The Element of Fire. Brendan Graham

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      ‘Ne’er mind, ma’am, something will crop up,’ Faherty tried to console her with, when she found them again. ‘I’ll take you to The Inn on the North Mall,’ he offered. ‘You can rest up there a while.’ He imagined a lady like her wouldn’t be shy the tally for the innkeeper, his second cousin. ‘It’s for ever full with agents and customs men. I’ll put word with the owner, a dacent man,’ he said, without naming him, ‘to keep an ear out on their talk.’

      Again Nell carted them, this time up against the slope of Boffin Street, through the town’s Octagon and past the Market House, a fine, ashlar-built, two-storey, with pediment roof and louvred bell cote.

      It reminded her of Faneuil Hall, in Boston’s Quincy Market. But Boston was a city much advanced on Westport. In turn the Octagon, with its imposing Doric column, oddly at variance with the inched-out life of those below it.

      She felt the children dig in closer to her as they passed the stench of the Shambles where the butchers of James Street rendered carcasses. Faherty yanked Nell to the right, away from the gated entrance to Westport House, home to Lord Sligo, and took them instead along the North Mall.

      On this tree-lined boulevard, with its leafy riverside, the poor huddled, congregating outside the place to which Nell delivered them. Faherty nudged the horse forward, shouting at those who blocked their progress, ‘Get back there! Let the lady through! She’s had a sore loss this day!’

      Ellen, aware of the pitiful, near-death state in which most of his listeners were, and embarrassed by Faherty’s words, bowed her head. It didn’t seem to bother Faherty, who skipped down from his perch, tied Nell to the hitching-post and then helped her and the children alight.

      The near-dead gaped at them, shuffling out a space through which they could pass. Some made the sign of the cross as she approached, respectful of her loss.

      Faherty gentled her in under the limestone porch, solicitous for her well-being, and bade her wait while he sought the keeper.

      Inside was a sprinkling of red-faced jobbers, stout sticks in their paw-like hands, the stain of dung on their boots. Beef-men in this ‘town of the beeves’ – Cathair na Mart – as she knew it by name. She wondered who it was bought their beef, in these straitened times? Merchants with money, she supposed. Some of the beeves would end up in the Shambles they had just passed. Some would go out on the hoof, heifered over in ships to help drive those who drove the hungry machines of England’s great industrial towns. Not a morsel would find its way to the empty mouths of those outside.

      The tug at her arm recalled her from England’s mill towns. It was Mary. ‘Patrick’s not here!’

      Ellen spun around. The boy was nowhere to be seen. She bade Mary and the silent girl wait and rushed for the crowds outside, impervious to everything except that she must not lose him now. Down the Mall she saw him some twenty paces away, on his knees in company with a ragged boy, scarce older than himself. She ran to him, ever fearful of … something – she didn’t know what.

      She reached him, relieved to see he was not harmed. ‘Patrick, what …?’

      ‘I was only helping him,’ Patrick said, defensively.

      The other boy, a tattered urchin with vacant stare, backed away, afraid of what this frantic and well-dressed lady might do to him. ‘Tá brón orm, ma’am’ – ‘I’m sorry, ma’am’ – he said, fearfully, in a mixture of Irish and his only other word of English apart from ‘sir’.

      She spoke to him in Irish. This seemed to help him be less cowed. Nevertheless, he kept his eyes thrown down as he told his story.

      They lived five miles out on the Louisburgh road. His parents, both stricken with Famine fever, had hunted him and his two younger brothers, eight and six years, ‘to Westport for the soup-tickets’. So the three had set off, he in charge. At the workhouse, he was too small to make headway against the clamouring crowds. Instead, he had followed the flayed carcass of an ass, bound for human consumption, and stolen some off-cuts, which he and his brothers had eaten. After sleeping in one of the town’s side alleys, he had awoken, planning to come here to The Inn, the headquarters of the Relief Works’ engineer, ‘looking for work, to get the soup that way, ma’am’, he explained.

      Unable to arouse his two younger brothers, he thought they still slept, ‘sickened by the ass-meat’, eventually realizing they lay dead beside him. Then he had stolen a sack, put their bodies inside and carried it over his shoulder ‘to get them buried with prayers’. At the Catholic church on the opposite South Mall, he had sneaked in the doors on the tail of a funeral: ‘for a respectable woman like yourself, ma’am – she was in a coffin’. But, while the church-bell tolled the passing of the ‘respectable woman’, he had been ejected on to the streets with his uncoffined brothers. Again, he had carried his sack back to The Inn, hoping against hope to get food. Food that would give him enough strength to find a burial place for his dead siblings, ‘till I fell in a heap with the hunger!’

      That was what Patrick had seen – the boy collapsing, the sack flung open on the road, from within it the two small bodies revealed. Not that he hadn’t seen plenty dead from want before. It had to do with Katie, Ellen knew.

      She made to approach the boy. He, still afraid that he had caused some bother to her, backed away. She halted, hunkered down, then called to him. Slowly, he approached, head down, arms crossed in front, a hang-dog look on him as if waiting to be beaten. She reached out and enfolded him.

      ‘You’re a brave little maneen,’ she said, feeling his skin and bone, his frightened heart, within her arms. ‘We’ll get them buried. And we’ll get some soup for you,’ she comforted, wondering as she spoke, what in Heaven’s name she would do with him then.

      After a few moments, she released him and went to Patrick. ‘You did right, Patrick, to go and help him,’ she said, and held her son against her. ‘I was so afraid I’d lost you again.’

      Patrick made no reply, neither accepting nor denying her embrace. She was a long way yet from his forgiveness.

      Grabbing the sack, she twisted the neck of it closed, not bearing to look inside. The weight of the corpses within resisted her, each tumbling for its own space, not wanting to be carcassed together in death. She didn’t know how the boy had managed to carry it for so long.

      Then Faherty was СКАЧАТЬ