The Element of Fire. Brendan Graham
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 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 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.
For the rest of the journey around the lake she never spoke. Faherty too was silent.
He never heard her even weep. It was all too much for her, he thought. Sorrow and guilt – a bad mixture. If she keened it out of herself, got shut of the grief, it would be better for her. 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. The only hope a quick leaving of this life and Paradise in the next, if they were lucky.
Faherty wondered about Paradise, the Garden of Eden. Was it like the big houses once were? Hanging gardens; carpets of flowers; servants at every turn; fruit on every tree. And long rows of lazy beds, the fat lumper potatoes tumbling out of them, begging to be eaten. He wanted to ask her was America like that.
Mairteen Tom Anthony, a big bodalach of a fellow from the foot of the Reek, once told him how the buildings were so tall in New York, that when he first went out there the roof of his mouth got sunburnt from standing all of a gám looking up at them. Faherty wasn’t sure if Mairteen was tricking him or not. America turned people into tricksters – even an amadán like Mairteen Tom.
Leave her be, he decided.
It was still light when Nell edged them past the conical-shaped reek of Croagh Patrick, so she made Faherty bring them straight to Westport Quay. As they passed the workhouse gates hundreds clamoured, seeking admittance. Hundreds more, 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, designated the ‘King’s Stores’. Here, fuelled by hunger, six hundred in rags milled in desperate hope, battened back by militiamen. Nearby, cart-followers, employed to protect the grain when being transported to the town’s merchants, waited, slinking on the margins of the famished until called to their cold duty.
Another angry crowd sent up cries of dismay as a ship from Marseille discharged its cargo of wheat, beans and chestnuts, while behind a clipper of Constantinople lay by, bursting with corn from New Orleans, and flanked by Her Majesty’s revenue cruisers. Behind the ships were the 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 be Atlantic-bound.
Westport Quay throbbed with all the mixed ingredients of quay life. Pampered gentry and a starving commonality jostled equally with tidewaiters and landwaiters, while elbow to shoulder with the herring- and oystermen of Clew Bay, shipping agents of indifferent character plied their raucous 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, gave her the once-over.
‘Yes ma’am, to the exotic city of New Orleans,’ – 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 them 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 – what did the woman care? ‘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. & Co., Ship Agents.
Mr John Reid, Jun., an affable-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 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 Québec, before three weeks was out’, adding, ‘Québec being but a tolerable land journey from Boston’.
She was dismayed. Here she was, her two remaining children secure, and no way out of Ireland. She wondered about Québec, about taking a chance, but feared for the ship Mr Reid had described as ‘fitted with every attention to the comfort of passengers’. She had seen these ‘comfort of passengers’ ships before. ‘Coffin ships’ and rightly named so. Then to land on Québec’s quarantine island – Grosse île, with its seeping 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,’ he offered. ‘You can rest up there a while.’ He imagined a lady like her wouldn’t be shy the tally for the innkeeper, his second cousin. ‘It’s for ever full with 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 Nell carted them, this time up against the slope of Boffin Street, through the town’s Octagon and 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. In turn the Octagon, with its imposing Doric column, 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,