Mrs. Winchester frowned.
“And where are you from yourself, Miss Murphy?”
“I was born in this town actually,” she said.
“Were you?” said William. “I didn’t know that.”
“Oh yes, but I moved to Dublin as an infant. I don’t have any memories.”
“And what did your father do?” asked Mrs. Winchester.
“He was a dock worker,” she said. “A foreman on the docks. I believe he worked very close to your offices, Mr. Thomas.”
“Well, isn’t that interesting?” he said with a smile. “A family connection.”
“Have you any concerns, Mrs. Winchester?” asked the Nanny, turning the questions back on the woman, who was now sitting in the light that had spread through the panel glass and was streaming across the skirt of her dress. Dust particles floated in the air. “About my qualifications?”
“I trust you have references?”
“Of course, would you like me to fetch them for you?”
“That won’t be necessary,” intervened William.
Mrs. Winchester gave a little sigh and handed the baby over to the Nanny. She patted the back of the child’s head, tears gathering again in her eyes.
“I think it’s time for tea,” she said, clutching her black lace handkerchief, one of many she had sewn since her daughter’s death.
“She seems fine for the moment,” said Mrs. Winchester, holding her teacup and sipping the scalding liquid. “Perfectly adequate. But, William ...” She leaned in closer, dipping her head towards him. “Wouldn’t it make sense to bring the baby to Swinford? We could employ a team of nannies. She could be brought for walks every day in the countryside. Think what the fresh air would do for her. Here she’s so cooped up. You all are.”
“No,” said William, feeling his teeth grit in his mouth.
“It would give you a break too,” she said. “Give you some time without a crying baby in the house. Let you concentrate on your work for a while.”
William shook his head.
“Anna was always so happy at Swinford. She loved being outdoors, always outside, it was such a job to keep her clothes clean. If her nannies scolded her once, they scolded her a thousand times. In the end we just put pantaloons on her and let her run riot. This baby could enjoy the same, the freedom of a large house. I honestly think, William, if –”
“I said no!”
Mrs. Winchester jumped in fright.
“Goddamn it, woman. She’s staying here where she belongs, with me.”
She stared at him, in the gloom of the room which was cold and never got the sunlight, watching his face, held in anger towards her.
“She’s all I have left,” he said.
“Very well,” she said after a moment, composing herself and sniffing in contempt. “But I will have you think about it, for all your sakes.”
They were silent, the clip-clop of the horses passing by outside clear to hear.
“I have some errands to run,” she said eventually, standing and brushing down her skirts. “I will write and I hope to see you at Swinford soon.”
“Yes,” he said bending to kiss her proffered cheek in goodbye.
If his mother-in-law had her way, she’d adopt the child herself, taking her away from him altogether.
Such a difficult woman, nothing like her daughter at all.
Chapter 15
Betty
I remember Anna Winchester when she first arrived into that townhouse. I used to see her hair, golden, at the windows, like a fairy-tale princess I used to think. She’d peer down at the street and I’d look at her and marvel at her beauty.
There’s beauty and then there’s beauty that shines out from the soul. It was her soul that made her beautiful.
I’d met her mother twice and I can tell you the beauty didn’t come from there. She was an awful bustling woman, huge, with bosoms that would eat you up. No, I expect the softness, the gentleness came from the father’s side. Though I don’t know much about him.
They were a lovely match, William and Anna. I always thought that. They were a pair. They chose love over status. It can’t have been easy for her to marry into that townhouse with her coming from a big sprawling estate that took up acres and acres of land through the middle of Meath. You could see it on the face of Mrs. Winchester when she arrived on her rare visits to Number 43, pulling up all fanfare in that gigantic black carriage of hers, a footman waiting, her nose curled. I expected it wouldn’t be long before she had her way and had them taken out of that house and installed into a much grander affair. On Fair Street perhaps. Or even a country villa, out at Baltray or, maybe, if she really got her way, back out into the countryside in Meath somewhere.
But it never came to that. She never got that far. Not with Anna and what happened to her.
Mrs. McHugh used to tell me about them when she called in. She had settled on her weekly visit by then, dropping by first thing after lunch on a Wednesday. She’d come in up the stairs, bringing the Drogheda Conservative for me and sometimes a periodical.
“Oh, she’s in a terrible mood with him today,” she told me one day, not long after Anna and William were married. She let me in on all the secrets.
“Who?” I asked, my ears pricking up. I always love a good argument, me.
“Well, it’s all her fault of course – Mrs. Winchester. She wants Anna back out to Swinford for a few weeks, to help her recuperate.”
It was around the start of their troubles, I think, around the first time Anna lost a baby.
“She’s saying no, but part of me thinks she would like to go out there for a rest and be fussed over,” said Mrs. McHugh. “But he won’t hear of it, says she’s not to be running back to Mother and Father whenever anything goes wrong, that they’re married now and this is married life.”
“That’s not like him.” I said. I was surprised to hear of his insensitivity.
“Oh, I think it’s just Mrs. Winchester annoying him, you know the way. Putting her foot down. I don’t blame him really – you’d want to see the fuss she made the last time she visited, all nose in the air and sniffing and saying wasn’t the house very damp, wasn’t there a smell of damp everywhere? And sure, hadn’t I put fresh flowers in every single room for her arrival? There was no smell of damp let me tell you.”
“Do you think she’ll go to Swinford?” I asked.
“No, but she’s letting himself know that she doesn’t like to be bossed about by him. Or her mother, I suppose.”
“Oh, I feel sorry for her, pulled in every way,” I said.
“Well, you’d understand,” said Mrs. McHugh. “About how she’s feeling.”
“Aye,” I said and then quickly changed the subject. I didn’t want to talk about my own circumstances, comparing them to Anna’s, dredging up old memories that were buried good and deep, way down. “So, you might have a few more visits from Mrs. Winchester?”
“Oh, I hope not,” she said, her face wrinkling up. “I bloody hope not, I couldn’t cope with that. Could you imagine? Mrs. La-di-da landing in on top of you, sniffing out damp and looking for dust. I don’t know where she got that lovely daughter from, I really don’t.”
“I bet Mr. Thomas doesn’t know either,” I chuckled. “Mother-in-laws, who’d have them?”
“Not me,” said Mrs. McHugh. “One of the reasons I married Mick is because his mother, God rest her, was long dead.”
We laugh at the joke, both knowing that Mrs. McHugh would have loved Mick’s mother, the way she loved her own mother, because she was part of him. Mick’s mother and Jimmy’s mother were of the same ilk – decent, hardworking, simple women.
Neither of us would ever have been inflicted with the likes of Mrs. Winchester. But these were the problems of the gentry. Something we knew only a little about.
Over the years, I’ve developed a habit of looking at my hands whenever the subject of losing babies was brought up. Eyes straight down, look at the knuckles first, the way t
he bones pop up when I flex them. I watch the sinews move as I curl up my hands, digging my nails into my palms, concentrating on the white scar above my thumb, where I’d cut myself to the bone peeling potatoes in the year I was first married.
Sometimes I think that scar is a physical sign of what is on the inside.
I thought, when I was expecting, that I’d feel different, that I’d have a big change come over me. But I’d had no signs at all, no sickness. It was nearly four months before I was sure, when I could feel my stomach wall hard. It was then I confessed to Jimmy what I thought and by God he was so happy.
Swept me up off my feet, he did. He grabbed me, his arm under my behind, and swung me round behind the counter, my feet nearly hitting off the small handles on the spice drawers.
“Will ya stop!” I shouted at him.
He was grinning and he gave me a big kiss, even though Mrs. Gilhooly had just walked in looking for her snuff and newspaper, but he didn’t care that she was watching at all.
“That’s bloody brilliant,” he said.
Brilliant. A lovely word. I was brilliant, me, his wife, who was going to give him a child, installing a family in that grocer’s and pub, up those stairs in the room where I lay now, filling the place with light laughter and keeping it forever young.
But sometimes life isn’t brilliant at all.
I finger the scar on my hand, which has faded over the years into nothing more than a mark. Back in the day you could have identified me by that scar – ridged it was and solid. Maybe I’ve rubbed it too much in the sixty years I’ve had it, or maybe my skin is too wrinkled and papery now for it to hold onto the damage.
I sigh with the sadness, trying to push back memories I’d rather remained locked away. I read some of the newspaper Mrs. McHugh has brought, but my mind keeps flipping back to Jimmy, back to the pub below, to all the people that I knew.
I decide to take out some of my journals, for a look. I want to remember. I want to feel what it was like, back then.
I pull them out from under the bed, where I keep them in a neat stack, tied with brown curly string. I pull one from the middle and open it, smelling the scent of the crinkled pages within. I’ve put news clippings and receipts, a ticket to a show we went to at Mayoralty House and a train ticket when we went to Dublin for our Christmas shopping.
I turn the pages, thinking of that day out in Dublin, when we had cream buns and tea in a little café on Henry Street. The streets were so busy, wide, the vastness of the city so different to our small town – it almost overwhelmed me. Jimmy put his hand on the small of my back, steadying me, as we walked through the throngs, soaking up the cheer in the winter cold.
Towards the back of the journal, some writing catches my eye and I begin to read. I smile when I see I’ve mentioned that Mick McHugh had a new woman on the go and that ‘she seemed grand’. I’ll tell her that when I see her next week – Mrs. McHugh.
Below it, I’ve written about Christmas, about something that happened that year, an incident that shocked us all.
Some trouble tonight. That lovely seaman from Mauritius was started on by another seaman, from Poland. He was at him all night, till things got loud and Jimmy asked him to leave. That one Mad Maggie had been hanging off the one from Mauritius all evening. I hate to see her in but we let it go, with it being Christmas.
Mad Maggie was an alcoholic and a scourge. She’d been born with good looks and she used them to her advantage the only way she knew how. For as long as I could remember, she’d been going about, taking up with men who would have her.
It was why she liked the sailors, why she liked our pub, because it was where they drank and they were transient. We’d barred her years ago but sometimes she’d sneak in and we might not see her, or sometimes, like that night, it was Christmas and we just let her away with it.
I read on, my notes bringing back the terrible sight that greeted us after we’d heard shouting, after Jimmy had put Mad Maggie and the quarrelsome sailor out.
Well, didn’t she pull a knife on the sailor outside. We heard a load of screaming and ruckus and when we came out she’d stabbed him in the stomach with it. The Pole was on the ground, bleeding, and Mad Maggie stood over him roaring into his ear, spit flying and everything, going mad she was.
I was distraught to see such violence on the street outside our pub. Rows happened, arguments and fights when the drinks went in, but it was rare for something so murderous to happen like that, for a man to lie dying on the street, under the Christmas candle glowing in the big front window. And for a woman to be responsible for it. We always knew Maggie was mad, but we never thought she’d have that sort of badness in her.
The police came quick enough, but it was too late. The man had bled out, even though we’d brought him back in and tried to stem the bleeding with towels. Terrible night and those poor girls too.
There they stood, white-faced, shivering, across the road in front of Rosemary Lane, a dangerous place for two young girls to be standing. They watched their mother dragged off, the two arms pulled behind her back, carted off to the station, kicking up and screaming, the streets filled with her racket and noise. It was Jimmy who pointed the girls out to me as I was busy pouring sudsy water onto the street, trying to wash the blood away from the pub, out onto the cobbles of the road.
“Betty,” said Jimmy and I looked up to where he was pointing, over at the alleyway at the two girls, hovering quietly.
“Isn’t that her daughters?” he asked.
I peered over and tried to make them out in the glow of the lamplight. The smaller one had a big yellow ribbon tied in her hair.
“I think so,” I said, and an awful pity came over me. You saw them around sometimes, a haunted expression on their faces, both so pretty, but racked with hunger and hollowness. They followed their mother about, sometimes begging for scraps.
“Should we tell someone?” asked Jimmy, scratching his head, a pained expression on his face.
“We probably should,” I said, thinking of where they might be staying, where Mad Maggie had lodgings. No daddy around and now their mother locked up.
“I’ll go over and talk to them,” he said and I watched as he crossed the road, stepping down off the footpath and heading towards them.
A group of men came out of the pub across the road then, loud and singing, roaring a shanty song.
When I looked back to where Jimmy was headed, I saw the girls had gone.
I turn over the page of my journal and there I’d cut out a picture from the newspaper. They’d printed an image of Mad Maggie and said she’d got twenty years hard labour. I look at her eyes, which were dark, framed with thick lashes, her cheekbones high in her head. And as I study the photograph, as I look at the picture of the woman I’d cut out with my scissors all those years ago, I realise something.
It is the eyes, the forehead, a strong brow, distinct.
Mad Maggie is the absolute image of the new nanny at Number 43.
That was the woman the Nanny reminded me of that first day I saw her, knocking on the door across the street. Mad Maggie.
I try to remember the last time I saw those two girls, before they’d disappeared off down the alleyway before Jimmy could talk to them.
I’ll need to get another look, to study the Nanny closely the next time she walks out the door, pushing the perambulator up the street.
But if you asked me to take a bet, if you said ‘Put your money down now on who that woman is’, I’d say that I was right and that I’d win that money back, no problem at all.
Mad Maggie was the Nanny’s mother, I’m sure of it.
I can’t wait to tell Mrs. McHugh.
Chapter 16
The Nanny
Putting the stones back into place – you had to hold the top one in place and shove the bottom one in – she noticed how the lichen had been scraped away at its edges now and, if you looked closely, you’d know someone had been at it.
As she walked away from the workho
use, she tried to push memories of Kitty from her mind.
It did no good to think of her. Coming here was supposed to put an end to all that, to close the circle, loop the loop. She had returned the ribbon and now it would be as if she never existed at all. The only way.
Still, Kitty flashed in her mind. She was such an innocent mite. The tears would spring to her eyes if she saw a dead animal on the side of the road, if she found an insect with a broken wing. She’d crumple when she saw suffering. She was soft as butter left out on a summer’s day.
She knew the workhouse would be the ruin of Kitty. That she didn’t have what it took to survive it. She knew that she would, in the end, walk out of that place on her own, one day, without her.
Every day, when the morning siren went off, it reverberated off her insides, filling her pounding head, shuddering her body awake. She usually gave an involuntary moan before turning over and trying to block out the caterwauling noise. But it was no good. The siren was designed to rouse everyone from their beds. There was no point in trying to block it out or seek another minute’s sleep. The night was over and the day had begun.
They’d make their way to the communal bathrooms, standing in line to wash in freezing water, splashing the scummy liquid across their faces and necks, wiping it with the rag that had been used a hundred times before them. And then to breakfast to queue again and sit at the bench and consume the tasteless gruel, barely sustaining the life within them, licking every scrap from the wooden bowls to try and quell some of the hunger pains that bloated their stomachs and gave them ever-pounding headaches.
Washed and fed, it was time to go to work. The laundry room was already hot and steamy by the time they got there, the great big vats bubbling overnight. The large carts full of the workhouse uniforms, sheets and towels would be pushed in and they would set about unloading it and sorting it and getting it ready for washing, drying and mending.
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