The Whitest Flower

She paused for a moment to let this sink in. Katie and Mary were agog at the image of God sorting out good and bad sins the way they sorted out good and bad potatoes – the good ones going in the basket, the bad ones thrown away. Even Patrick’s attention was caught.

‘So, what that tells us is that people themselves are not good or bad, but we can do good or bad things. Now, Katie, to go back to your question, “Are all landlords bad?” The answer is no, but’, Ellen moved on quickly, sensing that both Katie and Patrick were itching to put more questions to her, ‘some of them do a lot of bad things.’

‘Mr Pakenham is one of those, isn’t he?’ Mary surprised them all by getting the jump on the other two. ‘And Lord Leitrim for burning the church?’

‘Yes, that’s true enough,’ said Ellen. ‘And they say Lord Lucan beyond in Castlebar is most cruel to his tenants as well. Then again, the landlord at Moore Hall, over beyond Partry, is said to be a very good landlord, what they call an “improving landlord”. Instead of wasting money on fancy gardens and going to London parties, he improves the land and the conditions of his tenants.’

‘Pakenham isn’t like that – he’s a bad man, isn’t he?’ Patrick cut in, wanting her to say it.

‘True, Patrick. But one day he’ll have to answer to God for the bad things he does.’

‘He’ll be lucky if the Young Irelanders don’t get him first!’

Ellen was alarmed at this kind of talk from Patrick. He must have heard the men talking last night, or maybe young Roberteen had been saying things to impress the boy.

‘Now, Patrick, hold your tongue with talk like that,’ she remonstrated.

The boy fell silent.

‘What about our new baby – will we have to pay extra to the landlord for him too?’ Katie was back on target again.

‘Well, we don’t know if it’s a him or a her, yet – do we?’ Mary echoed aloud Ellen’s thought.

‘And it doesn’t matter,’ Ellen emphasized, ‘as long as the baby is healthy and well. Sure, whatever rent Pakenham puts on the baby – the gift of life itself is beyond all price. Somehow your father, with God’s help, will manage to provide for the new baby, and the rest of us.’

Ellen, glad that the children’s worries and concerns had been given a good airing, wanted to wrap up the lesson on this positive note. But it was not to be.

‘When God does the adding up for Mr Pakenham – will He send him to hell?’

As always, Katie had the last word.

Towards dusk Ellen went out of her door many times and looked up towards the Crucán to see if there was any sign of Michael.

With Beecham and his men going about the valleys on the bad business they were on, who knows what might happen if Michael fell amongst them. They would bait and jibe him until he struck one of them.

Or, if the water at Beal a tSnámha was wild and Michael had no horse to take him over, then he could be swept away to drown in the cold and the blackness of the Mask, alone. Without a sinner to say a prayer over him.

It could be at just such a time as this that the Banshee’s warning would be fulfilled.

With all these thoughts pressing in on her, Ellen Rua threw her shawl round her shoulders, bade the children to stay indoors until she returned, and set off up the village. She would follow the high road until she came to the crest of the mountain. From there she would be able to look down on the Finny road, watching for a familiar figure winding his way homeward between lake shore and mountain.

The evening was cold, but no matter. Wasn’t she better off out here than sitting at home, not being able to settle her mind for thinking about Michael and what might befall him? Anyways, she liked being out under the sky, feeling the cut of the air, having the freedom to go between mountain and valley and lake. Sure, a thousand walled gardens of roses, built by an army of ten thousand gardeners, could never match what was here around her. Unbuilt since time began.

As she passed the Crucán and turned left to ascend the high, mountain path, she remembered her father bringing her to this high place under the stars. Once there, he would say to her, ‘Now, find me the North Star.’ And she would look up with her little-girl eyes at the vastness of the sky twinkling above her.

‘Wonder is a gift,’ he’d whisper into her ear. ‘Wonder is not lack of knowledge, wonder is not ignorance. No, wonder is a gift – the gift of knowing there are things we cannot know.’

Then the sound of his voice would swirl around inside her head, and she would understand without knowing she understood.

‘Never lose wonder,’ he used to say, before she even knew she had found it.

‘What is it – where does it come from?’ she would ask, looking into his wise Máistir’s eyes, seeing something there that she now knew was the answer – wonder. A smile would come over his face and he would say, ‘Wonder is here now, a stóirín. Wonder is here now.’ And then he would say nothing for a while, just letting the wonder flow between them, dance in the air around them, binding them forever.

She never realized – until it was too late, until he was gone – that she was his wonder. Just as Katie, with her wild, generous impetuosity was to her; and Mary, with her quiet ways; and Patrick – dear, concerned, Patrick – struggling to find his feet, caught between boyhood and manhood. They were her three wonders. They wouldn’t realize it yet; maybe not until she herself was gone. And the kick inside, slowing her down – that too was her wonder. And Michael, her great love, who she watched for.

She followed the faint line of the Plough to the place where the Plough-maker made a giant leap across the heavens. There, where he landed, high above the mountains of ice, he had cut and chiselled the highest point, shaping it on his star-anvil. Then he blew it aloft, with a puff of his cold breath, to be the brightest, highest star of all – the North Star.

Underneath the North Star sat the North Pole. There, at the far edge of the world, the Máistir had told her, the stars sizzled and flashed, whizzing across the sky, caught in eternal conflict between night and day. The ‘Aurora Borealis’ was what he called this storm-tossed day-star. The very name rang with wonder: ‘Aurora, Aurora Borealis.’

From under that far place, he told her, ‘the Northmen came down in their long boats. Fierce warriors they were, coming out of the mists to raid our cattle and our women.’

Nothing much had changed, she thought. Now the invaders came from nearer home, in their fine clothes, speaking the narrow language of the Sasanach, still plundering and raiding our lands, and – she thought of Bridget Lynch – our women. Only now they moved not under stealth of mist, but by stealth of laws made in an English Parliament.

And now the language, too, was being stolen. Language that set the Irish apart, that was the expression of their spirit. English, the tongue of the invader, was now the official language, a barrier to keep out the poor, the peasant, the uneducated. English was the language of politics, of the Established Church; the language of opportunity, and emigration. It was the language of those who held the land. The language of power.

The old language was now a badge of ignorance and backwardness, the language of the potato people and the landless. It was the voice of the dispossessed.

Now, she too must contribute to the extinction of the language she loved. She must teach her children English. For them English represented escape to a better world somewhere out there under the stars. English was a chance of survival. Without it, they would remain forever impoverished in a landlord-ridden Ireland.

She and Michael still spoke the old language to each other, but to the children they had begun to speak in English. Michael did not like this, she knew. He saw it as a denial of their Irishness. But he accepted that they had no choice. If things got worse they would have to leave – if they could.

When the people left, the language would go with them, and with the language would go the songs, the stories, the sean-fhocails – the ‘old sayings’ – the prayers. Maybe on the far-off shores of North America and Australia, the exiles would, for a while, speak the old language amongst themselves. But Ellen knew it would be only a matter of time before Gaelic was cast aside as the language of paupers, the language of failure. In time, too, the culture and the spirituality of the people which lived through the old language would be weakened, dispersed to the four corners of the world. Those who stayed behind would also have to adapt to the language and ways of the ruling class – else perish.

The Irish would become English.

A great sadness came on her, and she raised her head to the heavens and prayed.

“Ellen! Ellen, a stór!’

Michael’s voice cut through her prayer. She jumped up, all vestiges of sorrow lifted from her; no thought save that he was here. He was safe.

And there he was, his silhouetted figure hurrying up the hill towards her.

How could she be so foolish as not to be watching – and that the very reason she was there in the first place! She climbed down from the rock and made her way towards him, not knowing whether the tightness in her stomach was the baby or the love-knot, ever-present when she and Michael were reunited after a separation, however brief.

In a moment she was in his embrace.

‘Ellen! Ellen!’ he kept saying, as if, having lost her, he had now found her again. ‘Ellen, you shouldn’t be out here.’

‘I came for you,’ she said.

‘Oh, Ellen, my bright love of the dark night, it is not a time for you to be on the mountain, and you as you are,’ he whispered into her hair.

Overflowing with relief at seeing him, she buried her face in his neck. The taste of the sweet salt of his sweat put all else out of her mind. She gathered some on her tongue and swallowed. Then she found his mouth.

‘You’re home,’ she breathed. ‘Buíochas le Dia.’

With Michael’s arm still round her, they turned for home, leaving the night and its thousand wonders above and behind them.

The children hung on every word as Michael recounted the details of his journey to Clonbur.

‘Things are bad,’ he said. ‘The people are all fearful of the grave times ahead, thinking that God has sent a great calamity to punish them for their sinfulness.’

Ellen had heard such talk before. Some of it from certain of the Catholic bishops claimed the blight was God’s warning to the lazy, ever-breeding, Irish to observe the laws of the Church and not engage in the old pagan practices, as they did at Halloween, and at wakes and Pattern Days. London too was quick to see the Hand of Providence at work, as if this absolved the Government’s failure to act. Ellen wondered whether the Government would have stood idly by if the blight had struck with the same severity in England.

Nothing had changed since Ireland had become one with England in the Union of 1800. England, that great all-conquering country, master of the seas, master of distant lands, had left its nearest colony to wither away like a diseased stalk. There had been no reform of land ownership; no schemes to develop an alternative source of food; no laws to hold in check greedy landlords.

Ultimately, Pakenham and his kind would blame the poor, as if they had willingly brought Famine down on themselves. Tenants who could not pay their rents would be evicted to die on the ditches and roadsides.

‘I can see it all now, Michael – I can see it all! They’re going to blame us for this Famine – they’re all going to blame us!’ she cried out.

‘Who, a Mhamaí? said Patrick, fear in his voice.

‘All of them – the Bishops, the landlords, the Government. I see it now. Oh, God, I see it! They’re all saying it’s the Hand of God moving against us, moving against the poor Irish peasants to punish us for our sins.’ She paced up and down the cabin, shaking her head. ‘But isn’t it the greatest sin of all to be saying that thing? Isn’t it a blasphemy to be blaming the Almighty?

‘We are the ones going to die – back here in the valleys, with our children – not the Bishops, not the landlords, or the Government safe beyond in London. We’re going to be the victims – and they’re blaming us already. It’s a wicked plan. If they all keep saying it now, it becomes true – it means they don’t have to do anything to save us!’ she said, anger rising in her voice. ‘Oh, I see it all now: the poor, the Irish Catholic poor – England’s everlasting problem – wiped off the face of the earth by the Hand of God.’

‘Ellen! Ellen!’ Michael’s arms were cradling her, stopping her.

The children looked at her in disbelief, stunned into shock and silence by what they had heard.

Ellen, seeing them, was overcome with remorse at her outburst. ‘Oh, my darlings! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to frighten you so!’ she cried, gathering them in her arms. They said nothing, only allowed the comfort of her touch to soothe their silent fears.

Michael had not yet told them what the priest had advised the villagers to do, but Ellen decided he could tell her later, once she had settled the children down for the night.

Then they prayed. Each one, child and adult alike, trying to find a solution to the frightening world outside their small cabin. A world that seemed to be waiting to swallow them up until they were no more.

Ellen looked with tenderness on the bowed heads of her loved ones as they mouthed the Hail Marys in a dying language, seeking relief in the hypnotic chant of prayer.

For her, this knowing what lay ahead was the worst thing of all. As if she were a helpless spectator to their own doom.

‘Thy will be done … on earth as it is in Heaven …’ Ellen wrestled with the words as she led her decade of the Rosary. Were blight, famine and eviction the will of God? Were poverty and hopelessness the only road to salvation?

Together they recited the Beatitudes:

Happy are the poor in spirit;

For theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven …

Happy are the hungry;

For they shall be satisfied.

At least there was hope beyond the world outside their door, she thought.

When they had finished, Ellen ushered the children to bed. She lay down with them, caressing their foreheads, stroking away the cares her earlier outburst had brought on them.

Tonight, even Patrick did not resist ‘being coddled’ as he disparagingly called it when Katie and Mary availed of this settling down from their mother of a night.

Gradually, each of them in turn fell away from the world, into a deep and restful sleep. In a final benediction for the night, Ellen placed her hand over the fourth of her children – the child within. Then, with her thumb, she inscribed four tiny crosses on the ever-stretching skin of her stomach, anointing the growing life-force inside her.

Salvation in the next life or not, she, Ellen Rua O’Malley, would be her children’s salvation in this life. The will of God, would, she decided, become one with her own will. Somehow …

11

She nestled in behind Michael, sliding her right hand up over the white nape of his neck, beneath the thick black tangle of his hair, letting it rest there. He was asleep.

Now, she had seen to all of them.

She and Michael would talk again in the morning about the Famine and going to America. Now, she needed time to work things out in her own head – to devise her salvation plan for them.

If, as she foresaw, things were only going to get worse in Ireland, should they just wait here, accepting whatever Providence – and Pakenham – doled out to them? Much depended on whether the blight returned. If it did, then their fate, along with that of half the population of the country, would be sealed.

Of course, it was possible that Her Majesty’s ministers in London had drawn up plans to deal with such a disaster … But instinct and the lessons of history told her that Ireland and its problems were low on the list of priorities where Queen Victoria and her Government were concerned.

To survive they would have to scrimp and scrape. They must save whatever pennies they could. She was glad they had not gone to Castlebar. Instead, she would go there after the Christmas to sell her silver hairbrush, the one the Máistir had given her. It was no sin, given the circumstances, and her dear mother Cáit in heaven above would forgive her. Anyhow, wasn’t it only vanity for herself and her red-haired daughters to be having such fine, silky-brushed hair, and people hungry.

Michael, too, could sell his fiddle, although she would hate to see it go. She loved it when he played for her.

Its music lifted her, mellowed her heart when she was troubled. Music was the people’s freedom. To sell the fiddle, she decided, would be like selling a birthright.

It would be more than the act itself. It would be an admission of defeat.

She returned to her plan.

Once the baby was born and a bit hardy, she would find work, even if it meant walking all the way to Westport or Castlebar. She’d have to find one of the younger women to take the baby and nurse it for her.

Michael, she thought, would have to find some other place on the mountain, as well as the one discovered by Beecham, on which to plant potatoes. If luck was with them, and the potato harvest was good, they could sell some of the excess by this time next year.

Before Christmas twelve-months, all going well, they should be ready.

There, in the dark of her cabin, as the turf fire slowly died down to a dull glow, Ellen Rua O’Malley resolved that she, Michael, and their family, would not see out another Christmas in Ireland.

It saddened her greatly to think that their fire would be forever gone from the valley. Knowing that once they left, they too would be extinguished from the land not only of their own birth but of their fathers’ fathers’ birth – and even back beyond then.

Emigration was a death. A double death. It was a death to the one who left, and a death to the ones who stayed behind. Small wonder that the people held wakes for those leaving – the American Wakes, they called them – to keen departing loved ones, to mourn their being torn away from life as they knew it, unlikely ever to return.

In the still of the night the tears welled up in her eyes. She withdrew her hand from Michael’s head and wiped them away. She must not weaken now. She had been given gifts to overcome all that lay ahead of them. Gifts of knowledge;

of dream; of visitations; of wonder. She must be strong, use her gifts. Else she might lose them.

Somehow the fire in their cabin would be kept alight – she would see to that.

But go they would.

Go they must.

Rachaidís go Meiriceá They would go to America.

12

The completed first section of the new curvilinear glasshouses sparkled majestically in the December sunlight, the brightest jewel of the Royal Botanical Gardens. Apart from the Kew glasshouse being built in England, no other gardens in Europe could boast anything to equal Glasnevin. Hopefully the coming year would see the construction of two more glasshouses, the Central Pavilion and the West Wing, which would stand alongside the first in a commanding position near the tree-lined banks of the gurgling River Tolka.

Yet despite the splendour all around him, David Moore looked troubled, his thoughts preoccupied with what lay beyond the grey wall dividing the gardens from its nearest neighbour: the cemetery at Glasnevin.

Would the coming year see the cemetery filled as a result of the disease afflicting Solanum tuberosum? Would the victims of the blighted potatoes which had first come out of the earth on this side of the wall be placed in the cold earth on the far side?

Seeing her husband deep in his musings, Isabella Moore fondly encircled her husband’s arm with her own and rested her head against his shoulder.

‘What troubles you, husband?’ she asked, concerned.

‘This cursed blight. The desolation of the crop now extends to every corner of the country, leaving the poor nothing to live upon but grass and nettles. Yet still there is no action from the Government.’

‘I hear there is talk of repealing the Corn Laws to alleviate the suffering.’

Moore shook is head impatiently. ‘That is nothing but expediency on the part of the Government to suit their own ends. It will help the starving populace of Ireland not one whit.’

‘Then what should London do?’ Isabella asked.

‘A National Calamity Plan needs to be set in motion. But it is my fear that politics will stay the hand of mercy and compassion for its own sinister ends.’

‘And what of the Irish themselves? Can they not do something?’ she pressed.

‘I fear that, even here, O’Connell and the Irish leadership will become usurers of the situation to press for further gains to repeal the Union.’

‘But surely they are right. Little has been done in half a century to develop Ireland’s economy,’ she said.

‘Yes, the Nationalists have a point, I’ll grant. The Union has not served Ireland well. But would that they would forgo the making of it at this fearful time.

‘Oh, goodness,’ Moore exclaimed, withdrawing his pocket-watch from its fob. ‘I am afraid I must hasten from you, my dear – I promised Mr McCallum a tour of the new glasshouse.’

As he hurried to keep his appointment with the student botanist, Moore’s thoughts turned from the failings of politicians to his own failure in the face of the blight. By the time McCallum came into view he had reached a decision: the promised tour of the new glasshouse would have to wait. There were far more pressing matters to deal with.

‘Is the cause of the Calamity yet established?’ Stuart Duncan McCallum asked.

‘We are divided amongst ourselves,’ David Moore replied. ‘There is the “fungalist” school, who believe the blight is caused by a mould whose growth is promoted by excessive wet. And then there are the “atmospherists”, led by Professor Lindley of the University of London, who argue that the blight is caused by atmospheric conditions. They admit to the presence of the parasite fungus, but only as a result of the murrain, not its cause. They are in the majority.’

‘And you yourself, sir?’ enquired the student. ‘What is your view?’

‘I am with Lindley … at the moment. Dampness certainly seems to be conducive to the spread of the disease, whereas dryness retreats it. I have found that potatoes lifted early, before the atmosphere attacks a particular area, are less likely to succumb, provided the harvest is carefully stored in dry, airy conditions.’

‘And what of a cure?’ the young man asked in his Scottish brogue.

‘Our experiments continue,’ Moore replied. ‘At the moment we are observing the effect of submerging tubers in copper sulphate – a solution known as “bluestone steep”. But it is difficult to proceed to a remedy when we have yet to identify the cause.’ The curator paused. ‘And identify it we must.’

Isabella watched from her window as her husband and his young student made their way through the gardens, deep in conversation. As the sun emerged from behind the clouds, her gaze was drawn to the new state-of-the-art glasshouse. How many thousands of pounds must be found for these, she thought, and at this time?

Isabella Moore, nee Morgan, late of Cookstown, County Tyrone, and now of the Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, Dublin, wondered about it all.

In her small dark cabin in Maamtrasna, Ellen Rua O’Malley huddled the three children to her body, giving them the warmth their fire could not provide. She surveyed the bare walls of the cabin, and she wondered about it all.

Her eyes strayed to the loft. Earlier she had inspected the lumpers lying there. They were cold but dry to the touch, with no sign of disease.

She wondered if somebody somewhere searched for a cure to this blight? What if it struck again next year?