The Brightest Day, The Darkest Night. Brendan Graham

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СКАЧАТЬ had a great St Pat’s … beggin’ your pardon, Sister, St Patrick’s Day, during winter camp when there was no fighting … but that was only among ourselves … and sure it’s now we need a diversion.’

      After repeated ‘spontaneous’ entreaties from a number of the men – carefully orchestrated by O’Brien – Louisa had acquiesced. As matron, she warned that any celebration would have to be both ‘orderly and circumspect’. She received every assurance it would … ‘be as quiet as a dormouse dancing’. Somehow, Louisa felt remarkably unassured by this assurance, as Jared Prudhomme’s blue eyes beckoned her to him, for the third time that day.

      Jared Prudhomme, proud to be from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was ‘the man side of seventeen’, he told Louisa, when three weeks prior, he first came to them. He was tall, possessed of piercing blue eyes and with a beauty of countenance not normally bestowed on mortals. That he was dishevelled from battle, his blond hair unkempt about his face, did not in any sense diminish from his striking appearance. It was, Louisa had decided, because of some inner light of character which shone from the boy, and which was unquenchable.

      She went to him. As on the two previous occasions today, she would be polite, not overstay with him, as she had when first he fell under her care. Then, though his shoulder wound had not been serious, due to a delay in getting him to hospital, he had lost a copious amount of blood. She had nursed him back, dressed his shoulder. One day, while leaning over him, their faces close, he had said, ‘You have the scent of the South on you … it reminds me of so much!’ She hadn’t answered him and then he was apologetic. ‘Did I embarrass you – I know you are not as other ladies?’ She had raised her head, looked at him, smiled. He had no guile. ‘Thank you,’ she had said and left it at that.

      Then, one morning, she had arisen, found herself rushing her prayers. At first, she couldn’t quite fathom it but something about it bothered her. When she had reached his bedside, he had greeted her with his usual smile and she felt bathed in the light of his company. Leaving him, she realised that her earlier undue haste at prayers was not just to do her rounds but to get to him. When next she tended him, she was conscious of this feeling, her fingers betraying her as she peeled back the dressing from his bare shoulder.

      ‘I am unsettling you,’ he said in his quiet, direct way, ‘and I would rather fall to the enemy than cause any such emotion in you.’

      This had discomfited her further.

      ‘Yes!’ she said, continuing her work. ‘It is an uncommon feeling …’ She paused, her words landing soft against his skin, her breath moistening the broken tissue.

      Now, today, as she went to him, a faint tremor of apprehension came over her.

      ‘I wanted to ask you before everybody else … and maybe I am already too late,’ he began. ‘Would you dance with me tonight – for St Patrick?’ he added in quickly, upon seeing the look come over her face. ‘It is my last night, before going out again … and I would go more lightly having danced with you,’ he pleaded.

      She looked at him, mended now, his face aglow at her. She had intended giving him a further talk about how ‘All must be included in a Sister’s love’ or that ‘Sisters, in spirit and in substance, must be faithful to their vows as a needle to the Pole.’

      He looked so young, so fragile, his blue eyes entreating her, that she had not the heart. Before she had thought it out any further she had said ‘yes!’, the words of Sister Lazarus pounding in her brain … ‘Impetuosity, Sister, will be your undoing. You must guard against it!’

      The rest of that day Louisa allowed no excuse to bring her within the company of Jared Prudhomme.

      

      Somewhere, somehow, Mary, in her own quiet way, had managed to forage a few gills of whiskey, some for everyone in the hospital. Not that she was in favour of the pleasures – or dangers – of ‘the bewitching cup’, herself.

      ‘Blessings on ye, Sister – your mother never reared a jibber,’ or some other such well-meant phrase, greeted the dispensation of the whiskey. Some had to be helped drink it. One soldier, half his neck torn away, tried to gather up the precious fluid in his hands each time it seeped from his throat. Being a fruitless endeavour, he finally abandoned it. Instead cupping the amber-coloured liquid directly back into the gaping hole itself.

      ‘A shortcut, ma’am,’ he gasped to Mary, the rawness of the whiskey snatching the breath from him.

      Another dashed it on the stump of his leg to ‘kill the hurtin’.’

      Overall, Sister Mary’s whiskey produced a tizzy of excitement among the men. Americans, North and South toasted ‘the Irish, on whichever side they fight’, while the Irish toasted themselves, St Patrick, and the ‘good Sisters’, in that order.

      The day, aided by the whiskey, invoked a kind of nostalgia in all of them. Some dreamed of the South – magnolia-scented days, fair ladies and the Mississippi. Some dreamed of the green lushness of the Shenandoah Valley. Others again sailed to further waters and valleys – the Rhine, the Severn, the Lowlands of Holland.

      The Irish dreamed only of Ireland.

      Ellen thought of the Reek, St Patrick’s holy mountain.

      ‘Do you remember how once we climbed it to look over the sea for a ship to America?’ she asked Louisa and Mary.

      They both nodded.

      ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t take me with you,’ Louisa said. ‘That after finding me, you would leave me. I prayed so hard to St Patrick.’

      Ellen remembered too when she had returned to Ireland to collect them. Her money had been running low, with staying in Westport, waiting for passage to America. She had herself, Patrick and Mary to look out for first. Rescuing the girl from the side of the road had been an impulsive charity, one she had already been beginning to regret. But a ship had come before she was forced to take a decision about ‘the silent girl’, before they had named her ‘Louisa’.

      ‘Little did any of us then know what lay before us in this far-off land,’ Mary reflected.

      ‘We’re still split apart from each other here,’ her mother answered, thinking of those not present. Only this time it wasn’t the famine, or ‘the curse of emigration’, or some other external force. This time it had been her own fault; her own fallibility that had scattered them. She was fortunate to have found again Mary and Louisa, or rather to have been found by them. But always her thoughts went to Patrick and Lavelle.

      Of them there was no sign.

      She knew they were out there somewhere, either with the Union Army of the Potomac, or with the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.

      A chill crossed her. They would have seen combat by now. She looked around the room. She always looked when a new consignment – the flotsam and jetsam of each fresh battle – arrived. Each time she looked, dread was in her eyes and in the back of her throat, and in the petrified pit that was her stomach. Now, as her gaze took in the men about her – a torn-out throat, a hole through a nose, like a third, sunken eye, a lifeless sleeve or trouser leg – she would have been happy to see them there. At least know that they were alive.

      In her care.

      ‘I know what you’re thinking, Mother.’ It was Mary. ‘Trust in the Lord!’

      ‘Oh, СКАЧАТЬ