Another Heartbeat in the House (39 page)

The crossroads that Young Biddy had spoken of marked the stage where the coach passed on its way to the city, and where arable land met forest. When I say arable land, I mean the patches that had been scraped out of the ground to grow potatoes.

St Leger had once told me that the Irish had the best staple diet in Europe: potatoes and what the Irish called
bláthach
– the residue left after the cream had been skimmed from the milk. I had thought at the time that he was being facetious, but he was not: I had found out for myself that buttermilk and potatoes were filling and nutritious. That was just as well, for while ships routinely sailed from the country's ports laden with wheat, oats, beef, pork, eggs and butter, all that remained for the Irish poor was potatoes. And because potatoes were easy to grow – even in bogs and on rocky hillsides –
The Times
of London had egregiously described the Irish as indolent drunkards who were perpetually inebriated with poitín distilled from their abundant crops.

Paídi's field by the crossroads was corrugated with potato drills. Before I reached it, I caught the first trace of the stench that Young Biddy had told me about. So noxious was it that I took off my gauzy scarf and wrapped it tightly around my nose and mouth.

In the field stood two men, shoulders hunched, their backs to me. The foul smell emanated from the crop that not two days ago had been green and blooming with white flowers. It had rotted in the earth; the field was a discoloured blanket of corruption. I went to dismount, then thought better of it. I had seen the face of one of the men as he stooped to dig with his hands in the fetid mulch; I had seen his features contort, seen the wet runnels on his cheeks. Paídi O'Keefe was a proud man; he would not want a woman to see him weep. I turned my little mare, hoping that her hooves would make no sound on the packed earth of the pathway home to Lissaguirra.

The potatoes rotted in Cork and in Waterford and in Galway. They rotted in most of the counties where they were grown, and in all four provinces. They rotted while the ships continued to sail from the western ports crammed with their cargoes, like seaborne cornucopias, and the Irish began to starve.

The London
Times
editorial that derogated the Irish as drunken ne'er-do-wells had been written before the famine struck. But even afterwards, when the people had nothing to eat, nothing at all, the condemnation came spewing forth in pronouncements from politicians, landlords and clergy.

‘Rotten potatoes and sea-weed, or even grass, properly mixed,' declared the Duke of Cambridge, ‘afford a very wholesome and nutritious food. Everyone knows that Irishmen can live upon anything, and there is plenty grass in the fields though the potato crop should fail.'

I had thought there was no further for the Irish to fall. In Cork city I had seen half-naked women begging for alms, and in Dublin's Liberties I had seen emaciated children, filthy beyond apprehension, offering themselves for sale. I had seen animals sharing cabins with the starving wretches beyond the lake in Aill na Coill. At a tender age I had seen squalor that would have appalled St Leger and his ilk; scenes of Hogarthian depravity in the Haymarket and Soho, and harrowing acts of violence in the
ruelles
of Montmartre. But I had never known what depths of misery humankind could plumb until I saw skeletons walking the roads of County Cork.

I had taken Clara Venus off to the city, where we were to spend a day or two with Maria at Grattan Hill. Maria seldom visited me at Lissaguirra; with no transport of her own the journey was a protracted one, and she was reluctant to leave her daughters unchaperoned.

St Leger did not like me to drive alone, but sometimes I yearned so desperately for company that I had to cut loose from Lissaguirra. On my trips to Dublin I was escorted everywhere by my beau, and fettered by
comme-il-faut
. In the village of Doneraile I was, unsurprisingly,
persona non grata
: the last time I had ventured there Mrs Grove-White had set the brim of her bonnet firmly against me as I approached.

In Cork I could kick up my heels a little, even if only to promenade Grand Parade or take a stroll through Daunt Square, or gossip over a glass of gin-and-water with the shabby gentry, the half-sirs and male and female dandies who congregated in Maria's lodging house. The stir, the tattle, the general buzz and hum of the place aroused in me a kind of
nostalgie de la boue
; it reminded me of the brouhaha backstage at the
Variétés
, or the more swagger of the Soho dens frequented by my father.

On my way there I drove past straggles of ragged families making their way to the poorhouse in Mallow. The strength had failed many of them; they lay listlessly by the wayside, and I knew from their demeanour that they were unlikely to get up again. As I passed the phalanx of walkers, a boy who was not much older than my Clara wavered, stopped short and stared after the others with eyes dull as stones before dropping to his knees.

I could not stop; I could not. I was afraid of these silent spectres, these fleshless walkers. I remembered the woman I had seen in Dublin's Liberties, so infested with vermin that she had torn the clothes from her back in her frantic attempts to rid herself of them: I could not risk having my daughter exposed to the diseases that these people would be carrying. Old Biddy had told me that her niece had died of the measles after inviting a vagrant into the kitchen for a bowl of soup.

‘What's wrong with that boy?' Clara Venus asked, craning her neck.

‘He is sick, sweetheart.'

‘Like when I had croup?'

‘Yes.'

‘And Old Biddy made me rice-milk?'

‘Yes.'

‘You should tell his mama to give him rice-milk.'

I tried to concentrate on my driving.

‘They look hungry, Mama.'

‘We have some lemonade you could give them,' I said. The carriage was jolting, for the road was full of ruts and puddles; however, I did not slow Minerva's pace, but urged her on. ‘That might be just as good as rice-milk. Look in my carpet bag – there are sandwiches there too.'

She rummaged in my bag and produced the bottle of lemonade and the packets of sandwiches that Old Biddy had made for our journey.

‘Mama, stop, now,' she commanded.

Panic clutched at me – the walkers were conceivably desperate enough to dispatch my pony and have her boiled in a pot – but stop I did, some yards ahead of the procession. I took my scarf and covered Clara's mouth and nose with it, drawing it into a knot at the back of her head.

‘What are you doing?' she protested, but I had no chance to explain, for within seconds the chaise was surrounded by a throng of supplicants. On every grimy brow the word ‘hunger' was imprinted. I could not look. I raised my face to the sky, so that any tears that might form would lodge behind my eyes, and gazed at the cloud formation.

Above us, there was a funeral in the air. It was Christy who had told me about this phenomenon, which was said to happen in the vicinity of an imminent death. As he described it, on the day his mother died he and his brothers witnessed a procession of mourners made up of clouds, moving slowly across the sky. ‘First came the dray carrying the coffin,' he said, ‘then the horses and horsemen, and then the people on foot: as plain as any funeral I ever saw.'

I saw it now, hanging in the sky over the road to Mallow as my daughter distributed food to those souls who were seeking sanctuary there. I heard her prattle as she delved into the bag. ‘Lemonade,' she said. ‘And here are cheese sandwiches. If you are sick, rice-milk is good for you, and beef tea. Oh! You must be very hungry. Wait. I have more.' She rummaged again. ‘Apples. And look – hard-boiled eggs, and here is some gingerbread. I'll give you some, and you and you and – oh! Stop! Wait!'

Turning, I saw thin arms stretching from the raggery, hands grabbing, voices calling, ‘God bless you, little Miss! May your pretty eyes never see anything that saddens them! God bless you for a kind and generous …' A baby was crying, a woman keening, a man retching: a nauseating effluvium rose from the emaciated bodies. A toothless man coughed in Clara's face, and a boy tried to snatch the carpet bag from her. I pulled her back, then touched up the mare with the whip. She trotted briskly forward.

‘Wait, Mama!' cried Clara.

‘No.' Lifting my skirt, I fumbled for the purse that I kept tucked into my garter. I spilled a handful of coins onto my palm, and thrust them at Clara. ‘Here – throw them this.'

As Clara sent the coins spinning into the road, I tore my fichu away from my bodice and held it to my face, to block the smell and stanch the hot tears that had sprung. I heard but did not see the scramble that ensued, the cries and the stumbling feet of the pitiful crowd that pursued us pell-mell.

When I finally glanced back, the wretched procession had resumed. Two men had returned for the boy who had fallen: one of them lifted him as he might an empty creel and hefted him onto his shoulders. They continued on their way like sleepwalkers.

Clara turned and looked up at me. ‘Was that the stink that Young Biddy was talking about?' she asked. ‘Why do those people smell, Mama? And why are they so hungry?'

I could not bear to tell her why. I could not bear to tell her that the world beyond Lissaguirra was a harrowing, hellish place. Instead I pulled her closer with my free arm, and started to sing ‘The ABC Song'.

IN THE HOUSE
on Grattan Hill, an impromptu party had been got up to celebrate a win at the races by a gentleman friend of Maria's. It had clearly been a substantial hit: champagne, wine and whiskey were flowing freely and there was a buffet, of which I was inordinately glad, since all the food that Clara Venus and I had brought with us for the journey had been distributed on the road.

Once Minerva had been installed in the livery yard and I had washed and changed, I felt sparky and animated despite our long journey. Clara Venus was spirited away by Maria's girls and I was reminded of how they had adopted Annie Thackeray as a little sister five years ago, and taught her Corkonian skipping rhymes and hopscotch.

Amid the dandified rag, tag and bobtail, Maria looked resplendent in a gown of silk dupion, which she had refashioned from one of her sister's cast-offs. Since she was not much of a letter-writer, we had plenty to catch up on. Her eldest daughter, Harriet, had finally inherited a substantial sum from her superannuated aunt, and was to be wed to a baronet.

‘A baronet!' I said. ‘How much is he worth?'

‘Ten thousand a year –'

‘How comfortable!'

‘– with a castle in Scotland.' Maria's expression told me that she could not bear the notion of her beloved girl fetching up in Scotland, even with a castle and a title.

‘My condolences, darling. But a castle is good!'

‘Not this one. It's in the Highlands somewhere north of Inverness,' she went on. ‘A ghastly, gloomy dump, by all accounts, that was built some time in the Middle Ages. He is more than twice her age, with a glass eye.'

‘A war injury?'

‘No. A shooting accident. So he is not even heroic.' She aimed a kick at a little Griffon dog with a bow in its hair that was snuffling around the buffet table, then reached for a bottle of champagne and refilled our glasses. ‘You must be sick and tired of being stuck in Bogland, dearest. Isn't it time you asked St Leger to set you up in London?'

‘He won't hear of it. He cannot afford to be anything less than an exemplary spouse to Sophia until her father dies.'

‘He'd better die soon. You're not getting any younger.'

A silvery laugh caught my attention. On the other side of the room, a ravishingly pretty girl was preening the whiskers of a drunken dragoon into a fantail and admiring the effect.

‘Who is that child?' I asked.

‘She's an actress, on tour with
The Maid of Milan
and some rubbishy comedies. That mangy dog belongs to her.'

I remembered my time as the star attraction at Doneraile Court, presiding over after-dinner divertissements with Sooty on my lap, and conducting
conversazioni
.

‘I was a fascinating woman once,' I said, mournfully.

Maria smiled sympathetically. ‘It will come back. Give it time.'

‘Time? How much time have I left? Look at that doxy. She can't be more than sixteen.'

Maria gave me a sideways look. ‘She's fifteen.'

There came a chime of merry chattering from beyond the door, as of Indian bells floating up the stairway, and a flurry of satin and Chantilly lace announced the entrance of a gaggle of chorus girls. Their dresses shimmered multihued in the candlelight, their shoulders were white as buttermilk, their coiffures so heavily looped at the napes of their necks that they had perforce to elevate their chins, in a manner both haughty and provocative. They were nymphs clad as sophisticates, little dressing-up dollies: they did not yet belong to their clothes.