“Hmm,” she said. “Yes. You’ll do.”
* * *
—
The young woman’s name was Ann Gorman and she lived alone in the middle of the countryside, a good hour’s walk from the town, with a mangy-looking mongrel and a one-eyed cat. Ann had been cast out of her mother’s house two years before for reasons she did not like to discuss. Mary Ellen found the woman to be curt and direct, but also warm and pleasant company.
It took months for Mary Ellen to grow accustomed to the quiet. Used to a family of seven children under the one thatched roof, living with only one other woman was strange to her. She filled the silence with her mother’s songs, chattered both to Ann and to her belly while she worked.
Ann’s daytime business was in apples, which seemed a cruel coincidence to Mary Ellen, whose downfall had been so tied to a now-destroyed apple tree. Still, she did not complain. She picked and tended the small and scraggly orchard; she helped to bottle the bitter, cloudy cider; she piled the apples too tart or rotten to use into baskets to sell to the farmers for their pigs.
Food was scarce and the cottage was tiny. She and Ann were lucky if they made nine shillings a week from the apples, but they shared what little they had. They also shared the profits from Ann’s nighttime business, which was something else entirely.
Ann’s cottage was the only dwelling in sight. Surrounded by the scrappy orchard, it was hidden from even the narrow dirt road that led to it by tangles of hedgerows and blackberry bushes. After nightfall, Ann’s skinny mongrel could hear even the softest footfall on the path outside. The creature would rise from its spot by the cottage wall and fetch Ann or Mary Ellen from the garden, or the bed, or the chair by the fire. And Ann would open the cottage door before the woman outside—for it was always a woman outside—could knock timidly on the wood.
Some women visited Ann and Mary Ellen monthly. They were mostly locals, faces Mary Ellen recognized from market days. The majority of the women were peasants and tenants. Some were servants. A few were the wives of millers and greengrocers, and they came to see Ann too, late at night, alone. Some came from as far as Galway town, making the six-hour journey there and back in the one night.
The women paid Ann in coin and grain, in meat and cheese, in leather and in poitín, a clear alcohol made from potatoes, distilled illegally in the darkest parts of the bog. Some women came and could not pay and Ann was forced to turn them away. Mary Ellen would see them some months later, trying to hide the shape of their slowly swelling bellies.
In the garden behind the cottage, Ann grew herbs. For the women who came monthly, she made and distilled tinctures of valerian root to ease the pain of their bleeding, or crushed monk’s pepper and tansy for them to eat if they wanted to get with child. For some, she chopped fennel and hogweed for them to feed to their husbands.
For the women who came only once, the quietest ones who appeared only when the moon was dark and they were sure they could not be seen, she brewed teas of pennyroyal and mugwort, wild carrot and rue. In front of the fire with Mary Ellen learning all she could, ready to be told which herb to fetch from the garden, Ann would listen to the dazed or frenzied or sobbing women, would examine their bellies and between their legs, would ask when they had last bled. And, depending on the answer, she administered her teas.
Some of the women looked at Mary Ellen with pity; others barely saw her at all. Ann had, from the moment she took her in, let it be known to the town that Mary Ellen’s husband had died of diphtheria in Donegal. The townsfolk’s pity was better than their scorn, and Mary Ellen was glad of the lie.
When the time came for Mary Ellen’s baby to be born, Ann laid blankets over rushes on the floor. Instead of having Mary Ellen drink laudanum and spirits, as the physicians did for the upper-class women who occasionally visited Ann, she gave Mary Ellen only water. She pushed her onto all fours and delivered her baby like a farmer would an animal’s, and Mary Ellen’s labor was half as long and half as painful as any of the well-to-do ladies, had ever been.
When Mary Ellen’s son slid out of her, bloody and gasping, Ann gave his rump a sharp smack and declared the squalling child to be named Patrick. Mary Ellen didn’t dare to disagree.
14.
A weak heart
Drumcliff, 1890–1918
Patrick Gerald Joseph Rys was a weak and sickly child. Food was scarce and, even with Ann’s apples to keep her from starvation, Mary Ellen had been hungry throughout her pregnancy.
Patrick was skinny, stammered and walked with a slight limp, but he knew from a very young age that his heart was the weakest thing about him. Not a man’s heart: strong, boisterous, tenacious, and hardy like the hearts of the boys in school, like their fathers’. Boys with strong hearts did not cry. They hardened their feelings so that they barely knew them, didn’t seem to feel fear.
Patrick, on the other hand, was indecisive, insecure, and afraid. He didn’t play with the other children for fear of ridicule. His teachers, the townsfolk, and the parish priest declared that a boy like him was doomed from the start. Not by his limp, his skinny limbs, his trembling legs, but because of his home. No man of strong heart could be raised by two women, the men of the town insisted. No normal boy could live with witches. And deep within the ugliest part of himself Patrick believed them. From his infancy, when not in the company of his mother and Ann, he was snapped at, roughed up, smacked, and beaten more than the other boys, the ones with fathers and siblings, the ones with wiry limbs and strong hearts. It wouldn’t have occurred to Patrick to see the correlation. That his heart was only weak because the men of the town made it so.
Patrick only saw the rough local boys who kicked pigs’ bladders around the town for lack of a real ball, who pinched the girls and punched each other, who dared themselves to jump into the river and could run around for hours on skinny, scraped legs that never trembled in the way Patrick’s left leg always had.
One evening on the road home from school Patrick came across a big group of them—the limpless, strong-hearted boys—clustered tightly around some loud game. He squared himself to walk as quickly as his shaky legs could carry him right past the scrum. Patrick didn’t notice until he was level with the shuffling cluster of boys that what they were circling was making noise. A heart-rending noise, a desperate noise, a noise of war and dying.
Patrick stopped despite himself. In between the boys’ stick legs there was a cat. Or rather there was a creature that had once been something resembling a cat. A black and mangy thing, more sickly skin than fur, more bone than sickly skin. What hackles it had were raised and it hissed and spat as if it were five times its size and actually stood a fighting chance against six boys who had no boots on their filthy feet but managed to kick anyway.
Patrick shouted “Stop!” before remembering that there was one of him and six of them.
The pack of boys turned from their original prey, who seized upon their distraction and streaked away, broken tail cocked like a fishhook and bony legs working so fast they were only a black blur.