Читать книгу The Whitest Flower - Brendan Graham - Страница 10

Ellen Rua O’Malley woke and immediately made the sign of the cross on herself. At the ‘Amen’ she pressed the thumb and forefinger of her right hand to her lips, then gently laid the hand in turn on the heads of her husband and three children. Unaware of her blessing, they continued to sleep – Michael, her husband, nearest the wall as was the custom; the children on the other side of the still-warm space she had occupied.

Her benedictions complete, Ellen moved quietly to the door of the small cabin and stepped out into the dawn light of the Maamtrasna Valley.

Roberteen Bawn, from his vantage point at the window of his parents’ cabin, watched Ellen appear. His mouth slowly widened in anticipation. This was the fifth morning in a row that she was up and about while all others in the mountainside village slept. All, that is, except for Roberteen.

From that first time he saw the red-haired woman slip away to the lake five days ago, he’d known instinctively that she would repeat the ritual – rising each day with the sun as it appeared over the top of the mountain, brightening the dark waters of Lough Mask – and he would be ready, in his position by the window.

Roberteen pressed closer to the cold stone of the window ledge, trying to keep his breathing under control. If his father – or, worse still, his mother – woke and caught him spying on the wife of Michael O’Malley, he’d be dragged by the ear-lug down the mountain to the priest in Finny. A chilling image of Father O’Brien denouncing him from the pulpit entered the boy’s mind. Still he could not drag himself away from the window and the sight of the red-haired woman.

He followed her every move as she straightened to full height on leaving her cabin. Good – he tensed with delight – she wasn’t wearing the shawl. When her bare arms reached out to the sun it was as though the sun came to her, its light playing on the dark red hair that earned her the name Ellen Rua – red-haired Ellen. As she reached back with both hands to loose the tangled mass of hair, she turned her face in Roberteen’s direction. He drew back sharply, and waited a few moments before inching his face to the window again. She was standing with her back to him, looking down the valley towards Lough Mask. He could see the white nape of her neck where she had pulled the hair forward over her shoulders. She mustn’t have spotted me, he thought, rubbing his hands together.

At nineteen, Roberteen Bawn was ripe for marrying. His mother, Biddy, was forever telling him so. ‘Oh! Roberteen,’ she would say, ‘if only you could get a girl like Michael O’Malley’s wife – she’d knock some spark o’ sense into you.’ If only she knew!

Ah, with such a fine woman for a wife wouldn’t he be the talk of the valley – and of Finny and Tourmakeady too – just like Michael O’Malley was.

Intent now on what the red-haired woman was doing, Roberteen’s thoughts broke off from his mother’s intentions for him. Ellen had not moved for some time now. She stood very still, gazing at the lake or perhaps at Tourmakeady far down along its western shore. Planning and scheming, most like; the red-haired women were notorious for it, and this one’s head was full of ideas she’d got from her father, the Máistir.

He turned again to check on his parents. Still sleeping. Good, he was all right. When he turned to look at Ellen again, she had moved slightly. Suddenly it struck him. Sure, he should have known right away by the way she was standing so still, her hands joined. She was praying, that’s what she was at!

This deflected him momentarily. It wasn’t a right thing to be looking at her that way, and she praying. But, then again, maybe she wasn’t praying, just looking at the lake and dreaming … dreaming of songs and poems and stories and all them things the Máistir had put into her head as a child.

His conscience thus salved, Roberteen remained where he was, watching.

Ellen felt the sun move down her body, searching her out, nourishing her with the warmth of its rays. It was difficult to pray this morning. It was always difficult on the mornings after the nights when she had turned to Michael, and, from deep in her throat, drawn out the soft, low words he loved to hear. It had been thus these past five mornings – ever since 15 August, Our Lady’s Day. It was almost as if the two strands of her love – her deep spiritual love of God and her deep physical love for Michael – should be kept apart, should not touch each other.

She put all other thoughts from her mind, giving herself up instead to this wild place on the mountain. Before her the Mask spread out, its myriad islands sparkling like emeralds in the August morn. Though her village lay on an arm of the Mask which extended just inside Galway’s northern border, Ellen nevertheless regarded herself as a Mayo woman – both her parents being of that county. The other arm of the Mask embraced the far side of the mountain, reaching back towards America Beag. Nothing there now but a few fields and empty cabins. The first one to go left back after the famine times of the 1820s, the Máistir had told her. Then the dollars from America came, and the next one left. One by one they followed like links in a chain, until they were all beyond in Boston or New York. So they called the home-place America Beag – ‘Little America’. Strange, she thought, only the odd one had left from anywhere else about the place.

From across the lake she could hear the dogs of Derrypark yelping for their morning scraps, their hunger echoing over the still waters of the Mask. Her eye wandered on along the far shore towards Tourmakeady, where Pakenham the landlord lived.

She had seen him once at the fair in Leenane. He had smiled and nodded at her, struck by the way she stood out from the crowd. She, without acknowledging him, had moved on, but not before she had heard him bellow at one of his lackeys, ‘That girl, who is she? No, not her, you fool – that one over there with the red hair.’ She was gone from earshot before the lackey had time to reply.

Not wishing to darken this fine morning with thoughts of Sir Richard Pakenham, or any other landlord, she redirected her attention to the valley. The garden of paradise could not have been more beautiful than her valley of the lake, framed by the towering Partry Mountains. Her eyes took it all in, just as they had taken in the sudden movement in Roberteen’s cabin. The thought of young Roberteen brought a smile to her blue-green eyes. The next time she came across him, she’d look him straight in the eye – let him know that she knew, the little whelp! And he not even the height of her shoulder. Some hard work drawing turf up the mountain would temper the rising sap in him. If Michael suspected Roberteen of spying on her, he would give the lad a thrashing and a half. But she wasn’t about to tell Michael. She would deal with it in her own way, and in her own time.

She let her eyes rest upon the patch of land between the staggered row of cabins and the lake shore. She always saved this scene, the most important of all, until last. There, just below the bóithrín, were the lazy beds. Underneath these long raised mounds of earth grew the villagers’ sole means of existence: the lumper potato. The growth was luxuriant – the best she’d seen in years. Down below the green stalks and the little white flowers bobbing this way and that, the tubers themselves were ripening and fattening, getting ready to be lifted.

This would be a good year. They would work hard and, maybe, with God’s help, they would be able to put a little by after the rent had been paid.

She looked back at the cabin and thought of her sleeping family: Michael, one arm unconsciously reaching for her; the twins, her darling cúplaín Ellen beag – ‘a pair of little Ellens’, as the villagers called them. Katie, a six-year-old bundle of fun and mischief, and next to her, or rather intertwined with her in a jumble of arms and legs, Mary. Quiet Mary, so different from Katie, but the two of them lying there as if they wanted to be one again. Patrick, two years older than Mary and Katie, slept a little ways off, as was proper for male children. If the girls were the reincarnation of Ellen, then Patrick was a young Michael in the making: dark of hair and feature, typical of the ‘Black Irish’ found along Ireland’s western shores – a living testament to the Spanish Armada’s visit to Galway in 1588.

‘Our children are our hope,’ the Máistir used to say. Would her children be allowed to realize the hopes of their parents – the hope of release from the tyranny of landlords, the hope of freedom from English rule?

Aware that her thoughts had strayed, Ellen returned to her prayers. Then, satisfied at having reconciled herself with her God, she strode happily alongside the mountain stream to the point where it entered the elbow of the Mask.

As she bent to splash some lake water on her face and neck, her thoughts once again turned to last night. How she loved the strength of Michael’s arms when he pulled her to him; the smell of the turf and the heather in his hair after he had been a day at the mountain; his eyes, shining out through the dark at her, riveting her very soul.

At thirty, he was four years older than she. Was it ever nine years since they first met? She had just turned seventeen and the Máistir had brought her to the Pattern Day Fair at Leenane. She’d seen Michael watching her – unlike Roberteen, he’d done it openly, like a man should – and she had known at once he would come for her. Before the week was out he called to see her father. Ellen remembered the way the feelings stirred inside her on seeing him again. In no time they were married. She was scarcely over her eighteenth birthday when Patrick was born. Then came the double joy of Katie and Mary. And then nothing.

Though they still loved each other passionately, God had not blessed them with any more children. At first, this hadn’t worried her unduly, but after a few years she began to wonder if she was barren; if it was a sign from God that she and Michael had loved too much.

She longed for a big family. As an only child, she had grown up wishing she’d been surrounded by brothers and sisters, like the other children in the village. At twenty-six she was still young enough – not like Biddy, who was too old to have any more after Roberteen was born. Children were a blessing from God and Ellen Rua wanted to be blessed again.

Eventually, somewhat against her better judgement, and without telling Michael, she had crossed the mountain to the hut of Sheela-na-Sheeoga. Sheela had delivered Ellen’s first three children, but the valley women rarely went to her now. It was rumoured that she consorted with the fairy folk and changelings, hence the name Sheela-na-Sheeoga – Sheela who is of the fairies.

What Ellen learned from that secret visit had served only to trouble her further. The old cailleach had asked some questions of a personal nature, laid her hands on Ellen’s forehead and stomach, and then shuffled off into the darkest corner of her cabin. It sounded as though the old woman was mixing something, all the time a-muttering away in words which Ellen did not recognize. When Sheela-na-Sheeoga finally emerged from the darkness, she anointed Ellen on the forehead, on the tip of her tongue, and over her womb, with a strong-smelling herbal brew.

‘Nothing ails you, craythur,’ she said. ‘You are young and you are strong. When the whitest flower blooms, so too will you bloom.’ She had paused then and moved closer to whisper: ‘But the whitest flower will become the blackest flower and you, red-haired Ellen, must crush its petals in your hand.’

Before Ellen could respond, the woman made a gesture of dismissal and said, ‘Now, go home to your husband, Ellen Rua!’ And with that she had ushered Ellen out of the cabin.

Once out of sight of Sheela-na-Sheeoga’s hut, Ellen had spat out the vile-tasting mixture and, with a handful of grass, cleansed the places where it stained her body. But the riddle the old cailleach had set her proved harder to get rid of; it had preyed on her mind ever since.

And now it seemed that the old woman’s doings with herbs and spells was all nonsense. Ellen’s prayers remained unanswered. There was still no sign of a younger brother or sister for Patrick and the twins.

As she sat looking for answers in the deep waters of the Mask, Ellen caught sight of her own reflection. Something about her face seemed different. She bent down closer, peering into the mirror of the lake’s surface, trying to find an explanation for the sense of trepidation and excitement she was feeling. This was more than the exhilaration of a fine August morning, the effects of the sun, the shimmering lake. Kneeling in the shallow water, she lowered her head until her hair draped over the Mask’s surface. The breeze rose. The water flicked at her face and tendrils of hair floated about her, red-eeled, seeking release. Then the breeze died and the waters settled to their previous calm. Still Ellen waited and watched, face to her face’s image. Seeing into herself.

First, it was a slow realization, sweeping silently over her body as the early dawn swept in over the valley – unnoticed until it was there. Then, with growing excitement, she knew – the face in the water knew – that this morning, after six long years, Michael’s seed had at last taken within her.

She was carrying his child.

‘Moladh le Dia,’ she whispered to the radiant face in the water. ‘Moladh le Dia,’ she repeated before lifting her face and her wet hair heavenwards.

She remained thus, silent in thanksgiving, for a few moments. Not daring to be too overjoyed, she resolved not to tell Michael yet. She’d keep it to herself until the month was out.

Roberteen Bawn watched transfixed as Ellen turned to make her way back up from the lake. Drops of water glistened in the sun as they fell from her hair. The loose-fitting shift she wore now clung to the contours of her body, accentuating each movement. Yet she seemed not to notice as she paused by the side of the stream, silently raising her head to heaven.

While his mouth and throat were dry with excitement, the unruly mop of blond hair which framed Roberteen’s face and forehead was ringed by beads of perspiration. ‘A curse on the woman!’ he muttered under his breath as he wiped the sweat from his eyes. ‘She’s the very divil!’ Gripping the outside of the window ledge, the boy hauled himself up until his legs dangled above the cabin floor. Now he would be able to see her better.

Too late, he heard the swish behind him as his mother’s broomstick whacked squarely against his backside.

‘Get down outta there, you dirty little blackguard!’ Biddy yelled, while laying into her son with the broom. ‘I’ll give you spyin’ on that poor woman! ’Tis at your prayers you should be’ – she landed another whack on him – ‘droolin’ over another man’s wife!’ Again the broom found its mark, harder now. ‘Go on, get out o’ the sight o’ me, or I’ll not be responsible for you!’ she threatened, making one last lunge at Roberteen, who was already half out the door and headed for the mountain.

David Moore, curator of Dublin’s Botanic Gardens, marvelled as the sunlight fell upon the vibrant reds and yellows of the rose gardens, then shimmered across the lily pond. His daily rounds, notebook in hand, were a constant source of delight. What better position in life could one aspire to? Working under God’s airy light, bounty and beauty on every side, entrusted with the pursuit of scientific knowledge and the furtherance of God’s work in creating new hybrids of plant life. Fine gentlemen and their ladies, out taking the air in his gardens, nodded to him, acknowledging his handiwork, and his treatises on matters botanical had won plaudits – even from Kew.

This morning he had every reason to be pleased: his roses were abundant in their growth and in the full bloom of health. He made a note for McArdle, his outdoor foreman, to prune them back harder next year. Turning the page, he scribbled a reminder to write to Pakenham at Tourmakeady in response to a letter he had received from that quarter. Pakenham wanted to know how to deal with blemishes afflicting the pride of his extensive rose gardens, a Rosa chinensis – the Jenkinstown Rose, forever immortalized by the poet Thomas Moore in his song, ‘The Last Rose of Summer’. The curator thought it likely that Pakenham’s problem was a product of the poor soil in the West, but he would consult his reference books and consider it further before replying. Moore’s own specimen was flourishing and showed neither spot nor blemish of any description.

Satisfied with the condition of the rose gardens, Moore moved on to the vegetable patch. Every kind of vegetable known to be capable of cultivation in the Irish climate was grown here. As curator, he carefully monitored growth under varying weather and tillage conditions, and conducted experiments with sulphides and phosphates to ward off diseases.

‘God’s day, Mr Moore,’ he heard, and turned.

‘Ah, yes a good morning, indeed it is, Canon,’ he replied to the sprightly old rector who frequented the gardens on a daily basis.

‘My most important appointment, as I always say. A good constitutional, in the company of the Lord, combined with a visit to my faithful congregation botanicus … That’s the thing, eh, Moore?’

‘Yes, Canon,’ the curator replied unenthusiastically.

The good Canon Prufrock, having delivered himself of his prescription for a healthy life, began to saunter away, muttering to himself in Latin. But his ruminations were interrupted by an anguished cry behind him. Alarmed, he turned to see the curator bent as if in pain.

‘What is it, man, what’s the matter?’ he asked, hurrying back to Moore’s side.

‘It’s here! It’s here!’ The curator gesticulated, unable to find words to describe what he had seen.

‘Why, I see nothing there except the makings of fine healthy potatoes glistening with God’s morning dew!’ said the cleric, in a tone that suggested he thought Moore had taken leave of his senses.

‘That is no dew! Look at it – feel it. That, Canon, is the blight. Have you not read of it in the journals? Introduced from America, it has wiped out the potato crop from the Low Countries to Northern France. Now it is here in Ireland – and may God have mercy on us all!’

‘Will it be of … of such a consequence?’

‘Consequence! If it takes root here in Ireland, this murrain will wipe out the entire potato crop in a matter of months. With two million acres – one third of all tilled land – given over to its cultivation, well over half the population is heavily dependent on the crop. Of those, some three million souls rely on it totally. This could be the biggest disaster Ireland, or the Empire itself, has ever experienced.’

‘But what is to be done? Is there nothing you …?’

Moore had not registered until then the awful burden which now rested upon his shoulders. As curator of the Royal Botanic Gardens it was natural that he should be looked to for a solution to this calamity. Sounding more composed than he felt, he began to outline a plan of action: ‘Firstly, I must alert the Lord Lieutenant. He, no doubt, will inform London with utmost expedition so that the Government can mobilize its resources to avert a catastrophe. Here, in the gardens, we must immediately find a cure. We must prevent this blight from taking root in Ireland, whatever the effort, whatever the cost.’

‘God will provide,’ Canon Prufrock said tremulously. ‘God will provide,’ he repeated. And then, almost sotto voce, he added: ‘If it be His will.’

Slowly and deliberately, David Moore opened his notebook and recorded the first occurrence in Ireland of a blight which would leave a trail of death and desolation, and forever change the lives of Ellen O’Malley and her little family:

Late Blight – Lumper Potatoes Royal Botanic Gardens, Dublin.

Twentieth day of August, 1845.

As Ellen walked back up towards the village, an unseasonably cold chill swept in from the lake, catching her about the neck and shoulders. She shivered, and for a fleeting moment the old cailleach’s strange prophecy echoed through her mind. But Sheela-na-Sheeoga’s words were drowned out by the rí-rá coming from her neighbours’ cabin. When young Roberteen emerged, scurrying up the mountainside like a scalded cat, she laughed and relaxed. Then smiled, thinking all the more of her new condition.