In the Time of Famine

by Michael Grant

  With each sarcastic jab, Emily literally jumped in her seat. Every time she was about to counter his wild, unfair accusations, he went right on as though she weren’t there. Oh, the impertinence of the man!

  Finally, she found her voice. “You are an… ingrate!” she screeched.

  “I don’t know what that means,” he said, looking baffled.

  “You have no gratitude.”

  “Oh, but I do. I’m grateful to anyone who wants to help. But five blankets doesn’t count for much, does it?”

  Emily fought to catch her breath. She had never been spoken to like this in her entire life.

  “At least I’m doing something!” Her voice was at least a half an octave higher than normal. Dear God, what is going on here?

  Michael shook his head. “You, and your ladies, are doin’ somethin’ for yourselves. No one else.”

  “You are—so wrong.”

  “Do you remember what you said to me the day that man passed out on the road?”

  “Why would I remember anything I said to you?” Emily asked imperiously.

  “Oh…” Michael was momentarily stopped by her icy retort, but he quickly regained his momentum. “Well, anyway, you called me a cowerin’ sheep in a ditch. I didn’t want to admit it to myself at the time, but you were right. Well, I will not be a cowerin’ sheep any longer. I will do whatever it takes to save my family, myself, and my people. I suggest you take your own advice. Stop bein’ a cowerin’ sheep in a ditch and do somethin’ useful.”

  Michael tossed the blankets back in her lap and stomped away.

  Emily stood up in the trap, gasping for breath. “You are”—she searched for the proper adjective, a word that would cut him to the quick, and had to settle for—“impertinent!” As she spoke the last word, the horse took a step forward, flinging her back into her seat and ruining the full effect of her denunciation.

  Michael continued down the road, arms stuffed in his pockets, back stiff with indignation. When he was out of sight of the carriage, he yanked his hat off, threw it to the ground, and kicked it into a ditch. “Eejit!” he shouted to the surrounding trees.

  He climbed down into the ditch, retrieved the hat from a mud puddle, and flopped on the ground completely disgusted with himself. “What’s the matter with me?” he muttered aloud. “When I’m around her I either talk like a born eejit or I take off insultin’ her. ‘Do you remember what you said to me the day the man passed out?’ says I to her. ‘Why would I remember anythin’ I said to you?’ says she to me. Of course she would not. Who’d remember the rantin’ of an eejit?” He flung his hat back into the mud. “Jasus!”

  Emily trotted down the road in her trap muttering to herself. “That man is nothing, A lowly peasant. A tenant farmer. I will not let him upset me.”

  Ahead, she saw a gaunt man pushing a wheelbarrow. He was stumbling from the load and weaving all over the road. At first she thought he might be drunk but, as she drew closer, she saw what was in the wheelbarrow: It was a young boy no more than ten and he couldn’t have weighed more than fifty pounds. His pathetically thin arms and legs hung out of the wheelbarrow like broken sticks, and his lifeless eyes, half open, stared up at the sky.

  Emily reined in the horse. “Where are you going, sir?” she asked softly.

  The man stopped and looked in her direction, his eyes feverish, unfocused. He hadn’t even noticed her until she’d spoken.

  “It’s to the Fever Hospital... my boy is sick... I must get him help….”

  It was clear to Emily that the man himself had the fever. And it was also clear to her that the boy was dead. The man could barely stand, but with superhuman strength, he got the wheelbarrow going again and continued down the road muttering to himself.

  Emily watched until the man and his pathetic cargo was out of sight. She picked up the reins, paused, then dropped them in her lap and began to cry uncontrollably.

  After a time, she knew not how long, she regained her composure. But now she was puzzled and confused. She felt like an alien in her own land. Something was going on in this country, but she didn’t know what. Emily, like most young women of her class, had led a typically sheltered life. She sewed, read poetry, the classics, but not the newspaper—there was nothing in it except politics anyway. She didn’t know how the food got onto her table or at what cost. She didn’t know how Nora and the house staff were paid or, for that matter, what they were paid.

  Of course she knew there was a famine, but it was something remote, something that had nothing to do with her; like those endless and tiresome European wars. She’d taken her father and his fellow landlords to task for her own amusement, not out of any deep concern for the plight of the poor. Exactly what impact this famine had on them she had no idea. Certainly the servants who worked in her father’s house were well taken care of. They had clothes to wear, food to eat. They looked healthy enough.

  It suddenly occurred to her that she had been deluding herself all this time. The truth was, she didn’t want to know what was going on. She had gone out of her way to avoid coming into contact with the misery around her. Shocked the first time she’d seen a family of poor wretches on the road, she’d taken to riding only in the fields so she wouldn’t have to encounter such sights again. She never rode past the tenant’s cottages anymore or stopped to talk to them—something she’d always done as a child. She’d even stopped going into the village because it made her uneasy to see the hordes of displaced people—sometimes whole families—streaming through the village streets, begging for food and shelter.

  But the encounter with that man and his dead child had stripped away her self-deluding innocence and she was forced to face the stark reality. People were dying all around her. She must do something. But what? Then she thought of her father. Hadn’t he told her to get involved? She thought of Michael. Even that impudent man had thrown her own words back at her. Well, by God, she would get involved.

  With a newfound resolve she turned the horse toward the village—and within the hour descended into a circle of hell that even Dante had never dreamed of. On the road she passed men, women, and children, apparitions with eyes sunken in their sockets and rags for clothing, mouths stained green from eating grass and nettles. It was a macabre parade of the dead, the dying, and the disenfranchised. She forced herself to look at them, really look at them, for the very first time.

  Some had lost their homes, some were carrying their dead, and others were trying to reach the Fever Hospital before they themselves died. She didn’t know how it was possible for these people, some of whom were nothing more than flesh hanging from bone, to have the strength to move.

  Not all did. She counted a dozen dead bodies lining the sides of the road. She tried not to look, but how could she not? They were everywhere. It was as though God in his Heaven had decided that Ireland, and all who inhabited it, must die. And in his fury he was casting down thunderbolt after thunderbolt to kill all who walked the face of the land.

  Emily rode into the village and steered her trap around throngs of specter-like men, women, and pitifully emaciated children aimlessly clogging the roads in search of food and shelter. She reined the horse in and stopped in front of an imposing and forbidding structure with thick gray walls and narrow-slit windows. Six months earlier, it had been her father’s granary. But now, he had donated its use to the Public Guardians and it had been turned into a makeshift fever hospital. Even from where Emily sat, more than forty yards from the front door, she could hear the pitiful moans and cries of its wretched inhabitants.

  Steeling herself against what she imagined must be behind those imposing iron doors, she marched through them—and stepped into yet another uncharted circle of hell. The sights and smells—as palpable as a slap in the face—overwhelmed her and she had to grab onto a nearby wall to steady herself. The sick and dying were everywhere—on beds, on the floors. The smell of offal, disease, and death assaulted her nostrils. Weakened voices cried out for water; others in pain. Some call
ed out, asking God to let them live; others to let them die. The individual cries, weak and pitiful, joined with others in a dissonant chorus that rose to a shrieking climax, sounding for all the world like souls dammed to eternal hell.

  With a determination that threatened to desert her at any moment, Emily slowly moved through the cacophonous nightmare. A door to a side room opened and Dr. McDonald, the head of the Fever Hospital, came out. His white apron was covered with blood and body fluids.

  The doctor’s bushy eyebrows rose in astonishment at seeing a lady here. “Can I help you, madam?”

  “I would like to offer my services.”

  McDonald took one look at the dainty, well-dressed dilettante before him and scowled. She was young, beautiful, and clearly had never done an honest day’s work in her life. More to the point, she certainly had never done the kind of soul-deadening work required in this hospital.

  “This is not a fit place for a woman of your sensibilities, madam,” he said dismissively. In another time he would have been more solicitous in recognition of her class and standing, but he’d been going nonstop for over twenty hours and he was long since past the stage of politeness and concern for the feelings of her class.

  He pushed past her. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”

  Emily would not be put off that easily. “Dr. McDonald,” she said, grabbing his arm firmly. “I want to help. I can do what’s required.”

  McDonald looked into her determined green eyes, then at a patient lying in a nearby bed; an advanced typhoid case. “Tend to that patient,” he said.

  Emily looked at the sick man and swallowed hard. He was bleeding from his mouth and ears. His eyes, an opaque yellow, stared up at the ceiling, unseeing. Without hesitation she knelt down beside him, rinsed a cloth in a bucket by the bed, and began sponging away the blood.

  McDonald looked on with grim satisfaction—and gratification. He needed all the help he could get. If she could deal with this patient, she could probably deal with the others. But only time would tell.

  He snapped his fingers at a passing attendant. “Get this woman a clean pail of water,” he said.

  January 1847

  London, England

  A reluctant Trevelyan hurried down the corridor for his meeting with the Scientific Commissioners. As usual, he expected to be harangued by those tiresome men who, every day, pleaded with him to do more and more. Before the second crop failure, he’d been adamant about not sending food to Ireland. But conditions had become so appalling by the fall of 1846 that he was forced to reconsider. Playfair and his two colleagues had taken great pains to paint a gruesome picture of starving people subsisting on blackberries and nettles, and hordes of desperate women and children competing with field mice for scraps of overlooked cabbage leaves. But, he had other sources in Ireland who concurred with the Scientific Commission. Their assessment, he was told, was not exaggerated. With nothing to eat, the people, especially the children, were beginning to die in alarming numbers and he was getting pressured by certain members of Parliament to do something. And so he had. He agreed to send Indian corn to Ireland, taking solace in the fact that Indian corn was the cheapest food on the open market and hence not a bone of contention with the ever-watchful merchant class.

  Trevelyan came into the conference room and, looking impatiently at his pocket watch, took his usual place across the desk from Playfair, Kane, and Lindley.

  “I understand you have a complaint about the Indian corn?” he asked with a pained expression.

  “The introduction of corn into the Irish diet has created some difficulties,” Kane said.

  Trevelyan glanced at his pocket watch again. “What difficulties?”

  “The corn is rock-hard. In America, where it’s used extensively in the south, it’s milled two, sometimes three times. The Irish peasants don’t have milling devices at their disposal. They’ve tried eating it unmilled, but it creates great intestinal discomfort in some, and even death by internal bleeding in others. It’s especially hard on the children.”

  “I have read your reports, your many reports,” Trevelyan emphasized the word “many” with a raised eyebrow. It was his way of letting them know that he wasn’t pleased with their almost daily reports, all of which implored him and the government to do more.

  “I have just the solution,” he said with the type of satisfied smile that the three men had come to regard with great suspicion. He only smiled—if, indeed, that grimace could be labeled a smile—when he’d found a solution that cost the government nothing. He went to a cabinet, took out an ancient hand-mill, and placed it on the conference table. “I borrowed this from the India House museum for demonstration purposes. It’s really quite simple to operate.”

  As Trevelyan carefully poured a quantity of Indian corn into the mill, Playfair and his colleagues exchanged questioning glances. Trevelyan tried to crank the handle, but the corn was too hard and it jammed the mechanism. He shook it, turned the handle again. Nothing. Trevelyan was not one to display anger, but clearly he was becoming frustrated. He picked up the mill, held it to his chest, and cranked the handle hard. Corn shot out the top of the mill and the broken handle came off in his hand. Playfair stifled a chuckle into a cough when Trevelyan glared at him.

  Trevelyan put the mill down. “In any event, you get the idea.” He scooped up the spilled corn from his desk.

  Playfair stroked his beard, perplexed. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “The solution to grinding the corn, man. I propose to manufacture hand-mills and sell them in Ireland. Of course the new mills will work better than this antique.”

  Lindley studied the broken mill. “And the cost of these mills will be?”

  “I’m told they can be made for only fifteen shillings a piece.”

  The three men looked at each other in astonishment. To the Irish peasant fifteen shillings was a king’s ransom. Trevelyan was busy scooping random bits of corn kernels from his waistcoat and didn’t see their incredulous expressions.

  Chapter Twelve

  January 1847

  Cork Harbor, Ireland

  The tall merchant ship, burdened by her heavy cargo, slowly and majestically threaded her way through an armada of ships and fishing curraghs anchored in the bay. Then, seeing a clear shot for the mouth of the harbor, she trimmed her sails and, catching a strong westerly breeze, moved smartly through the rock jetties and out into the wide open sea beyond.

  Michael stood on a hill overlooking the harbor intently watching the ship—the fourth one to sail today. For weeks, he’d been hearing unbelievable, if persistent, rumors that ships bound for England were loaded with grain, wheat, and corn and that ships returning were empty. But he didn’t believe them. Ireland was in the grasp of a great hunger, he told himself. Surely the British government would not ship food out of a starving country.

  And so he’d come to Cork harbor to see for himself if the rumors were true. To his astonishment, he’d discovered they were. But not just grain, wheat and corn were leaving the country. So, too, were vast quantities of sheep, swine and oxen. For three days he’d kept count of the ships coming and going. Six ships loaded with food cargo sailed out for every ship that came in.

  As he watched this latest merchant ship, growing smaller and smaller as it sailed toward the horizon, a thought began to form in his mind. A thought so monstrous in its implication that he didn’t want to give life to it. Nevertheless, from what he’d seen with his own eyes, he was forced to admit the unthinkable: The British government was purposely starving the Irish people.

  Ballyross, Ireland

  Early Sunday morning, as the family was getting ready to go to mass, Michael mentioned to his father that he was going to speak to the men after mass and tell them what he had seen in Cork. The older Ranahan, always careful to steer clear of controversy, was fearful for his son’s safety. He took his son by the arm and walked him into the field to talk some sense into him.

  “These are treachero
us times, Michael,” he said. “Sure there’s nothin’ to be gained by callin’ yerself to the attention of the landlords.”

  A resolute Michael, with his hands stuffed in his coat pockets and his eyes fixed on the ground, said nothing. “Ah, you’ve the stubbornness of your Mam,” Da said in exasperation. “And that’s a fact.”

  When mass was over, the men collected in a field across the road from the church. Michael climbed on a rock and waited for the stragglers to gather round. Behind him, Da paced nervously, head down, muttering to himself.

  When the men of the village were all there, Michael began. “I’ve been to Cork harbor and I can tell you they’re takin’ the food out of the country while we starve. The ships leave loaded with grain and all manner of food, but they come back empty. I’ve seen it with my own two eyes.”

  There was an angry murmur from the crowd. “What can we do about it?” Pat Doyle called out.

  “We can stop them,” Michael said.

  “That’s daft.” Da shouted, desperate to head off what he knew would come to no good. “How can the likes of us stop those big ships from comin’ and goin’? I ask you that.”

  Da was gratified to see several heads nod in approval, but they were mostly the older men. The younger ones, always sullen and angry these days, didn’t want to listen to reason. They glared at him with stone-hard expressions.

  “How can we stop them, Michael?” Padric Leahy asked.

  “Guns and bullets!” a voice cried out over the crowd.

  The men fell into stunned silence as Jerry Fowler pushed his way through the crowd. “Guns and bullets will stop them,” he repeated.

  “No,” Michael shouted above a tentative murmur of approval. “It must be a peaceful demonstration.”