by Rhys Bowen
“Nothing worse than the smells I’m used to in New York City,” Isaid. “I’ll hope to be back in a few days then. By then I should know my plans, one way or the other.”
“I wish you luck,” the inspector said. “I think you’ve got quite a task ahead of you.”
I thought so too. I went back into the hotel and made arrangements for someone to pick up those trunks and ship them to the hotel in Dublin, under my name. I hoped that I’d seen the last of them and that I was finally getting Oona Sheehan out of my life.
Thirteen
Istarted for Clonakilty early next morning. News vendors at the station were hawking their wares, calling out loudly, “Girl murdered on transatlantic liner. Famous actress involved. Read all about it.” I glanced at them in horror and hurried past.
There was a quite a group of travelers boarding the jaunty green-and-yellow train with me at the terminus. Most of them seemed to know each other. I thought this boded well for my search—maybe news had traveled when a baby girl was left behind in the care of a priest all those years ago. As we pulled out of the station with much huffing and puffing I listened to the lilting accents of Cork and the discussion about things that seemed so remote to me now—harvests and stolen pigs, fishing boats and men lost in storms, deaths, and babies born. The tapestry of simple life outside of big cities, where nothing changed but the seasons.
Green countryside slipped past us: fields and cows and horses, and now and then a fine house among the trees. This was still the tamed part of Ireland, where nature was at the service of man and the ground yielded good harvest. Out where I came from, it was all peat bogs and mountains, and you’d have been lucky to grow enough potatoes to feed the family at the best of times. Often it wasn’t the best of times, and during the famine the entire potato crop had failed.
A road ran alongside the rail, and I wondered if this was the very road that the Burke family took from their croft beyond Clonakilty tothe famine ship in Queenstown harbor. I didn’t think they’d have taken the train, if the railway was indeed up and working back in 1848. People only left their homes when they had no money and no hope and could only take what they could carry. I pictured the road very different from its current air of prosperity, lined with a ragged column of starving people, some pushing everything they had managed to salvage in a wheelbarrow, some falling along the way and being left behind to die. Had Mary Ann Burke been left to die, or had she recovered and been taken in by a kindly family? Tommy had been told that she had been left in the care of a priest, and I scanned the road, making a note of any churches we passed.
So little to go on: her approximate age and the place where she was born. And all of this happened over fifty years ago. Now that I was here, I had to admit that my chances of finding what happened to her were indeed slim.
Around me the other passengers chatted on in their lilting Cork accent, regarding me, the outsider with the fancy clothing, with obvious interest and suspicion as they passed along juicy pieces of gossip. It was hard to remember that I had lived such a life myself once. They did inquire of my destination, and when I told them the name of the hamlet beyond Clonakilty, they instructed me where I should change trains.
“Are you going to the seashore for your health, miss?” another asked. “I can’t think of any good boardinghouses in that area. You’d do better to go to somewhere fashionable like Bantry where I understand they have lovely hotels.”
“Actually, I’m looking for someone,” I said. “I’ve come over from America.”
This news caused quite a stir and almost everyone present in the carriage chimed in, asking if I knew relatives or acquaintances who had also gone to the New World. When at last I could get a word in edgewise, I told them I was trying to trace a relative who had been left behind when the family sailed in a famine ship. “Her name was Burke, Mary Ann Burke.”
They debated among themselves as to Burkes that they knew or had known, but most of them weren’t from around Clonakilty. When we reached the junction, they put me off the train as if I was a two-yearold simpleton,- and in fact one of them, also bound for Clonakilty, led me like an errant child across to the train waiting on the other side of the platform. During the next portion of the ride, I asked about how to get to a hamlet called Ardfield.
“It's a goodish walk if you’re not used to it,” one of my fellow passengers said, and I realized suddenly that I was no longer one of them. My clothing, my manner, were now that of a stylish lady, not an Irish peasant. I have to say it did give me a little thrill of pleasure.
Again I explained my mission. Again met with blank stares. Nobody had heard the story of the abandoned baby.
“Likely enough she’d have wound up in the workhouse,” one of them said. “That's where most poor wretches wound up in those days. And not many got out alive.”
With that depressing news we pulled into Clonakilty station. They set me in the right direction, and I came out to a bustling market square with the market in full swing. I pushed my way between the stalls, bought an apple from a child whose own cheeks were as rosy as his wares, and set off along the road munching it. On one side of the square there was a fine church with a spire. I was tempted to go right away to talk to the priests, but I had resolved to start at the Burke's croft and work my way back.
The town was soon left behind. It was a crisp but chilly day, perfect for walking, and I strode out, remembering how I had walked for miles in my youth with my hair blowing free behind me and usually no shoes on my feet. My current costume prevented me from taking more than dainty steps and the shoes pinched at my toes, but I hitched up the skirts as high as I dared and became less dainty after a few yards. I passed people along the road and asked each of them about the Burkes with no success, until at last I came to an old man, sitting outside his cottage door. He vaguely remembered a family called Burke, but couldn’t remember a baby called Mary Ann.
“Is there anyone you know around here who is old enough to remember the famine, besides yourself?”
He thought for a moment then spat down into the dust. “Paddy O’Reilly,” he said. “He lives out that way, if he's still alive. Haven’t seen him recently, but then he's got a gammy leg. Doesn’t get about much any more.”
The man's name made me react with a start. Paddy O’Riley had been my employer and mentor in New York. From him I had been learning how to be a detective. If he hadn’t been killed just when I was getting started, I might be more use at my profession by now instead of stumbling along blindly most of the time, solving cases more by luck than skill. And now it seemed I was to be in the hands of another Paddy O’Reilly. We Irish are a grand bunch for believing in portents and dreams and that kind of thing, so a shiver went up my spine as I heard the name mentioned. It never occurred to me that Paddy Reilly must be one of the most common of Irish names, with one in every town. Instead I felt the excitement of believing I was finally on the right track.
I set off again. The countryside now was more like the Ireland I had known—wild, rocky with the occasional cottage and a glimpse of the sea in the distance. Along the way I passed the ruin of one cottage after another, with four crumbling walls, some with roofs caved in and some with no roofs at all, but no sign of live inhabitants. At last I came to a cottage with a line of nappies flapping outside and the sounds of children's voices squealing as they played. A woman came to the door, a baby on her hip, another one on the way, by the look of it. She had never heard of the Burkes and confirmed that Paddy O’Reilly would be the only one in the neighborhood who might be able to help me.
I followed the road down toward Clonakilty Bay. A couple of cottages perched on the small quayside, a rowing boat bobbed in the waves, but there was no sign of life. Then I noticed smoke rising from a cottage chimney and savored the familiar sweetness of burning peat. I went to the front door and knocked. A dog barked and an old man appeared from a vegetable plot beside the house. His face was rough and weather beaten, the wrinkles set into a permanent scowl- an
d indeed the face did seem to mirror his temperament.
“What do you want?” he demanded. “If you’re one of those do-gooding church ladies you can turn right around and go home. I’m not coming to your services nor reading your confounded Bible.”
“Are you Paddy O’Reilly?” I asked.
“What if I am?” he demanded. He was certainly nothing like the Paddy Riley I had known.
“I’m here because I’m trying to find information on a family called Burke who used to live around here.”
“There's no Burkes around here anymore,” he said grudgingly. “They’re all gone. Those that didn’t die in the famine went west across the ocean.”
“But you remember them?”
“I do,” he said. He glared at me suspiciously. “Are you a relative?”
“A friend of the family. Which was their cottage?” I asked.
He pointed. “Up on the hillside over there. You can scarcely tell it was once a home now. The land agent's men didn’t bother to wait for the people to die. Wanted them out in a hurry. They came in and set fire to the thatch and started knocking down the walls. Didn’t even wait for folks to get their possessions out first. And those that couldn’t get out quick enough burned with the thatch. I still remember the stench of it in my nostrils.”
“That's terrible,” I agreed. “I gather we had the same sort of thing where I come from in county Mayo.”
“That's how they behaved in those days. There were once three hundred or more people living in these parts. A thriving little port it was here. Now there's just a handful of us left, waiting to die.”
“So what happened to your family? You didn’t go away?”
He grunted. “I didn’t say that. I went away all right. My dad was lost at sea when I was a boy. I couldn’t wait to get out. I took a job on a merchant ship, sailing to South America, bringing back beef from Argentina. It wasn’t a bad life at all. I came back here when I was too old to do the work, and everyone had gone. Not a soul that I remembered from the old days.”
“But you do remember the Burkes? Tommy Burke?”
“Tommy Burke—was that one of their children? They had a brood of children like most people around here.”
I nodded. “Four children, I believe. An older boy and girl. Tommy would have been about three or four at the time they left. And there was a baby sister too—Mary Ann.”
He shook his head. “Can’t say I remember clearly now. I heard that the Burkes went to America. The old folks died and the younger generation went. That's how it usually was in those days.”
“But the baby didn’t go with them,” I said. “She was sick. They had to leave her behind. Tommy has sent me to find her.”
He looked scornfully at me. “They’d only have left her behind if she wasn’t expected to recover, wouldn’t they?”
“How would I find out if she died? Where's the nearest churchyard?”
He jerked his head to the right. “There's a churchyard at the old abbey, behind those pine trees on the hill. That's where we bury folks around here, but it won’t do you any good looking. During the famine there were too many to bury properly. They just dug big pits and filled them up with bodies. The priest said a prayer over them and that was it. No headstones, no memorials.”
“So where would her death have been recorded, do you think?”
He looked at me scornfully. “They didn’t bother with recording births, deaths, or marriages in those days. Not for us Catholics. We were like cattle. Not worth much alive,- worth even less dead.”
I tried another tack. “Tommy Burke believes the baby was left with a priest along the way to Queenstown. Where's the nearest church?”
“The nearest church would be that grand-looking affair in Clonakilty. You’ll have passed it. Just as fancy as the ones those Anglicans build.”
“So you can’t think of an old priest around here—one who might have been around since the famine times?”
He shrugged. “I don’t go near the place myself. Already damned to hell, that's me, and not a thing any of them do-gooders can do about it. Off you go then. There's nothing more I can tell you. The Burkes are all long gone.”
He stumped back to his garden and I made my way back up the hill to those pine trees. I wanted to take a look at the graveyard for myself. I found Burkes buried there, but no Mary Ann, nobody from the time of the famine. If they’d added her body to a family grave, I had no way of knowing it. As I stood beside the old abbey ruins, listening to the sigh of the wind through those Scotch pines, I felt overwhelmed with the melancholy of the place. Great sorrow lingered here. I couldn’t wait to get away.
Fourteen
Ifound the Burke's old cottage, now just a pile of rubble overgrown with dying weeds. I stood staring down at it for a while, then I turned away and began the long trek back to Clonakilty and called on the priest at the grand-looking church. He was a young man, fresh faced and eager, but he could tell me nothing about older priests who might have been in the area at the time of the famine.
“I must have been the fourth or fifth priest to occupy this post since then,” he said.
His parish records only dated from the 1880s. “You’ll not find good records before then anywhere,” he said. “They didn’t care about recording the births or death of Catholics in Ireland. Took more trouble to note the birth of their cattle.”
“So there is nobody by the name of Mary Ann living around here these days?” I asked “She might have grown up and married.”
He considered this. “I can think of a couple of Mary Anns,” he said, “but they wouldn’t be the right age for the woman you are seeking. Have you tried the workhouse? That would have been the logical place to have taken in an abandoned child.”
“The workhouse,” I said. “In Clonakilty, you mean?” “Oh indeed, we’ve a small one still operating here, but there would also probably be one in Bandon and certainly one in Cork city,” he said. “Any one of them could have taken in the child, but I doubt most ofthem kept good records at a time like that. They must have been full to overflowing. And rampant with disease too. No, I think you’ll have to assume that it's likely a child left behind did not survive.”
I thanked him, and left in a cloud of gloom. Nobody seemed to believe that Mary Ann might still be alive. And if she didn’t survive there was not likely to be any record of her death. I went to the workhouse in Clonakilty and a sad, sorry place it was too: a grim brick building, with bars on the windows like a jail. Inside, it was dark and dank. Someone was coughing. And the news was equally depressing—there had been no proper records kept from that chaotic time. People arrived and died every day and were buried in mass graves.
I made a few more half-hearted inquiries around the town and then began my return journey. This time I could not take the train, which I could hear puffing merrily in the station. I had to follow the route the Burke family would have taken. There were a couple of older people who had seen the famine processions pass and pointed me in the right direction. By now it was past midday and I was hungry, tired, and dispirited. My legs, no longer used to walking five miles over rough terrain, were feeling the strain. I was on a hopeless quest, no way of finding if the little girl had lived or died. Most likely she was in one of those unmarked mass graves in a local cemetery, and Tommy Burke would never know what happened to her.
But I wasn’t about to give up yet. I hadn’t really expected to find Mary Ann on my first day of searching, had I? I was going to see it through to the end, one way or another. I bought a meat pie in a bakery and stared walking again, this time in the direction of Bandon, the nearest big town on the main highway. I managed another three miles before my legs refused to go on, so I was forced to spend the night at the Nag's Head Inn, part of a cluster of houses beside the road. And an uncomfortable night it was too—lumpy bed, wind whistling through the cracks around the window. I couldn’t wait to be up and out in the morning.
I set out at first light, stopping to ask anyone
I met along the way. But most people were too young to remember the famine, and nobody recalled a family taking in a girl child called Mary Ann. Older people were noticeably absent from the scene. They probably went first in thefamine, sacrificing their share of the food to the young. Those few old women I met shook their heads sadly.
“A sick child left behind on the way to the famine ships?” one asked. “There were so many of them, my dear. You’d seldom pass along a road in those days without seeing a funeral procession, or a body, just lying there. We had a man employed full time by the government, just driving around with his cart and picking up bodies. Children fared the worst. The poor little souls didn’t have a sporting chance at life. I lost two of my own, you know. Watched them slip away and couldn’t do a blessed thing about it.”
She sighed and wrapped her shawl around herself.
And so it was all the way back. I asked in every village, at every workhouse, general store, in every church and heard the same story. So many people had passed through on their way to the ships. So many had died along the way.
I had to spend another night on the road. I met no old priests and only blank stares at the various churches in response to my questions. One priest suggested that I contact the bishop's palace and take a look at the diocesan records. But any priest in 1850 would now be seventy or eighty at least. Likely not still working.
Thus I arrived back in Cork on the third day, my shoes much the worse for wear, and my legs not much better. I was unsure what to do next. I had retraced the route that the family probably took to Queen-stown, but it was possible they had followed the coast along byways instead of the most direct route along the road. If I was going to do the job properly, I should now go back and visit every hamlet between Cork and Clonakilty. Not an enviable task.
I walked into Cork longing for a hot bath, a change of clothing, a comfortable bed. I arrived back at the hotel to find a note from Inspector Harris informing me that the inquest had been arranged for the very next day. Lucky that I hadn’t lingered any longer along the way then. I washed, changed, and enjoyed a good cup of tea with warm scones and cream. Thus fortified I decided I should make use of the remaining hours of daylight by visiting the cathedral and asking questions at the diocese headquarters.
