The Convictions of John Delahunt (24 page)

When I sat down, the barber spoke to me with the affected cheeriness common to his profession. ‘So,’ he said, ‘are you in here long?’

‘Less than a month.’

He took some hand-held clippers I’d have thought more suited for livestock, and began to roughly bare my head. ‘That’s no time at all.’ Tufts of dark hair tumbled over my shoulders and into my lap.

Then he dipped a shaving brush in the basin, swept it twice over a yellow soap and dabbed at my face.

‘What did you do for work on the outside?’

‘I was a student.’

The razor he used was dull and abrasive. Its wooden haft was worn smooth so the handle had more gleam than the blade. He pulled the skin taut over my jaw, and scraped the edge along the underside of my chin.

‘How did you end up in here?’

‘I killed someone.’

The blade paused, and he asked my name.

‘Delahunt.’

‘Oh.’

The blade resumed.

He didn’t speak after that. When finished he merely grunted, wiped my face with a foul cloth, and told me to send in the next in line.

As Turner escorted me back, he told me employing a prisoner in this fashion had been his idea. ‘I thought, rather than putting this delinquent barber to work breaking stones, why not have him shave his fellow prisoners and even some of the guards?’ He was clearly proud of the scheme, as if the idea put him at the forefront of enlightened prison-keeping. ‘But Shankly’s term elapses in a few weeks, so that’ll be the end of it.’

I suggested the prison should hire a barber to continue the initiative, but Turner was confident another of that profession would be committed here soon enough. I feared the next Dublin barber who found himself before the assizes would be in for an unpleasant surprise come sentencing.

Turner looked at me sideways. ‘Anyway. It’ll hardly concern you.’

True enough.

We walked for a while in silence. As we neared the condemned cell Turner said, ‘I sent out that message today, as you asked.’

‘Will that be enough time?’

He pulled open the door. ‘If he wants to respond, he will.’

Cooney’s trial concluded in the first days of February with a conviction. The evidence had been too strong: my witness statement; the Italian coin found in his purse; the bloodstains on his leather apron. He claimed, truthfully I’d imagine, that the splashes came from a type of cement mixed from heifer’s blood and lime. The jury wasn’t convinced.

He was sentenced to hang, but not too many people went to see it, for the weather was particularly foul on the morning of his execution. In Dublin, one can never depend on the weather for anything. Helen and I weren’t going anyway. In the days leading up to it, I asked her if she wanted to go along for old times’ sake.

She frowned at me. ‘We can’t go to the hanging of a man you helped convict.’

My smile faded. ‘Why not?’

On the morning itself we remained in bed as rain drummed against our window. We’d recently bought a mahogany clock shaped like Napoleon’s hat, and I watched as the hour ticked past ten. A gust made the door creak.

‘That’s Cooney gone,’ I said.

Helen was only half-awake. She raised her head to look at the time, then rolled over and went back to sleep.

I thought of the hangman, his hand slippery on the lever. The tinker at the end of the rope, buffeted by the wind, his black hood drenched. In the ceiling above me, water seeped along a crack, collected in the corner, and dripped down on to the floorboards in a slow rhythm. Perhaps Cooney pitched about, so that his bound legs bumped against the edges of the platform. I pictured the cleric, head bent against the slanting rain, shouting his prayers over the bluster. The windows shook again. I pulled the blankets higher and sank down beneath their warmth.

I went to collect my money from Fownes Street that month as usual. There was only one item in the ledger: ‘For information that led to the conviction of Richard Cooney – £60’. We spent half the money straight away, when I applied to retake my final year in college. I wasn’t sure it was necessary, but Helen insisted. She said once I attained my degree I could find proper work, and we could move back into more respectable society. It should have been pleasant to have something to work towards. But I found I was unmoved by the prospect of returning to the cobbled paths of Trinity, and its dark wooden lecture halls. I rummaged in the bottom of the trunk for my old college notes. Helen cleared some space in the drawers of her writing desk, and said I could evict her whenever I needed it. I preferred to read by the window.

Those few months were among our most contented. We had enough money to live comfortably, and our year ahead planned out. The harsh winter gave way to a mild spring, and Helen and I would take strolls in Mountjoy Square, just as we did when we first courted in Merrion Park. Leaves had begun to sprout, and children from the surrounding streets played on the lawns. Grenville Street was near the northern outskirts of the city, so if we walked a mile we could reach the countryside. Our favourite route was to go by the widows’ retreat on Drumcondra Hill, then turn left at the infants’ school, and continue along the canal as far as Whitworth Hospital. On the way, Helen picked snowdrops and crocus flowers from the roadside hedges.

Hidden behind the hospital was a long narrow graveyard surrounded by sycamore trees, with gravel paths and listing granite headstones. Helen liked to wander among them, read the epitaphs, and speculate about the lives of those interred. Many graves contained married couples. In one, the husband had died young while the wife had lived on for another half-century, and Helen imagined the woman’s long widowhood: sitting alone in a draughty parlour, her grey hair pinned and black dress pressed, dry arthritic hands gripping wooden armrests. In another grave the couple had lived to ripe old ages, but the husband had been born in Sligo and the wife in Wexford, and Helen wondered what accident of fate had brought them together: a chance meeting at a family gathering, or on a channel crossing, or at a debutante’s ball. Another headstone recorded the death of a newborn boy only a few days old, and his mother who died a fortnight after. Helen read the inscription with her head tilted and said, ‘Perhaps if the baby had lived, she would have as well.’

At the end of the cemetery, one lonely grave was marked by a plain wooden cross and a rectangle of untidy earth. There Helen would place the flowers she had picked along the way.

I thought the humble grave probably meant that the person had died in penury or disgrace, and one day I said to her, ‘For all we know, he could have been a scoundrel.’

Helen removed a marigold weed, looked at the matted roots for a moment as if considering the source of its nutrition, and then tossed it away. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

Back in the tenement, we began to notice small twigs and pieces of bark falling into the hearth, which could only mean that birds were building a nest in the flue. Helen was loath to light the fire, but I said the smoke would force them away. The next day, as we returned from the park, we saw two jackdaws flapping and dancing around the chimney stack, their attempts to reach their clutch repelled by billowing smoke. Later, when I went to the market, there was no sign of them.

Helen and I began married life cut adrift from our families and her friends, so we had nowhere to turn for advice in certain matters. When we moved into Grenville Street the previous summer, Helen had approached Mrs Lynch downstairs, who was happy to direct her to certain apothecary shops, and also lend some of her own folk remedies to stay clear of the ‘family way’. I pointed out that the Lynches had six children; Helen said they were determined not to have any more.

Our first port of call had been Simeon Boileau, the Huguenot druggist on Talbot Street. His shop had bright moulded window frames and a glass front door. Rows of shelves contained coloured bottles neatly stacked, a pestle and mortar, and weighing scales of various sizes. Boileau wore a full-length coat and a monocle at the end of a chain, which he used to read labels. When we first spoke to him, I wasn’t sure how to broach the subject, but Helen told him what we needed. Boileau nodded and disappeared into a back room. He brought back a small jar of pills labelled, ‘Plumbum’.

Ignoring me, he leaned forward and spoke to Helen in a low voice. ‘Take two each month, a week before you expect your period.’ He gave the container a slight shake. ‘It will ensure that event is realized.’ I hooked my little finger and swept some lint from the counter-top. She reached out to take the jar, but Boileau maintained his grip for a moment. ‘Don’t take more than two at a time. It can lead to … complications.’

She thanked the chemist and slipped the bottle into her purse.

While walking home she considered the name of the tablets. ‘I wonder if it’s a play on words, referring to internal plumbing.’

I glanced down at her. ‘Is that really what you think?’

‘Well, what is it then?’

‘
Plumbum
is the Latin name for lead.’

Helen looked again at the label and said, ‘Oh.’

The tablets had proved effective for the best part of a year, until the middle of April. She gave me the news one morning while we were still in bed. I studied her face to gauge her feelings, and stopped myself from asking if she was sure. After a moment, I pushed a strand of hair away from her eye.

She took my hand and held it on the pillow. ‘I don’t think it’s the right time to have one, John.’

I pursed my lips as if considering.

She squeezed my fingers. ‘It would arrive in the middle of winter. We’ll be scraping by because you’ll be in college.’ She rolled backwards, enough that she could look up towards the ceiling. ‘I don’t want our first child to be born in this place.’

A long dark smudge stretched from the corner of her mouth to just beneath her earlobe. She must have rubbed her face with an inky finger.

Helen turned back to look at me. ‘If we wait another year or two, you’ll be working. My book will be complete. We’ll be living somewhere decent and safe.’

I realized I hadn’t said anything yet. I pressed her hand against my lips.

She was right, of course. I was only concerned with her well-being. We had years in which to start a family.

A crease between her eyebrows disappeared. She moved closer to me and spoke into the collar of my nightshirt. ‘I thought you’d be upset.’

I didn’t answer, just draped my arm over her shoulder.

We began to peruse advertisements at the back of the cheaper evening papers. One caught our eye: ‘Ellis’s pills for ladies: acknowledged remedy for anaemia, bloodlessness and all ailments of the female system. Extra strong.’ We sent off the sixpence and received the tablets within a week. They came in a packet which contained the warning: ‘On no account to be taken by persons desirous of becoming mothers.’ Helen took the tablets with a tumbler of water. She looked at them in her opened palm for a few seconds, swallowed them, then cleaned the glass in the washbasin. Another week passed by and there was no noticeable effect.

She went downstairs to speak with Mrs Lynch, who said the remedies advertised in the papers weren’t worth a curse. They couldn’t be too strong, for if the mother became sick, the peddlers would be prosecuted. Helen asked if she should return to Boileau, but Mrs Lynch said she was too far gone for him to risk helping her now. In any case, the lead pills were still the best thing to try. Helen was wary of using them. She always felt ill for a day or two afterwards, and she feared to take them in a larger dose.

One evening, she sat beside the cold hearth with her hands pressed over her stomach. She hadn’t yet begun to show. ‘Mrs Lynch knows of a woman who provides a proper service.’

I looked up from my book and considered the word ‘proper’.

But it was an unpleasant operation and cost five pounds. The woman who did it was a retired midwife who lived in Old Dominick Street. I thought of poor Domenico.

We still had twenty-five pounds of the Cooney money. ‘If you want to go, you need only say.’

She smoothed the folds at the top of her skirt. ‘I’ll try the other remedies first.’

The other remedies turned out to be a series of folk medicines made from various herbs and compounds. We spent hours over the fire brewing acrid tonics of nutmeg and caraway seeds, gin and salt, tansy and washing soda. Helen would sniff at each glass, then gulp down the liquids as fast as possible, squeeze her eyes and try not to gag. Once or twice she felt ill, and our hopes were raised, but the queasiness soon passed. The final attempt consisted of boiling a fistful of copper coins in water for an hour, and then drinking the liquor that resulted. I remember straining the pot, and tipping the shiny coins back into the money tin. Each separate tonic was given a few days to work, and the weeks passed.

One day I returned from the market to find Helen doubled up on top of the bed. She had wrapped her arms about her stomach and buried her head beneath a blanket. The shutters were drawn over, but even that dim light was hurting her eyes. When I put my hand on her back, I could feel she was rigid. She gave low moans with each wave of pain in her abdomen, and she leaned over the chamber pot, heaving drily.

I built a fire in the hearth – my hands trembled as I struck the match – dragged the basin of water next to it, then gathered clean blankets and towels, and brought them to the bed.

Helen said she had a piercing pain in her head above her temple, so I placed a damp cloth over her brow. Her breathing had became short and sounded as if it squeezed through a narrow gap in her throat. At one point, she lifted her right hand and showed it to me. Her fingers were stiff and bent into a claw. She said, ‘I can’t move them.’

I took her hand and massaged it. Her fingers were malleable, and they remained set in whatever position I put them, like soft metal.

‘I’m sure it’ll be all right,’ I said.

I put her hand beneath the covers next to her body, where it would be warm. She tensed up with another wave of nausea.

‘What was the last tonic you drank?’

Her head hung over the edge of the bed. ‘I took four of the lead tablets this morning while you were out.’ When she lay back her mouth was slack, and I could see a blue tinge around her gums.