The Star of the Sea (10 page)

As I made along, I rehearsed in my mind some words I might say to the Commander: that I was an honest-hearted and industrious tenant who bore him no ill despite our former differences. That I begged his forgiveness for having spoken disrespectfully to him that time when I was angry, that on the life of my child my debt to him would be paid for certain if only he would overturn the eviction and that way allow me the means to pay it. That for all our differing stations he like myself was a Galwayman, no foreign planter come across the sea, and might help another Galwayman who was down on his luck. That he himself was a father, after all, and surely to Jesus could pity my situation, for if he were to put himself into my shoes he must imagine what it is to see your only child scream with the hunger and be able to bring no ease nor comfort.

The road was hard and fearsome cold. Near Cregganbaun the lake was after bursting its banks and so I had to wade across the road up to my chest in my clothes. The water was cold as a stinging fire. But I felt a kind of courage inside whenever I thought about you, Mary. I truly felt you were with me then.

At length the lights of Delphi Lodge appeared in the distance. How happy I was! Up to the house I went with haste. Courtly music was coming from the inside of it. A serving girl answered the door. I took off my cap and said I was a tenant of Commander Blake, much in distress, and was after walking three days and nights for to see him, and gave my name. She went away but shortly returned. The Commander was playing cards, she said, and would not come out and see me.

At this I was astonished.

Again I asked – Mary, I begged – but he would not come out.
Once more I gave my name but she said she was after telling it already and he had answered it with oaths so obscene I would not defile your eyes by writing them down for you to read.

I looked in the window of the withdrawing room at the front. A strange kind of ball was in progress, with elegant ladies and gentlemen in frock coats and they wearing the masks of goblins or angels and supping hot punch. I could not see the Commander anywhere within, but his horse and trap were in the yard.

I sat down on the snowy ground beneath a pine tree, intending to wait. It was dark now. It was very quiet all around. I was thinking strange thoughts, all sorts of thoughts. I do not know what I was thinking about. After a while I must have fallen into a sleep.

I dreamed that you and I and our child were in Paradise together, with warmth and plenty all about us. Music was playing. Your father and mother were there with my own, as hale and young as could ever be hoped; and many old friends, and all of us were happy. Our Lord came among us, as I thought, and gave us bread to eat, and wine to drink. A strange thing was that He had a newborn pig in his bloodied hands and when I asked him why, Our Lord said in our own Gaelic language:
he is holy
. And then Our Lady came in to the place where we were – not a chamber but a kind of shining meadow – and She touched our faces one by one and we became full of light, as water. And Our Lady said in the English language:
blessed be the fruit of my womb
.

When I woke up it was black-dark and the music was after stopping. I could taste the bread I was after eating in the dream, as sweet and luscious as any I ever knew. But then the cramp came back, harder than before – Christ stand between us and all harm – like a blacksmith’s iron aflame in my guts. I thought my time had come to die but it stopped, then, and I could feel myself weeping for the pain of it.

All the lights were put out in the house. The lower portion of my body was covered in snow, and I could scarcely feel my legs no more. Such a dreadful stillness over the icy land I never heard before. Not the cry of a beast nor the croak of a bird. Just blackness and stillness all over the fields. It was as though the whole world was quietly dying.

Someone was after coming out and putting the horse inside in the stable and blanketing him. I went and waited beside the trap for a time.

But he never came out.

At length I went and knocked on the door again. One of the other servants, an old footman this time, said I would have to go on for myself. Otherwise he was after being told to set the dogs on me and it was more than his life was worth to give me admittance to the house for His Lordship the Commander was in a drunken fury. He gave me a cup of water and pleaded with me to go on for myself.

At that a terrible raging anger swept through me like a torrent. I tried to strike the man – God pardon me the raising of my hand to an aged person – but he slammed the door shut on me.

I prowled around the house like an animal for a time. But all inside must have gone to their beds for the windows were darkened now and shuttered. The madness came up again in me then. I let a roar out of me.

I cursed the living name of Henry Blake, and prayed to Christ that neither he nor his will ever know rest so long as they live, all seed and breed of them that ever sees Galway. That they may never sleep a night in their lives again. That they may die in agonies and have a dishonoured grave.

Mary, I would have murdered him if he came out of the house. Christ forgive me, but I would have got pleasure out of watching him suffer so I would.

Wind was coming up hard and biting off the lake. Now I heard a wolf crying in the hills behind. Down the mountain to Leenaun I went, thinking I might beg a place for the night in some haggard or even a morsel of bread itself or a sup of milk for the child. But the people would not stand for it, being afraid of the fever and they whipped me out of it with shame and scorn. Some troopers went past in the rain but gave me nothing either. They said they had nothing to give.

I came back here to find your sister looking over the child who was bestraught with the hunger. She said you were after going walking all the way over to Kingscourt to ask about help. That was shutting the stable door when the horse is after bolting,
Mary, because I know there is not a soul in that place at the present. I have sent her away now, for the pitiful screams of the child were distressing her.

They will stop soon.

Do you remember, my gentle Mary, how we used to go out walking together when we were young? The simple happiness of the days together and the sweetness and friendship of our nights. What a life we thought we should have, a life of buttermilk and bees, you once said. Even though I knew I was not your first choice for a companion of life, there was no happier man in all of Ireland than myself at that time. Nor would I have translated my place with any king or landlord, neither with the Sultan of India himself. All the gold in Victoria’s throne would not have given me lure or temptation: nor every gem in her crown. O my own wife. My own Mary Duane. I felt that love would flower if watered with consideration and gentleness and I believe it did, at least for a time.

There are so many kinds of love in the world. If we were more like sister and brother sometimes, that would have been more than sufficient for myself; for no man ever had a better friend and helper than you and it was all my happiness to care for you.

But then a rat came into the wheatfield.

The meaning seems to have gone out of it all lately. Even the face of our innocent child now only seems a mockery.

I beg you pray mercy on my soul for all I have done and for the terrible thing I am about to do.

Forgive me for failing you, when you deserved so much more.

Perhaps after all you should have married that other creature of Satan who has brought me so low. Well now you are free.

I am so cold and afraid.

She will not suffer, Mary, I will do it quickly and be not long after her.

Say a prayer for me sometimes, if you can bear to remember your loving husband.

N

patt, for the honour of our lord Jasus christ and his Blessed Mother hurry and take us out of this … [Your infant brother] longs and Sighs Both Night and morning untill he Sees his two little Neises and Nephews And … the poor child Says ‘I would not Be hungary if I was Near them.’

Letter of Kilkenny woman to her son in America, pleading for help to emigrate

¹
Document written (in Irish) twenty-two months before commencement of voyage of the
Star of the Sea
. Found by New York Police Officer, in the cabin of the Merridiths’ maidservant, several days after the voyage’s end. The translation is by Mr John O’Daly, scholar of the Gaelic language and editor of
Reliques of Irish Jacobite Poetry
(1847) and
The Poets and Poetry of Munster
(1849). – GGD

T
HE FIRST OF A
T
RIPTYCH IN WHICH ARE DEPICTED CERTAIN IMPORTANT
RECOLLECTIONS
OF THE
G
IRLHOOD AND LATTER LIFE OF
M
ARY
D
UANE, MAIDSERVANT; AND IN PARTICULAR HER
R
EMEMBRANCES OF A PERSON TO WHOM SHE ONCE RETAINED A
T
ENDER ATTACHMENT
. H
ERE WE ENCOUNTER
M
ISS
D
UANE ON THE
SEVENTH
MORNING OF THE
V
OYAGE
.

24°52′
W
; 50°06′
N
— 7.55
A.M
. —

Spears, maybe. Muskets? Maybe. Grey as Dog’s Bay in the early morning. And the bullets must have been big to pierce his hide. And what did they use to hack him to pieces? A hatchet, maybe. A crosscut-saw. Trumpeting blaring bellying down. Trees all around as they went to work on his tusks. A scurf of blood flowing over the slick leaves. Black men, brown men with blood on their feet. Red men watching the black men cut.

Mary Duane glanced out the porthole at the monotonous dawnscape of the heaving Atlantic. In six long days it hadn’t changed. She knew it wouldn’t for another three weeks. Never would she have dreamed, this fisherman’s daughter, that the sight of water could be so detestable: if you could even put the name of water on that colourless billowing desert.

Grey the fish that skulked down there. Grey the dolphins; grey the sharks. How could anything live in its depths? Grey as a shroud. Grey as a deadman. Grey and crinkled like a fibrous, shrivelled skin; as the elephant’s foot she had often seen in the hallway at Kingscourt Manor. It was every bit as deathly and repulsive as that.

‘Would you wash your hands again, Mary. Before touching the children.’

‘Yes, Lady Merridith.’

‘Their skin is so sensitive, Jonathan’s especially.’

‘Lady.’

‘Make sure to change the sheets after breakfast, won’t you? The counterpanes and pillowcases also, of course. If Robert doesn’t get a comfortable sleep, we all know what happens.’

‘I don’t get your meaning, ma’am.’

‘His nightmares, of course. What else would I mean?’

‘Lady.’

‘And I hate to say it, Mary, but would you wash your armpits too. I notice you have a habit of putting your hands in there when you’re hot. It’s really most unhygienic.’

Mary Duane wondered if she should tell her mistress that almost every night for the last seven months the lady’s husband had come to her quarters at midnight to sit on her bed and watch her undress. That might soften her cough for her.