by Sarah Tolmie
Christopher died of dysentery weeks after they landed. He never saw any action. For Meg, the main action of the war in Ireland was marching in mud, closely followed by fighting for space in wagons, lifting heavy objects, lighting fires in rain, and strapping wounds and ulcers in the feet of her brother and his immediate friends. Then she was raped by some ally or other, a Presbyterian—he had a Scots accent—on a field during the siege of Wexford. There was a lot of ferocity during that siege, and ferocity spreads in every direction. After that, her reputation was tarnished. Her brother couldn’t protect her, and after a while, he didn’t care to. Having a whore for a sister has many perks in a near-starving army. The wench from Huntingdon increased in value as the campaigns went on. It was as close as men could come to fucking Cromwell.
Meg took care of herself as best she could. She even took care of her brother, who was as trapped as she was. They walked clear across Ireland, getting sicker and angrier and dying by inches. There were a few battles, which were loud and confused; sieges, which meant waiting around and endless thieving; a few times they drove parties of prisoners before them. These prisoners were mostly poor, ragged men who spoke only Irish. Nobody could get sense out of them. Sometimes they prayed, or sang. The army resented them: they were not worth feeding. Often, they let them escape for that reason. Some were rescued by locals who raided by night, always leading to losses. Prisoners were a bad business. No regiment wanted them. There were fewer of them as they went west. Meg did see people fleeing, though. Families, women, even a priest or two, carrying as much as they could on their backs. God knows where they were going. Into the sea, perhaps. The Parliamentarians let them go, only taking their bacon or fowls, though occasionally they killed the priests. They knew the priests would not recant, and they were at war with the Roman church, weren’t they?
Meg and her brother and the last few men she knew from Huntingdon, plus some eight hundred men or so, made it as far as some nameless moor in Connacht. There they definitively lost a battle against a group of well-armed and organized Irishmen under the command of a local lord, who had some horses left. Most of the men had cut down their pikes long since to make them easier to carry. They were used to fighting men on foot. A shorter pike is fine for that. But you need the length to turn horses. The Englishmen lost. Horses and men overran them, and those who could still flee ran for it. Meg, in a field behind the front where the men had been lined up, had the battle fall back and run straight over her. She and the other remaining women, the cripples and camp followers and baggage-carriers, were suddenly in the middle of a crowd of men screaming in Irish and English. There was running. There were pounding hooves, foundering and falling bodies. Within minutes, Meg herself fell. She held up her hand to ward her face and a sword sliced off her finger. Then she was gone.
Nobody missed her because they were all dead. But when Meg came to, on the damp grass that she assumed was endemic to Ireland, she was on Inis Caillte.
Wandering around a day later, weak from loss of blood and beginning to be feverish, she met Mary MacIntosh, out watching over the sheep. Mary was kind to Meg, even after she learned she was English, and Meg was astonished to find that she understood her. She had never understood an Irish speaker before. Meg was led back to the MacIntosh farm and looked after while her hand healed. The family didn’t even shun her when they learned she had travelled with the Ironsides.
“There’s no call for those old enmities here,” said Conor MacIntosh, Mary’s uncle. “They’re not very real to us as was born here,” he went on, “seeing as we only seem to connect to the other islands, let alone the mainland, from time to time. Dipping into certain chapters of a long book, like, and skipping the rest? And then, the people who comes to us, we’ve found over the years that they’re all equally lost. It’s hard to be loster’n somebody else. It’s even-steven.”
The family was, however, extremely interested in Oliver Cromwell. Once they understood that she had crossed the country with his army, they were full of questions about him. Was he, in fact, a giant, a sort of blood-soaked ogre? Did he kill priests and women with his bare hands? How many people really had died after his army took Drogheda? Did he believe in God?
“I never met him,” said Meg, “Nor did my brother. But he did come from our borough. Huntingdon. I think he was gone from Ireland before our regiment fell. He went back to be Lord Protector and run the government with the rest of the Parliament, I expect. I don’t know what happened to him.”
“He died,” said Mary, “And then the king came back.”
“What, Charles the Scot? He was dead!” said Meg.
“No, his son, I heard. I think his name was Charles too, though.”
“That’s terrible,” said Meg, “So, are there still kings and dynasties in England now, then?”
“Yes,” said Conor, nodding, “There’s a queen, Victoria. From Hanover. She’s even queen of Ireland, people say.”
“Isn’t that in Germany, Hanover?” asked Meg.
“Yes.”
“And she’s queen of England?” said Meg, “Is she a Protestant—a Lutheran, or what?”
“All I know is she’s not a Catholic,” said Mary. “Philip Murphy was very clear about that.”
“And who’s he?”
“A Catholic priest. He arrived not long before you did. From the Low Countries, he said. There was a war,” replied Mary.
“There’s always a war,” said Meg.
* * *
Jim had been living on Inis Caillte and cosying up to Mary MacIntosh for two months, working for her father as a herdsman and fisherman by turns. MacIntosh was glad of the help, as he had a lame leg. There was nothing else Jim could do, as he was not a landholder there. Not but there was a lot of free land, and quite fertile, too.
So, for the first time, he had gone on an expedition. He decided to look at the northwest of the country. He was always the man looking for land’s end and the open sea. There he was, on a headland, gazing out at what must surely still be the mouth of Galway Bay and wondering if he sailed out there, would he end up in some imaginary America, when somebody pulled on his sleeve.
He turned and saw a small, fine-boned woman with black eyes and a fountain of heavy black hair.
“Jim Conneely?” she said, in the toneless voice of a sleepwalker.
He had not the slightest idea who she was.
“I am Nellie,” she said, “of Cill Rónáin. She who was dumb.”
“Nellie!” he returned in amazement. He had not been one of her patrons but knew several men who had been.
“Dirty Nellie,” she said in her light voice, and looked at him.
“No longer dirty, I see. As clean as a well bucket,” he said gallantly, wincing at his comparison. He pressed on, “And dumb no more. Was it one of the miracles of this place?”
She looked at him steadily.
The gallantry had been a mistake. It was not his custom to treat woman like fools. Formerly, he had tried to avoid them altogether. But between his courtship of Mary and what he would have to describe as the beginning of a friendship with Meg Haylock, the situation was now somewhat different.
“So, that was stupid, wasn’t it? Whatever it is that goes on here doesn’t strike me a miraculous. Unless you count the fact that I’ve met only the one priest on an island this size. I’d describe it more as a freak of nature,” said Jim.
“There are two priests,” said Nellie, smiling.
“No miracles, then,” said Jim. “Can I ask you how you came to be here? Do you remember it?”
“Pain,” replied Nellie. “I just thought I’d died. But I woke up on the shore here.”
“How is it that you speak so well now?”
“I married a man,” said Nellie, “A learned man. A priest.”
“A priest!” yelped Jim. Then he paused, embarrassed at his own shock. Was he a grown man, or a child? “So, he’s a priest no longer, then? He gave it up?”
“He’s still a priest,” said Nellie.
“Is he a Protestant man?”
“No,” said Nellie.
“It’s beyond me, then,” said Jim, firmly.
“Yes,” said Nellie.
Jim was amazed at her assurance. But then, he thought, if whatever had happened to her on this island was as odd as had happened to him, there wasn’t much point in clinging to the old certainties. “But he’s not from Inis Mór, your husband, is he?” he asked.
“No, he’s from the mainland. The funny thing is, he knew Father Anselma. They met in Brussels, in seminary there. He got caught up in politics in ’30. So did Father Anselma, he says, though he had a different name then.”
“Bad politics?” said Jim.
“Bad,” nodded Nellie.
This was the last conversation he could have imagined himself having with Dirty Nellie, the village whore. Not that he could have had a conversation with her at all in Cill Rónáin. He thought of his conversations with Meg, who spoke no Irish. It came to him in a kind of grim flash that the deaf and illiterate girl from his own village had been as lost to him as an English woman from the seventeenth century. For that was what this was, the lost speaking to each other. It made him want to sit down and reckon up the ways in which he himself was lost, and even—the thought made him uncomfortable—to whom.
He walked back with Nellie to a very pleasant cottage in a glen and met her husband, Philip Murphy from County Clare. He was a slight, quick-witted, talkative man with brown hair and a long nose, and he and Nellie seemed most domestic. He had three books in his house, from which he had taught Nellie to read. “I chanced to have them with me when I met the bayonet that brought me here,” he said, but did not elaborate. Philip spoke Irish, but a number of other languages, too. For the sake of simplicity, Jim assumed that they all spoke Irish together—he heard it as Irish—but he couldn’t be sure. He heard Irish when Meg spoke, as well.
“There’s good land around here,” remarked Jim, “Do you know who owns it? Do you?”
“I feel I own the cottage. I helped to build it. The land, I don’t know. I farm a little of it, though God knows I’m no great farmer,” said Philip. “No one else lives too close.”
“I might claim some of it, a ways off, if you’ve no objection,” said Jim, “I’ve a mind to get married as soon as possible. Though it seems an odd way of going about it. I’ll never know if it’s mine or not.”
“It’s not like you owned your land at home,” said Philip, with a gleam in his eye.
“Didn’t I?” said Jim.
“No,” said Philip, “Not in the law, you didn’t. It’s a sin and a crime, but you never did, as you well know.”
“I’ve never met a radical priest,” Jim couldn’t help saying.
“Well, you have now,” said Philip.
Jim walked slowly home to the MacIntosh farm, thinking of Philip Murphy. If you lose, are you lost? He asked Mary to marry him and she said yes.
So. That’s how it came that Jim Conneely was found washed up on Inis Mór in a sweater that nobody knew but that was nonetheless an Aran sweater. His wife Mary of Inis Caillte knit it for him. The ball, the rope, the grass, the cow’s hoof: the pattern that women on the MacIntosh farm had been knitting with the wool of their own sheep for generations. The death of Jim was a terrible thing. He was a new-married man with a pregnant wife and a cottage barely built. He was a man just learning to sleep soundly in his own skin. He went out in his currach to fish and he never came back.
The death of any person is a terrible thing. But the lost are as mortal as anyone.
* * *
Now, you might be wanting to know a bit more about Inis Caillte. There’s not a great deal that we do know. One is that the island has a lot more timber than the other islands. So, the cottages of Nellie and Philip, and of Mary and Jim, had a lot more wood in them than the stone cottages of Inis Mór or the western mainland. They went up the quicker for it, which is why Jim had a cottage all built before he died. He only helped the MacIntosh men to build it, as he wasn’t accustomed to building in wood. He found that embarrassing, but the work got on fast for all that. Also, on Inis Caillte, there are no potatoes. Jim had been horrified at this.
“But you’ll starve!” he said.
The fact is, on Inis Caillte they grew more grain. Not a great deal, so flour was precious. It was used a lot in barter, as a matter of fact. It was the island’s own gold. The soil was deeper and richer near the trees, and by careful cultivation of small, irregular plots they could get good wheat, up to three crops a year. You’d think it might be a matter of stone querns and hand milling and all that nightmare after that, but as it happens, they had a windmill. Yes. It had been built by a Fleming in 1713. He had been on the wrong side of the War of the Spanish Succession. Sometimes, the lost are of great use to each other.
“But potatoes!” said Jim. He couldn’t believe it. “There really aren’t any here? Why not, I wonder?” he said to Mary.
“Well, you didn’t have any on you when you landed, did you?” said Mary, reasonably, “And I guess nobody else did either. They’re great heavy roots, you say? A pocket full of seed’s a lot easier. And maybe they’re more of a found thing than a lost thing. They’re not from here, anyway.” And that was that.
Jim missed potatoes. This surprised him, as he had hated them back home. The Jim Conneely of Cill Rónáin had been a fisherman who hated fish and a herdsman who hated cows and a farmer who hated potatoes. But Inis Caillte was softening him somehow. Heaven knows the man he might have become had he not drowned.
In other respects, the island was much like the other islands. The weather was temperate, the winds were high, and the people ate more seaweed than they do in other lands. However, there were no big towns, and no churches, and people lived scattered all over on farms and homesteads. It wasn’t a very populous place. You’d have thought it would be, as there are an awful lot of the lost. But it wasn’t.
* * *
On Inis Mór, things went on much as they had before. Mairín O’Donnell was called on from time to time at this gathering or that to sketch out the mysterious panels from the unknown sweaters, and everybody would muse on them and make various suggestions. But gradually, the reappearance of Jim and the disappearance of Nellie moved to the back of people’s minds and there they stayed.
Only Arthur O’Donnell, who had inked out the pattern on vellum, remained fascinated by it. As it was, in the end, a piece of knitting, it seemed a bit of a girlie fascination, so he didn’t say much about it. But from time to time, he would draw it out of the chest where he kept it and pore over it a while. There was a round form he hadn’t seen in knit patterns before. Knitters on Inis Mór didn’t go in for circles. What was it? He assumed it was something. A hurley ball? A clochán seen from the top? The turd of a hare? A fish’s roe? What else is round? There was a pair of triangles side by side like hills with a valley between them. Or maybe more like a rectangle with a triangular bite out of the top, like a notched bonnet ribbon. Or like the cloven hoof of a deer or a cow. And then there were cables and textured bits that he’d seen before, each of which was supposed to have a different meaning. He couldn’t make any kind of sense out of it. Not that he’d ever got much meaning out of the sweater patterns people had explained to him, the ones supposedly associated with this or that name, or parish, or woman. They didn’t tell stories. They were like the markings on flags or the emblems of noblemen: signs of a clan or a tribe. What could they really say, except maybe how people made their living? Well, he could see that a living could be made out of cows. Or cables, if they were fishermen’s ropes. But he couldn’t for the life of him think what living could be made out of a ball. Perhaps it was a basket—a creel, say? A buoy? Then it struck him that maybe it was the sun, like on old pagan things. But that wasn’t much use. Everyone has an equal claim on the sun. It lights everybody. Why would you want that mixed up with your profession, or your family? It doesn’t make much of a distinction. The moon? And the moon would mean
what, then? Tides? The bleeds of women? Any number of foolish pisreogs?
He would get about this far down any mental track and become embarrassed with himself. Then he would roll the leather carefully back up and put it away. He would have felt better about it had it been a map. A map is a manly thing. But things woven out of wool ought to be women’s business. We kill an animal and take its skin, or we crop its living hair like grass, and that makes all the difference.
* * *
On Inis Caillte, Meg had stayed for some time with the MacIntoshes, and then, to her amazement, they helped to build her a cottage. It wasn’t a very big one, just one room and a hearth, but it was hers. It may be said that she was a lot more useful in the building of hers than either Jim Conneely or Philip Murphy were in the building of theirs. For one thing, she had seen houses framed with timber before—there are plenty of trees in East Anglia—unlike Jim, and she was a much sturdier worker than Philip, who was vague and easily distracted.
“There’s a woman with a lot of sense, now,” said Conor MacIntosh. He was a widower and looked at Meg with a bit of a glad eye. She kept herself to herself, however, and showed no inclination to settle down with anyone. She did accept an ewe and a ram lamb from Conor, though. At first, she had suggested a very frank way for herself to earn the sheep from him. Conor was aghast but that’s not to say he wasn’t tempted. But he up and gave her the animals outright in the end. He examined his feelings and concluded that he was a marrying kind of man and that was the end of it. If Meg Haylock was not a marrying woman, so be it.
