A Girl Called Eilinora (4 page)

‘I did, Liam, and you have beaten her. You are the living proof that the banshee isn’t always right. Would you look at you? Almost a picture of health and what a relief to your poor mother here.’

‘Mrs McAndrew reckons the banshee wasn’t for Liam at all,’ said Liam’s mother. ‘She says that given the famine, the banshee would be wailing day and night if she were only to warn of a death. No, Mrs McAndrew says it’s far worse than that.’

‘Good Lord, what could possibly be worse than a death?’ Lord Owen looked at Liam’s mother with open astonishment.

He knew of the power of Mrs McAndrew. He had heard rumours he didn’t approve of. She had far too much power, based on her long history as a healer and midwife. Her husband had died before Owen had been born. He had often wondered if maybe he could get her moved on. Even as he nursed the thought, he knew it would be impossible. The tenants went to her before any doctor and he had never in his lifetime evicted a tenant; he was unlikely to start now.

As he left the cottages and looked over at Mrs McAndrew’s door, he saw the herbs, hung up, tied and drying inside the porch. He knew her kitchen was full of potions and medicine. He had been terrified when as a boy, Mrs Gibson had taken him inside for a cure for his ‘heat lumps’. They covered him from head to toe and itched beyond belief. They had arrived in the summer, as had the fleas; it was now his belief that they had been flea bites. Owen had to admit, the potion she gave Mrs Gibson had taken the itch clean away and had cured him and probably killed the fleas.

*

This morning, Lord Owen was once again in the kitchen and irritating Mrs Gibson.

‘I had been very worried about the fever, cook. I was concerned for yourself and Mary, because you have been looking after her, but it’s obvious, we had no need to worry. She’s over the worst. It must be your broth. What do you put in it?’

‘You know I can’t tell you that. You’d never touch it if you knew.’

Owen knew better than to push cook for an answer. Mrs Gibson kept her secrets close to her heart.

Twice a week, at the first sound of the dawn chorus, she picked herbs on the riverbank, when they were still heavy with morning dew and only just touched by the early light. Then she took them down to Mrs McAndrew in the cottages, so she could cast a healing spell on them. In return, the old woman, who had just passed her hundredth birthday, received the cooked broth and bread, along with an egg or two and a rasher of bacon and a plate of anything sweet that was cooked in the kitchen that day.

This week, cook had exhausted Mrs McAndrew with her demands for spells and potions to speed the girl’s recovery. There was something about her that made cook afraid. She had no explanation, other than her own wariness, but she wanted the girl out and away, to the poor house in Galway. Her instincts had never failed her in the past and right now, they were stronger than ever.

When Mrs Gibson told him her plan, Owen was alarmed. He had seen for himself the disgustingly filthy conditions in the poor house. He knew it also contained a busy mortuary and overflowing graveyard. People were dying inside by the minute. Some made the journey to the door only to die the same day.

‘The poor house in Galway? Is there nowhere else she can go?’ he asked. ‘I was there last week. It is not a place you would want to send anyone.’

‘Do you have any other suggestions?’ asked cook. ‘Because I’ve none, I’m afraid. I have asked her, does she have family, but she says they have all gone, either dead or fled, to where she has not a notion. There are times I think she is mighty confused. That could be the effects of the starvation mind, I have seen that many times before.’

Owen hadn’t told anyone about the sight that had greeted him in the cottage. He knew the girl’s family were dead.

‘There must be someone in Mulranny we can send her to, a relative who lives somewhere out there? No one in these parts would be so unlucky as to have a small family.’

Mrs Gibson shook her head, her face clouded with sorrow.

‘The farms out in Mulranny have all been deserted. They say the landlords won’t farm the land for years, to see away the blight. And they say it could all be solved easily in England too, but that your English Parliament is deliberately letting us suffer. You are a man of the Parliament, surely to God that cannot be true? Why would men like yourself stand by and watch this happen? Is it true what they say? Is it true that in Dublin there are fancy parties in society and nothing has altered for some while the streets are filling with the hungry, because if it is, I for one think this country must be staring into the mouth of hell because I have never known such evil.’

Owen felt cowed by shame. What could he say? He was struggling to understand the behaviour of his peers himself. He had heard the arguments against repealing the Corn Laws over and over. They never improved with retelling and were wholly unconvincing and steeped in self-interest.

‘That’s what I am here for, Mrs Gibson. To report back to Parliament, to let people know what it is like here, and I promise you, I will do it to the best of my ability.’

Cook’s eyes narrowed. ‘Well then, it seems to me that every minute you spend in this kitchen looking to that girl, is one you could be using to make things better for others. Put this in your report if you will, the stench from the blight is what carries the fever. It flies in the air from farm to farm and I’m not moving outside of this kitchen any more during the day. Not until it’s night, when it’s colder. You can’t catch the fever in the dark. You need to talk to people like me to know that. Not the other landlords.’

Owen didn’t like to say that her theory regarding the spread of typhus entirely contradicted Shevlin’s belief that you only caught the fever at night, or in the dark. It occurred to him just how little they all knew and what a killer in itself ignorance was.

‘I have visited the poor house for information to include in my report and I know this, we can’t send her there,’ he pleaded. ‘What would be the use of all your hard work, in making her well? She has not the strength to survive the conditions in Galway.’

‘Where do you suggest we send the girl, m’lord, if not to the poor house? We are already overrun with staff, for a castle neither you nor her ladyship are living in for most of the year and God alone knows when, if ever, either of you will be back. Ireland is a dying country. It may be like this forever. This could be it, the end, only God knows what is to become of us all.’

Owen could see that Mrs Gibson was becoming distressed and he had no answers for her. Everyone thought the first crop failure would be the end of it. The people out on the bogs and on the farms only just survived. The second blight hot on its heels was a terrifying situation. The conversations he had heard were full of doom and gloom, many believing that there would never be another potato grown in Ireland and that they would all starve. If the crops had failed two years on the run, why would they not do the same the following year?

Owen turned to see if the girl had overheard them discussing her future. He saw that she was watching them intently from her pallet in front of the fire while Mary combed her long hair. It occurred to Owen that she was beautiful. Gaunt, lost, eerie, bewitching and truly, truly beautiful. But, there was something more, which he could not put his finger on. Something beyond his understanding, which brought him to her. Despite his best intentions to remain upstairs and to avoid the kitchens, there was nothing he could do to resist his incessant desire to see her with his own eyes. She pulled him down the stairs daily. Each morning, he made himself wait. He played games. He would not leave his chamber until the clocks struck midday. But it was no good. He brought the deadline forward, to improve his chances. He would not leave until the clock struck ten, but still he broke his own rules. Is it in my blood? Am I cursed? He asked himself, remembering how his father would attend church on Sunday and visit one of the cottages in Mulranny on Monday. It was only as he grew older that the reason dawned on him. He hadn’t needed to overhear the servant’s whispers to understand.

Even without an ounce of fat on her bones, with sunken eyes and tallow skin taut across her cheeks, there was something about the rescued girl called Eilinora which fascinated Owen. It was the light in her eyes, the aura of strength that radiated from her, even during the hours when she had been so close to death.

Owen had inherited vast estates and more acres than he could count, yet, bringing someone as beautiful as she obviously was back from the point of death made his vast fortune feel like nothing. He felt godlike, responsible, virile, as though she were his, for no other reason than because he had saved her.

He was now desperate to change the path of Mrs Gibson’s thoughts. He had known her all his life to be a kind and compassionate woman, what was happening now? Why was she being so cruel? She would not even consider the prospect of the girl living in the cottages, despite the fact that four of them stood recently emptied, due to families fleeing to America.

‘I will speak to the clerk and the constable and see if either of them have another idea,’ he said.

Mrs Gibson sighed. ‘Have you thought of taking her back to England, when you return next week? Could they do with an extra maid in the St James’s house? Or maybe on one of your estates?’

‘That’s a good suggestion.’ Owen smiled weakly at Mrs Gibson, and she gave him a rare, toothless smile back. ‘I shall write to my wife immediately. If she agrees, I will take the girl to London with me, and the housekeeper there can look after her until she is fully recovered and ready to take a position.’ Owen’s thoughts were racing ahead.

Mrs Gibson slapped the dough she had been kneading with both hands down onto the floury table.

‘Well your lordship, that seems like a good solution all round.’ She wiped the sweat from her brow with the hem of her apron. ‘But next time you flit off on your travels around the county, could you please think twice before picking up another stray. God knows, with the fever everywhere, there are plenty of them about. At least Liam is recovering, let him be the last.’

Owen stole one last look at the girl.

She stared straight back at him and he thought she gave the faintest of smiles, but he could not be sure that it wasn’t a trick of the light.

As he sprinted back up the main stairs to his study, to finish writing his report, he wondered how he would explain everything to his wife.

Mrs Gibson stood at the back door to see if she could see Shevlin in the stables. She was in luck as he spotted her wave.

‘I need you to write a letter,’ she said.

‘Ye know I cannot.’ Shevlin took off his hat and scratched his head. Mrs Gibson had asked him to do many things before, but never to write a letter.

‘To the lady, in St James’s. We need to be sharp and you need to get it to the bag in Belmullet today before it leaves. We have to warn her.’

‘Warn her of what?’ Shevlin’s curiosity was aroused.

‘I need to let her know my notion, that she only takes the girl in if she wants trouble and that if it were me, I would insist she is sent to the poor house. Oh, don’t look at me like that. I have always written to Lady Lydia when Lord Owen is here. It is the lady’s instruction. The agent before you, he wrote all my letters for me. I have no objection, she is a good wife and mistress. Men, they don’t know nothin’ about the ways of women. This way, it’s the lady who says she goes to the poor house and not me.’

*

Owen closed the study door with more force than usual and flopped into the chair at his desk. Despite the heat thrown out by the fire, the damp seeped through into his bones. He could feel the cold air fill his lungs and he shivered, as he picked up his quill and began to compose an artful, pleading letter to his wife. The letter he had received from her only that morning lay open on the desk before him.

I remember that the castle is cold even in summer, I hate to think how it must be now and I fear for your health.

Owen snorted as he re-read the lines. It wasn’t the cold of the castle that was a danger to his health, but the typhus lurking in every corner of Mayo. He picked up his quill and began to write.

*

The reply from Lydia FitzDeane was delivered directly by a messenger from Dublin. It was swift and unambiguous. He was to deposit the girl in the poor house in Galway himself and then continue on to Dublin the following day. There was to be no compromise.

If we give permanent shelter to this girl, the whole of Ireland will make its way to our door and pray, what shall we do then? Or rather, what will Shevlin and Mrs Gibson do? You will take her in the carriage, and in saying this I take it that the girl has been confirmed to be free from disease by Dr Hoey. You will leave her at the poor house. She will survive because she has been cared for by cook. You have no reason to reproach yourself, you have been more than generous. I could not for one moment countenance keeping her at St James’s or indeed any of our homes, for surely a thousand more would then turn up on the servants’ steps…

Lord Owen hurriedly pushed the letter into the drawer of his desk, and made his way down to the kitchen. With no preamble at all he asked Eilinora, ‘Would you like me to pay for your passage to Liverpool or America?’ He didn’t dare look at Mrs Gibson. Every one of his staff would bite his hand off for a ticket to America and he was afraid of becoming the lord of a ghost castle as some others had.

The girl looked at him long and hard, then she said, ‘No, I would not. I have to stay here. There are things I must to do here, I cannot leave.’

Owen flopped down onto a chair, exasperated, and ran his fingers through his hair. ‘But there isn’t anywhere for you to go. The roads and the villages are dangerous. If you choose to stay, I’ll have to take you to the poor house. America would be far better.’

With her jaw set and eyes blazing she looked him squarely in the eye.

‘No. If it has to be the poor house, then so be it. I am not leaving Mayo.’