can tell. If I only had the sight, I'd
march ahind it meself,' she said. 'Will you be one to carry it, Ellie?'
She had no intention of carrying it, and was hesitant enough
about being just one of the crowd.
Up to this Ellen had never mentioned anything to Blind Mary
about Biddy or the child, but now Mary herself drew it down.
'There was a great commotion the other day while you were at
work, Ellie. They found a casket with a little blackfella in it up at
the burnt house. It near went out of my head to tell you.'
Ellen said nothing.
'Mind, it wasn't one of hers . . .' Blind Mary said,'. . . the nigger
woman what got mobbed-out!'
'I suppose it could have been any poor waif,' Ellen replied, trying
to get rid of the subject.
'Ah, faith, 'tis well known to some whose waif it was!' Blind
Mary said, starting the nodding again.
Ellen didn't know if the woman was referring to her, or was
instead letting her know that she, Blind Mary, knew, so she
let the remark go, and waited a moment before changing the
conversation.
'They say, Mary, there'll be war before long, on account of John
Brown last year in Virginia - attacking the Government gunnery
at Harper's Ferry.'
'I think you are right, Ellie,' Blind Mary said, the head going
strongly. 'But no Irish supported him, nor even the niggers he was
trying to raise up!' she added, as if John Brown had received his
proper comeuppance.
'They were foolish to hang him,' Ellen believed, 'making a
martyr out of him. The British always made that mistake with
us!' she added.
'Sure, he wasn't a right American at all,' Blind Mary started
to disagree, 'a black Protestant, he was the spawn of Cromwell
himself! They didn't hang him half high enough. It's our poor
innocent Irish boys who'll be sent out in the end because of the
like of John Brown - and our lads don't want Lincoln neither!'
For a blind woman who hardly moved off her stoop, Mary had
her ear well glued to the ground, Ellen thought. She probably got
it at night from the sailors and the militiamen, when they were
well juiced up on her juniper berries.
'Lincoln will be the President, with or without the Irish vote,
Mary - he's a good man,' she argued.
'He's nothing of the kind, he's a nigger-lover and the Southern
States won't have him.' Blind Mary argued vehemently against
Abraham Lincoln. 'He'll show the cloven hoof yet, Ellie, and burst
the country apart!' she predicted, adding dolefully, 'Oh, Ellie, it's
terrible times we're living in; I hope we'll all be spared - and poor
Dan. I'm thinkin' of startin' a new novena that he won't come back
at all now, afore the trouble starts and he be drafted to fight for the
niggers. The heart is scalded in me, Ellie, tryin' to work out what's
right and what's wrong.'
The woman was right about the troubled times ahead, and there
was nothing Ellen could say about Dan that wouldn't sound false.
Not that Blind Mary, now that she had started on her favourite
topic, gave her much chance.
'It's a shame, all the trouble them savages is bringin' on people, after the Court giving it down that they was inferior and unfit to
mix with us white folk.'
Mary, she knew, was referring to a case two years previously, whose judgment that a Negro had no rights equivalent to a white man was widely supported amongst Boston's Irish. But Ellen didn't
like to hear talk of imminent war and Lincoln going to 'burst the
country' as Mary put it. If there was a civil war, then everything
else would fall into second place - the Sisterhood, higher wages
and better conditions. Factories might even be closed with the war
soaking up men and money on every side.
That night she thought on the war.
What of her own? They all had strong views on the Southern
question. Patrick was twenty-two now, almost twenty-three. If he
went to war it would be with the South, she was sure of that.
Lavelle also, she thought, would stand with the South. Stephen
she couldn't tell. He would regard the South trying to free itself
from the American Union as the mirror of an Ireland bent on
breaking its union with Britain. On the other hand, he was always
for 'freedoms', for the abolition of slavery. It might even depend
on what stance his comrades - and Lavelle's too - took. Some
of his Young Ireland comrades had already indicated they would
join with the South. Others of them had spoken out for the North.
So it would be Young Irelander against Young Irelander, sons and
lovers against fathers and husbands. She closed her mind against
the thoughts of it.
At least, she consoled herself, the girls would be safe from the
war, in the sanctuary of the Magdalen convent. Although it must
be soon, she thought, that they would be professed, take their final
vows. It was nearly five years now, she'd never forget the day; a
Tuesday in early October 1855, under the Great Elm. Maybe they
still had another year to go yet, she wasn't sure. Then they would
come out from their solitude, and rescue poor sinners like herself,
the Preservatives and Penitents. Help them back towards a life
of grace - a blameless life. They were young women now, Mary
twenty-one, Louisa a year or two older. Of marriageable age, but
Brides of Christ - Mary's golden-red hair cropped short, hidden
modestly behind the brown Magdalen head-dress, Louisa's dark
and shiny nut-brown tresses, similarly gone. But their smiles . . she could imagine the radiance of them at having found the real
life, the one she now sought. She wondered if Louisa had yet
spoken. These past five years she would have had no need, Ellen
supposed, in a life consecrated to silence. Still, she had always

wondered about Louisa - if she had the power to speak. The old
woman Sheela-na-Sheeoga's prophecy still stood. 'She will speak
at the moment of silence . . .' Sheela had said of Louisa '
the far-off land.'
Ellen couldn't work it out. Maybe 'speaking' wasn't 'speaking'
at all, perhaps some act, some sign, something the girl would do.
Maybe it was as simple as Louisa speaking by taking vows - 'the
moment of silence' meaning entering the silent world of a convent
in America - 'the far-off land'. She left it there, turning instead
to pray for them all, that they would be delivered safely from
whatever lay in store for them.

DO

In the cold New Year snows Blind Mary came not as often to visit
her as she previously had - 'until the weather picks up again!'
Ellen was more pleased with this than she might have imagined.
The woman kept her going, could put talk in a bottle, and
frequently did, especially on the nights she swigged her juniper
juice. Blind Mary never called it gin any more or 'Geneva' as Ellen
told her she heard them call it in Westport once. The 'juice of the
juniper berry' seemed to put a different character on the grubby
bottle, whose neck the blind woman would wipe clean with the
heel of her hand before passing it to Ellen. 'And sure it is for the
good of our health, Ellie!' Blind Mary would argue, 'while we're
alive. We'll be in the grave long enough, then where'll we get a
sup o' it?'
But Ellen was well relieved that Mary and her juice of the juniper
berry had banished themselves, at least temporarily. More and
more she valued solitude, regarding herself as a Magdalen 'on the
outside' having passed from being a Preservative to the higher,
Penitent state. She was not yet ready, she knew, to be a full Magdalen,
a contemplative, her life devoted totally to sanctification, a
life of complete self-denial, of absolute abnegation. She had a loose
idea that by the close of the year, when maybe Mary and Louisa
were taking their final vows, she too might be ready to advance
herself to the final Magdalen state. It was something to aim for.
Already she had taken the shard of vanity glass she kept as
a mirror and cast it away. What use had she of it anyway, at
her age? It was well named - 'vanity' glass - for primpin' and
posin' herself in front of. Her, with the eyes hollowed back in
her head from stitching and sewing, eyes needing 'her little blue
windows', as she called the spectacles, to see any bit of detail at all. And her forehead, furrowed with being scrunched up over
that infernal Singer machine, worrying about her eight stitches
per inch, discoloured from years of tannic acid. Above it the fine dos of hair she once had gone wild on her, its lustre lost, like
gone-to-seed corn.
Mostly she kept it pinned back - bad enough catching her
fingers in the feeders, without her hair too. She ate sparingly,
'not enough as would put flesh on a sparrow's shin', Blind Mary
used to castigate her. That showed in her face too, the skin either
side of her nose now pinched a little, exaggerating her cheekbones.
And the little furrow below her nose that ran down to her lips, the
one Lavelle always watched when she became impassioned about
something, or in passion itself, had flattened a bit, the tiniest of
creases attaching themselves to its ridges, creases she couldn't see
but could feel all the same.
Since the day she had cut herself away from her previous life,
the only condescension she had allowed to it was to 'beautify'
herself with a solid bar of carbolic soap. Not a speck of powder,
not a jot of rouge had she ever put on since. Now, in her simple
homespun smock with her wild hair and her clean-scrubbed face,
she could have been one of the many young women teeming off
the emigrant ships straight from the valley-life in Ireland.
Apart from her sight - and her age, being the forty now.
The cordwainers' strike on George Washington's birthday, 22 February,
produced a triumphant turnout. Thousands upon thousands
of shoemakers and bootmakers clogged the streets of Lynn and
handed in their awls, lasting hammers and clicking knives. Thousands
more citizens turned out to support the striking workers. But
the men strikers did not add the women's grievances to their own,
fearing it would damage their cause.
Ellen was in a dither about the women's protest, the following
month. After all the preparation involved and Libby's unbridled
enthusiasm, part of her looked forward to the march. The cause
was just and right, one she had always espoused. She remembered
Mary, at thirteen, being all fired up about notions of 'a society for
the promotion of industry, virtue and knowledge'; how she herself
had told them that 'mill life should be more than the tyranny of
employment replacing the tyranny of unemployment'. In that sense
she felt duty-bound to the children, as well as to Libby, to uphold
those views, to march.
The other half of her ached for anonymity. She had a fear of
being recognized, her shame revisited on Lavelle and the children.
Increasingly, too, she saw all activities such as marching and
agitating as distractions from her inner life, from contemplating
the Divine and her soul's delivery.
She decided that on balance, she should go. In any event, she
would be downing tools like the rest of them after the march - or
'walking off the machines', as Libby called it. She wondered what
she would do, how long she could hold out for, without even the
miserly few dollars she now earned coming in. And while Libby
was convinced that 'the bosses will break first, when the machines don't sing', Ellen wasn't. But God will provide, she thought, even
if the bosses wouldn't.
Though it was not yet St Patrick's Day, Blind Mary had found
her a sprig of shamrock from somewhere. On the day of the march
itself snow was falling but this did little to dampen the spirits of
the eight hundred women who turned out.
'Though we are smaller in number than the men, our protest
will be as important - it will show other women what can be
done!' Libby said to her, undeflated by the numbers or nature's
climate.
So they marched in the falling snow, her banner boldly out front,
she further back, hidden under the umbrellas. It was exciting.
Crowds lined each side of the street, some to gawk at the brazen
shoewomen, others shouting support to them, bosses' men to
heckle them.
From a makeshift platform Libby addressed them, Ellen marvelling
at the gritty Wickla woman prettied with cows.
'Sisterhood of Toil,' she began to a huge cheer, 'sewing at once
with a double thread a shroud as well as a shoe . . .'
The cheering swelled. It was a favourite theme of Libby's - that
because of the conditions in which they worked, they were all
'sewing themselves into an early grave'.
'When Massachusetts supports the freedom of the black slave,
what do we say?'
'Yes!' sprang up the roar.
'When we, the white slaves of the North seek our rights, what
do we want Massachusetts to say?'
'Yes!' came the clamour of hundreds.
'American ladies - we will not be slaves!' Libby Corrigan from
Wicklow shouted at the top of her voice.
'No!' The roar of the needlewomen and mill girls thundered
against the white, falling flakes.
That was as far as Libby got. She was immediately drowned
out by the derumptytum of a marching band. When she stopped
speaking the band at once stopped playing. When she started up
again, so too did the band. The bosses and Tory shoe barons had
sought to hold the women workers up to ridicule, to reduce the
protest to a carnival with music as the weapon. Women, they held,
violated their sphere by public speaking.
It was stalemate until Libby, incensed by the treatment being
meted out to them, leaped down from her makeshift platform and
made for the hapless musicians, umbrella flailing.
'I'll give you music!' she shouted, much to the delight of the Sisterhood and onlookers alike, a bevy of them joining her in
similarly belabouring the band. The musicians took to their heels
under the assault from the angry needlewomen with nary a toot
nor a derumptytum between them, the only sound ringing in their
ears, the flat battle-cry of Wickla.
'Musicians, is it,' Libby shouted derisorily, 'they haven't a sping
of spittle between the lot o' them - buglers and dung-diggers!'
Ellen hadn't enjoyed a day like it since the bottlenecks.

The strike spread right across Massachusetts with some twenty
thousand cordwainers downing tools, the greatest walkout in
American labour history. Lincoln, campaigning for the Republican
Presidential nomination in New England, declared support for the
freedom of the workers to strike.
'I like a system which lets a man strike when he wants to and
quit when he wants to,' Lincoln said, likening that freedom to the
same freedom slavery sought to deny. Ellen liked Lincoln with
his 'Capital is the fruit of labour', but labour being 'greatly the
superior of capital'.
But Abraham Lincoln or no, the Tory bosses ignored the
workers' demands. The very reasons for which the strike was
called, 'The High Wages List', bit by bit forced the striking workers
back to work - when they had no wages.
Two weeks later, with the machines still not singing and the
Massachusetts Cordwaining Company still silent, so too were the
Tory bosses to the workers' demands.
'Libby! I can't stay out any longer,' Ellen was driven to tell her
friend after a meeting to decide the future. 'I have nothing to pay
the rent with.'

By early April Libby had returned to work, one of the last few remaining strikers to do so. It was all over. The cordwainers' strike
had failed and the factories sang once more to the sound of the
Singer sewing machine - eight beats to the bar, eight stitches per
inch. Though she did not say as much to Libby, Ellen was glad it
was all over. She didn't have the heart for such things any more. Just to put in her day was all she wanted, and to talk to Blind Mary
at night, hear the old songs and the old stories. Even Blind Mary's
praying and then her not praying for Dan's safe return was a sort
of blessed normality. Blind Mary didn't require her to do anything
- just to be willing to talk or more often to listen.
She had come to accept again the visits of the old woman, using
the onset of Lent and abstinence from alcohol as a reason for refusing
the 'bewitching fruit' of Blind Mary's bottle.
And when the brighter spring days and longer nights had edged
in over Half-Moon Place, Blind Mary had once again begun to visit
her with more frequency, cabin-hunting along the passageway for
talk and any gossip or scandal that was going. Ellen herself did not
engage in the cabin-hunting talk, lapsing more and more into silence,
listening, letting Mary ramble on about everything under the sun.
How 'wicked proud' she was, of 'her Dan', and America being 'a
land without stars' and 'the sun not dancing on Easter morning
on account of the place being full of "niggerology" with Lincoln
and his likes!'
They would recite the Litany to the Blessed Virgin or whatever
saint it was that week, who was in vogue with Mary, and
who would bring Dan dancin' back under the archway to her
or else keep him away 'safe till the nigger-war is over'. Then
Blind Mary would spin out songs of tryst and treason, and
tales of young girls forced to marry old 'dead' husbands and
'Rise up Your Blanket', and the like. Rattling them off like
her prayers. Songs she had 'picked up' or 'got' back home in
Ireland or kept alive here in the late-night dram shops. One
she had learned from Biddy Earley, 'Lord Gregory'. 'The babe
is cold in my arms, Lord Gregory let me in,' she sang in her
gin-cracked voice.
In return, Ellen recited what she could remember of the Holy
Sonnets. Without her missing book, it was difficult.
'Then, as my soul, to heaven her first seat, takes flight . . .
So, fall my sins . . .
For thus I leave the world, the flesh, the devil.'

And the blind woman would cross herself three times. 'Jesus, Mary
and Holy Saint Joseph, Ellie - you have the heart put crossways on
me . . .' And she would hurl back the gin into her mouth. 'I'll ha' to
give up the drink, I will ... do d' other one instead, Ellie - the one
about wakin' up again when you die!' And Ellen would recite:

'Death be not proud . . .
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.'

'Death, thou shalt die,' Blind Mary would repeat, 'that's a better
class of a poem altogether,' and she would pull at the bottle again,
all thought of giving it up gone now that death was dead. 'You
never say d' other ones no more, Ellie - you know, the ones you
used to ... about love and his mistress and the like?' Blind Mary
asked, nodding in agreement with herself.
'No, not any more, Mary, they're ... I got tired of them,' she
answered, half-telling the truth. Instead, she would sing one of the
old songs for Mary and herself - in Irish, the words now sitting
better with her, the rust of years fallen away, their beauty shining
out in the blue dark between them.
'All the same, Ellie, you can't whack the old songs,' the woman
would say when Ellen had completed singing.
'I suppose you can't, Mary,' she would answer. 'They're not just
songs, they're what we are.'
And so it went into the early summer, everything in its place,
everything settled. She diligently went to work, partaking in none
of the Bloomerism or the cat-calling at Clegg. Once, even, when
he leaned over, rubbing himself into her back, asking him without
malice, 'Mr Clegg, to which God do you kneel at night?'
And like the singing of her needle puncturing the uppers, the talk
and nodding songs of Blind Mary became part of the safe fabric of
her material world.
In the late summer, when the heat rose, Dan returned.
'Jesus, Mary and Joseph and Holy St Jude - hisself came back!'
Blind Mary croaked at Ellen, all excited. 'But we always knew he
would, didn't we, Ellie?' she insisted.
Ellen agreed. The woman had shown unshakeable faith. 'Flow
is he, Mary?' she asked.
'Oh, he's great in hisself, great entirely, though . . .' She hesitated,
came closer to Ellen. '. . . I think the old complaint still ails him from
the furnaces,' she explained.
'Oh!' said Ellen, understanding. Dan's brain, she felt, must still
be 'melted'.
'Yes,' the blind woman said, a hint of melancholy in her voice.
'He's talking about going again, when the war comes. I suppose
that's the way with the men, coming and going? Sure, he has to, I suppose?' she added.
Her heart went out to the woman. Ellen herself had never
believed that 'hisself would return, yet Blind Mary had prayed her
novenas, sat on her stoop every day at the doorpost, 'looking out
for him'. And sure enough the scoundrel had come 'buckleppin'
down the passageway whistling as if he hadn't been gone a day,
scattering the unclad urchins just as Blind Mary always said he
would. She had no recriminations for his long absence. Blind
faith was followed by blind love; no questions asked, no answers
expected.
It wouldn't be that way for her if she returned, Ellen knew, not
that she deserved it. She hadn't been 'just gone', like Dan. She had
transgressed, crossed the forbidden line, and while a man might cross
over it, he could cross back again. A woman, she knew, couldn't.
About a week later, Blind Mary visited Ellen again. She came in
sheepishly, head down, hands behind her back, the sun lighting
her spidery frame in the doorway.
'What's the matter, Mary?' Ellen asked, concerned. 'Is it Dan?'
The woman shook her head.
'What is it then?' She went to take her by the arm, but, before
she could do so, Blind Mary brought her hands from behind her
back and pushed something towards her.
'What . . . ? Oh, Mary - it's my book! Where . . . ?' She was
beside herself. After all this time her book that was lost was found.
Her joy had been returned to her; it was a small, tender miracle.
'Thanks be to God,' she said.
'I'm sorry, Ellie,' Blind Mary was saying, her voice barely
audible. 'I should never have took it. I wanted to have it for
when hisself came back ... to read them out loud to me, the way
you did,' she explained.
Ellen took the book, hardly heeding the words, running her
hands over the cover, thumbing open the leaves, hearing them fall
together again, the lines, whispering to each other like paperbound
lovers set free at last.
'Hisself made me take it back to you,' Blind Mary continued,
Ellen at last starting to take notice of what she was saying. 'He
wouldn't have that English filth under the same roof as hisself, he
said,' she explained.
'Filth?' Ellen repeated, the word leaping out at her, the full bent
of what the woman was saying beginning to dawn on her at last.
It was Blind Mary who had taken her book!
'That's what hisself called it,' Blind Mary went on, making
nothing of the fact that she had stolen the book, only of what
'hisself thought of its contents. '"Fancy filth" - that you were
trying to turn me into a common night-walker from reading it!'
she said more defiantly, the nodding head now backed up by a
higher authority, her Dan.
'But do you think it's "filth", Mary?' Fallen asked, dazed by
the events unfolding before her, remembering all the nights the
woman had sat nodding in the dark, listening to her read or recite
from it.
Blind Mary shook her head, this time deliberately. 'It's no use
going against what is, Ellie,' she explained. 'It's not what we
were reared to, like the old songs and stories. I'll be off with
meself, anyway,' she concluded, adding, 'Hisself said not to be
delayin'.'
With those words Blind Mary left and Ellen doubted that, unlike
Dan, she would ever return again. She sat on the bed holding the
book. Glad to have it back, like a lost friend. But where did it
leave her? The person she had shared it with more than any
other living soul, the one person she had never suspected. And
then even after the woman had taken it, squirrelled it away, she
had carried on as if nothing had happened, kept cabin-hunting
down to her, sat there listening as she, Ellen, struggled to remember
the stolen lines. All the time the book stashed away in her
own cabin, like a fatted calf against the return of her 'Wanderin'
Dan'.
More and more, everything was getting trina cheile - turned
inside out, upside down. She had trusted Blind Mary, sucked
gin from that soiled bottle of hers, talked up and down with
her about the Old Country, the new country, the 'Bridgets', the
blacks and the Bloomers, and traded songs with her. They had
even prayed on their knees together, for the safe return of her
absentee husband.
How wrong could she have been about Blind Mary? Thinking
first that it was she who had warned Maybelle Tucker, then
blaming Biddy for stealing her book. She had been doubly wrong,
not only about Blind Mary, but about Biddy too! Then again, why
was she surprised? People concealed their true selves. She herself
had been one thing to Lavelle and her children, a dutiful wife, their
moral guardian. But another thing with Stephen - a different kind
of being entirely - a trollop. Did the one deny the other? Or were
they just two conflicting parts of the same whole? The temple and
the tempted locked in a life-long struggle, until, one day the soul
took flight.
Once it had all been easier, more clear-cut. The Crown, the
landlords, the proselytizing clergymen selling 'soup for souls' to
the famished, were clearly the bad. Likewise, but in opposition to
them, the famished, the downtrodden Catholic peasants, were the
good. 'Blessed are the poor in spirit; they shall see heaven.'
Here, nothing fitted the old moulds. Peabody had helped her once
until imaginings and jealousy had turned him. The Frontignacs
had helped her, but only because of an old and Church-led
landlording system. Stephen Joyce, Lavelle's fellow revolutionary,
had dishonoured that comradeship. Both patriot and Protestant,
he was one of the hated Scots-Irish, but a Young Irelander too. And
the Irish themselves? What of them? Here in Boston, they preyed
on each other in the tenements in a dog-eat-dog existence - the
Irish landlords the worst. And the rabbit-Irish, living in corners
and dugouts, hated the other suppressed race, the Negroes. This
hatred in turn was spurred on by the Pilot, the voice of Holy
Mother Church, whose greatest commandment of all was 'Love
thy neighbour as thy self - but not thy black ones!
Everything in contradiction with itself. And what of the contradictions
within her own character? Kathleen Ni Houlihan Mother
Ireland - on her back in a dowdy Montreal hotel, wet
with sin. Or kissing the feet of the crucified Christ, staining him
with her lust. A Mary Magdalen; a 'Jezebel', Peabody had called
her. A thousand times worse than Blind Mary ever was, carrying
on to the outside world as if nothing was amiss. Yet, all the time
with the worm in her heart, eating away at it, gorging itself on
her deceit.
She leafed through the book lovingly, squinting at the words,
most of them denied to her now, even with the aid of her little
blue windows. Some she could retrieve, tilting the book towards
the light. 'Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee . . .'; 'Love built
on beauty, soon as beauty, dies . . .'
As the words floated to her, so too did the memories they
brought, her hand reaching to her cheeks, her hair . . . She flicked
on from the Love Elegies, disturbed by their immediacy, searching
out other lines. With difficulty, she found them.

'The element of fire is quite put out;
The sun is lost, and th' earth . . .'

Peabody, he had seen it all along in her; the Element of Fire, her fatal element. The fire of passion - long since extinguished. Now
only the fire of Purgatory ahead of her, turned for the purification
of her soul.
'Fancy filth!' she muttered. 'Fancy filth!' She had heard it
all before, from the pulpit and the Pilot; 'literary poisons
pernicious English writers, soiling the flower of our womanhood'.
Driving Boston's maiden aunts and moral guardians like
Mrs Brophy to patrolling the libraries, blacking out the lines of
Byron and Shelley and Donne. Or sneaking into the Old Corner
Bookstore, surreptitiously ripping offending pages from books.
Erotica - Blind Mary's 'fancy filth'. Soon, words wouldn't matter
to her. Soon, the world would be as dark to her as to Blind Mary.
She longed for that darkness of the eyes to blot out the world of the
mind, to blot out the questions, the confusion, not even wanting
memory to remain bright. If she was dark, then she would have
no need of books, no need to be worried if they were stolen or
not. It was unnecessary to life, her book, a distracting luxury, a
holding-on to the past, a proof that she was not truly contrite.
Despite all that she had imagined she had stripped herself of, the
book was a remembrance of sin - a silken, sensuous thread of
attachment, one she at last should break. She closed Stephen's
book for the final time.

The following day at her machine, she was again reminded of the
book and of her intention to break her attachment to it.
Life in the cordwaining factory had returned to the humdrum.
No more banners; no strikers' songs, just a tension of ordinariness.
She lifted the connecting thread between the batch of uppers she
had just stitched, so as not to mix them with the next batch of a
different size, and brought the thread to her mouth to break it,
as was her practice. At once she felt the crack of an upper tooth
give way against the thick gauge of the thread, the broken crown
falling on to her tongue. She spat it into her hand - it was the
second one she had partly lost. Her teeth must be getting brittle.
Soon she'd be as gap-toothed as some of the older needlewomen.
It was a sign.
That evening she took the book, denying herself a last opening
of it, but holding it tenderly, like a child. She had thought of leaving
it at the Magdalen convent for Louisa. Mary knew little about the
book, apart from the evening Lavelle had mentioned it. But Sister
Veronica, or whatever Louisa was now called, would understand
the significance of her leaving it there, this final divesting of self.
Eventually, she decided against the idea. By letting Louisa know
in this manner, she would be calling attention to herself, negating
the act. Her self-serving revelation would only cause distress to the
girls, distract them in this most sacred of times, before the final
profession of their vows.
Instead, she went back to the long stretch of pier that necked
out into the Atlantic. The Long Wharf was where, all those
years ago, her journey into a new life had begun. It was fitting
that here she should cast off the last remnants of that life - her
poems. All about the wharves Boston had the smell, the noise
and the nervousness of a coming war. People talked more loudly
than she had remembered. A small group of militiamen passed
her by, the stale smell of gunpowder on them, their uniforms
sweat-soaked from quick-marching. Everywhere was a rattle and
hum as groups spontaneously gathered on street corners to discuss
the latest events.
She went to the very end of the pier, passing the male crimpers
and the female hussies; the Festys and Lostys in their green ties
still waiting to bilk the new arrivals. As she hoped, no one took
a blind bit of notice of her - unremarked, unremarkable, of
declining middle years, a needlewoman of no account in the
Athens of America. Through the roll of the summer sea-mist,
blue-shadowed shapes, almost indistinguishable to her, scudded
silently across the bay.
She stood and waited a moment, feeling the sea-turn in the
wind. When at last she let it slip from her hands, the book, her
cradled child, made no protest. She heard the entering splash,
watched it dance for a moment, pirouetting, swirling downwards,
the words from its mouth trapped in prisms of air, silenced before
they reached the surface.
When the disturbance within the water had ceased, she observed a momentary respect, before turning and retracing her steps along
the wharf. I he consignation to the deep had been reverential -- all
that it should have been. She allowed herself a little smile, the
newly-broken diagonal of tooth catching the side of her tongue.
She was still smiling when, at last, she returned home, the slight
rawness now at the side of her tongue seeming to cause her no
hindrance.
That night she slept the sleep of angels.
The next day Libby Corrigan noticed the difference in her.
'Why, Ellen, you look more like your old self today!' Libby
greeted her.
'Well, every day is a new start, a blessing, even in here!' she replied.
Libby peered at her. 'There isn't love in the air, is there, Ellen?
You'd tell me, wouldn't you?'
'No, Libby, there is certainly no love in the air,' she said, thinking
of her book swirling, dancing, committed to the deep. 'I've had my share of love,' she added.
'You're right too, Ellen,' the woman answered. 'It's only a bother
and stops us from getting on with life. If God was a woman, She'd
never have invented it!'
And they both laughed.
Ellen needled her way through the day with gusto, avoiding her
newly-chipped tooth whenever she had to break thread. It was a
nuisance. If she lost any more of her teeth her mouth would soon
resemble the peaks and valleys of Maamtrasna.
Somehow the day didn't seem as long as usual, the whirr of the
machines singing her through it with mesmeric insistency. How
true that the Irish make the machines sing - and the bosses too! she thought, looking around her. But now the battle-hymn of war
was everywhere in the factories.
'South Carolina will be the first to go!' Libby confidently
told her.
Ellen told her she had gone to Boston, seen all the excitement,
the militiamen.
'Were they Irish?' Libby asked, her face alight with mischief.
'How should I know?" Ellen answered, expecting some sting in the tail
reply.
'Well, if they had sugawns of hay-rope tied around their ankles
they were Irish,' said Libby, 'to teach them their right foot from
their left!' she added, bursting out laughing.
Ellen started to laugh with her. 'That's not true, Libby!' she
said.
'It is! It is! On my mother's grave, it is,' she swore. 'Wouldn't
the men make a show of your'
Everywhere there were whispers of war and boots. Boots in
which to march brothers and sons, husbands and lovers to
the battlefronts. Boots made by sisters and mothers, wives and
sweethearts. Boots that someday, perhaps, would rattle down the
welcoming streets and alleyways when they came back home
again. Whenever. If.
Every time that the talk was of war, she thought of her own.
What far-flung battlefields would this great American war take
them to? It wasn't even their own war - a war to free them from
the Crown, to sever the Union with the 'Old Enemy'. This was an
American war.
She remembered Patrick talking about the years of being ground
down by Famine and poverty resulting in the great scatterin of
the Irish. This American war, she knew, would produce a further scatterin. This time, to the four corners of America. In which
blue-grass plains of Kentucky, under what Tennessee moon, would
the Irish battling for America now scatter? No matter where, they
would be frightened, alone, unable to sleep for what the morning
might bring. Many wouldn't see the next night, would be ripped
to death, God help them. Patrick's words came back to her: 'If we
can't live as Americans then we will die as Americans.' That was
the way it would be. The Irish would die their way into the esteem
of American hearts. Irish blood on the prairies and cottonfields
of America, would, she knew, let the 'niggers turned inside out'
at last be white! Martyrdom was a long and sacred tradition in
Ireland.
As she came home, under the arched entrance of Half-Moon
Place, even in the passageway the garbage-throwing games had
changed. No longer were heard the cries of the Battle of the Boyne
- Orange against Green. No more were campaigns mounted with
rotting vegetables against Cromwell. Now it was 'North against
South', 'Paddies against nigger-lovers'.
Paddies against Paddies, more like, she thought, as she left the
battle-scene and went in.

Despite everything she missed the visits from Blind Mary. Between
them, they had created their own little world, where Mary's blindness
and her exile never mattered. The songs and the stories and
poems carried them beyond the conspiracy of boundaries, beyond
sight and severance into the place of memory, suspended the
ordinary. In her heart, she had forgiven Blind Mary. Forgiveness
was like food; everybody needed it all the time. She wondered
how it was between the woman and her Dan, in whom her sun
rose and set, whose long absence and further threatened desertion
she had already forgiven. Dan would soon be off again, no doubt,
mustering in on the Common. She imagined Dan to be one of
those men filled with wanderlust; any cause, any place, as long
as it was 'away'. His like loved the excitement of going and
the self-importance of returning, the notion of being accorded
a hero's welcome, even if they'd only been clearing swampland
in Louisiana - the swamp Irish, or digging coal in Pennsylvania
- the anthracite Irish. Adventurers, heroes and patriots exacted a
high price, for ever expecting the home front to be locked in time,
frozen to a 'before-the-going'. Unassailed, and unassailable. A high
price indeed.
She ate a little. A brew out of some bones, laced with a
smathering of mashed potato. She didn't want much food, didn't
see the point, as long as she had enough strength to do her work.
Food was a luxury, too. Didn't Christ fast for forty days and forty
nights in the desert, with the Devil coming to tempt Him with
food? And Saint Patrick, too, all those nights alone, at the top
of the Reek, only the Clogdubh, his black hand-bell, to pelt at
the devils. But the fasting had given both Christ and Saint Patrick
strength. Anyway, after the rent, her money went nowhere.
Afterwards she knelt and prayed. One of the few possessions she
still retained was the crucifix she had taken horn the house when
she had left the note for Patrick and Lavelle. Up over her bed it was - 'the alphabet of spiritual knowledge' - looking down over
her always. With it there and her dead Saviour, she was never less
alone than when alone.
She prayed for the dead, her children and Michael first. Then
for her father, the Maistir, and Cait, her mother. She prayed for the
about-to-be-dead in the great American war, that death wouldn't
be lingering and painful when it came; that they'd be taken quickly
and cleanly. Then she prayed for the living, all those she had
forgiven; Clegg, Blind Mary, Biddy, Peabody, even Pakenham, the
landlord from the old, bad times. Then those whose forgiveness she
could never earn, Lavelle, her living children, that they all would be
removed from the cloud of shame under which her sin had placed
them. She prayed for Maybelle Tucker and her children. Finally,
she prayed for her own salvation and that of Stephen Joyce, then
crawled into bed.
When Clegg asked her if she'd take in some homework, she agreed.
It would be the worst of needlework - by hand, in the gloom, with
only the strength of her finger to force the needle through the
resistant hide. But they needed the extra work, more boots were
being called for, for the militiamen. It was her country asking her,
Clegg said, not the bosses. Libby refused, as did the other Irish
women and the young farm girls, but the Italians and Germans
said 'yes'. She didn't care. She had nothing personal against Clegg
or the bosses and besides, what better had she to do? The few cents
she would get she could put by for the rainy day around the corner,
when she could no longer see.
So, in the evening times, she lived now in her own company
and the company of leather. The 'war boots' they had kept to
manufacture within the confines of the factory, the ladies' boots
and shoes they had given out. It was laborious work. The first
week, the thumb and forefinger of her right hand became so welted
from the force she had to exercise on the needle-head that she had
to stop working. Gradually, the welts became callused, as hard
as the hide itself. Still, every time she forced through the needle,
the pain seemed to come out the other side of her thumb, as if she
herself had been threaded.
She talked to the unformed shoes as if they were the people who
would inhabit them. Oftentimes she would sing to them, the old
songs, breathing the words over them, investing them with life. So,
one pair would be ' Una Bhan' destined for some fair-haired beauty
from the wealthy upper-side of Boston, forbidden her true love by
a Brahmin father not wanting his daughter to marry beneath her
class. Or 'Bean an Fhir Rua' - The Red-Haired Man's Wife' a
creature of unblemished nature, anonymously but passionately loved by the writer of the song, who wishes her husband dead,
so he can have her. Another pair might draw from her a song
like 'Bean A' Leanna' - 'Woman of the Alehouse' - in praise of
a woman who could plentifully dispense the consoling powers
of drink.
Her imagined insights into the future lives of those who would
wear her handiwork were drawn from insights into past lives
preserved within the memory of the tunes. She hoped she was not
putting any mi-ddh, or curse, on those lives by her stitching songs,
for she bore no ill-feeling towards any of them. It was more a sung
celebration of life, with all its dreams and hopes, its tenderness and
passion, a created space for them all in the tenement of her heart.
At times she sang for herself alone.

'A Stor mo Chroi in the stranger's land
There is plenty of wealth and wailing,
Where gems adorn the great and the grand,
There are faces with hunger paling.
When the road is toilsome and hard to tread
And the lights of their cities will blind you,
O, turn a stor, to that Eastern shore
And the ones that you leave behind you.'

She should never have thrown the old songs from her. They
held the truth; the feelings, the hope and despair of earthly life,
expressing it in the ordinary language of real people. Songs born
out of the rocks and the bare acre, not couched in anything that
you had to understand about the clever words of poets. Cleverness,
'living too much in the head', as Blind Mary used to say, was a bad
thing. The scalded heart was the place to live. But look where it had
gotten her. She thought about this for a moment. It had started in
the head, her malaise - wanting everything to be new and better,
dissatisfied with her lot. 'Shedding Ireland like last year's skin',
Lavelle had said it was. And you could never win with living too
much in the head. Jacob had taught her that. 'We cannot know
our own minds,' he would say, 'because we have only our minds
with which to do the knowing.'
They all had their own wisdoms; Lavelle, Stephen, Jacob, Blind
Mary, Biddy. Like herself, all were stumbling towards the light.
Confused, most of the time - like herself again. She should have
listened more, the way she had always done to the Maistir's voice
- until she had blocked him out too. Listened to the wind and the
rain and the rocks and high places, only you didn't get them all in
cities, and even wind and rain didn't speak to you in the same way
when it pelted down on you from city skies, or gusted against your
face on a busy street. There was less of God in cities, of that she
was sure. Cities with all of their bustling commerce forced Him out,
kept Him in the valleys and mountains. He was out there all right at
the end of the Long Wharf, beyond Spectacles Island and Noodles
Island, or above in the whispering fields outside Montreal, in the
Chateau des Messieurs, the priests' farm. And was in the frozen
anvil of the far north, silent, waiting. She had sensed it on the
train. But maybe somewhere in the tenements too: Biddy warning
Maybelle Tucker; Blind Mary clinging with blind faith to the faint
hope of 'her Dan' coming through the archway; wasp-waisted Mrs
Brophy - there with tea and sympathy, the times she needed it. She
was too quick to rush to judgement, too slow to have faith in God's
mercy, had even doubted that He would forgive her. Wasn't that
why He had come down from Heaven and died - to redeem her?
She thought of the Stations of the Cross - the Sixth - Veronica
wiping the face of Jesus. It was the small tender mercies of life
- the forgivenesses - that mattered, not the great passions or the
gestures of grande hauteur.
She kept stitching, singing to her shoe people. She should
never have thrown over the songs. One came into her head;
she started it, stopped, started again, deciding she had nothing
to fear from it any more. 'O My Fair-Haired Boy . . .' She had
sung it to Stephen in the room at Montreal, naked and brazen
at the window, every fibre of her, being waiting to be on the
bed with him; '. . . let no sad tears now stain your cheek; as
we kiss our last good-bye . . .', and she had sung it before that,
in the fever sheds of Grosse lie, singing it out over the great St
Lawrence, and it was the song Michael - her dark-haired boy always
called her to sing in the gathering places of Maamtrasna
all those years ago.
'If not in life we'll be as one
Then in death we'll be,
And there will grow two hawthorn trees
Above my love and me.
And they will reach up to the sky,
Intertwined be,
And the hawthorn flower will bloom where lie
My fair-haired boy and me.'

She finished the last pair of shoes for the night, wondering what
young Boston girl would walk in them? Maybe down the Long
Path, hand in hand with her 'fair-haired boy', flush with the
excitement of youthful love, praying he would not stop under the
gingko tree or the Great Elm, go the full stretch of the Long Path
with her.
Maybe they would grace the feet of some young soldier's
sweetheart, waving him 'good-bye' on the same Common, as
he mustered into an infantry regiment of Massachusetts bound
for God-knows-where. She put her thumb to her lips, moistened
it then crossed the instep of each shoe, that the girl's soldier boy
would be brought home safely. It was a thing she used to do at
night on the children's foreheads, when they were small, to protect
them from unprepared death. She put away her work for the night,
thinking still how she missed Blind Mary. Her shoe people never
sang back to her.
Then she lost them altogether. Clegg took the homework back
from her, saying her hand-stitching was like 'piss-holes in the
snow - all over the place'. She didn't think it was that bad; her
sight wasn't that far gone. But she said nothing. He was probably
right. And why would he do that anyway, without good reason?
That night she prayed for him.

A month later, in the early fall of September 1860, she still prayed
for him. Even after he had fired her.
She had known the day must come when her sight would fail
enough. She didn't blame Clegg for finding fault with her work.
Even when in the days leading up to that he had referred to
'bottlenecks and banner-makers', and how lace widows had 'come
down a peg or two and turned into Holy Joes'. They had all suffered
in one way or another for the strike, Clegg weeding out from the
workforce those he held responsible. Especially the older agitators,
with fading eyesight. Now it was her turn. It was as simple as that.
Libby took her part, making representations through the union,
but in the end there was nothing she could do. Nor did Ellen
expect her to.
'They're bastards, all of them, unrefined bastards - but our day will
come, Ellen, our day will come!' her friend tried to console her.
They had embraced each other and said goodbye.
She tried the other cordwaining shops, but it seemed word had
gone out that she was trouble - a Bloomerist - and there were
plenty of fresh green hands and clear green eyes still swarming
the wharves in Boston, still ready to make the machines sing.
In one smaller shop she managed a week, before they let her
go, citing her failing eyesight and the cost of good leather. For a
while she managed to gather in some homework, that somehow
Libby had put her way - from the Italians, she thought. But while
homework was a hard-won addition to her income while she had
worked, now its paltry rewards alone could not provide for her.
She took up her needle from dawn to dusk, endeavouring by sheer
dint of labour to compensate for the lowly homework price of four
dollars per one hundred dozen pairs of uppers bound. At the start
each pair took her five minutes, so that in one hour and with no
break, she would complete a dozen pairs. Working for twelve hours
as at the factory, she completed only twelve dozen pairs, so that the
hundred dozen took her not a week, but eight and a half days. She
worked two extra hours each of the seven days, except Sundays,
which she took off for Mass, to win back the week. So that now, in
seven and a half days, she completed her quota, thus saving one extra
day. By candlelight, she would try to feel her way along the rows of
stitching, gauging by touch what she could not gauge by sight.
Her fingers caused her more trouble. Each evening before kneeling
to pray she soaked them in water to soothe the bruising. Then,
in bed, she would lick the wounds with her tongue, like a sick
animal, until she fell away from the world.

Then she fell behind again, because her hands could no longer take
the daily punishment. First to eight days, then nine, finally to ten
days for the hundred dozen. So that in a space of thirty days, she
earned only twelve dollars. Fogarty, the landlord's middleman,
took two a week in rent, leaving her four dollars for the month
with which to get her 'sparrow's shin food'. She laughed at the
idea of it. But it did her fine, she didn't want much and when
the fruit over-ripened and the vegetables browned a bit, tanned
like the leather, she got them cheaper. She remembered well how
to spare out potatoes; a drop of water or buttermilk mashed into
them always stretched them. Sunday, she always had the scrap of
meat for dinner, at the old-fashioned Boston time of two o'clock.
It was perhaps the last remaining relic of previous life that she
retained, apart from praying. And pray she did, never missing a
morning or a night, no matter how tired or sore she was. Kneeling
there in front of her Jesus, her little blue windows kept on to see
Him with, putting the pain of her hands in His hands.
Some nights she felt that at last she was reaching the state of
sanctity she so much desired. Other nights she felt it was a
presumption - a vanity, a lacking in humility. He would decide,
not her, when the time was right to consecrate her a Magdalen,
fit to dry His feet with her hair. The pain in her eyes had now
grown so extreme it was a daily crown of thorns. She considered
it a sign of her deliverance, her redemption secured, that He had
allowed her to conjoin her suffering with His.
And when she sang to her shoe people, her voice had a new
clarity, and she only sang now in the old tongue, God's own
language as they used to call it back in the valleys. And she knew
it was beautiful, more beautiful than she had ever sung before,
her voice truly between the air and the angels - adoring her God; not man - not for her own glorification. In every song He was her joy of desiring. When she sang the words of Una Bhan:

'O a Una Bhan nacb to a chuaigh idir me is Diaf
Oh fair Una, wasn't it you that went between me and God?'

she knew that nothing now came between her and her God, and
nothing ever would.
Her needle had by now slowed to such an extent that she knew
it was only a matter of time before they took the homework back.
Scores and scores of the younger, clear-eyed Irish girls were beating
down the factory doors looking for work at any price, at any cost to
themselves. Girls with strong backs, whose quick ungnarled hands
and steady sight would be good for a handful of years, maybe more.
And sure 'they needed the start in America', she told Him the night
the last batch of shoes went.
And the Italian women, the pasta army, who gobbled up the
homework with increasing appetite - she couldn't fault them.
They had been kind to her too - keeping her going the while
longer. She had a few weeks' rent put aside, and she might get
a few weeks' grace from Fogarty - he wasn't the worst. After
that she didn't know. The fall wasn't too cold yet, she wouldn't
mind sleeping outside except for the filth and the rats, and those
unfortunates from the sailing ships who frequented the passageway
at night, fired with Blind Mary's gin.
She could fall on charity, she supposed, throw herself at the
mercy of God and the nuns, but not the Sisters of Saint Mary
Magdalen. Whatever, she wouldn't want that - Mary and Louisa
to see her in the state she was.
Her prayers took on a different tone. She still worried the Cross
about everyone else, but now as well - selfishly, she knew - prayed
more for herself, for release from her mortal coil. Blessed release,
but only if it was His will and He required no more of her in this
life. Nothing was left now in her own hands, everything in His.
She wanted nothing except reunification with her God. Neither
was there anything of this world to which she clung. No possessions,
none of the false promises, the deceits, the honey chilled in wine.
Not even the hoped-for sight of her children and Lavelle. Like
a Good Friday altar awaiting the Resurrection, she had stripped
herself bare of all human longings. 'Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring,
look with pity, upon me.'
As she retreated from the light of this world the clarity within
her inner eye had never shone more brightly. Like the Mask on
one of those hot August mornings, its transparent waters flashed
with sunlight, its islands glistening like dotted emeralds - it was
all made clear to her. Everything that had happened had led her to
this moment. Even her sin. A deep calm filled her. She had nothing
to be doing, to be wanting. Only to be ... only to be.
Blind Mary, when she heard that Ellen was sleeping under the arch,
brought her a bottle of gin; she didn't say anything, just pushed it at
her, nodding. She refused, thanking the woman, blessing her for her
thoughtfulness.
Biddy was a more regular benefactor. Scraps of food and a drop
of milk, an off-handed offer of shelter in her basement 'for a few
nights, widow-woman, till you secure a place of your own!' Ellen
was grateful to her, but it was no earthly haven her soul craved.
Still, it must have been hard for the woman to make such an offer
given what had passed between them.
At night, sometimes, she thought she heard Biddy's shrill voice
driving a hard bargain with the men of the sea. Then again, she
couldn't be sure - it was wrong to make a judgement. Even if it was
her, Biddy, too, had to live with the cold hard lessons of love. She
wasn't to be judged. Love, like life along the passageway, came and
went, like the tides which regularly flooded the basement cellars. In
the end no one took much notice. Nor did she, not even when the
children stole her blue needlewoman's glasses, and the following
night the sailors took her clothes.
Next day, when the two young nuns came, searching out
Penitents, they found her sitting amongst the garbage, naked,
singing, th' earth lost to her, and the sun.
The one the other young nun called 'Sister Veronica' ran to her,
wiping the dirt from her face, cradling her nakedness.
Blinded by Heaven's light, lost in the rapture of her song, Ellen
did not see her, nor did she hear the words the woman spoke.
'Mother?' she cried. 'Oh, Mother!'
Recommended for readers who are further interested in a
history of the times:

Abbott, Edith, Historical Aspects of the Immigration Problem: Select
Documents (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1926)
Bartlett, Cynthia Chalmers, Images of America - Beacon Hill (Arcadia Publishing, an imprint of the Chalford Publishing
Corporation, Dover, New Hampshire, 1996)

Bergen, Philip, compiled, Old Boston, in Early Photographs 18501918,
174 Prints from the Collection of the Bostonian Society (Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1990)

Bourke, Marcus, ed., 'Tipperary Historical Journal 1998' - Young
Ireland 1848-1898 Commemorative Issue (Co. Tipperary Historical
Society, Ireland, 1998)

Comerford, R.V., The Fenians - in Context: Irish Politics and
Society 1848-82 (Wolfhound Press, Dublin, 1985)

Cullen, James Bernard, ed. and compiled, The Story of the Irish in
Boston - Together with Biographical Sketches of Representative
Men and Noted Women (revised edn, illustrated, H.A. Plimpton,
Boston, 1893)

Davis, Richard, Revolutionary Imperialist - William Smith O'Brien
180-3,-1864 (Lilliput Press, Dublin, 1998 and Crossing Press, New
South Wales, 1998)
Diner, Hasia R., Erin's Daughters in America - Irish Immigrant
Women in the Nineteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University
Press, Baltimore and London, 1983)
Doheny, Michael, The Felon's Track - or History of the Attempted
Outbreak in Ireland, Embracing the Leading Events in the Irish
Struggle from the Year 1843 to the Close of 1848 (M.H. Gill &
Son Ltd, Dublin, 1914)
Gribben, Arthur, ed., Introduction by Ruth-Ann M. Harris, The
Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in America (University of
Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1999)

355
Hamrock, Ivor, ed. and compiled, The Famine in Mayo
1845-18 50: A Portrait from Contemporary Sources (Mayo County
Council, Castlebar, Co. Mayo, 1998)

Handlin, Oscar, Boston's Immigrants 1790-1880: A Study in
Acculturation (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Mass., Fiftieth Anniversary edn, 1991)

Harrington, Edward T., Lord, Robert H., Sexton, John E., History of the Archdiocese of Boston: In the Various Stages
of Its Development 1604 to 1943 in Three Volumes: Volume
II. Foreword by His Eminence William Cardinal O'Connell,
Archbishop of Boston (Sheed & Ward, New York, 1944)

Harris, John, The Boston Globe: Historic Walks in Old Boston (Globe Pequot Press, Old Saybrook, Connecticut, 1993)
Ignatiev, Noel, How the Irish Became White (Routledge, New
York and London, 1995)
Jones, Howard Mumford and Jones, Bessie Zaban, The Many
Voices of Boston - A Historical Anthology 1630-1975 (Little,
Brown Books, 1975)
Juravich, Tom, Hartford, William F., Green, James R., Commonwealth of Toil - Chapters in the History of Massachusetts
Workers and Their Unions (University of Massachusetts Press,
Amherst, 1996)

Kinealy, Christine This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845-52 (Gill & Macmillan, Dublin, 1994) A Death-Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland
(Pluto Press, London and Chicago, 1997)
Lankevich, George J. compiled and edited, Series Editor, Furer,
Howard B., Boston: A Chronological and Documentary History
1602-1970 (Oceana Publications Inc., Dobbs Ferry, New
York, 1974)
MacKay, Donald, The Square Mile - Merchant Princes of Montreal (Douglas & Mcintyre Ltd, Vancouver and Toronto, 1987)
McLean, Eric, and Wilson, R.D., The Living Past of Montreal,
revised edn, (McGill-Queens University Press, Montreal and Kingston,
1964,1993)
Marsan, Jean-Claude, Montreal in Evolution (McGill-Queens
University Press, Montreal and Kingston, 1981)
O'Connor, Thomas H., Boston Catholics - A History of the Church
and Its People (Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1998 Civil War Boston - Homefront and Battlefield (Northeastern
University Press, Boston, 1997)
The Boston Irish: A Political History (Back Bay Books, USA,
1995 Little, Brown, Canada, Ltd, 1995)
Ryan, Dennis P., Beyond the Ballot Box - A Social History of the
Boston Irish 1845-1917 (Associated University Presses Inc., 1983)
Whitehill, Walter Muir (Second edn) Boston - A Topographical
History (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
Mass, and London, 1959, 1968)

* An extensive bibliography relating to Ireland's Great Famine is
included in the appendices to The Whitest Flower.