The Element of Fire

‘You’re a merchant, Mother!’ Mary said, flushed with pride in her, yet seeming not in the least bit surprised.

‘I … I suppose I am,’ Ellen replied, never having thought of herself in that way.

They went inside, Louisa remaining close by her, Mary and Patrick going from rack to rack examining the cradled bottles and the labels with the unusual writing wrapped round them.

‘Fron-teen-nyac, pair ay fees’ – Frontignac, Père et Fils – she tried to explain, ‘the people we get the wine from in Canada. Frontignac, Father and Son,’ she went on, watching them watch her as if she was some stranger. And in truth she was. Their memories of her were as far removed from the woman now before them, explaining French wines, as Massachusetts was from the Maamtrasna valley. An ocean in the heart’s geography. It would take time.

‘Bore-dough,’ she pointed to a ruby rich red, ‘the place the wine comes from in France.’

It was a strange thing, Patrick thought, for her to know about, her and the ‘fancy man’ that kept watching him and kept smiling at his mother.

Ellen was well pleased at what she saw. Lavelle had kept the warehouse solidly stocked against the coming season and the winter closing of the St Lawrence river. Furthermore, he had secured her new accommodation.

‘In Washington Street between Milk and Water Streets, near the Old Corner Bookstore,’ he told her. ‘I know you like to be at the centre of things, and it’s bigger, more suitable now with the children.’ She had surrendered her old lodgings, not knowing how long she would be away. Her belongings Lavelle had stored in the warehouse, and more recently moved to the new address, paying the rent to secure it against her return. He himself continued to live where he previously had, in the North End, though it was ‘now being over-run with the poorest of our own’.

The Long Wharf led them into State Street, New England’s financial heart, its temples of commerce close to the city’s importing and exporting lifeline – the wharves. Lavelle took them left at the Old State House, down along Washington Street, its patchwork of buildings, filled with apothecaries, engravers, instrument-makers and ‘Newspaper Row’. Signs and hoardings jutted everywhere, higgledy-piggledy, while canvas awnings over the footwalks provided shelter from the rain, shade from the sun, for those with dollars to spend.

Four flights of stairs they climbed of the high-shouldered building, which itself stretched upwards above the world of commerce below. The effort was repaid in full when arriving in their rooms she saw, across from them on the corner of Milk Street, the nestled campaniles of the Old South Meeting House; how they ascended like a pinnacled prayer to the steepled sky.

She knew she would love it here ‘on top of the world’, as she said to Lavelle. They had three rooms. One large, with two windows, for living in, and above that, two smaller rooms, each lighted by dormers, for sleeping. The larger one for herself and the girls, the smaller for Patrick. She had considered giving the three children the larger one, her taking the lesser room. But Patrick was of an age now.

It was close to everywhere. The Wharf and their warehouse, the Common, shops, churches, schools. The Old Corner Bookstore – which she had commenced frequenting before she left – now only a hen’s footstep away. Beneath their roost, on the next floor down, were commercial offices. Below that again, suppliers of mathematical instruments, while a sewing shop for ladies’ garments and a dye house occupied the street level of the premises.

She was grateful to Lavelle. He had gone to some trouble to find this place, knowing how much she preferred the rattle and hum of city life above the quiet of some numbing suburb. The frantic commercial life of ‘Hub City’, as Bostonians liked to call it, was rapidly devouring all available space here at its centre. She wondered how long it would be before trade and commerce would drive further out the dwindling number of inhabitants, like themselves. Where they now stood would soon enough fall into use as an instrument-maker’s den, or a sewing sweatshop. But while ever they could remain here, she knew she would be happy.

When she had thanked him again, Lavelle left and she began to settle them into their new home, high above the world of clarion calls and the street noise of Boston, far from the hushed valleys they had known.

8

Jacob Peabody made an exaggerated fuss of her when, the following week, she came to visit him at his premises on South Market Street across from Faneuil Hall. On top of the Hall’s domed cupola, its weathervane – a copper grasshopper – spun from side to side, busily welcoming her back.

Now Peabody, white-domed and wrinkle-faced, grass-hopped from behind his counter to welcome her, rubbing his hands on the white apron he kept on a peg, but which she had never seen him wear. ‘Ellen! Ellen Rua!’ he exclaimed, both arms outstretched, a bleak shaft of October sun diagonally lighting one eye and a flop of his white hair, vesting him with a kind of manic enthusiasm. He clasped her to him. He not being quite the match of her in height, her head ended up over the shoulder of his well-seasoned cardigan. In its wool the smell of salted hams, spices from the East, tobacco from the Deep South, all indiscriminately buried there.

‘Jacob, I’m going to reek of pork and spices just like you,’ she laughed. ‘Let go of me! Anyway, I thought it forbidden by your beliefs to sell certain things,’ she added, unable to resist poking fun at him. He laughed with her, held her back from him, the snow-white eyebrows arched, the canny eyes taking her in.

‘Ah, Ellen, you are as beautiful as ever. Weary from your travels, I can tell …?’ He paused. ‘And beyond that a certain sorrow …’ He had never changed, could tell everything and then never hesitated in its saying. ‘But underneath,’ he went on, ‘your spirit has not changed. Look at you, the first minute you are here flinging the beliefs of an old man in his face. It’s good to have you back – back home in Boston,’ he beamed. And he clasped her to him again in his pork and spice way.

It felt good to her to be back. And Boston was home. The sounds, the smells, the bustle of Quincy Market, the air spiced with possibility instead of the pall of oppression which hung over Ireland. And good old reliable but mischievous Jacob. He had been a tower of strength before she had left on her journey to Ireland.

He made her tea, Indian, from the Assam Valley, closed his door against the world and bade her sit. ‘I want to hear every word, Ellen,’ he emphasized. ‘I’ve missed the music of your voice – the Boston drawl has little music to it – as flat and as cold as the Quincy marble that built the place!’

Whatever about missing her, Jacob still didn’t miss any chance to snipe at his adopted city. Some day she’d ask him about that and Papa Peabody, as he called his father, and the change of name from something Jewish to Peabody. Whatever his origins, Jacob had built up a commodious store on South Market Street. It was frequented alike by well-heeled clientele from Beacon Hill, the literati of Louisburgh Square and Boston’s rising middle class. Always well stocked with the exotic and the oriental and anything in between, pickled gherkins to spiced Virginia hams, ‘Peabody’s’ did a thriving business.

When she and Lavelle had first arrived in Boston, they had decided that rather than she go to the factory gates and Lavelle to ‘build railroads to build America’, they would invest in some business. The wine had been her idea, after Australia – being all that she knew apart from potato picking in Ireland. She had written to Father McGauran, the chaplain she had befriended in Grosse Ile, with the idea that she could import French wine from French Canada. Through the old Seigneurie connections of the Catholic Church in Québec’s province, Father McGauran had found them Frontignac, Père et Fils, Wine Merchants, importers of vin supérieur de France.

Soon the deliveries came. Crates of full-bodied reds and clean-on-the-palate whites, from the châteaux of Bordeaux and Burgundy. Sparkling mousselet from the chilly hills and chalk caverns of Champagne. Darker – liqueured aromas too, matured in oaken barriques; coveted by angels in the deep cellars of Cognac. All signed with the flourished quill of Jean Baptiste Frontignac, their quality guaranteed with the red waxen seal of the French cockerel. At first, she had approached the Old English-style merchants of Boston – the Pendletons and Endecotts. Politely but firmly they had turned her away, astounded at her nerve, she only ‘jumped-up Irish and selling French wines!’

Finally, she had happened upon Peabody’s place. Although at the time uncertain of his motives – the way he had taken her hand, lingered over it – Jacob had taken a chance on her, when no one else would.

She too had taken a chance on Peabody, devising an ‘at cost’ agreement with the merchant. The terms by which it operated guaranteed that she and Lavelle would deliver him the finest of wines and brandies, at cost, taking no profit. Peabody, when he had sold their wines, would then split the profits with them. Further, she had convinced Peabody to give their wines a separate display from the rest, near the entrance, on shelves specially constructed by Lavelle. It had been a risk but it had worked and Jacob had opened a second such store.

As the story of her journey to Ireland unfolded, Jacob Peabody again held on to her hands, rubbing them underneath in the fleshy part, but not in the suggestive, wicked way that was normally his wont, but of which she took little notice. Now, he comforted her, his sharp eyes on her face watching, understanding.

It surprised her how much she opened herself up to Jacob. Not nearly so much had she to Lavelle. To this Jewman, who had changed his name to survive in Nativist Boston – a city as zealous in attitude to Jews as it was towards ‘papist Celts’ – but had closed his shop to listen to her story. When she had finished, it was as though a great weight had lifted from her.

Peabody waited before speaking. She had suffered much, more than most who had found their way here to the Bay Colony. But she had an indomitable spirit. Time and America would heal her loss, if she let them. She was angry now at the ‘Old Country’ and all it had inflicted on her. But that would pass. He hoped that, on its passing, it would not be replaced by the misbegotten love for their native land, so often the fruitful cause of insanity among the Irish here.

At last he spoke. ‘Ireland is behind you now, Ellen,’ he said tenderly, still stroking her hand, like a father. ‘A new life in the New World beckons. Try, not to forget, but to remember less. It works, Ellen, believe me, it works.’

‘Thank you, Jacob … for listening … for everything.’ She leaned over and kissed his cheek. How wise he was. What he had told her was like something her father – the Máistir – would have said. ‘Try, not to forget, but to remember less.’ It was good advice.

She could never forget; that would be a betrayal. But she could remember less, without letting Ireland and its Famine gnaw at her insides, eat up her capacity for life.

They sat for a while, exiles both. Trade had been good for Jacob and things had gone well between him and Lavelle – ‘her young helper’, as Peabody insisted on calling him. She didn’t correct him this time, just thanked him again, with the promise she would be back within the week to talk about ‘clarets for Christmas and champagnes for the New Year’.

As she walked back from Peabody’s, Boston, with its busy streets, its banks and fine tall buildings, seemed indeed to be the hub of the universe. The buildings that, when first she came there with Lavelle, crowded in on top of her, taking patches out of the sky, now signified something else – progress, getting ahead. Looking upwards instead of downwards.

She wanted to be part of all that now, instead of on her hands and knees clawing at lazy beds for the odd lumper missed by the harvesters, up to her eyes in muck. What good were grand mountains and sparkling lakes, when you had to crawl, belly to the ground, in order to fill it? An empty craw sees no beauty.

Faneuil Hall, the spiralling Old South Meeting House, the Grecian pilasters of the State Street buildings, Beacon Hill – these would be her new mountains. The harbour with its wharves and docks, its busy commerce – her new lakes. It was all here. Everything Ireland wasn’t, this place was.

‘Try, not to forget, but to remember less,’ she repeated to herself.

9

In her efforts to ‘remember less’, Ellen in the following weeks threw herself with abandon into her new life in Boston. Lavelle had indeed done well while she was away. He had kept Jacob’s two stores fully stocked and the merchant reasonably happy, despite Peabody’s frequent mutterings about it not being the same ‘since Mrs O’Malley deserted me and sailed for Ireland’.

Lavelle had also secured a new outlet for the New England Wine Company, in the developing suburb of West Roxbury, far enough away not to damage Peabody’s business.

‘What he doesn’t know won’t bother him!’ was Lavelle’s dictum. Ellen wasn’t so sure.

‘It’s a bit underhand – Jacob’s been a good friend to us and our business,’ she said to Lavelle, resolving to tell Peabody herself at the right moment.

The children seemed to take up so much of her time, but she was happy ‘doing for them’, busying herself more with domestic matters than business. In this she was forced to rely, to a greater degree than she thought fair, on Lavelle. If during the daylight hours she did not manage to get to the warehouse, then at evening Lavelle would call on her to discuss matters of business, bringing various documentation of invoices and receipts. Because of the nature of their arrangement with Peabody, resources had to be prudently managed – something to which she had always applied herself vigorously. She looked forward to these evening visits, finding some time for titivating herself in advance of them – between household chores and the children. This total reliance on Lavelle would, she knew, be but a temporary measure, until she had settled them into suitable schools.

Situated in the ‘Little Britain of Boston’ – the non-Irish end, of the North End – the Eliot School was one of Boston’s better public schools for boys. Nominally non-denominational, pupils nevertheless sang from the same hymn sheet – the Protestant one. Too, the official school bible was the King James version. However, Eliot School had the best spoken English in Boston, fashioned no doubt from that bible of the city’s non-chattering classes, Peter Piper’s Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation.

Ellen wasn’t unduly worried about the Protestant ethos prevalent in Boston’s public schools – the ‘little red school houses’ as the Boston Irish called them. Patrick would receive a more liberal education at Eliot than in the narrow Catholic schools, the ‘little green school houses’. She, herself, would see to his spiritual needs outside of school. At first Patrick resisted her choice of schooling for him, but finding Eliot School populated with a good sprinkling of other Irish Catholic boys, his resistance diminished.

Mary’s future, Ellen decided, would be best served by placing her with the nuns. She saw no contradiction in this, relative to her plans for Patrick. Boston, in terms of schooling for girls, particularly young Irish and Catholic girls, far surpassed that available to its young men, mainly due to the influence of the ‘Sisters of Service’. Mostly Irish or the American-born daughters of the Irish, the nuns were a group of free-spirited and independent-minded young women who had eschewed marriage in favour of the economic, social and intellectual independence the Sisterhood offered. What Ellen liked about them was that having liberated themselves, they had a more liberal view of other women’s roles in society. Orders like the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, where she would send Mary, sought not to prepare young immigrant women solely for marriage, but to lead lives of independence and dignity. This would provide the pathway to spirituality, rather than that followed by most young Irish women – the bridal path.

The nuns would be good for Mary.

With regard to Louisa, Ellen had much with which to occupy her mind. She had grown a great fondness for the girl but still wondered about her – where had she come from? Her family, if any?

The Pilot ran regular columns of the ‘lost’ and ‘missing’ Irish – those who had become separated en route to the New World, or who had moved deeper into the American heartland before family had arrived from Ireland to join them.

Each week Ellen read the ‘lost’ notices, relaxing only when nowhere among them could she find a description to match that of Louisa. She agonized for weeks as to whether she herself should put in a notice, seeking any family of the girl who might be in America. Reluctantly, she came to the conclusion that it was ‘the right and proper thing to do’, as she explained to Patrick and Mary, ‘and pray that we don’t find anybody!’ she added.

For a month she had inserted the notice, hoping it would go unanswered.

Female child – of about twelve or thirteen years, unspoken. Tall, with dark brown hair and hazelwood eyes – found among the famished near Louisburgh Co. Mayo 20th day of August 1848. Now living in Boston. Seeking to be reunited with any members of family who may have escaped the Calamity to the United States.

To her despair, she had been flooded with respondents. With each one her heart sank lower, fearing that this would be the one to claim Louisa, lifting again with relief when it was not. In turn, she was filled with guilt at her own selfishness, then sorrow at the disappointment carved out on the faces of those who came with so much hope but left again, empty-handed. Faint-heartedly they would apologize with a ‘Sorry for troubling you, ma’am!’ or ‘I was hoping ’twould be her,’ some would say, awkward for having come in the wrong.

One young woman from near Louisburgh arrived brimful of hope. She had, she said, been told that her young sister ‘had been taken pity on by a red-haired woman, rescued from the famished and brought over to Amerikay’. She had searched high and low, doggedly traipsing each mill town. At nights waiting outside until, disgorged in their thousands, the mill girls poured out into the streets. Ever afraid her sister had been among them and that she had missed her in the crowds.

‘Was it to Boston she came?’ Ellen enquired, wondering if the young woman’s task was fruitless from the start.

‘To Amerikay, anyway!’ she replied, as if ‘Amerikay’ were no vaster than the townland of her home village. ‘She has to be here somewhere, if it’s true what they say!’ she added, defiant with faith. The girl had no idea where her sister was, would spend a lifetime looking for her in ‘Amerikay’. Probably never to find her – in this life at least, Ellen knew.

‘You have to keep looking,’ was all she could limply offer the girl.

‘I do – them that’s still alive back home are always asking for news of her – she was the youngest … but I’ll find her yet, I will!’

Ellen’s heart had gone out to the young woman, her hopes dashed once again, yet still full of faith, still resolved to finding her sister.

‘Thanks, ma’am – this one is very like her,’ she said of Louisa, ‘but it’s not her. She’s a fine child, God bless her, I hope you find her people.’

She spoke to Lavelle about it. ‘There are thousands upon thousands of them still searching for their lost ones, still hoping to find some trace. It’s heartbreaking.’

‘They’ve done a right good job, the Westminster government,’ he replied, scathingly, ‘scattering the Celts to the four corners of the globe. Keeping us on the move, wandering, like a divided army trying to find itself. One day that army will regroup –’

‘Oh, Lavelle!’ she had chided him. ‘I’m not talking about armies or the British Empire. You should’ve seen the look on that poor girl’s face – she will search all of America, search till the day she dies. Louisburgh, and all that’s in it, will have long since disappeared before she finds her sister.’

As the months passed the number of enquiries about Louisa, originally from Boston and the greater Massachusetts area, reduced. Then a trickle from the further-flung regions of New York, Montana, Wisconsin and even Louisiana, found their way to her door clutching old issues of the Pilot, clinging on to even older hopes. Eventually the stream of people calling dried up completely. Only then did Ellen allow herself to be fully at ease, previously having measured out to herself only small, fragile rations of relief as each month had slipped by.

Louisa herself bore all of this with apparent equanimity, Ellen having assured her in advance that this course of action was not an attempt to get rid of her. Again reassuring her, each time someone called, of how much both she and the others loved her. Some callers took just one look at her, knowing immediately she wasn’t the girl they sought. Others inspected her more intently, peering into her face, asking questions: ‘Does she ever utter a sound at all?’ or ‘What name has she?’

Always, Ellen had the feeling that Louisa understood. Once or twice she had faced her, asking, ‘Louisa, can you hear me – tell me if you can hear me?’

The girl had just looked at her lips as she spoke, so that Ellen didn’t know whether she was avoiding looking directly at her, or merely trying to understand in that manner. Either way she got no response, only the killing smile.

Although Louisa did not converse with anybody she was yet such a part of their lives; always there, soaking up everything. If not, indeed, through her ears, then through her eyes, and, in some strange way Ellen couldn’t define, just through her presence. She resolved to take Louisa to a doctor.

‘I can find no physical defect in the child, Mrs O’Malley,’ Doctor Hazlett confided in her after examining Louisa. ‘It may be that the abject circumstances in which you found her have locked a portion of her mind, a portion in which she still remains,’ he offered, referring to their pre-examination discussion.

‘What am I to do, Doctor?’ she asked.

‘The answer lies not with me,’ he replied, ‘but the answer, if anywhere to be found, will be found in Boston – the cradle of the sciences. I propose sending you to Professor Hitchborn for further consultation.’

‘What kind of professor?’ Ellen worried.

‘Professor Hitchborn is a doctor of medicine – a graduate of the Harvard School, but shall we say he deals more with what the eye cannot see and the ear cannot hear, rather than with what they can.’ With this conundrum still ringing in her ears, he bade her ‘Good-day!’

Professor Hitchborn failed to elicit any utterance from Louisa after four visits. Ellen hated going back to ‘the old stiff-neck’, as she called him, but continued to do so for Louisa’s sake. Always, Ellen seemed to leave these visits with the feeling that she herself was somehow to blame. That her own motives in first saving, then adopting Louisa, were not morally pure, thus causing Louisa’s condition. It troubled her. If Louisa felt that she was a burden on them, they had only held on to her out of guilt and a sense of duty and not out of love, then maybe Louisa’s silence was fear. Fear that if she was found to be able to hear and speak, to be not so dependent on them, she would be packed off again, to an orphanage, or worse, to the streets.

Finally, it was Mary who decided for Ellen what to do regarding Louisa. ‘Send Louisa to school with me, I’ll look after her!’ she appealed to her mother. Ellen had at first been doubtful of this solution and considered keeping Louisa at home, giving of her own time to the girl’s education. It would be difficult, but somehow she would manage. Mary’s entreaties of ‘Please let her come – I can help her!’ won the day. After consultation with the Mother Superior, it was agreed the two would be put side by side in the classroom at the Notre Dame de Namur School for Girls.