Secrets of Our Hearts

by Sheelagh Kelly

  Seated at the table with her brothers and sister, still eating their porridge, Juggy overheard. ‘Aw, you’re not selling ’em?’ came her lament.

  ‘Sure, and how do you think we’d make our living if we didn’t?’ her great-uncle called to her, whilst lacing his boots. ‘They’re big enough now to leave their mother.’

  ‘Can’t we keep just one?’ wheedled the child, fixing him with disappointed eyes and inclining her head beseechingly, a ploy that usually worked with her father.

  ‘We can not,’ Austin apologised, then rose and went to a tin on the mantelpiece and fished out a halfpenny. ‘But here’s a picture of some wee pigs for ye.’

  Accepting the coin with polite thanks, Juggy turned it over, grinning at the sow and her piglets on its reverse, whilst similar denominations were handed out to her brothers and sister.

  Batty had turned his attention to his father, asking eagerly, ‘Can we come with you to town, Dad, so we can spend ’em?’

  ‘Would you rather not play with your cousins?’ Aunt Beesy intervened. ‘Sure, their mothers will be bringing them over any time now.’

  ‘Well, I don’t mind—’ Niall began to say that he would not mind taking them all, but Austin grabbed his arm to still him.

  ‘Take thirteen children to town?’ he growled from the side of his mouth. ‘Is it mad you are?’ Then he raised his voice to instruct the others, ‘They’ll be safer here. Sure the market’s a dangerous place, what with all them creatures leppin about.’

  Beesy saw through him. ‘Don’t be thinking ’tis stout you’ll be tipping down your neck all day long,’ she said firmly. ‘There’ll be drinking enough at the shindy.’ A party in honour of the guests had been arranged for the end of the week.

  Her husband might take umbrage, but Niall smiled and asked his children which they would prefer. ‘If you want to stay and lark with your cousins, I’ll take you to town later in the week.’ When they opted for this, he turned to his mother-in- law. ‘What about you, Nora, do you want to come?’ He hoped she would refuse.

  And so she did, though her reply was to spark mixed feelings. ‘No, it’d be rude to go just as Beesy’s relatives have nicely arrived.’

  Turning glum, Niall offered to stay too, but Nora was keen to explain that her words had not been meant as a rebuke. ‘It’s going to be all women again here,’ she told him. ‘It’d not be much fun for you. You might as well make the most of your freedom whilst you can.’

  Seeking a double edge to this pronouncement, Niall locked eyes with her, but only for a second. Then he was away with Austin, glad to be out of her company.

  Unlike some who lived far away and had been up before sunrise in order to travel to market, the occupants of this house had only a few miles down the road to go. With a good breakfast inside them, and a great stack of bread wrapped in a cloth to take for lunch, Austin and Niall, with some help and hindrance from his children, loaded the litter of pigs into the donkey cart. Then, with each man alongside it, they set off for town on foot.

  It was a day for selling livestock, but the market was very different from that of York, for few of the animals were penned, save for those trussed up in donkey carts. The square was lined with such brightly coloured little vehicles, some containing a single pig, others an entire litter; lowing herds of cattle that blundered on and off the pavement, herded by drovers with pipes in their mouths and blackthorn sticks in their hands. But except for the panting dogs with fanatical eyes, no one seemed unduly hurried, drifting along as if they had all the time in the world, giving an occasional idle poke of a red-speckled hide, or a white one, or a brown. There were donkeys everywhere, some with panniers, some hauling carts laden with turf, or vegetables, or pigs. The crowd was composed mainly of men, though there were one or two old women with shawls over their heads, travelling sedately along the street, as deals went on all around them amid a great deal of spitting and slapping of palms.

  His piglets sold by mid-morning, Austin made a beeline for a pub. Niall’s protestations that it was much too early for alcohol were ignored, and he was dragged off the street into a tobacco-stained room that was hardly bigger than his own front parlour. With two small tables and eight flimsy chairs, and a wooden counter loaded with trays of sweets and all manner of unrelated objects, the place itself did not seem to know whether it was a pub or a shop. And there Niall and Austin were to sit for the rest of the morning, sinking pint after pint of Guinness, whilst others came and went in their dung-stinking boots and their trail of pipe smoke, until Niall began to feel lightheaded and refused to touch another drop before some of it had been soaked up with the wedges of homemade bread.

  ‘I think I’ll just go for a wander round town while I can still stand,’ he eventually told Austin, who was remarkably unaffected. ‘You stay here as long as you like.’

  ‘I intend to.’ Ruddy-faced and cheerful, Austin took another greedy gulp of his stout. Shaking his head in wonder at the slender man’s capacity, Niall re-emerged into the sunshine, and proceeded to go about the town, pausing occasionally to look into a shop window, or to buy some sweets and comics for his children, and a book for himself, but mainly to wander aimlessly, and to wonder what was being said about him in his absence.

  Back at the cottage, five other women seated around the table with half-prepared vegetables and scandalised expressions, Nora had finally divulged her true reason for being here.

  ‘An affair!’ Beesy stopped grating the potato to gape in disbelief, then turned to examine the others, who were similarly shocked, her daughters hardly able to utter a word from excitement. ‘No, it cannot be, not Niall – why, he’s quiet as a mouse!’

  ‘Huh! And you know what they say about the quiet ones being the worst,’ retorted Nora, slicing her way through a pile of scallions, the smell of them taking over the room. ‘So… much as I love coming to see you, Beesy, we’re not just here for a holiday – it’s to get him out of the clutches of that one!’

  After a further series of indignant gasps, the culprit’s name was raised and ridiculed.

  ‘Boadicea Merrifield?’ repeated Beesy’s latest visitor, also called Mary, a prim-and-proper kind with a superior air. ‘What kind of a stupid name is that? Did she concoct it herself?’

  Nora shrugged, and continued slicing the onions.

  ‘I’ll never understand the English.’ Old Beesy shook her head, her vivid blue eyes momentarily clouded by these troubling thoughts, as she went back to using her grater, slivers of potato dropping into her bowl. ‘Cursing a child with a heathen name like that.’

  ‘Oh, she’s not English,’ informed Nora, reaching for another onion.

  ‘Then where is she from, Aunt Nora?’ enquired Nancy, her own knife fallen idle.

  ‘That I can’t tell you, except that it’s this county—’

  ‘Ye mean, she be Irish?’ shrieked her niece Mary, almost slicing through her finger along with the cabbage. ‘With a name like that?’

  ‘Well, as I heard it from Niall,’ proceeded Nora in confidential manner, ‘she’s known as Mary by some—’

  ‘Sure, aren’t most of us?’ The woman from Ballina interrupted with a little laugh at her own daughter, who shared her name, and also at Beesy’s daughter.

  ‘—but she prefers the fancier title,’ continued Nora. ‘Her father must have been English, with that surname, but she was definitely born here because she’s got the accent.’

  ‘And ye’ve no idea what parts she’d be coming from?’ asked Beesy.

  ‘No, only that it’s County Mayo – but I’d dearly love to, so’s I could find something out about her.’ Nora’s attitude grew darker by the minute, her knife slicing briskly through one onion after another. ‘Niall cracks on that she’s told him all about herself, but there’s something shifty about her—’

  ‘You’ve seen her for yourself then?’ put in Beesy.

  ‘Yes! She goes to our church. Bold as brass and brassy-looking with it. Got the nerve to stand making cow’s eyes at
him whilst Father Finnegan’s taking Mass!’

  ‘Shame on her!’ breathed the listeners.

  ‘Well, that’s what you get from the kind of woman who pounces on a man the minute his wife dies.’ It was not just the onions’ astringency now that brought tears to Nora’s eyes.

  ‘And sure, there’s no accounting for what a man will stoop to.’ Beesy extended a hand across the table to comfort her. ‘We’ll pray for him, darlin’.’

  There were pious murmurs of accord from those others round the table.

  Sufficient potato in her bowl now, Beesy’s gnarled, arthritic hands set out a linen cloth, then tipped the gratings into it, wrapping them into a bundle and squeezing this over the bowl. Watching those deformed fingers having trouble in milking out the moisture, Nora offered to take over. Her own large fists pressed to the task, and the bundle so malevolently set upon, it was not hard for others to visualise this as her son-in-law’s neck.

  ‘Aw, those poor wee children o’ his!’ Beesy clutched her pendulous breast. ‘The more I think about them, the nearer I’m to weep. Just lost their mother and now another trial. Do they know about their father’s wickedness?’

  Nora shook her head. Her mouth was set in an unforgiving line as she tipped the contents of the cloth into another bowl, and handed this to Beesy, who waited with the flour. ‘And if it’s up to me, they never will.’ Her eyes held a plea. ‘That’s why I need all the help I can get.’

  ‘You shall have our prayers,’ promised Beesy, mixing in the flour and salt, these words supported by all who were round the table.

  ‘Thank you, Beesy, but I meant more tangible help. I think I’ve managed to make Niall see the error of his ways, but that one might still want to get her claws into him, and if she does then I need to have the ammunition to stop her.’

  ‘With such a name, there’s someone sure to have heard of her,’ announced Mary from Ballina. ‘I’ll be after having a word with Father Kelly when I get back. Maybe he’ll be enlightening us over your mystery woman, if it is true she comes from this area.’

  Nora thanked her, but, ‘I don’t hold out much hope. Our own priest couldn’t tell me any more than I already knew.’

  ‘Ah, but Father Kelly is very well-appointed with the bishop,’ declared the woman, the glint of surety in her eyes as she levelled them at Nora. ‘If he cannot find out, no one can.’

  Then her look of self-importance was deflated by the intervention of a church bell, and everyone fell silent; she composed herself for prayer.

  With the sun directly over the bustling market town came the tolling of the Angelus. As one, the crowd paused in their dealing and bargaining and shopping, each woman religiously crossing herself, each man removing his hat and bowing his head, all devoting their attention to God. Standing at the top of Main Street now, Niall removed his own cap, bent his head and crossed himself, and waited in reverential silence whilst the bell continued to toll, only the lowing and snorting of beasts intruding upon the sacred moment.

  The clanging finally stopped, and in a trice, or so it seemed to Niall, everyone returned to what they had been doing, whether gossiping, or cheating … or thinking of some forbidden love. Lifting his head, he replaced his cap, but instead of moving on, he stood to watch them for a while, pondering the vagaries of humankind. How could they carry on so unaffected whilst for him the Angelus had driven home the message of his sinfulness as effectively as a nail through his heart? His anguished eyes fell upon a green post-box set into a wall, causing him to wonder if he should write to Boadicea. It might be easier to inform her of the situation by letter …

  With an inward sigh, he began to move back down Main Street, his gaze straight ahead now. But suddenly he was to undergo an eerie flash of recognition, and everyone around him was to vanish. The trip to town had been intended to lift his spirits, but for Niall, this parade of shops was so like Micklegate, the cobbled road having a gentle curve to its descent, and the buildings on either side possessing a similar feel of antiquity – even if not so tall and grand – that for a moment he was magically transported there, and hurrying home from work in anticipation of an evening with Boadicea. They could drag him a thousand miles, they could drag him ten thousand, but his mind would remain in York.

  This preoccupation had not gone unnoticed by his host. Working alongside Niall in the fields the next morning, the constant click of their hoes the only sound shared between them, Austin said nothing for a long time. His frame, like his wife’s, was arthritic. Such outdoor work must have induced considerable pain, though he did not show it; and neither did his failing eyesight prevent him from seeing another’s.

  Only after they had toiled many lengths of the field, however, did he make a rare pronouncement. ‘I’m thinking we must have you to the matchmaker while you’re here, Nye.’ His tanned wiry arms wielded the hoe along the rows of healthy seedlings, carefully turning and sifting the soil until, halted by Niall’s glare, he added in guilty afterthought, ‘Aye, well, maybe it is too soon after poor Ellen …’

  Niall came upright. ‘She’s put you up to this, hasn’t she?’

  The old man looked up under the peak of his cap, his face bemused. ‘Who is that?’ he asked.

  ‘My bloody mother-in-law!’ snapped his accuser. Then he gasped his frustration to the sky, where great banks of cloud sailed gently past. ‘I knew there was summat going on when we got back from town yesterday; they were all looking at me in a funny way. I guessed Nora’d been up to skulduggery!’

  ‘Why not at all …’ Austin’s weather-beaten face, with its big nose and ears, continued to look thrown. ‘’Twas just myself thinking to ease your misery, son.’

  Niall threw down his hoe. ‘I wish every bugger would stop interfering!’

  ‘I’m not, truly I’m not!’ protested Austin.

  And, upon studying the old man’s baffled expression, Niall’s glower began to fade, and he bent to pick up his hoe, mumbling, ‘Sorry, Austin, I just thought … well, Nora’s tried to fix me up with a couple of women, and we’ve fallen out over it.’

  ‘I swear I never heard a breath of it,’ vouched Austin. ‘The matchmaker was my own idea.’ Then he eyed his companion with sympathy. ‘But, from the cut of your face ’tis obviously too soon to engage his skills.’

  ‘Well, Nora reckons it is.’ Niall remained pessimistic.

  ‘That would be understandable, Ellen being her daughter.’ The old man took off his cap and scratched his scalp through the curly grey hair, pondering on his own words, before going back to work, his hoe once again striking stone. ‘But now ye have me totally confused again. Ye say ’tis her who thinks ’tis too soon, yet she’s the one who’s been coming up with marriage candidates.’ He adopted a reasoning tone. ‘Did ye not think to accept one of them? I know what a loss it must have been, but a man needs a wife to look after him, Nye, and the children a mother.’

  ‘It depends what sort of wife.’ Niall lifted his eyes to follow a hooded crow that balanced on a thermal overhead, its gliding form etched against the cloud as it watched them from above. Then he drove his implement at the earth again. ‘Nora’s choice doesn’t coincide with mine.’

  ‘Well, like I said,’ panted Austin, ‘we’ve a fine matchmaker down the road.’

  Niall cast his mind back to his first time in the motherland, when he had thought it odd not to see any courting couple as in York, nor any Monkey Run in the town for a chance to pick a mate. Nowadays, he understood how things were done in Ireland, that such important matters were left to wiser beings. But as he told Austin, ‘It’ll be a waste of time. Anyhow,’ he dashed a hand at his sweating brow, ‘Nora reckons we’ve got her to look after us; we don’t need anybody else.’

  ‘We’ve heard a lot of what Nora reckons.’ Still perplexed by these contrary declarations, Austin continued working along the row. ‘But what do you feel yourself?’

  Had it been any other male, Niall would have welcomed this opportunity to get things off his chest. But Austin wa
s his wife’s uncle, if only by marriage. Thus, not wanting to insult Ellen’s memory, he responded with a non-committal shrug. Still toiling, he lifted his eyes and looked away across the field to where his children were once again in the company of their cousins, and taking it in turns to lead the donkey up and down, one of them on its back. He could not, though, prevent his thoughts from straying to Boadicea.

  Involved though he was in his work, the old man must have interpreted that secret smile. ‘Could it be,’ he said, ‘that you’ve already found a match?’

  Niall stopped hoeing and looked back at him quickly, his expression turning apologetic.

  ‘You’ve no call to pay penance to me,’ Austin reassured him.

  ‘Sorry for being so cagey, Aust. I’m surprised you didn’t know already.’ Returning to his labours, Niall gave a mirthless laugh. ‘That’s her whole reason for bringing me here, to get me away from a scarlet woman.’

  The old man sucked in his breath, finding this a good enough reason to stop work. ‘Scarlet woman, begor?’

  ‘In my mother-in-law’s opinion.’ Niall stopped hoeing too, smiling wistfully as he informed his companion, ‘Ah, she’s not really. She’s a lovely lass. Everything I want. It’s just that everyone thinks it’s too soon, and maybe it is …’ Turning sombre, he leaned on his hoe, resting his chin on his hands.

  Austin was firm, pointing a thick horny finger as he declared, ‘If your mind is set on it, then ’tis not too soon! Don’t let yourself be bossed about like I am – why look at me, driven out of my own house to make room for people I’ve never even met. Not yourselves! I mean those two biddies from Ballina. Having to move because her ladyship objects to sleeping on the other side of the wall to the pig! Who the blazes is she anyhow?’