When she finally
tuned over to swim
again a few moments later, she saw that she was heading slowly
but surely to
the shore.
By the time Emer
made it onto the
beach, a threatening storm roared overhead, and it was pitch
dark outside.
Emer lay exhausted,
her lips
parched, her stomach growling with hunger.
Dazedly she took in her
surroundings, and looked for
any sign of shelter.
She could see a
small light in the
distance, and after resting for a time, she began to drag
herself by her hands
and elbows towards it.
Emer noticed that
she could just
about bend her knees, and so she turned herself over and used
her bare feet and
arms to push off against the ground as the rain lashed down
around her,
scuttling like a crab.
At last, after
about two hours of
crawling, pushing, and resting, she rapped at the door with
the light in the
window, and looked up to see a tall young priest standing over
her in the entry
way.
“If it’s food
you’re after, I have
only some soup,” he said automatically.
Then he looked
down. Stooping to
take a closer look at the visitor seated on the door-step, he
exclaimed, “Good
God! What on
earth has happened to
you, my child?”
Emer felt herself
being lifted, and
once she was seated inside the humble cottage by the blazing
fire, she made a
frantic gesture of writing.
The priest brought
her a pen, ink,
and paper, and with trembling fingers Emer wrote down a brief
account of how
she had come to be there, and why she couldn’t speak.
“My poor dear girl,
I’ve never heard
such a tale of woe,” the priest, who had introduced himself as
Father Darcy,
shook his head.
Emer asked him for
shelter, and also
asked if she could get a letter to her friends in Canada to
tell them where she
was, and ask if her son and Dalton were all right.
“You write the
letter, Emer, and the
next time I’m in Cork, I shall post it, ” Father Darcy
promised. “But
now I think you should take off
those wet things and rest, and I’m sure you must be hungry and
thirsty.”
Emer nodded, and
Father Darcy turned
his back while she stripped off her sodden skirt and blouse,
and wrapped
another dry blanket around her shivering body.
He helped Emer eat
the soup, and
then carried her up to the hay loft, where he made her a
comfortable bed in the
straw.
Emer slept soundly
for the first
time since she had boarded the
Britannia
, as she felt a
growing certainty
that Dalton would
find her, and she would one day return to her family and
friends in Quebec.
The next day Father
Darcy boiled up
some water for Emer in his tin tub, and allowed her to have a
good long
soak. Then he
gave her a spare
pair of his trousers, and a shirt, and apologised, “I’m sorry,
they’re all I
have.”
Emer indicated that
he should let
her have some scissors, and needle and thread. After she took up the
trouser legs about
six inches so they
fit her, she proceeded to cut her hair with the small pair of
shears.
“You look just like
a young boy now,
if you keep your shoulders slumped. It’s probably
far safer you
looking like that. There have been a great deal of rumours
about unrest due to
the English still continuing to export food out of the
country, while people
the people here are starving before their very eyes."
She stared at him,
stunned.
"Aye. The Irish
Confederation,
who used to be part of the Young Ireland group, are now
agitating for armed
rebellion, and the authorities are getting very nervous. They're all
so
hot-headed about all the
revolutions in Europe this year, that they think these poor
famished urchins
you can see wandering the roads looking for a crust will all
quite happily
follow them to certain disaster,” Father Darcy explained.
“Who knows, perhaps
it’s better to
die quickly, cleanly, with a bullet through the heart, than
this slow,
lingering death, with the agony of hunger burning in your
belly, or the torment
of a raging fever driving you mad.” The young priest shook his
head.
Emer gazed at him,
wide-eyed.
“Don’t worry, I’m
not advocating
rebellion. Far
from it, for the
Pope has issued a decree to all Irish clergy saying it is
strictly forbidden to
give succour to any rebels.
At any
rate, I do believe it would do far more harm than good, in
some fairly
unpredictable ways. Any
attacks
will be severely punished by the British government, and will
only alienate
them further from our cause.
If
the potato crop is bad again this year, we will need their
help. A rising
now would only serve to make
them turn their backs on us utterly,” Father Darcy predicted.
At Emer’s worried
expression, he
nodded. “There
no way of knowing
whether the crop will fail again, but with the wet spring and summer
we've had so far, it's
always a
possibility. Some folk around here say you can already smell
the stench of
putrefaction and corruption coming from the fields again, like
a black cloud
hanging over the land. I’m
not so
fanciful, but I can see many will give way to despair if they
have to face yet
another winter with nothing but grass, nettles and seaweed to
eat."
Emer sighed
heavily. She recalled
only too well what the tenants at Kilbracken had had to
endure, and they were
by no means as
badly off as others
had been.
“But there is no
sense in worrying
about that which we are powerless to change. We will just have to
wait for the first
crop in August to
find out whether the famine will continue. But I fear that even if
it doesn’t fail,
the people will still
starve, for not enough seed potatoes would have been planted
to meet the
demand, even leaving aside the dwindling population, now that
so many have been
carried off by disease, hunger, and emigration.”
Emer was haunted by
the priest’s
bleak predictions, and the faces of the poor despairing
wretches who came to
the door for a thin, watery bowl of soup or gruel which Father
Darcy made every
day out of his own meagre rations, and paid for out of his
small stipend.
Emer helped keep
the house, and
cooked the soup or gruel, while Father Darcy worked in the
field, harvesting
the poor miniature carrots and turnips he had planted in
spring.
She grew fiercely
determined to
regain her health and help the suffering famine-stricken
residents of her
homeland, and so she indicated to Father Darcy that she wished
to try to
re-learn how to walk.
When Father Darcy
wasn’t going about
his parish duties, he supported Emer’s endeavours, even making
two crutches for
her to lean on so that she could use her strong arms to propel
her around the
room.
More than once Emer
ended up in a
heap, but with more scalding hot baths in some seaweed that
the priest kindly
gathered for her from the beach nearby, Emer could feel her
legs and back
strengthening.
By day she kept
busy, but her nights
were the same as they had been on the ship, full of fears over
what had
happened to her son at the hands of Frederick Randall.
When she wasn't
worrying about
William, visions of Dalton, and how much they had shared,
filled her senses,
and left her aching with longing, so much so that she would
finally cry herself
to sleep.
And yet every day
brought her new
hope, that she would get well. That she would see her beloved
again, hold him
in her arms once more. Above
all,
she prayed that she would get her son back, no matter what
Frederick Randall or
anyone else tried to do to keep them apart.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
One day, about a
fortnight after she
had arrived, Father Darcy said, “I have to go in to town for a
meeting today,
and I’ll take in your letters to your friends to be posted. I’ll be
back Sunday
night from
Cork. Are you
sure you’ll be all
right on your own?”
Emer nodded, but
she suddenly felt
very uneasy. The
black fever had
been rife in the area recently, and she didn’t think Father
Darcy looked well
enough to walk all the way to Cork.
But Father Darcy
reassured Emer that
he was fine, and set out through the pouring rain with an
almost jaunty stride.
“Take care of
yourself, and God
bless!” he called.
But that was the
last Emer ever saw
of the kind young priest. For true to her predictions, Father
Darcy died on the
road to Cork, and his body lay for several days until the
parish authorities
found him, and gave him a decent burial.
Fortunately for
Emer, they found her
letters in his pocket, and eventually one of the men got
around to posting them
to Canada.
Meanwhile, Emer
waited for Father
Darcy to return to the cottage, keeping herself busy making
soup and using her
crutches.
But when Tuesday
came and he had
still failed to arrive, Emer decided it was time for her to
move on. She had
a roof over her head, true, but
little food, and was not strong enough to continue farming the
sodden land
herself.
She tied a black
strip of cloth to
the door knocker to signify that the priest had died, and
indicated to several
people who came past begging for food that she was leaving,
but they could stay
if they liked, and take advantage of the turf and the farm as
best they could.
Then Emer took the
rest of the bread
and a bottle of water, and with only a small bag of carrots
and one of her
crutches, she set out for Kilbracken, certain Lord Devlin
would help her once
he knew of her plight.
Emer walked and
rested, walked and
rested, and occasionally even got a lift in a passing cart
when someone felt
sorry for the poor lame young man who couldn’t speak very
well.
A couple of days into her exhausting
journey, a wagon had left
her out the outskirts of the city, near an old ruined
seventeenth-century fort.
Emer trudged on
purposefully until
she reached the river. The
quays
were lined with warehouses, which at first gave an impression
of prosperity to
the town, until Emer looked more closely and saw that most of
them were shut,
and indeed had fallen into complete disrepair. Even a wealthy
trading town like Cork
had fallen prey to the
ravages of the famine.
Emer entered Cork,
a city built on a
small island in the middle of a marsh, encircled by the river
Lee, via the
Parliament Bridge, and then hobbled up the Grand Parade, a row
of fine Georgian
buildings, and past the market square, which was nearly
deserted.
Only a few
tradesmen were out
selling their paltry wares, and Emer was able to secure more
provisions for
herself with the last of her coins.
She found one trustworthy-looking young man, and
pointed to her wedding
ring.
“You can sell at
the South
Mall. Just go
back down the way
you came, and turn right.
You’ll
see all the banks and shops you need on that road,” the man
informed her.
Emer shouldered her
crutch, and
headed on purposefully.
She sold the ring
for a fairly good
price, and after having the shopkeeper pay her in pennies
only, she distributed
the coins in her various pockets and hem of her blouse. Taking
up her crutch
once again, she moved on.
As Emer journeyed,
she noticed that
there were hundreds of troops patrolling the countryside, and
Cork was full of
police constables.
Ever conscious of
her status as an
escaped convict, however innocent she might really be, she
hurriedly left Cork
behind, and headed for Mitchelstown, the next large settlement
in the
area. The ground
rose steeply in
front of her, and it began once again to teem down with rain.
Emer was just about
to take shelter
in a disused cow byre with only half a thatched roof when she
saw something
glowing in the distance.
Climbing
up the steep road a bit further, she discovered a small group
of men, women and
children, all gaunt like skeletons, crouching around a blazing
turf fire as
they cooked a scanty repast.
Emer approached
timidly, not sure
how desperate the people were. Opening her small burlap bag,
she held out her
last remaining carrots and a small piece of cheese as an
offering.
They were seized
gratefully, and she
was allowed to approach the fire and sat soaking in the warmth
as the rain
steamed off her drenched clothes.
They were more than
kind to her when
she indicated she couldn’t speak very well. Emer sat and listened to
all they had to
tell her. Her
jaw was healing slowly, but she
thought it best to say nothing and save her strength for
eating the small
portion of rabbit stew and carrots with a square of melted
cheese on top that
she was given in a crude wooden bowl.