The Element of Fire. Brendan Graham
the poor huddled, congregating outside the place to which Nell delivered 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, aware of the pitiful, near-death state in which most of his listeners were, and embarrassed by Faherty’s words, bowed her head. It didn’t seem to bother Faherty, who skipped down from his perch, tied Nell to the hitching-post and then helped her and the children alight.
The near-dead gaped at them, shuffling out a space through which they could pass. Some made the sign of the cross as she approached, respectful of her loss.
Faherty 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 drove 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. Down the Mall she 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 …?’
‘I was only helping him,’ Patrick said, defensively.
The other boy, a tattered urchin with vacant stare, backed away, afraid of what this frantic and well-dressed lady might do to him. ‘Tá brón orm, ma’am’ – ‘I’m sorry, ma’am’ – he said, fearfully, in a mixture of Irish and his only other word of English 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. His parents, both stricken with Famine fever, had hunted him and his two younger brothers, eight and six years, ‘to Westport for the soup-tickets’. So the three had set off, he in charge. At the workhouse, he was too small to make 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.
Unable to arouse his two younger brothers, he thought they still slept, ‘sickened by the ass-meat’, eventually realizing 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, from within it the two small bodies revealed. Not that he hadn’t seen plenty dead from want before. It had to do with Katie, Ellen knew.
She made to approach the boy. He, still afraid that he had caused some bother to her, backed away. She halted, hunkered down, then called to him. Slowly, he approached, head down, arms crossed in front, 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. ‘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 carcassed together in death. 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.
Puzzled, 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 her way.
‘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! I don’t need you to wash 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 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. Then, 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.
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; and much as she didn’t want to think of it, she had to be careful about that too. Disease 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.
‘Katie is with the angels in Heaven, with the baby Jesus … with –’ She paused, thinking of Michael, the hot steam of the tub in her eyes. ‘I was too