The Herbalist (44 page)

A stick hit my thigh. It was a woman all in
black with a black headscarf. It was Birdie: she looked so small and bent since
Veronique had passed. I missed the old her, the old sparky Birdie with the halo of white
hair.

‘Is there anyone in your house
tonight?’ I could barely hear her.

‘I don’t know, Birdie, but
I’ll be all right.’

‘Stay at mine.’ She hit me
again, this time across the arm. ‘Come on.’

So I stayed in Birdie’s spare room,
where everything was ornate and the sheets were cold with damp. She had no hot-water
bottle for my feet, so she gave me a long black fur coat and a grey cat. The cat curled
up on my feet straight away, obviously used to second jobbing as a foot warmer. I
thought of the herbalist: he would sleep between the same four walls for the next eight
years. He would never step across the town square in his white suit again. Where was
Doctor B, where was the man who had planted the seed? He would never be punished. Why
did I feel sorry for the herbalist? He was a monster. Yet I remembered him disappearing
through the courthouse door and into the crowd, his hat yet to be knocked off, and felt
the pity you’d feel for a lamb thrown to the wolves.

I shouldn’t have felt sorry. He got
hard labour, but I got life. If I was a nobody before the trial, I’d be a leper
afterwards.

You found me, Aggie, you found me.

I knew I would, love, knew I would.

I was a good girl, Aggie.

I know, Rose.

Didn’t go out on my own, averted my eyes around men and only went to the
pictures with Mam. Sorry, no. Mother. I forgot: not Mam, Mother. ‘Mam’
is common. So is Charlie, but he’s beautiful. Not like my father. My father
didn’t go – to the Picture Palace, that is. It’s a low-class thing.
Low-class things are so exciting.

Low class, my arse – that dada of yours
thought he was royalty; gadding about town with his black bag, pushing up his spectacles
and looking down his nose.

That wasn’t his fault, Aggie. He was a doctor because he had to be – he was
born to it. My poor father didn’t have a say-so in the matter. He was a very
busy man, worked all hours, tending to all and sundry. Mother made a sad face about
that, but I know she hated it when my father was under her feet in her drawing room.
She hadn’t designed it with him in mind.

Your dada was a bastard.

Aggie, how could you! It wasn’t him. It wasn’t really. My father had a
twin. Not many people know that. A not-so-nice a man as him. They were alike but
smelt different. He used to barge into our house very late at night – he’d no
right. Mother put on her visitors’ voice, all polite and light. I’d
listen to them talk, to their voices going up and down – my father’s twin and
Mother – thinking, ‘He shouldn’t be there. If my father knew, he
wouldn’t like it at all, at all.’

The maid always came up before him. Take your milk, then. Warm milk and whiskey. The
new maid was a bit simple. Voices. The simple maid. Warm milk. Whiskey. My
father’s twin. That’s the way it went.
Mother would
say – ’night now – with a catchy kitten in her voice. And he would come up the
stairs.

It started the day of the goldfish. I was carrying it home from the carnival.
Rushing to get out of the sun; had got a notion the water would heat and boil the
fish to death. ‘Look at the girl’s dress!’ someone hooted. I
stopped. There was blood on the back of my skirt, like a poppy. Mother told me to
run.

She screamed when she got home. Who saw! Who saw! I was twelve years old and
counting. To bed with no supper. Later I heard the door clatter, the thick voice,
Mother telling tales and laughing. Well may they have laughed, she and my
father’s twin. When they were tired of laughing, he came up and did his
sin.

It was the stain, you see. ‘You showed me you were ready,’ he always
said. But I can’t answer when he blows my mouth full of air, I can’t
answer.

I know, I know. Shush, I know. I have you
now, I’ve found you.

How did you know where to find me?

Sure I’d seen you, Rose. Saw you every
night since the one Seamus and myself set you on the road to that big grey house. Saw
you hang over the river like a low moon, all alone. Heard you too in other places,
crying by the shed for your child, searching the reeds; in the folds of the day, you
were everywhere I lay.

Where are we going now, Ag?

To another river, different but the same as
this one. It’s not far at all now, around the next bend. Look, it’s just
over the horizon.

Are there more spiders weaving in
September, or is it just me? The Holohans’ shop front is grey; the window bald and
dark, as mucky as the river, with nothing in it except for my reflection – a pale figure
floating in a rectangle of glass as if I was the ghost, as if I was the one that
torments this place. My hands leave prints on the dusty glass.

I think back on the impressive
straight-backed couple that I once knew, so nice and well-to-do. Dan and Carmel, their
respectable faces, their polite voices. How I wish that impression had stayed true. I
can see them still, Dan drawing plans for shop improvements in a copybook and Carmel
reading banned novels, drinking tonic wine.

I can’t believe Dan went back to
Tipperary, that he just abandoned the shop and everything in it. Finbar wanted it so
much that he hired solicitor after solicitor to find a loophole in the will. And there
was Dan, not wanting it at all in the end. So much for those who say it was the only
reason he married Carmel.

The church bells clang, calling the town to
attention. In the alleyway, young children skip rope. Soon the path will fill with
people making their way to Mass. Not many would recognize me. If they did, they’d
think me a vulture, skulking around to see what’s left.

The herbalist would know me. I almost felt
him when I walked into the market square, felt his knuckle graze my neck, lift a Marcel
wave from my newly set hair, to peer past the pan-stick and eye shadow, past my
carefully drawn womanhood.

Emily
, he’d whisper,
Emily, is that really you?
Sometimes I confuse what I knew with what the
townspeople said afterwards, so that even in my dreams he becomes just another
smooth-tongued devil.

‘A peasant Irish girl,’ he once
called me. To think it was me caused all that trouble. Skinny drab Emily. Lover of the
next ruler of the Western world, the medicine king himself. Believer of all
his promises, waiting to be sent down the river on a raft, to be
washed in milk, bejewelled with gemstones and adorned in silks. Something had to be
done, but sometimes the cure is worse than the sting. A bad man he was, but I miss the
sweetness of his fingertips, and the grand dreams he gave me.

How that crowd of bitches chased him in the
beginning, flushed and powdered, perfumed to high heaven. Pushing their bosoms into one
another’s backs in their rush to get near his market stall. ‘A great man to
have. Aren’t we lucky he came our way? You know he wasn’t going to stay only
for the great welcome we gave him?’

Fools, did they really believe that was it?
The few pence they spent on invigorating tonic?

We were in love
, I thought.
I’m a woman now, and soon we’ll leave together and go to Brighton,
where we’ll marry. And he’ll make a fortune as a medicine man with his
cure-alls. He’s a saviour, a great help to all.

The herbalist always gave out about me and
my big gob. Said girls were dangerous because of what’s between their legs and
what comes out of their mouths. How right he was. What came out of my big mouth got him
prison. I did it for Rose. True. But I did it for him too. Well, it was better than
being buried alive in the bog. That’s what Charlie had in store for him.

Wasn’t it funny? The herbalist
sentenced to hard labour, considering the nature of his crimes? I can hear Aggie laugh
at that. It’s strange, but Aggie was right about not having long to live. She
passed away the morning after the trial. Seamus found her and had her taken to the
morgue. When he came back, the boat was gone.
Biddy
must’ve come undone –
a badly tied knot no doubt, for it was last seen by Ned drifting in the current of the
high river towards the leafy bends. Ned claimed there were two women in it, one old and
one young. Everyone agreed that Ned was seeing things again. But the boat was never
found.

I miss Aggie’s dirty laugh, but
I’m glad she got to see me make my confession. The way that judge looked at me.
Poor girl of the lower classes led astray
,
set upon.
He looked at
my top button, moved his mouth like he’d like to set upon me himself. Wanted
details, he wanted every detail, to better imagine me violated, offended, up against
it.

It wasn’t the herbalist that got those
girls in the family way in the first place – everyone forgets that. And everyone got it
wrong: he and I – monster that he was – we were equals. Not in the beginning, and not in
the end, but during the most important time, when he was my love and I was his
empress.

Kelly’s shop was shut, in darkness and
deserted. A window display of Jacob’s tins held tight to their crumbling biscuits.
No one dared enter. No one dared creep up those stairs. It was nonsense, a child’s
tale, but youngsters said that Carmel was there still, roaming around, peering through
windows, lamenting. The grown-ups laughed, but no one went in. If they did, they might
have seen the peeling wallpaper and the cracked plaster beneath it. The clothes that
hung limply in the open wardrobes, the family photographs that lay smashed and greasy on
the floor, and underneath – a five-pound note. They’d have to push open the
heavily cobwebbed doors first, except for the one upstairs – that one was sealed
shut.

The day Carmel drove out the gossiping women
and slammed the door behind them was the last day Kelly’s shop ever opened. She
hid indoors during the herbalist’s trial and after. Didn’t work,
didn’t eat, didn’t answer the knocking out front. A lot of people called in
the beginning, but that fell off after a week or two. Birdie kept it up the longest.
Finbar never showed his face, not once. The townswomen gathered outside and discussed
her – what were they to do?

Carmel went upstairs, shut her ears, but she
couldn’t shut them out –
The girl was up to no good with Carmel’s
husband. Oh, the pity of it, the poor woman!
The town crowed with pity and
delight. Carmel felt their words beat the roof at night.

The girl Sarah all but disappeared. The
herbalist was taken off before harm was done – at least Carmel didn’t have that on
her conscience. Whatever evil had possessed her was gone.

Then Grettie B came to call, pushed her way
in. Shoved and rattled the back door till the lock snapped.
To rescue me, from
myself
, thought Carmel, but she thought wrong. Grettie came to return the
five pounds she had borrowed. ‘It bought death for my daughter.
Have it back, go on. I’m making amends for my sins.’ She threw it towards
Carmel and left. It fluttered and lay on the floor. Carmel never touched it, never
picked it up. The realization hit her fully and straight in the gut. Rose died, and
Rose’s child had died, and Carmel’s five pounds had paid for their deaths.
There would be no end to her torment now.

Carmel gathered what was left of the rope
from the shed and went upstairs. She sat on the rocking chair, and listened for
Samuel’s cry to tell her when it was time. When he came, it wasn’t as a cry
but as a soft light, a blur in the corner of the room, and she knew that his soul had
come to meet his mother’s, so that they could make the journey together.

Sarah worked with letters, names, wrote in
copperplate. That much didn’t change. She often thought,
I’ll write it
down for him, I’ll write it down for Ben
. But would she really want him
to know such a sad, sad story? What good would it do for her brown-eyed boy? It would be
her need, not his. Let him go on blindly and happily with his life. He’d go on
better without knowing of certain incidents.