Cashelmara (55 page)

“Everyone must be dead,” I whispered, struggling with my panic.

“I think I can see a light in the dispensary.” Marguerite was already poised on the edge of her seat. “Why doesn’t the coachman open the door?”

It was then that we heard the noise. It was a whispering, almost a twittering, as if a group of birds without voices were trying to sing. The smell reached us a moment later. It was different from the reek of putrid flesh, yet it was still the smell of disintegration. When Marguerite turned ashen I too leaned forward to peer out of the window, and what I saw so appalled me that at first I could not believe my eyes.

We were looking at the living dead, scarecrows who might once have been men and women, half naked, sexless, gray-skinned. There were small scarecrows too with grotesque swollen stomachs, and one woman was carrying a dead baby with a blackened tongue.

The noiseless chattering, senseless and inhuman, began again. Skeleton arms stretched toward us in an appeal for alms.

“Marguerite …” My voice was far away, distorted as if I were at the end of a long corridor.

“Stay here,” she said. “I’ll go.”

“No, don’t!” I was terrified for her, terrified for myself. “We’ll go back to Cashelmara!”

“We must see Madeleine.” Marguerite’s face was white and set. “We’ve come all this way. We’ve got to see her.”

“But …”

“Give me all the coins you have.”

I was so terrified that I could no longer argue with her. I did as she asked. Black spots began to dance before my eyes.

When she opened the door the stench was so overpowering that she almost lost her nerve. I saw her hesitate. The coachman was sitting riveted to his box and would not come down, so she had to scramble unaided to the ground. I saw her fling some coins at the mob, and as they scattered she ran lightly to the door of the dispensary.

The door opened. I saw a room full of people before I fainted.

When I opened my eyes again Marguerite was coming back. The twittering was louder, and as she threw down the rest of the coins the crowd ignored them and pressed closer to beg for food. But Marguerite was empty-handed. She pushed past, stumbling as they grasped her coat, and suddenly there was a mighty explosion as the coachman fired his blunderbuss in the air. The crowd fell back in fear. Heaving as hard as I could, I thrust open the door and dragged Marguerite into the carriage.

She was so white that the freckles stood out on the bridge of her nose like dark blotches. She was trembling as she collapsed onto the seat beside me.

The carriage moved forward with a jolt. The twittering nightmare receded slowly into the dusk.

After a long while she managed to say, “The ward … the little ward with nine beds …”

“Yes?”

“There were forty people in it and all of them were dying.”

“Of hunger?”

“Of fever,” said Marguerite. “Famine fever.” She clenched her hands tightly in her lap. “Madeleine had no food but soup. I didn’t take any. It would have been wrong. She hadn’t received our letters, and she said she had had no time to write any herself. She and Dr. Townsend haven’t had a proper night’s sleep in weeks. The fever came to the valley a month ago from Letterturk, and people have been dying like flies. Madeleine said that if she’d known we’d even dreamt of returning …” She stopped.

The carriage plodded on beside the long lough. The horses were so tired they stumbled often and the carriage swayed sickeningly on the narrow road. It was quite dark by this time and the stars were shining.

“We can leave now,” my voice said. “At once. As soon as we get back.”

“It’s too late for us to leave,” said Marguerite. The long silence had enabled her to recover herself, and when she spoke she sounded as crisp and practical as she always did. “But Nanny and Nurse must leave with the children as soon as they wake in the morning, and they must leave in the other carriage and with the other coachman.”

“But …”

“The fever travels on the clothes, Sarah. We may both be carrying it at this minute. We can’t risk seeing the children again until it’s certain we’re safe.” After a pause she added, “Edward’s favorite son Louis died of fever here at Cashelmara thirty years ago. We mustn’t let history repeat itself.”

The very idea was so appalling to me that I could not speak again for the rest of the journey and found my tongue only when on our arrival we found that Patrick had been busy in our absence. Fires had been lit in the nursery, library and kitchens, and Patrick himself was chopping wood as vigorously as any artisan. The kitchen fire looked so cheerful that I thought I might stop shivering if I knelt beside it, but I was chilled to the bone and my mind remained numbed by the horrible experience in Clonareen.

The very next morning the children left for Galway on the first stage of their journey back to England.

When I had finished crying I found that Patrick had taken one of the horses from the remaining carriage and ridden to Letterturk to buy food. None of us had slept that night. Patrick, Marguerite and I had huddled in the chairs before the library fire, while his valet and our maids had rested as best they could before the fire in the kitchens.

“We must keep busy, Sarah,” said Marguerite. “Tell the servants to unpack the clothes upstairs while we start taking off all the dust covers down here.”

“But, Marguerite …”

“We’re going to be here at least a week and we must have something to do.”

There was no arguing with her, and when Patrick arrived back from Letterturk he found Marguerite industriously sweeping the hall while I was folding discarded dust sheets into neat piles.

“Heavens above!” exclaimed Marguerite. “Look at all that food!”

“Isn’t it odd? There was plenty for sale in Letterturk, but George said when I saw him that the poorer people have no money at all—their last article of bedding is pawned to the gombeen man—and so they can’t even afford fourpence for a stone of potatoes.”

“But that’s monstrous!” exclaimed Marguerite. “How can famine exist in a country where there’s plenty to eat? I shall write to the
Times
at once and expose the situation. There must be some very muddleheaded thinking at Westminster! Any administration that permits a situation like this must be criminally negligent.”

“But the English are trying so hard to help!” protested Patrick. “Think of all the money that’s being raised at present!”

“Yes—but where is it? What happens to it? Why isn’t it saving people from starvation? It’s a scandal,” said Marguerite, having whipped herself into a fine rage by this time, “an absolute scandal.”

Her intensity was characteristic but too frantic to be normal. I sensed her repressed fear and had to struggle to fight my own panic.

“We must keep busy,” she was repeating. “Let’s try and cook. I’ve always wanted to. How do you suppose one cooks a potato?”

“You boil it until it’s soft,” said Patrick promptly. “It takes about half an hour.”

“How on earth do you know that?” I said, amazed.

“I was always in the kitchens at Woodhammer when I was little,” said Patrick happily. “I know all about cooking. It’s great fun.”

I restrained myself from saying how extraordinary he was. I was too hungry to do more than urge him to cook us a meal immediately.

Summoning the servants from their labors upstairs, we divided one of the loaves to take the edge off our hunger while more food was cooking. Patrick boiled eggs and potatoes together for the same length of time and was disappointed to discover how hard the eggs were. However, we were all so hungry that we ate everything, and when Marguerite’s maid offered to cook one of the chickens Marguerite promised her an increase in salary.

The last egg had just been eaten when MacGowan, having seen the smoke from the chimneys, arrived to find out what was happening. He looked not only stupefied to see us but shocked to the core to see Patrick in his shirt sleeves by the kitchen range.

“If your lordship had written to tell me you were coming …”

As we had suspected, he had not received Patrick’s final letter. He began to apologize for the broken windows, the damaged front door and the missing livestock, and he was still explaining how the police had left despite all his attempts to bribe them when Marguerite said fiercely, “MacGowan, why did you send reports that matters were improving in the valley? It’s obvious everyone’s on the brink of starvation.”

“No indeed, my lady, with all due respect. The starving people are mostly O’Malleys, and they were always too shiftless to do more than tend a potato patch. This is God’s judgment on their idleness and sloth, my lady.”

“Don’t talk of God’s judgment to me!” cried Marguerite in a fury. “It’s English negligence, not God’s judgment!”

“That must, of course, be for your ladyship to decide,” said MacGowan sulkily. “But the Joyces and the O’Flahertys have their crops now, and although it’s not a fine harvest it is at least an average one and they’ll pull through. All the reports of famine are much exaggerated, and if your ladyship knew the Irish as well as I know them, your ladyship would also know the Irish love to make a fuss over their troubles. To tell the truth they welcome it because it gives them a chance to complain about the English.”

“Absolute stuff!” said Marguerite. It was so unlike her to be so rude that we all gaped at her. “I’ve seen starving people dying of famine fever. How dare you tell me they welcome it!”

“It’s God’s judgment, my lady,” said MacGowan again, “and God’s will. My lord, with your permission I beg leave to withdraw.”

“Yes, very well. No, wait. MacGowan, we must have some servants—a cook, a couple of maids. Employ some women without delay, could you, and send them here as soon as possible.”

“I’ll do my best, my lord, but these peasant women know no more than how to cook a potato, and they wouldn’t know what the word ‘clean’ meant. I’ll have to send to Galway for decent Christian servants.”

After he had gone Marguerite said in a trembling voice, “Patrick, you’ve got to dismiss that man. He’s intolerable.”

“Marguerite …” He saw she was overwrought and tried to take her in his arms, but she pushed him away.

“Don’t come too near me.”

“You’re not going to get fever,” he said gently. “Plenty of people are immune to it, you know. One often hears stories of people who nurse the sick and yet never sicken themselves. You’ll be safe and everything will soon be well again.”

“Nothing will be well unless you dismiss MacGowan” was all she said as she turned away from him. “He’s going to bring us trouble, I’m sure of it. I can feel it in my bones.”

“I’ll dismiss him later when everything’s returned to normal, but I can’t dismiss him now. I need him.”

Even Marguerite had to admit this was all too true. MacGowan, heavily armed, made the regular expeditions to Letterturk to buy food. He would set out at different times to avoid the risk of ambush, and during the week that followed he managed to find an old woman who would cook for us and two young girls who would wash floors and light fires. All the local cats had been eaten, so the mice were still rampant in the house, but Patrick built traps for them and soon I could go to sleep without fear of finding a mouse in bed with me when I awoke.

Presently the scarecrows came to stand in the drive. They were not violent, but they refused to go away even after we had distributed what food we could spare. They would stand for hours and hours in the cold and only disperse at nightfall.

“We must start a soup kitchen,” said Marguerite. “I believe soup is easy to make, and a little of it goes a long way.”

So the soup was made, and one of the maids, who had had the fever in the past, was put in charge of the distribution.

“What can we do next?” said Marguerite, still aflame with energy as I longed to collapse with exhaustion. “I know—the nurseries! We can prepare them for the children’s return. That’ll cheer you up, Sarah. Let’s get the dusters and take them upstairs right away.”

We had been doing all our own dusting, as the maids had been too burdened by the heavy work to spare time for the lighter cleaning, and Marguerite had attacked the work with great zest. I can see her now, her wiry hair tucked neatly under a cap, an apron tied tightly around her tiny waist, her spectacles anchored firmly to the bridge of her thin nose. She had abandoned her pince-nez a year ago after complaining that she could see nothing at all whenever it fell off and that she was too old to be blind for vanity’s sake. The spectacles did make her look older, but she was still so petite that she looked far younger than her age, which was thirty-seven. Only her hair, mellower now than the startling carroty red of her teens, hinted that she was closer to middle age than one might have guessed.

However, there was nothing middle-aged about her dusting, and so I was surprised when later in the day nursery her energy seemed to flag. I was in the middle of wiping the dust from Ned’s rocking horse when she stopped work and began to open all the windows.

“What are you doing?” I said, startled. It was a chilly day and the upstairs rooms were very cold.

“Don’t you feel hot?” said Marguerite.

“Not in the least.”

“I think I’ll go downstairs and see if that new pot of soup is ready. Then I can step outside for a breath of air. I won’t be long, Sarah.”

When she didn’t come back I went downstairs to look for her, but no one had seen her in the kitchens.

I went to her room. “Marguerite?” I said, tapping on the door. “Marguerite, are you better?” And then as I opened the door I smelled the stench of sickness and saw the pool of vomit on the floor.

We tried to get the doctor. Patrick rode to Clonareen at once, but Dr. Townsend had died of fever that same morning, and Madeleine was alone at the dispensary with her sick and her dying. Someone said there was a doctor at Letterturk, so Patrick rode there to fetch him, but he too was dead and no one knew where another doctor could be found. Meanwhile, all the Irish servants had left us except the one who had already had the fever, and Marguerite’s maid was in such a stupor of fear that she refused to go into her mistress’s room. I could not ask my own maid to go, and I refused to leave Marguerite’s care in the hands of the poor illiterate servant girl who remained at the house.