‘Game?’ he asked, although it was obvious. It had been practised on many a young girl down the centuries.
‘Game to seduce me,’ Ellen replied. ‘Michael was always taking liberties. He said as we were to be married what was the harm? But,’ she paused and looked at Robert from under her lashes, ‘as much as I wanted to, I wouldn’t let him.’
Anger had replaced jealousy in Robert’s chest as he pictured the young, innocent Ellen, so trusting and so in love with such a bastard.
‘What happened then?’ he asked in a low voice.
‘When he stopped coming by I was heartbroken. When I heard he’d taken up with a girl from Limehouse, I cried myself to sleep for a week. Then Michael appeared again and was his old charming self. He said that he thought I did not love him because I was saving myself for someone better than him.’ Ellen smiled sardonically. ‘I swore I loved him and to prove it I ... I let him have his way with me.’
‘So you became pregnant and he married you,’ Robert said, moving nearer to her.
Ellen gave another short laugh. ‘I became pregnant and his feet never touched the cobbles as he made for his ship.’
‘So how—’
‘My pappy...’ She stopped for a second. ‘My pappy made him.’ She looked up at Robert and he swore he felt his heartstrings tighten. ‘Mammy guessed first. She found me retching into the soil hole in the yard. She knew it was Michael.’ Ellen bent over and kissed the dying woman’s hand. A distant smile crossed her face. ‘She didn’t rant or rave like some would. She didn’t call me names or threaten to throw me out. She just hugged me,’ Ellen said, still looking at her mother.
Robert felt the love that encompassed the two women and he envied it. He loved his mother, of course. He tried to imagine what she would do if his sister Hermione came home pregnant. He doubted it would be to hug her.
‘We kept it a secret as long as we could, but eventually we had to tell Pappy.’ Ellen turned to him, raw pain etched on her face. ‘It almost cut his heart out. He had great hopes for me. He taught me to read, write and calculate.’ Ellen shrugged, and tucked the pain of her father’s disappointment back deep inside. ‘Anyhow, he raised hue and cry in the parish and when Michael returned, he had the priest waiting for him. We were married two weeks later, two months short of my sixteenth birthday. Josie was born four months after that.’
‘Were you happy?’ Robert asked.
‘I suppose I was. I soon had Josie and for that alone I am thankful to Michael. He also taught me a great deal, too.’
‘Taught you?’
‘He taught me that when you’re knocked to the ground you should roll into a ball and stay there.’
Robert was appalled. During his work he had seen many women who had suffered from his own sex’s brutality. Even so-called respectable men felt they had the God-given right to assault the women in their care, but as a vision of Ellen cowering and beaten by this brute of a husband formed in his mind, blind rage surged through him.
Bridget moaned and Ellen leant close to her mother. Robert looked closer at his patient too. Her breathing was becoming slower. The texture of her pale face had already begun to take on the waxy sheen of a corpse. Bridget would be fortunate to see dawn. The dying woman’s eyes flickered open.
‘Ellie,’ she whispered.
‘I’m here, Mammy, I’m here. So is Josie,’ Ellen answered, shaking her daughter awake.
Bridget’s gaze focused on her daughter and her blue lips curled slightly at the edges.
‘Dr... Munroe... got you... fro—’
‘Save your strength, Mammy,’ Ellen said, kissing her mother’s hand again.
‘He’s a ... fine... looking man, so ... so ... he is,’ Bridget said breathlessly. She let her eyes rest briefly on Robert.
Robert saw Ellen’s cheeks glow pink at her mother’s words. ‘Aye, he is a fine doctor.’
‘Don’t.... give... me ... that... Ellen.... Marie.. ... Shannahan,’ her mother continued, struggling with each word ‘It’s a ... man.... like... Doctor Munroe you... deserve... my girl... I know... you’re... right fond—’
‘Mammy
! Please, you’re embarrassing Doctor Munroe,’ Ellen said.
Ellen was fond of him! Please God, she was more than that.
Bridget waved her hand in a dismissive gesture, letting it fall back on the cover, and with a last effort, said, ‘I but... speak... the truth. It’s the right of the dying... to say what they like.’
‘Mammy,’ Ellen whispered with a quiver in her voice. A tear swelled in her right eye and rolled slowly unhindered down her cheek.
‘Sing “The Soft Soft Rain... of Morning”,’ Bridget said.
A lump formed in Robert’s throat as Ellen took up the strains of the old Irish ballad. Although she sang faultlessly as always, there was a tremor of emotion in her voice. Josie awoke and came around to join Ellen. Robert gave up his seat to her and she sat holding her grandmother’s hand tightly. He stood back and a lump came to his throat.
Death came to everyone in time of course, and Robert had seen more than his fair share. Like Kitty with her innards perforated, dying in agony, or the stevedore who screamed for days after having his skull crushed beneath a crate, or the woman who just gave up after trying to expel a dead baby for three days.
After witnessing such deaths he knew there was no easy way for the soul to depart the body, but if he could choose how he would leave this world it would be the way Bridget was facing the afterlife now, with Ellen’s sweet voice surrounding him.
Fourteen
Danny eyed the men in the low-ceilinged bar, who shuffled uneasily under his unrelenting gaze. Uneasy? They ought to be shitting themselves.
‘One week I’m away,’ he said glaring around him. ‘One fecking week, seeing Shamrock Lad race at New-market, and I come back to this.’ He spat on the sandy floorboards.
Black Mike stood calmly beside him, waiting for orders. Beside him his two cousins, Milo and Wag, lounged against the table of the empty bar room. Wag was cleaning his dirty nails with the end of a large knife and Milo was twisting the rings on his right hand and cracking his knuckles.
Danny jabbed a finger at Henry Forster. ‘Just so’s I know that I’m hearing aright, you’re telling me that Doctor Munroe walked into the Goose’s bar, floored Bull Hennessey with one blow and walked out with Ellen and no one stopped him?’
Henry Forster nodded. Danny rubbed his finger across his chin and turned his mouth up to one side, still looking at his bully boys ranged before him.
‘And what did Munroe say?’
Henry Forster stole a gaze at the men flanking him. None met his eye. ‘Doctor Munroe said, “If you have anything to say, you can say it to me”.’
A caricature of a smile spread over Danny’s face, making it a picture of artless good humour. He beamed at Forster, Black Mike and his two cousins Wag and Milo. ‘Is that so?’
‘Th ... that’s what he said,’ Forster stuttered, looking to the others for support. None was forthcoming.
Danny puffed out his chest and sauntered around the desk. He put his thumbs in the armhole of his waistcoat, pushing open his blue-striped frock coat. ‘Well, that’s mighty civil of him, don’t you think, boys? What a kind gentleman our Doctor Munroe is.’ He was inviting them all to agree with him, but no one moved a muscle and only the squeak from the lamp fixture above cut through the silence.
‘Rescuing the fair Ellen from ol’ Bull Hennessey’s clutches and stealing her off into the night. I might just have a word or two to say to him, don’t you know.’
‘He threatened us with the police, he did,’ Henry interjected. ‘I didn’t think with all the - er - you know ... in the cellar, you would want...’ He didn’t complete the sentence.
Danny’s face lost its congenial expression and was replaced by a look of pure venom. He struck Henry swiftly across the face with his new walking cane, opening up a deep gash on his cheek with its silver tip.
‘I only said—’ Another blow found its mark and silenced the landlord.
‘Of course I don’t want the fecking police anywhere near the Swan,’ Danny said, towering over Henry. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Black Mike step forward. Danny took hold of Henry and the other men in the room stood back. Henry, although bigger than the average man, dangled like a captured rabbit in Danny’s huge fists.
‘Haven’t you got a brain in that thick head of yours?’ He shook Henry, who tried to say something, but Danny let him go with one hand and smashed into his face with the other, splitting his nose in an instant. Blood splattered over Henry’s white shirt and over Danny’s hand. He ignored it and continued to shake the now almost insensible man. ‘Couldn’t you have sent the lads after him?’
Henry’s mouth was working but no sound was coming out. His right eye was all but closed by a rapidly swelling and discolouring eyelid.
Danny stared at Henry for a second, imagining Robert Munroe hanging limp from his grip instead. In his mind’s eye he could see him walking into the taproom and taking Ellen away. His stomach twisted as he imagined the soft smile Ellen had bestowed on her rescuer. The blood in his head pumped harder.
He focused again on the man in his grasp and threw him from him. Henry landed in a crumpled mess on the floor and Danny kicked him where he lay. Henry murmured, but lay still. Danny then swung around and pointed at Mike.
‘That bastard’ll pay for this,’ he said, and no one was in any doubt as to which bastard he was referring.
‘Comes here full of his do-gooder ideas,’ Danny continued to no one in particular, ‘poking his nose into others’ business and costing me money with his repairs orders and investigations into the workhouse supplies.’ He glared at Mike, Wag and Milo. ‘God Almighty, if that’s not bad enough, he’s now looking to me business at the Swan.’ The cane between his hands started to bend. ‘And to top it all, he’s after stealing my singer from under my very nose.’ The cane snapped. He threw it behind him. ‘And you.’ He glared at Henry for a second then landed him another kick, square in his chest. You fecking well let him.’
Mike, Wag and Milo stood still and there was a long silence.
‘Do you want me to cut him like?’ Wag asked, sliding his knife across the pad of his thumb.
For a long moment Danny stood with his fists clenched, then a smile crept across his face. He tapped the side of his nose with his finger. ‘Gentle now, me boys, gentle. Do you think you could pop around to Ol’ Bull for me and tell him I’d like a few moments of his time?’
Unsuccessfully trying to stifle a yawn, Josie took the hot cup of tea from her mother. She sipped it and cupped it in her hands. Although it was not Friday night there was a large sugary bun on the plate at her elbow.
Taking up her own cup of tea, Ellen took the chair on the other side of the fire. She looked tired, with dark smudges under her eyes. It was hardly surprising that neither of them had slept much in the last two days.
‘It was a grand send-off, though, wasn’t it, Ma?’ Josie said, taking another hot mouthful of tea.
Ellen gave a ghost of a smile. ‘It certainly was. Just like back home.’ The smile broadened a little. ‘It’s a shame your Gran wasn’t here. She would have enjoyed it.’
‘Well, she could have been if we hadn’t had to bury her,’ Josie retorted, which brought a further smile to her mother’s face. ‘When old man Ryan died last year he was in the middle of the room the whole time dressed in his dapper best.’
In truth it hadn’t mattered. Despite the absence of Bridget’s body, their small house had been open for the long night of vigil and neighbours came from the surrounding streets to pay their respects to Bridget and to ‘keen and cry’ with Josie and her mother.
‘You know why we couldn’t have her lying out for a week. Doctor Mun ... Munroe explained about the risk of catching cholera and why she had to be buried so quickly, didn’t he?’ her mother told her. Josie gave her a sharp look. There was something in the way her mother said Doctor Munroe’s name that was different somehow. She wondered if she said Patrick’s name in the same soft way and if her mother’s sharp ears heard it.
‘He did,’ she conceded, but it still didn’t seem right to have a wake without a body.
‘I’m sure Gran would have understood.’
Yes, she would have. Gran always did. She understood when Josie was given the birch at school for punching Marjory Swallow. Gran understood when she told her about Patrick and how she thought he was the handsomest lad in the streets for miles around. Patrick had come to Gran’s wake.
‘Still it was a grand seeing-off for all that, the young girl went on. ‘The fiddlers were sharp and played every tune anyone asked them for, and everyone danced until they dropped. Even Mrs Munny from over the road was jigging around and she’s never got a smile on her face for any.’
Her mother gave her daughter a long, considered look. ‘You were on your feet all night, that’s why you’re so tired now,’ she said, as Josie completed another yawn. ‘And don’t think I didn’t see you dancing with Patrick Nolan.’
Josie nibbled at her bun, pointedly ignoring her mother’s remark. She had danced with Patrick on three occasions, and wonderful it had been too.
‘It’s a shame that we had no relative here who could have come,’ she said, changing the subject and hoping her mother would do the same.
‘I wish Joe could have been here and Aunt Mary, but it’ll be weeks before she gets my letter in Munster and months before Joe hears the news in America.’
‘Uncle Joe has another child on the way, hasn’t he? That’ll make five cousins, won’t it, with the two older boys’ two girls,’ Josie said, her eyes bright in spite of their lack of sleep. ‘I suppose we will be off to America sooner now there is just you and me.’
Ellen put her cup down very carefully and smoothed her skirt. ‘There’s no rush.’
‘But if we book passage now, in the sailing season, we’ll make swift passage. Patrick says that we might make it in eight weeks or less at this time of year.’