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  Ballyford Castle, Mayo, 1846

  ‘What’s that on the road ahead, why are the dogs barking so fiercely?’ Owen FitzDeane shouted to his land agent, Shevlin, who had already noticed a suspicious looking bundle on the verge and had ridden on ahead to take a look for himself.

  It appeared at first glance to be a mound of rags, lying close to the entrance of an apparently abandoned cottage. Each one they had passed so far on their journey had been derelict and neither man had dared dismount to look beyond the wind beaten, clattering, open doors, for fear of what they would find within.

  ‘You keep back m’lord,’ shouted Shevlin. ‘I will take a look. It’ll be nought but rags and pots, which a tenant found too heavy to carry when leaving, I’m guessing. Poor beggar, probably hoped it would be safe under the hedge until he came back for it.’

  The sky darkened and Owen saw that dark clouds had moved swiftly inland from the Atlantic. His horse, unhappy that Shevlin’s had gone on ahead without him, spooked and skittered about, its shoes scraping on the rough road, sending up clouds of dust.

  ‘Steady Aghy, steady,’ shouted Owen. His face gleamed with moisture from the damp air and the effort of controlling the spirited, grey gelding. His hat became dislodged in the struggle to remain in the saddle and now lay in the middle of the road. At last Aghy reluctantly obeyed his master and stood four square, his eyes bulging with anxiety and blowing white clouds of steam as he snorted his unwillingness to stand still. ‘Good boy, steady,’ whispered Owen, patting Aghy’s neck, fearing that at any second, he would rear up. In the battle between man and horse, Owen was only just winning.

  Owen saw that the foreboding clouds had settled over a gap in the hills and heavy, black, vertical rain was pouring down onto the village of Mulranny, covering the village in a shadowy veil. Owen shivered as a cool breeze, caught between the hills suddenly whipped down the road.

  ‘Jesus,’ he whispered, shortening his reins.

  ‘What is it, Shevlin?’ He was afraid to shout too loud, in case he set the horse off again, but a feeling of wanting to be away had overtaken the need to calm a spooked horse. He didn’t like this road and he trusted his horse. If Aghy was nervous, there would be good reason.

  Shevlin was standing still and the dogs, who had run out with them that morning, were investigating the bundle, half concealed by the hedge. They began to circle around, barking madly. Almost in a frenzy.

  The cottage door stood ajar and an air of decay loitered close to the outer walls. No welcoming plume of smoke rose from the central chimney as it would normally have done on such a miserable day.

  ‘Stay back, m’lord,’ Shevlin shouted over his shoulder, as he kicked on his own horse into a trot. ‘We should ride on. The cottage is abandoned, it will only be vermin infested. Don’t come near! Away now.’

  Shevlin was newly arrived at Ballyford. Owen’s previous land agent had left for America as quickly as the famine and typhus had arrived in Mayo. They were off to Cobh faster than the time it took for news of their desertion to reach the FitzDeanes’ town house in London.

  There was not a land agent in all of England who would set foot in Ireland during these days of disease and hunger. The second potato crop had failed and there was devastation everywhere. The air was filled with the overpowering stench of decaying vegetation and the streets were filled with people travelling among the dead, with no place to go. They carried meagre belongings, tied with string, and rags on stooped backs, desperate to reach somewhere they could offer work in exchange for food.

  At Ballyford they heard that soldiers on horseback, armed with bayonets, were heading towards Mayo in an attempt to maintain order.

  Owen had estates in Lancashire, Scotland and Ireland. Moreover, as a member of the British Parliament, he had been requested to compile a report on the effect of the famine upon the peasants. It was felt that a report from one of the landed gentry who had farming interests in the worst hit areas, would be more readily believed by Parliament than the findings of the scientific committee.

  Before the famine began, Owen had left his land and his tenants in Ireland in good shape. He resented having to leave his family in London to return to his estate alone, but Owen was a man of principle and if the prime minister desired his considered opinion, it was his duty to ensure it was provided in full.

  Since news of the first crop failure had arrived in London, he had dedicated his time to the needs of the country where he felt most at home. He argued with his fellow landowners for the repeal of the Corn Laws and for the British Government to ban imports from Ireland, so that the country could become self-sufficient. He had even made a speech to that effect in Parliament.

  ‘What is the use of establishing a board of works, Mr Speaker? Of paying good English pounds to employ men for work which has no purpose? When all that is required is to place a ban on imports. It would cost a paltry amount in food subsidy until the crops grow healthy once more and the Irish peasant is able to feed himself and his family, as he has always done.’

  Since that day Owen and his wife, Lydia, had been shunned by their peers. Too many of their friends made vast amounts of money from the grain imported from Ireland. This ostracization did not make Lydia happy, and she was less than supportive of Owen’s journey back to Ballyford, the home he loved best of all.

  ‘Why you? Why can’t the prime minister pick someone who doesn’t have to neglect business interests in London to go? For goodness sake, I haven’t even visited the place since before the children were born. You aren’t even on the scientific committee. Let him send someone else.’ Lydia was strident and relentless in her opposition.

  Owen, a man of few words and deeper feelings than most, let his wife remonstrate and she knew, by the mere fact that he chose not to argue with her, he had won.

  This infuriated Lydia. She controlled and ran their London home with meticulous precision and she never ceased to try and spread her tentacles of control further into Owen’s life.

  Owen considered himself to be a Christian man and was deeply shaken by the lack of compassion shown towards the Irish in the midst of their plight by people he had attended school with and known for most of his life.

  Unlike other Irish landowners, Owen had taken no rent from his tenants during the blight and had arranged for them to be secretly supplied with bread from the castle. Owen could not pray to the Lord for forgiveness for his sins every night without knowing that he had done his best to help his tenants survive disease and starvation, during the darkest days Ireland had ever known.

  Typhus had followed quickly on the tail of the famine heaping a double disaster on the poor. Death was audacious and roamed freely. It slipped quietly into homes where families assumed it had passed them by unnoticed. It strode out across fields and farms into even the most remote sod houses and hovels. Babies were first. Elders second, mothers next. Finally death went hungrily in search of youth and took down the men. It was never quick. Always slow. Agonizingly slow. Death waited patiently, as muscle wasted and skin yellowed. Flesh fell from bones before the spirit succumbed. It appeared that death was insatiable. Back in London, MPs argued about a law which taxed Irish grain, and meanwhile, the death bell tolled.

  Entire families starved to death. Owen had himself seen bones in the fields where they had fallen. He noticed candles burning in the church throughout the night, while the church doors stood open and gravediggers struggled to bury the dead, before they were themselves stru
ck down. Now, there were too many dead to count. Parish priests were overwhelmed as their flocks died before their eyes, and then they too, fell.

  Owen had arrived from England to find his estate barely surviving in the midst of a disaster.

  This morning he persuaded a hesitant Shevlin, a cautious man from the mountains, to set out at first light. ‘I cannot write a report for the Crown and Government if I haven’t seen what is happening with my own eyes, Shevlin. We can do it in a day if we set out early.’

  Shevlin reluctantly agreed. It was not a journey he either wanted to or thought they should make.

  Although the Ballyford houses remained occupied and fires still burnt with stock-piles of the turf they had gathered and stored over the years, Owen couldn’t help wondering if enough had been done in his absence to help his tenants. The cottages appeared unkempt and the people malnourished. Even though he had not collected rent and had provided bread, it had clearly been almost impossible for his tenants to keep body and soul together.

  The further away from the estate they rode, the worse the desolation. They rode past people so thin that they were little more than walking dead. Men who would normally have raised their hands in greeting, now stepped out into the road to grab at his foot as he went past. Shevlin had insisted they take the dogs, in case they were set upon. To Owen this seemed unbelievable in a country where women always came out of their cottages to hand him food and drink to sustain him on his journey. He knew most of them by name. Only Shevlin was aware that many of the women who had greeted him with oatcakes and water, were dead.

  Fortunately, few babies had been born during the famine. Women who weighed little more than children themselves would have been unable to nurse an infant and in her mercy, Mother Nature spared them.

  *

  Owen had become impatient waiting for Shevlin to tell him what it was they had found on the road. He loosened the reins and kicked Aghy on so he could take a closer look at the bundle. The smell that wafted across from the fields made him want to vomit onto the road. He pulled up his scarf with one hand and tightened the cravat across his mouth.

  ‘Stay there, I’m coming to look for myself,’ he shouted in a voice muffled by the scarf. When he had reached Shevlin, he added, ‘Here, take the reins, I’m going to take a closer look, the horse has the devil in him today, be careful.’

  ‘There is nothing to see, we’re wasting our time. Look at that rain coming our way,’ said Shevlin.

  Owen could have sworn he saw a movement from the shape on the verge. Now he was sure he heard a groan. Bending down, he pulled away the rags to reveal the face of a young woman. The skin clung to her cheekbones. She could have been sixty, but vestiges of youth and beauty remained evident beneath her tallow skin. Owen had quickly become used to boys much younger than himself, who now looked like old men.

  This girl was barely alive. Owen lifted his head and studied the small cottage set back from the road.

  ‘Is this where she is from?’ he asked Shevlin.

  Shevlin shook his head slowly in response but gave no reply.

  ‘I’m going in to take a look,’ Owen said as he sprung to his feet.

  ‘Are you mad? It’s dark in there.’ Shevlin looked alarmed. ‘The shutters are closed. She could have the fever, it could be inside the cottage waiting for us. They say it’s in the air and you can only be free of it during the daylight. They say it lives in the dark and the night air. You’d be putting yourself and all of us in danger.’

  Ignoring him, Owen pushed the wooden door further open and looked inside. He could see four people, maybe more. They were dead, lying on pallets made of straw. One, who had obviously gone first, had shining white bones escaping through the papery, rotting skin. Others, in a lesser state of decay, had departed since. The cottage was filled with a swarm of midges, feeding off the fleshy leftovers of death.

  Owen heard the horses’ hooves behind him. Shevlin stood a distance away, holding both horses by the reins.

  ‘You would see the same in every cottage you looked in along this road. There are no villagers here to care for each other’s dead, just the empty cottages to house them.’

  Shevlin’s horse now began to back away, refusing to step any nearer. Owen moved forward to hold his own horse. In truth, he needed the warm neck of his trusty Aghy, for support. His legs felt weak and he wasn’t sure how much longer he could stand. He had been rocked to his very core by what he had seen since returning to Ireland.

  How could he ever put this ruin, this sight that had just met his eyes into sensible words for the prime minister at home?

  Owen walked back to the girl on the edge of the road and fell to his knees next to her. The smell of her clothes and the rags in which she was wrapped repelled him. They were stiff with the caked dirt, and damp. Even his scarf could not filter out the acrid aroma of stale urine and of flesh on the very edge of decomposition. Her body would be eating itself by now, in its own struggle to survive. He saw the lice move in her hair and the smell from her breath made him heave. Underlying all of this was the aroma of peat smoke and fire. Every peasant smelt the same. Living, as they did, in one room, the smoke impregnated the skin and lived in their pores. But her bright blue eyes were open, shining bright with what little life was left within and their desperate gaze pinned him to the spot, willing him not to leave. Owen knew that if he rode away and left her, she would be dead before the morning.

  ‘Here,’ he shouted to Shevlin. ‘Help me lift her onto my horse. She is coming back to Ballyford with us.’

  He saw the look of horror in his agent’s eyes and detected his reluctance to move closer.

  ‘I’m not riding away and leaving her here, Shevlin.’ Shevlin moved the horses closer.

  ‘She smells to high heaven,’ he said, his face contorted in distaste. ‘If her skin is hot, I’m leaving. You can stay here with her if you wish, but I will have no truck with the fever and nor should you. When did you last see someone like this, eh? You don’t know what you’re doing.’ Shevlin’s face was shrouded with fear. It ran through his voice and was picked up by his own horse who began to strain against the reins, impatient to ride on down the road.

  ‘Can you not feel it?’ he hissed. ‘There is something come in the air here, ’tis not right, I’m telling you. The horses are spooked and the hair on my neck is prickled with a notion of something bad. Let’s leave her and be away from here, now.’

  Owen could not disagree. The atmosphere was charged, the horses’ ears were pinned back. He thought he could hear the haunting sound of deathly whispers on the edge of the wind. Mayo was steeped in folklore and legend. He had known the stories since boyhood and had snuck down to the tenants’ cottages with the stable lads and listened to eerie tales told by the storytellers. The peasants lived close to the earth and closer still to the spirits.

  The girl encased in rags moved suddenly on the floor and as she did so, he made a decision. He put his arm under her shoulders and lifted her head.

  ‘She isn’t hot, there is no fever, she’s just nearly starved to death. We will sit her in front of me and ride back to Ballyford, now. There’s a water bottle, an oatcake and some bread in one of the saddle-bags.’

  Shevlin realized he might have gone too far with his master. Fear had driven his speech beyond the boundaries of what was acceptable even given the nature of Owen, who had an unusual relationship with his staff. Not for him the falseness either of subservience or adoration.

  ‘Here, here, take this water,’ he whispered to the girl in his arms. She made a great effort and raised her head; Owen saw the strain cross her face as she forced herself to drink.

  Shevlin held out some food.

  ‘Here, I’ve taken an oatcake and broken it up, although I’m not sure that someone in her state should eat too much at all for the first time. Cook says there have been some who have died in the poor house once they have eaten their first meal. I’ve crumbled the biscuit; you add some water.’

  Owen dr
ibbled water onto the crumbs and mixed them into a grey and unappetizing dough, then fed her a little at a time. It took her five whole minutes to swallow the first crumbs. It seemed as though she had almost forgotten how to swallow. Most of the water ran down her neck when he tried to get her to drink.

  ‘The sky is getting darker,’ Shevlin said. ‘That rain is surely heading this way. It’s straight above Bangor Erris now. If we want to ride her back to Ballyford, we had best do it right away.’

  The girl grasped at Owen’s hand and, in a whisper clearly audible to both Owen and Shevlin, she said, ‘You came, you came.’

  ‘She is delirious,’ said Owen. ‘I doubt she has long.’

  He looked up at the gathering clouds. Shevlin was right; the wind was blowing the rain across much quicker than either of them had anticipated.

  He tried once more to encourage the girl to swallow. Thinking that the water bottle was about to be taken away from her, she tried frantically to grab it.

  ‘Steady, steady,’ said Owen. ‘Don’t worry, we aren’t going to leave you here. We’re taking you on the horse with us. Let’s lift her up now,’ he said to Shevlin.

  Owen mounted his horse first and Shevlin lifted the girl up. Owen felt her flop against him, as he circled her waist with his arm. It was the last time she moved, but he clearly heard her say again, ‘You came.’

  ‘The ride back to Ballyford will take us at least two hours,’ said Shevlin, mounting his own horse. ‘She will very likely be dead by the time we reach the castle. I’ve no idea what you think we’re going to do with the body if she dies on the way home. If we pass the county constabulary or even the soldiers on the way, may I suggest we hand her over? Although God knows, they won’t be interested. There are hundreds of poor people like her to be found on the road outside of Belmullet.’

  Owen was slightly irritated, afraid that the girl might have heard Shevlin’s words and he glanced down to check. Her head was flopping from side to side in time with the rolling gait of the horse. The skin on her face looked like parchment.