The Good People (45 page)

They arrived in Tralee at dusk. Nance shrank into her seat at the sight of the town and its streets of business, at the fine houses along the promenade. Mail coaches, upright with gentlemen, clattered in the road amongst crowds of servants, tradespeople and the usual dregs of beggars. The widow briefly listed her head to gaze at the town, until they neared the limestone gates to Ballymullen gaol, when she glanced at Nance, terrified.

‘We will never leave this place,’ she whispered, eyes wide.

‘No talking,’ one of the policemen interrupted.

Nance became frightened then. They passed through the gates and immediately the air felt heavier, dank. Under the weight of the shadows thrown by the high walls, her body began to tremble.

Stone-silled, iron-grilled. The gaol was dark, and the constables moved them from the gate and into its passageways by lamplight. Nance’s throat filled with bile and she thought back to her cabin and Mora, who would surely be waiting for her, udder heavy with milk.

The gaolers took Nóra and weighed her first, then after some discussion with the policemen they hauled the widow off into the dark corridor. Nóra looked back over her shoulder, her lips parting in terror before the shadows fell over her face, and Nance felt hands take her firmly about the arms and direct her to the scales.

‘Anne Roche. Unknown age. Four feet eleven inches. Ninety-eight pounds. White hair. Blue eyes. Identifying marks include: tender eyes; enlarged joint, left and right thumbs; front teeth; cut mark on forehead. Catholic. Pauper. Charged with wilful murder.’

The women in the cell with Nance were mute and dirty. They lay on straw piled over the flagged floor, eyes large in the dark. One, her skin pocked like mountain soil, muttered to herself. Every now and then she shook her head, as if in disbelief at her imprisonment.

That night Nance woke to a piercing shriek, and when the guard came to see what the fuss was about, holding a lamp aloft, Nance saw that the mutterer had thrown herself at the wall, splitting her head on the rock. The guard took her away. When they had left and the cell was once more snuffed of light, a voice spoke from the corner of the room.

‘I’m glad that one is away.’

There was a pause, then another voice replied. ‘She’s turned in the head.’

‘Wantonly scalding with hot water,’ said the first woman. ‘That’s what she’s here for. Tried to boil her child like a pratie.’

‘What did they pinch you for then?’

There was another pause. ‘Begging. And yourself?’

‘Borrowed some turf.’

‘Drink.’

‘And you, old biddy? Public nuisance was it?’ There was a snide chortle at this.

Nance said nothing, her heart beating fast. She closed her eyes against the darkness and her ears against the faceless voices and imagined the river. The flowing river, in the height of summer. She thought of the green light cast by moss, and the berries on their brambles swelling with their sweetness, and the eggs in the hidden places breaking with tapping beaks. She thought of the life that thrust itself onwards outside the prison, and when she could see it there, see the unconquerable world, she finally fell into sleep.

Grey light slid down the wall like a stain. Nóra had been unable to rest in the close air of the cell with the suggestion of bodies around her, their coughing and weeping, and the scuttering sounds she could not place that filled her with terror. It was a relief to have respite from the pitch-black she had wept into all night. Rubbing her eyes, she saw that there were seven other women in the tiny cell with her, most of them asleep. Nance was not amongst them.

One girl, dark hair streaked with early grey, slept next to Nóra, her head resting on the wall. Another was sprawled by her feet, snoring. Both were thin, their feet black.

Only one other woman was awake. Mouse-haired, she sat with her legs tucked up beneath her, eyeing Nóra carefully. After catching Nóra’s glance she slid forward, crawling across the floor until she was beside her. Nóra sat up hurriedly.

‘Mary Foley,’ the woman said. ‘Sleep well?’

Nóra drew the canvas dress she had been given about her. It was damp.

‘I know what you’re here for. You murdered a child.’

Nóra could smell the tang of the woman’s breath.

‘You’d best be after the priest. They’re after hanging women that do be murdering now.’ The woman tilted her head, examining Nóra with a cool eye. ‘Johanna Lovett. They dropped her out the front of the gaol not a month ago for the murder of her man.’ She winked. ‘Like a fish on a line, she was. Bouncin’ like a feckin’ fish on a line.’

Nóra stared at her.

‘I’m in and out of here more often than a sailor up a whore,’ she said. ‘I know everything.’

‘I didn’t murder him.’

Mary smiled. ‘And I don’t take the drink. But sure, the Devil manages to pour it down my throat anyway.’ She sat back on her heels. ‘Baby-dropper, are you?’

Nóra shook her head.

‘How did he die then?’

‘’Twas no child at all.’

Mary Foley raised her eyebrows.

‘’Twas a changeling.’

Mary grinned. ‘You’re a mad one. Still, better to be mad than bad. That one there? Making an almighty racket?’ She pointed to the snoring girl. ‘Mary Walsh. Tried to conceal the birth of her baby. She’ll be getting three months or so, unless they also decide to charge her with deserting her child. Then she’ll be getting more. That’s the badness in it.’

Nóra stared at the young girl and thought of Brigid Lynch, the blood rippling between her legs. The longed-for child in the
cillín
.

The changeling buried in the Piper’s Grave. Ten inches of soil over that little body.

‘Yer one there with the burn mark on her face? Moynihan. Attempted self-murder.’ Mary sniffed, wiped her nose with the back of her hand. ‘Tried to drown herself. Kept bobbing up like a cork so they fished her out.’

Nóra looked at the freckled girl Mary was pointing to, curled asleep in the corner, her hands tucked under her chin.

‘Surprising, the amount of them here after a ducking. ’Tis stones you want, if you’re after drowning yourself. ’Twould not be the way I’d go. Unless ’twas drowning in a bottle.’ The woman nodded to herself. ‘Sure. Only those who are born to hang are not afraid of the water.’

CHAPTER

NINETEEN

Mint

M
ary’s blouse was pinching
under her armpits and she could feel sweat seeping through her collar. The Tralee courthouse was the finest, largest building she had ever stepped inside, but it teemed with people and Mary thought she might faint from the heat, from the stale air and the fear that lingered in the court from all those who had stood behind the spiked stand, protesting or accusing badness in the world. The violence in it. Beatings and burglary and theft and rape.

Mary searched the crowd for Father Healy. He had brought her to the courthouse from the home of the merchant family she had been placed with these past three months, but in the crush of the crowd she had lost sight of his face.

I have grown, Mary thought, running her fingers along the tight seams. ’Twill be the first thing I do when I return home. I will unpick these clothes and I will make room for myself.

She would have liked to burn them. Burn the skirt and the shift and the shawl and everything she had gone to the widow’s with. Put them on the fire and burn them into nothing, and dress in new cloth that Micheál had never touched. Despite the hard scrubbing she had given her clothes on arriving in Tralee, she could still smell the boy on her. The piss and sourness of him. Smell the nights awake, the wet mouth of him screaming into her chest. The peck soap. The mint. The dark mud of the riverbank.

Mary cast a look at the men who had been sworn in as jury. Over twenty of them. A shoal of gentlemen, black clothes and beards trimmed, sitting placidly amongst the swarming, jostling horde of those who had come to hear the verdicts pronounced over the prisoners led to dock. It had taken Father Healy and Mary a long time to reach the front of the crowd. People collected in dense masses around the lawyers, pulling at their sleeves, asking for justice. Court reporters stood nearby, eagle-eyed, some of them sucking at pencils. Mary took a deep breath. Her hands were damp with nerves.

One of the jurymen caught her eye and gave her a kindly smile. Mary looked away, towards the chair where the judge sat. The Honourable Baron Pennefather. He looked tired.

At the end of this rope of words was Annamore. That was what she had to remember. She had to answer the questions and tell them of her fear, of the strange and sorry things they did to the boy. How frightened she was of all the fairy talk, how she did not understand what it was they were doing. That she was fearful of God and prayed that He would forgive her.

God forgive her. For saying nothing, for doing nothing, for not splashing through the river to slap the widow and take up the boy and carry him home to her brothers and sisters. They would have made a pet of him, she thought. They would not have minded that he screamed from hunger when they, too, were always crying from it. In a cabin of too many, one more would not have made a difference.

Mary started. A hush had fallen, although an undercurrent of babbling continued amongst the people still squeezing themselves into the room. There was a straining of necks and she saw that they were bringing Nance and Nóra into the room, their wrists in irons.

The women’s months in gaol had changed them, had thinned them. Nance looked ancient. Dressed in the garb of the prison, she seemed to have shrunk ever smaller. Her white hair had taken on a yellow sheen in its unwashed state, and her shoulders were hunched. Nance’s eyes, as fogged as ever, looked around her in confusion and fear. She seemed alarmed to see such a vast crowd of people.

Nóra, behind her, was weeping. Mary was struck by the difference in her appearance. Gone was the righteousness, the stubborn chin. Now Nóra’s complexion was sallow and drawn, and she seemed to have aged several years. Her forehead was deeply lined. Despite the heat in the courtroom, she shivered uncontrollably.

Perhaps they will decide to hang them here, Mary thought, and fear creased through her stomach. It might have been her, standing there.

She wanted to leave the room. How could she speak in front of all these people? All these men in their fine clothes, and the judge come all the way from Dublin. She was only a girl from a bog. A girl of the rushes and the turf ground, where the soil oozed black and it was only ever grass and dust and clay underfoot, never the cobbles, never the lacquer of wood.

The counsel gave Mary a careful look. Smoothed his hair from his forehead, glossy with perspiration. She could feel her legs turn to water beneath her.

‘Let the record state that in the case of wilful murder against Honora Leahy and Anne Roche the first witness called is Mary Clifford of Annamore.’

Mary stepped up to the witness box. They passed her the Bible and she kissed it, her fingers gripping the leather tightly.

‘Mary Clifford, can you please identify the prisoners?’

Mary looked out at the sea of staring faces and saw, finally, the long forehead of the priest. He held her eye. Gave her a nod.

‘’Tis Nance Roche. And Nóra Leahy, who I served as maid to.’

‘Mary, in your own words, please tell the court how you came to work for Mrs Leahy.’