by Rose Doyle
I remembered about what Allie had told me of the Naas Union Workhouse. 'You don't know what you're talking about, Jimmy,' I said.
Two days later we went to Newbridge together to get me a room. Jimmy was to pay for it. He said he'd heard from soldiers in his regiment about a row of cottages in which there were rooms for rent.
I said nothing to Allie or to Beezy Ryan about going to live in Newbridge. Time enough when the deed was done. That would be the time too for Allie to leave the village. I'd an idea growing in my head also about how I might help her do what she wanted with her life.
Jimmy arrived to meet me with a swollen nose and blackening eye. He'd sorted out things with his treacherous friend in the way that men do.
'I hope John Marsh didn't get off so lightly,' I said.
'He won't be writing letters for a while, or doing a lot of reading either,' Jimmy said.
'Will you be punished?' I was worried about him being put in a guardhouse.
'They'll have to find me out first,' Jimmy grinned and rubbed his sore nose, 'and that's not going to happen. That lying swine never had many friends but he's got none at all today.'
Jimmy didn't come into the village to meet me, preferring to wait at a distance in the horsecar. Allie said he was wrong to do this, that he would have to get to know the women sooner or later, that it might as well be sooner. I said it would have to be later and kissed her and ran to the horsecar.
The cottages Jimmy had been told about ran along one side of Francis Street. Across from them stood the barracks and a row of high trees. The road in between was wide and stony, with yapping dogs and a great deal of traffic. The cottages straggled in a low, uneven row and once, in some distant past, might have been decent and whitewashed.
My skirts raised clouds of dark dust as we walked and counted the doors to the cottage Jimmy had been told to look for. A woman with pale eyes opened the door a narrow crack to his knocking.
'What do you want?' She spoke to the buttons on his tunic.
'We're looking for a room,' Jimmy said.
'For one of you or the both of you?' She didn't raise her eyes. She didn't open the door any wider either.
'For my fiancee,' Jimmy said.
'Will she be staying long?' The woman opened the door another couple of inches. Her smile revealed a single, large tooth.
'Until we get married,' Jimmy said.
'A couple of weeks,' I added.
The door opened, wide. 'Ye might as well come in,' the woman turned and went down a dank, dark hallway. We stepped through the door and followed her. It was hard to see anything at first, after the light outside. The smell was another thing. It seeped from the walls and ceilings, smothering in the dank air. I'd been in an abattoir once and it had smelled only slightly worse than the hallway of that cottage.
'You can't stay here.' Jimmy reached for and held my hand.
'Maybe it's cleaner at the back of the house,' I said, 'maybe there's a drain or something causing the smell in this part.' I wasn't hopeful, just desperate to be settled in a room with four walls around myself and James.
At the end of the hallway we went through another door into a kitchen. It had a dirt floor and some tubs of water, a table and chairs, an unlit open fire and shelves with crockery and utensils. Everything was filthy or broken or both. The smell was no better.
The woman who had let us in was talking to another, older woman. They turned when we came in.
'We've a room all right,' the older woman had hair on her upper lip and chin. 'But you'll have to share it with two others. There's great call on the rooms we have here.' She sniggered and nudged the other woman who showed us her tooth in another grin. They were alike enough to be hell hag and daughter.
'I won't be staying,' I said, 'I've changed my mind.'
'We're not good enough for you, is that it?' The first woman narrowed her eyes. This made it impossible to see where she was looking.
'That's it,' I agreed, 'and your house isn't good enough for me either.'
'You'll not get anything else in Newbridge,' the woman sneered, 'there's nowhere will take the likes of you and your bastard child.'
I ignored Jimmy's hand on my arm, urging me out of there. The woman wasn't the kind worth losing my temper with. I would have kept it too if she hadn't insulted James.
'Then I'll stay where I'm living,' I was loud and sharp, 'there's decency among the wrens, at least. There's not a nest on the Curragh as foul as this hole.'
'A wren! The dirty jade's nothing but a wren!'
The daughter spat at my feet. Her mother moved back as if I was diseased.
'You come in here full of airs and graces and you're nothing but a bushwoman,' the daughter screamed. 'Get out.' She advanced a step, her eyes like a cat's when it's ready to fight. 'Get out before I lay hands on you.'
'There's no need for that,' Jimmy put an arm about my shoulder and held me and James tight against him. I could feel him shaking and knew he was having a hard time with his own
temper. 'A mistake's been made. We'll go now.' He turned me towards the door.
'A mistake's been made all right,' the mother's voice snarled behind us, 'the mistake was in thinking that we'd take in a strumpet from the Curragh.'
'The cottages might have the name of being a she-barracks,' the daughter's voice followed as we went back along the stinking hallway, 'but the women who stay here aren't savages.'
The dusty street, with its grey barrack wall and trees, might have been a palace garden, it felt so good after that house.
We walked in silence until we got to the railway station. Then we kept on walking because I wanted to be clear of the town. To rest in a place where I would feel clean. When we came to a river we sat on its bank. Jimmy took off his tunic and laid it down again, this time under a bush, for James to lie on. A bird was singing and I asked him what it was.
'Would it be a swallow?' he guessed. Jimmy was a city person like myself.
It seemed more like a linnet to me. I didn't know much but I knew that the swallow lived among buildings and the linnet in the countryside where he sang like a canary.
'I miss the goldfinch we had in Henrietta Street.' My eyes blurred with sudden, scalding tears.
Jimmy took my hand. 'I'm sorry I brought you to such a place as that,' he said, staring into the river, 'I should have known better, should have known there's only one kind of house will take in an unmarried woman with a child.' He tore a clod of earth from the bank and threw it violently into the water. His face was red from the neck up. 'I've ruined your life, Sarah, I've destroyed something that was beautiful and free.'
I put my hands into the river and cupped them full of water and threw it over his face. 'I was never free,' I said, 'and are you telling me now that I'm no longer beautiful?'
He looked at me for a minute, the water dripping from his nose. 'There's nothing compares to you on this river bank,' he grinned.
'And I know the difference between a linnet and a swallow too,' I said.
We stayed a long time by that river. When I put James to the breast Jimmy watched as if some miracle were happening in front of him. He'd seen his mother suckle his younger brothers but it was very different he said, when the baby was your own and the breast belonged to the woman you loved.
'What's a she-barracks?' I asked. Jimmy frowned and hesitated but I insisted he give me an answer.
'I heard the name in Dublin first,' he said, slowly, 'it's given usually to houses where women of bad habits lodge.'
'Prostitutes and such?' I laid James down again on Jimmy's jacket.
'Every kind. Women who marry soldiers without leave, drunken women, thieving women,’ he leaned over James, watching his sleeping face. 'We won't marry without leave, Sarah. When you're my wife you'll have all the respect due a married woman. You'll never again, as long as I live, be treated like a bawd or harlot.'
'Are you expecting to die soon then?' I joked. He took me seriously.
'I'm a soldier,' he re
minded me.
'The world is full of soldiers living long and healthy lives,' I was impatient, 'and there's no war in this country for you to fight.'
'There are the Fenians . . .'
'The Fenians are not going to attack the Curragh camp.'
'Maybe not,' said Jimmy, 'but we might be sent to attack the Fenians. A soldier must go where he is sent, serve where his army tells him to.'
'Even when he has a wife?'
'It makes no difference.'
I was tired of army talk, and what might happen. 'I'll stay with the wrens until we marry,' I said. 'Compared to Francis Street the wren village is decency itself. It's closer to the camp anyway and the weather looks set to hold for a couple of weeks more.'
I took off my boots and then my stockings and put my feet into the river. The water was cool and curled about them like silk.
'The wrens are decent, many of them,' I said, 'and Allie and Beezy Ryan are in no hurry to leave.'
Jimmy put his feet into the river too and we sat and watched the quick water while I told him about how Allie was trying out her medical skills on the wrens.
'You told me she wanted to be a nurse,' Jimmy remembered.
'She wants now to be a doctor.'
Jimmy had more sense than to challenge this. She'd brought us together and the least he could do was respect her dreams. All he said was, 'She seems to make her own rules.'
I was glad to be returning to the wren village when we crossed the Curragh in the late afternoon. Much as I'd wanted to be out of it I'd had worries about Allie staying on there without me and about forsaking Beezy Ryan. A lot had happened in the months without Jimmy. Allie and Beezy had been with me through it all.
I'd good reason to worry about leaving Beezy alone in the village. She was drinking more than I'd ever known her to and had taken to talking to herself in a way I'd never seen her do before either. It didn't need a crystal-gazer to see she was brooding about the fire and all that had happened in North King Street. Lizzie Early going to the workhouse had made her worse.
I told Jimmy as much of this as I thought he'd understand as we came closer to the village.
'You can't stop her drinking,' he said, 'and she wouldn't thank you for telling her what to do with her life.'
He was right, of course.
There were a couple of things on my mind about Allie that I kept to myself though, and didn't discuss with him. There seemed no point, yet, in telling him I felt she was becoming too bound up in the village. The arm she'd stitched up for Ellen Neary was healing fine. She'd stopped Lil Malone's vomiting
two days before. She'd cured another wren of a crippling ear ache and she'd treated a child's fever. All of this made her feel important and needed, as well as which she was all the time adding the wrens' own cures to her store of knowledge. She watched and learned as she saw them use a stinging nettle against insect bites and feverfew for headaches. When Beezy took dandelion tea, saying it was ‘very effectual for obstructions of the liver', Allie agreed it could do good.
But when the worst happened and she was unable to do anything for Lizzie Early her distress had been terrible.
'There should have been something,' she said over and over, 'it's because I know so little that I was able to do so little. But I'll learn here. I'll learn by observing the women and testing what can be done.' She stopped when I looked disbelieving. 'It's called empiricism,' she snapped.
'I don't care what it's called,' I said, 'it sounds to me as if you're making an experiment of the wrens and their illnesses. It's not right.'
'Why? I'm helping. I'm doing good. If I learn in the process what's wrong with that?'
I could have argued that there was no future for her in the wren village. She wouldn't have listened.
I didn't tell Jimmy either that I was worried, and hurt, by Allie's secrecy over a meeting she'd had at the Gibbet Rath with Captain Ainslie. They'd been seen there by two of the wrens.
I said nothing because I knew she would tell in her own time. She always did. But I wondered about it and was hurt anyway.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Sarah
The weather continued fine. Everyone said it was a miracle and that the devil, at last, was looking after his own. By his own they meant the wrens.
The sun rose, and set, in glowing orange in a cloudless sky. The days in between were long and lazy. Not even the army, with all its rules and disciplines, could get its soldiers to drill and parade with any energy.
One thing, however, did cut through the idleness of that summer and it affected me and Jimmy. When word came that the Prince of Wales was to visit the camp all marriage leave was cancelled until after he'd gone.
I railed against the Prince daily, wishing he would stay at home and amuse himself in England, something the newspapers said he did with great zeal. Jimmy said the visit was an honour and that the commander and his staff were in a state of 'high anticipation'. He would plead, he said, for ours to be considered a special case and ask if Captain Ainslie would help. Jimmy had great faith in Captain Ainslie.
The wrens enjoyed that time of grace and sunshine for the respite it was. There wasn't a woman in the village didn't know from experience the calm that will always come before a storm.
None of it mattered to Lizzie Early. She lived on for two weeks after going into the workhouse, but without ever being aware of where she lay dying. The prayer in the village had
been that she might never know she'd been taken to Naas Union. God, for once, listened to the wrens. They say He listens to the prayers of sinners. Lizzie had no next of kin but a good half of the wrens went to her burial in Kildare churchyard. Beezy paid for a deal coffin and spared Lizzie the final shame of a pauper's funeral.
The priest was young and came from the workhouse. His thin brown hair hung to his collar and he was full of Christian charity. 'We bury our sister Elizabeth Early,' he said, 'in the full and righteous belief that she is at peace at last with her Heavenly Father. The sins of her short, painful life are all forgiven now. We will remember her in our prayers.'
Things would have been all right if he'd left it there but he added a homily.
'Her friends, gathered sadly here on this most wondrous of God's days, must learn to pray that they will be guided to the path of righteousness, the path that poor Elizabeth failed to find.' He opened his arms wide, as if to embrace us all. 'You have only to ask. God's mercy is infinite and generously given.'
Clara Hyland said loudly what most of the wrens felt. 'We've seen plenty of God's mercy. We saw it in the way He listened to Lizzie's prayers, and she said plenty of them.'
'Despair is a sin against God's goodness.' The priest's pale face lit up at the prospect of saving a soul. 'You must fight against it. We will pray together.' He fell to his knees by the open grave and raised his arms. 'Send enlightenment, Almighty God, to the friends of Elizabeth Early . . .' He gestured that we too should kneel.
'Cover her,' Beezy, nodding to the grave diggers, was curt, 'cover her good.'
I left the graveyard with Beezy. We were the only two there had known Lizzie in her other life, when she'd had her health and been what Beezy called 'a decent hard-working whore'. Beezy knew her better than anyone.
Allie stayed talking to the doctor from the workhouse and Clara Hyland waited with her. From being sworn enemies they'd
become companions of sorts, at least in the matter of Lizzie Early.
'I blame myself,' Beezy said as she turned for the Curragh. She hated Kildare and every other country town. She said they were nothing but cesspits of ignorance and cant. 'I should have seen Mary Adams for what she was and left her where I found her. I should have put my girls first and then there would have been no fire. No deaths.' She walked fast, swinging her arms, her rings flashing in the sunlight. She'd worn every ring she had for Lizzie's last outing. She hadn't had a drink all day either. I had James in my arms and found it hard to keep up with her. Though there was no talking to her in the mood s
he was in I tried anyway, calling after her.
'You might as well say you're sorry you took me in, Beezy Ryan,' I cried, 'I didn't bring you much luck either.'
Beezy stopped. 'I wanted you to do work for me, and you did it. You more than earned what I paid you. I wasn't looking for luck, or any other kind of unearned reward. Not from you and not from Mary Adams. Taking Mary Adams in wasn't even a kindness. It was business. I knew the men would like her and I was right. They came after her like dogs in heat. Lizzie was the one said it was wrong.' She started to walk again when I came up beside her. She went on talking. 'She said it to my face that Mary Adams was demented and would destroy us all. I told her that if Mary Adams went on account of her that I'd put her out too.'
Beezy faced me. She'd got older-looking since coming to the Curragh and her hair wasn't the shining mop it had once been. But the sun had at least faded the scar on her face.
'Now they're both gone. Three people dead and my house burned to the ground and my girls on the streets and for what? For what, Sarah?'
'It wasn't your fault, Beezy, and Lizzie dying was nothing to do with any of it either. You're not seeing things straight since we came here.' I shook my head. 'Taking Mary Adams in was a great kindness. How were you to know what would happen? You've worked all your life, Beezy, and here on the Curragh
you've too much time on your hands. You're brooding on things that are past and done with and can't be undone.'
She was more like stone than stone, standing in the road, looking at me without seeing me. I touched the scar on her face and she blinked and came to herself.
'Listen to me, Beezy,' I said, 'what happened was terrible but you can't bring William Fleming back. Mary Adams was mad before you ever met her and Allie says Lizzie had a growth inside her for a long time. It could have been there a couple of years, she says, before even she came to the kip house. She knew by the feel and size of the swelling in her stomach.'
'Allie Buckley is not God.' Beezy was snappy. But she was listening so I went on.
'The countryside doesn't suit you,' I said, 'you're a city woman, used to working for yourself. You're too independent- spirited for this place. It's driving you to melancholy.' I stopped, deciding not to say anything about the drink. I might lose her if I did, now that she was listening.
