by Rose Doyle
In the morning early, before either Mary Connor or the house was stirring, I left quietly through the back kitchen door.
It was still dark but to make certain no one saw me I made my way to Mount Street Bridge through the warren of back lanes and poor cottages behind the big houses. I met only barking dogs and women beginning their long, daily walk to places of work.
On the town side of the bridge I got a horse cab.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Allie
I arrived to join Sarah at the Magdalen convent as light broke on the first day of March, 1868.I left at an equally early hour on the last day of May.
In the months between I learned how to knead and wring clothes, how to iron and fold and hang them on drying lines. I learned to do without creams and mirrors and to keep my opinions to myself. It was not one of those Magdalens which insisted on penitents and others cutting off their hair and for this I was thankful; I couldn't have borne to lose my hair.
I also relearned what I'd known in the Paris convent — that communities of women have an inborn way of sharing and surviving together.
I could have lived without the lessons in laundering. Those about the fraternity of women would prove invaluable.
My arrival gave little joy. The nun who opened the door looked from my bruised face to the departing cab and back again with a sigh. 'Come in, child,' she said.
I gave her a version of my story designed to secure me sanctuary.
'My mother's depravity has made me afraid not just for my body,' I put a hand to my swollen face, 'but for my immortal soul too. I can't go on living in my father's house.' It wasn't hard to let a tear fall. I felt genuinely battered in soul as well as body. 'I'll pay for my keep and I'll work. I'll need to be occupied.' I opened my purse.
'You're not with child then?' She had grey eyes and was gentle.
'No . . .' I made it sound as if I was fearful even this might happen if I stayed on in my father's house.
'Come, child,' she took the money, 'we’ll find you a cell.'
'I'd prefer to sleep in a dormitory with the other women,' I said. When she hesitated I added, 'For the company. I don't want to be alone in the night.'
'The women we have here are not, by and large, of your class,' she said.
'Surely we're all one in the eyes of God?' I said.
The grey eyes became thoughtful and I worried she might be seeing me as a postulant. After a minute she said, 'Very well then,' and led me to the dormitory.
I'd been fairly sure the nuns would find a place for me as long as I was willing to work. The city was full of public laundries and the Magdalens had to keep ahead or lose customers. Success in the laundry business meant they could give homes to women without places to go.
Offering money, as well as my labour, was a way of buying me an independence of sorts. It also ensured my father couldn't easily take me away, even if he wanted to. I'd deliberately said nothing about knowing Sarah. From experience I knew that nuns kept order, and control, by applying the principle of divide and conquer. Once they knew we were friends they would keep Sarah and myself apart. Either that or dispatch one of us to a sister Magdalen.
I couldn't have endured that.
By mid-morning I was drawing and boiling water in the heat and steam of the laundry. Without experience it was all, to begin with, I was fit for. All around me women scrubbed and kneaded over washtubs, or squeezed clothes through mangles. The windows were high up, ensuring light without views. The noise deafened. My face felt on fire.
Watchful nuns meant it was a while before I was able to talk with Sarah. When I found her she was in a corner under a
window, almost hidden by freshly ironed petticoats, bed linen, shirts and frilled blouses. She was folding and packing them into baskets for delivery, a job which allowed her to sit.
She needed to. She'd grown large and looked pale and drawn. The dark blue dress she was wearing was the homeliest thing I'd ever seen on her.
'Hello, Sarah.' I sat under cover of the hanging clothes.
She looked at me in silence for a full minute. 'What are you doing here, Allie?' Her eyes had become very bright and she blinked. 'And what happened to your face?'
'I came to be with you and this,' I touched my eye, 'was on account of a disagreement I had with my mother's fancy man.'
'Ned Mulvey?'
'I know you tried to tell me about him . . .'
'I should have tried harder. But it seemed such a terrible thing and I couldn't say it without being sure. She's your mother, when all's said and done.'
'It doesn't matter now, anyway, who or what she is,' I said.
It mattered so much I couldn't bear to talk about it. It would always matter.
'Have you had word from Jimmy Vance?'
'Not yet . . .'
'Not yet,’ I gave her a hard look through the swollen eye. 'Listen to me, Sarah.' I spoke quickly, trying to say as much as I could before a nun came. 'You'll have to make plans for yourself and your baby. I'm here now and I'll help you. Maybe it might be best to forget Jimmy Vance. When the baby's born we'll go away somewhere. To Paris, maybe. I'll teach. My father will give us money.' The ideas came to me as I spoke. I thought them inspired.
'You can't stay here,' Sarah automatically smoothed the shirt on her lap, 'a Magdalen is no place for you, Allie. It's full of. . .' she half smiled and shrugged, 'sinners like me.' She stared at my face. 'Your complexion is very red.'
'It's the steam,' I said, 'what do you think of my plan?'
'If they see us talking they'll separate us,' Sarah said. 'You'd better go. There's one of them coming. We'll talk later.'
I heard a swishing sound and out of the corner of my eye saw a nun's black skirts come to a halt beside us.
'Continue folding, if you please, Sarah,' her voice was businesslike, 'we have customers waiting for their clothes.' She tapped me on the shoulder. 'Pleasure and prattle are for when the work of the day, and God's work, is done.'
I looked up and saw that she was about my own age, with very freckly skin.
'If there's something you wish to know,' she said, 'the sisters are here to help.'
'I was curious to see the finished task,' I said.
'You've seen enough. The task begins with the drawing of water.' She moved away, clearly expecting me to follow.
'I have a plan already,' Sarah said quickly, 'Beezy Ryan is here too. This is the Magdalen she was reared in. We've a plan worked out together.'
I told the nun my face was bothering me and went and lay on my bed in the long dormitory. The rows of narrow, white- covered beds gave it the air of a mausoleum but at least I had it to myself and was able to weep alone. I wept as I hadn't been able to the night before, tears of lament for Sarah, who didn't need me any more, and of loneliness. I told myself I was a grown woman, that Sarah was too and that Beezy Ryan had helped her when I couldn't. None of it stopped me feeling desolate and cast aside. They were also tears for what I'd lost, for decisions taken, letters written and because I had nothing to go back to.
On my way to the Magdalen I'd posted a letter to Daniel Casey at the dispensary. In it I'd told him I could no longer work there, said I hoped all would go well for him and Dr Connolly and been thankful for all that I'd learned. It had been a harder letter to write than the one to my father.
I sat up and hugged my knees. Salt tears stung my face but the movement changed everything. The reality of the women who slept in the other beds came to me and self-pity retreated.
I got up and paced between the beds, touching the tightly pulled counterpanes as I went. They were so identically neat they might never have been slept in but were, every night, by women whose lives were in much greater states of desolation than my own. Those who sought refuge in the Magdalens did so because of drink or violence or poverty. Or because, like Sarah, they were with child. They had no choices.
I had. When I was less tired I would think about what those choices were. I climbed under my own immaculate
counterpane and slept.
It was dark when Sarah shook me awake. 'The nuns said to leave you be or I'd have woken you before. You've slept enough, Allie. Get up now and wash yourself and put some cream on your face.' She was efficient and in charge and I did as she said.
'They know we're friends,' she answered my unasked question as she stood over me in the wash house, 'Beezy told them.'
'Why did she do that?'
'Because I told her we would have to help you too,' her belly brushed against me when she handed me a towel. She really was very big. 'I said I didn't want to leave you behind.'
She put her cool hand against my face. 'May he never see a day's happiness. May he be miserable for the rest of his life and your mother with him.'
I didn't tell her then what had happened between myself and Ned Mulvey. It was a week before I could bring myself to talk about it and when I did she said, 'You were right to leave. You'd be wrong to go back.' No further comment was necessary.
That night we sat on my bed, the other beds like recumbent spectres about us in the dark, and Sarah told me of Beezy's plan to go to the Curragh of Kildare.
We would have to keep it a secret, she said, because Beezy didn't want anyone to know where she was going. She needed to be out of Dublin, away from questions that might yet be asked about all that had happened in North King Street. We would live with the women who lived free on the plains, in huts they made themselves. Sarah would stay there until she married or settled with Jimmy Vance, Beezy would stay until the autumn, when she would go to America. And me?
'I'll be a nurse and doctor to the women and their children,' I said. 'In the autumn . . . I'll see.'
Sarah took my hand. 'I'm very glad you're coming with us,' she said.
'But Beezy doesn't want me,' I guessed, 'she told the nuns we were friends hoping to have me shifted to another Magdalen.'
'She doesn't know you like I do. She's afraid you won't be up to life on the Curragh.' Sarah began undoing her hair.
A moon had come up and the room was more ghostly than ever. Her face, when her hair fell loose, was like an oval sixpence in an inky frame.
'She says the women there won't take to you and that we'll have to look out for you all the time.' She shook her head tiredly. 'She was all for asking Mother Stanislaus to have you moved to another Magdalen.'
'Then why am I still here?'
'Because I said I would leave if you did and because of your father. He came today. Mother Stanislaus wouldn't have you woken for him but he stayed a long time with her in the parlour. I'd say money exchanged hands. I'd say too that you'll be well looked after while you're here.'
The news of my father was good. It meant he hadn't disowned me and that a plan, hatching in my head, might very well work. I would be twenty-one years old in October. I would go to my father and ask him for my birthright, or whatever amount it took to give me the independence to study medicine. In the meantime I would earn my keep.
'I'll work, like everyone else,' I said to Sarah. There was nothing unselfish in this. I was afraid that if I wasn't occupied I would slip into melancholy, as I had before. 'I learned a lot in the dispensary that I can use to help the women on the Curragh,' I went on, 'there's a great deal I can teach them to do for themselves too.' I paused. 'I'd like to.'
The days got longer, the weather milder and I became used to life in the Magdalen. We rose early, worked until seven and had two breaks during the day for food and rest. Each evening, after dinner, we were free to pray and look after our own clothes and needs until nine thirty. After that the dormitory was locked and the entire convent retired for the night.
'There's a peace here,' Sarah said one night before sleep.
'There's order,’ I said.
We were both right; it was the predictability that made us feel safe. But I'd grown not to trust the calm periods in life. They usually heralded a storm.
By the time Easter came I was as used to the women in the Magdalen as I'd been to my student companions in the Paris convent and knew all of their stories. Most were with child. Some, escaping brutal men, had arrived at the convent beaten to within an inch of their lives. Others were there to cure themselves of drinking and others still were whores tired of a life on the streets.
They would all leave the Magdalen in time. They would nearly all return to the lives they had left.
Beezy Ryan didn't work in the laundry. It was said she spent her time working on the nuns' finances, on schemes that would help them make money. She knew some of the women from outside and wandered about, full of talk and gossip, when the mood took her. She spoke to me only when she had to but I knew the time would come when she'd have plenty to say to me.
She chose to do it on the drying green, on a day when Sarah's time was near. The drying green was a great square surrounded by high, bare walls with ropes strung between them. Miles of petticoats, bed linen, shirts, pinafores and pantaloons shifted and blew on the ropes as they dried in the wind and sun.
'You'd be better off leaving here alone and making your own life.' Beezy stood with the damaged part of her face to the sun. She was convinced of its healing properties and seemed to be right; the welts were fading. 'Your father will help you. You can rejoin respectable society. It's what you're fit for.'
I assumed she was sneering. The welts had created a distortion which made her expressions hard to read.
'I know better than you what respectable society has to offer.' I finished pinning a sheet and moved on. She moved with me. 'I'm going to the Curragh to be with Sarah and her child until she sets herself up.' I fumbled with another sheet. I could do nothing right when Beezy was around.
'You'll be no help to her.' Beezy took the sheet and laid it expertly along the rope. 'She has her life to live and you have yours.'
'We've been friends all our lives.' I kept myself from shouting. 'We'll always be friends.'
'Friends? Where were you, friend, when she was thrown out of Henrietta Street and had to come to me for work and shelter?' Beezy raised her voice so that others in the drying green could hear. 'The world knows you were dressing yourself in Paris gowns and playing at being a saint in the Eccles Street dispensary. Your type are ten a penny in this city, Allie Buckley. You're the kind dips your fingers into the stench of poverty and disease and leaves it behind you when something new comes along.' She dropped her voice again, to the annoyance of at least three women. 'You want to dabble now in Sarah Rooney's life, amuse yourself until you decide what to do with yourself. Take my advice. Go home to your father's house and live the life you were reared to.'
'Did the nuns rear you for a life of prostitution, Beezy? Or did you choose it for yourself?' I began pinning the sheet. 'Why do you want to possess Sarah?'
Beezy studied the rings on her fingers. 'You misunderstand,' she spoke slowly, 'I promised she could have her baby in North King Street but this is where she's ended up instead. Also, she stood by me in my spot of bother.'
I looked at her over the sheet, understanding what I hadn't before. Beezy had lost more than a kip house in the flames. She'd lost the women who'd worked for her and whose lives she'd governed. She only had Sarah now.
I finished pinning the sheet.
'Her soldier won't be there for her,' Beezy said, 'but I will be. She can go to America and start a new life there, her and the child. The three of us will go in the autumn.'
'Sarah's agreed to this?' She'd said nothing to me about America. All she ever spoke about was Jimmy Vance and bringing his child to him.
'No,' Beezy conceded, 'but it'll be the only choice left to her by the time the autumn comes. You'll see.'
'Tell me about the women of the Curragh,' I said.
'They're known as Bushwomen, on account of the way they live. They're rough and they're hard and there's no place for you with them.'
This was as much as I could get out of her and it convinced me she knew very little. Like everyone else in the Magdalen she knew of the Curragh women only by repute. Not
that it made any difference. Even if I'd been told all about them I'd have gone anyway.
I wouldn't have believed what I heard.
'You'll never find yourself a place in respectable society if you go there,' Beezy said.
I didn't believe this either.
Two other things happened before Sarah had her baby.
The first was my father calling to the Magdalen again. He was in a sorry state, sodden with drink and full of talk about my mother and the laudanum she was taking. He seemed to think I had become a postulant. I didn't disabuse him.
The second was the news, in a letter from Bess, that Daniel Casey had called at the house in Haddington Road. He'd been told by my father that I was a postulant. 'I’ve let the hare sit and haven’t told him anything different,' Bess wrote. 'He seemed to me saddened.' She sent Sarah the shawl she'd been christened in along with the letter.
I loved Sarah's baby almost as much as she did from the day he was born. She went into labour in the laundry and had to be almost carried to the sanatorium. The nuns, who were well used to birthing babies, wouldn't let me near her. She was nursing her baby when first I saw him.
'A boy,' she smiled.
'Are you sorry?' I touched his dark head. He was soft and warm.
'He couldn't be better, or more wonderful. I'll call him James, after his father. I'll see he has a good life. One better by far than my own.'
James was the darling of the Magdalen until we left. It was rare for a baby to be there for more than a couple of days but James had two full weeks of loving attention from nuns and Magdalens alike.
Beezy persuaded the nuns to break all rules and Bess was allowed see him. She said she would pray that Sarah found her man in Kildare. Sarah told her nothing about us going to live in huts on the plains.
I don't know what Beezy told the nuns but they did nothing to stop Sarah leaving with her baby. They appeared sad to see us go, particularly Beezy.
'Maybe you're the one should become a postulant,' Sarah joked as we walked down the avenue.
