A Girl Called Eilinora Read online

  He lowered his head to her ear, to check that she was still breathing and so that she could hear him.

  ‘Hold on young miss, just a couple more hours and we can get you out of the damp. I have an excellent cook and she will feed some nourishing soup into you. You’ll be back to good health in no time.’ He saw a light in her blue eyes flash back at him gratefully. She had heard and he was sure she understood him.

  The return journey was more difficult than their ride out had been earlier that morning. Word had got out. As they reached Geesala, a small gang of men and boys, almost too exhausted to stand, tried to intercept them. Owen thought he recognized one of the boys as one who had left Ballyford, to travel to Liverpool.

  ‘Is that Liam Toohey?’

  ‘Aye, it is, but for God’s sake, show no sign of knowing him. There are at least ten of them.’

  The men had chosen their spot with care. The road was narrow, a bottleneck, just wide enough for the horses to ride two abreast. The hills rose steeply away on either side of the road which was bordered by deep, water-filled ditches. The houses in the village they had just passed through had been largely uninhabited and the farm cottages which straggled along the road, tumbled to the ground. The men, dispossessed by their landlord, had nowhere to go. Homeless, wet, and starving, their homes destroyed, they began to form a straggling line across the road. Some of them swayed as they stood, as though their legs struggled to support the weight of their bodies.

  At the sound of Owen’s voice, Liam began to stagger towards him.

  ‘Help, m’lord, have ye food? Can ye get me to Dublin?’

  Owen did not hesitate, even for a second. He had never before seen anyone he knew in as desperate a state as Liam. He now unstrapped his saddle-bag and threw it down in front of the boy.

  ‘There are oatcakes and bread in there and a water bottle,’ he said. ‘I will send two of the stable boys back for you tonight. Don’t move from here, I will tell them where you are.’

  Owen remembered Liam well. He was a bright boy. Owen had understood why he had needed to move out of Ballyford to create an independent life for himself. Shevlin had provided a good testimonial and given a shilling to the boy as a parting gift.

  But now, two of the men seized Liam from behind. One grabbed the saddle-bag from his hands and the other dragged him down and began to beat his skull into the road. Liam, having been kicked away from the others, lay helpless on the ground while a fight over the saddle-bag broke out between the stronger men. Father against son, neighbour against neighbour, friend against friend. In these days of starvation and despair, it was each man for himself.

  ‘Canter on!’ Shevlin shouted, as the remaining men realized there was a second saddle-bag and lunged towards them in an attempt to rip it from Shevlin’s horse. Some were brandishing the farm tools they had rescued from their cottages before they were tumbled by the landlord’s men.

  Owen’s gaze was fixed on the face of the boy he had tried to save and he momentarily considered dismounting to take him up on to his saddle. Liam’s face was grey, his eyes were glazed and blood ran down the side of his face.

  ‘Is he dead? Is he? Have I just killed him?’ Owen screamed at Shevlin. As he kicked his horse on to take a closer look at the boy on the road, the girl slipped in his saddle. Steadying her, he realized Shevlin was right, they were in real danger. Shevlin grabbed Owen’s reins.

  ‘Move, for pity’s sake! Do ye think we can pick up every poor peasant and take him home? You are a liability to both of us. I will not stand by while you take risks with our lives to pick up the boy. Kick on! Now!’

  Owen was almost too dazed by what he had witnessed to take offence, and he obeyed Shevlin who shouted, ‘Now! Ride hard now!’ Owen could hear his own heart as the adrenaline pumped through his veins, making the blood pound in his ears. They rode like the wind, charging through the men who still stood upright and were intent on forcing them both out of their saddles. Once clear of danger, Shevlin tried to explain.

  ‘A horse is food. These men are so hungry they are beyond reason. They would rather be alive in jail with a full belly than dead in a ditch, and some of them would even prefer deportation to a penal colony to staying here in Ireland. At least after a few years they would be free men in a country with food. Ireland, ’tis a stinking rotten, half dead country, growing nothing but stinking rotten potatoes. There is nothing here for anyone. Ireland is dead.’

  Owen was silent for the remainder of the ride home. He felt foolish, but he would honour his promise to Liam. ‘I will send the stable boys back tonight, armed, and Liam can come back to Ballyford, alive or dead.’

  ‘I have no argument with that,’ conceded Shevlin, ‘none at all. So long as he doesn’t have the fever.’

  A diversion across the bog added an extra half hour to their journey and by the time they turned down the drive to Ballyford, it was pitch black. The only sounds were those of the Atlantic waves crashing against the rocks along the shore and the clip clopping of the two sets of tired hooves.

  The girl had not stirred once. Not even when Owen had to kick his horse on through a crowd and jump over a ditch into a field. He was no longer sure if she was still alive. He felt foolish as the walls of Ballyford rose in front of him and guilty that he had put the lives of all three of them at risk by wanting to bring Liam back too. By the look on his face, it was more than likely that he had the fever.

  Owen called out to one of the stable boys, who now came out to take the horses. ‘Run in and tell cook I have a half dead girl with me. She will need a mattress near the fire, a bath ready and soup. Here take her.’

  The boy hung back, looking terrified.

  ‘Don’t worry, she is only starved, she doesn’t have the fever. There is no heat in her. I will need at least two of you ready to ride back to Geesala and collect Liam Toohey. We have left him on the road. I don’t know if he will be alive or dead.’

  Owen let the girl slip from his saddle into the boy’s arms and watched as the boy ran in through the kitchen doors, shouting for the cook, as though the stables were on fire.

  Owen handed his horse over to one of the other boys and entered the castle through the main hall. Shevlin was just behind him.

  When the stable boy returned, he said, ‘Cook wants to know, do you want the girl to stay in the kitchen or shall she be cared for in one of the cottages?’

  ‘No,’ Owen almost shouted. ‘Keep her in the kitchen. She may be sickening, we don’t know for sure.’

  Shevlin snorted. ‘Oh, I see. So we all catch it and die, instead. You will catch the fever and die, it has no notion that you are the Lord of Ballyford. What happens to everyone in the cottages and farms then? Who provides for them? Your brother in London, who doesn’t know one end of a pig from the other?’

  The air was tense, and the men exchanged a long hard look before Owen answered. ‘She can stay in the kitchen. She can sleep in there too. If she does have the fever, we can contain the risk. Tell cook I will be down when I have washed and eaten, and send two of the lads back for Liam. Make sure they have bayonets and good fast horses. They know the roads and should be safer in the dark. Can you remember where we left him?’

  Shevlin nodded. ‘Aye, I can, by the second tumbled cottage, if he’s still there that is. If he’s dead, they will have hidden him in a field ditch.’

  Shevlin was astounded by what had happened since they rode out that morning. For a start, he could not remember ever seeing Lord Owen in the kitchen. In the hall the paintings on the gallery were staring down at him. The portraits of Lord Owen and his brother, Henry had newly arrived from London. In them both men were smiling. Shevlin sighed and the thought crossed his mind, It will be a long time before anyone around here smiles again.

  As promised, once he had bathed and changed and eaten his dinner in front of the roaring fire in the main hall, Owen went down to the kitchen to check on the girl. He had found his own food hard to swallow. Braised beef from the farm, carrots from Dubli
n, apples from England. The hardship he had seen during the day continued to haunt him. Even after washing, he still felt dirty, and the fire could not shift the cold dread that lingered in his bones.

  Pushing his plate to one side, he downed his wine in one gulp. He felt drawn beyond all reason to the girl. He couldn’t get her out of his mind, although he knew he was being irrational. But he needed to know that she was being treated kindly. That she was being fed good food and nursed by one of the kitchen maids.

  Now he was amazed at the change in her appearance. She was propped up on a straw pallet leaning against the wall, while Mary, one of the maids slowly spooned a vegetable broth into her mouth. Although she was taking minutes to swallow each spoonful, there was a new vitality about her. Owen instantly understood, it was life.

  He squatted down beside the mattress. She smelt better, although still ripe with the smell of peat smoke and ash. It was so acrid that it seemed to burn the inside of his nostrils and his eyes watered. He rubbed his eyes with his thumbs and the cook, Mrs Gibson, used to the smell of people who lived over a fire, took it as a sign of tiredness.

  ‘Come back in a week or so, master,’ she said to him gently. ‘She will be properly cleaned and much improved by then and ready to be sent back. She has a fierce independence about her, that she has. I’m thinking not many would have survived out on the road as long as she has, not with the rain we’ve had over the last few days and the damp now, surely to God, that would have seen a grown man off. She’s thin all right, not a pick on her bones. But now she is here, we’ll sort her.’

  ‘Do you think she has the fever, Mrs Gibson?’ Owen and the cook had known each other since he was a boy. She had been kinder to him than his own mother had, even though he’d also received more than one smacked backside. Owen remembered being chased with the broom, for dropping a rat into her large urn of buttermilk to see if it could swim.

  ‘I’ve seen enough of this over the last two years,’ she murmured. ‘We have had relatives of tenants brought up to the estate in much the same way. I’ve sorted them all out with my broth and put each one back on the Dublin road with enough food to get them to the ferry headed to Liverpool. I hope Liverpool has enough work, because it seems to me as though half of Ireland is heading to her docks.’

  ‘I’ll return in a week, Mrs Gibson and do as you say,’ Owen said. ‘I always listen to your advice, as you know. And thank you.’ He knew only one thing for sure, and that was that he did not want the girl to leave the safety of the castle, or return to a cottage full of decomposing corpses.

  ‘I have no idea what you put in this healing solution,’ he said. ‘It must be well prayed over.’

  He turned to the girl and asked her gently, ‘What is your name, girl?’

  ‘She says her name is Eilinora.’ Cook moved back to the fire and stirred the contents of the large black pot. ‘The same name as the witch, Mary tells me, from up on the flat land beyond Bellacorick. Not that I have any notion how Mary knows who is or isn’t a witch. Sure, I have her in mass three times a day, as are all the girls and I cannot think when she was ever up at Bellacorick, either.’

  The girl, Eilinora, remained silent, as though to speak would require an effort beyond her means. The girl’s blue eyes held his, in the seconds before they began to close. The thought that they were fathomless crossed his mind and with a start, he saw her smile up at him, knowingly. Owen pulled the blanket up over her shoulders and his own gaze drank in the structure of her face. The angular cheekbones, the matted dark hair and the long, oh so long and thick, black eyelashes, which lay gently on her cheek.

  ‘We will make you well and sort you out,’ he whispered to her sleeping face, wanting neither Mary, nor cook to hear his words. He made as if to stand from his squatting position and her eyes shot open and flashed with fear, before closing again. She had possibly not slept for more than a few moments at a time for weeks. Now even the defiance, which had sustained her to this point, could keep her awake no longer. She would not die. She would not be eaten by dogs, or attacked by the starved and diseased. She was safe, here in the Ballyford kitchens, she could sleep.

  ‘I will leave now, cook,’ said Owen, walking past the fire on his way to the back stairs.

  As the door banged shut, Shevlin walked in through the back door, on his way from the stables.

  ‘It will be a late night for us,’ he said. ‘I won’t sleep until the lads are safely back. ’Tis likely they will have a corpse with them and if they don’t, it will be another on the floor for you.’

  ‘Who is it then?’ asked cook.

  ‘’Tis young Liam Toohey. We found him on the road in a bad state and saw him set upon by a gang. We couldn’t stop, or they would have had us too. Lord Owen has sent the stable lads out to fetch him.’

  Cook blessed herself. ‘God in heaven, what will become of us all?’

  ‘Is everything well, so?’ asked Mary, worried by the frown on Mrs Gibson’s face.

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ replied cook, ‘but, as God is true, there is something afoot tonight. I’m feeling that girl brings trouble with her. It’s only the second time since he married that I have known the master to come down the stairs.’ The cook blessed herself and took her rosaries out from her apron pocket. ‘And what is more, I didn’t like the way she looked at him. Where did anyone get such bold eyes from, they’ll bring trouble, I’m guessing. They aren’t natural, so they aren’t and when were you up at Bellacorick? If she is from beyond the river, we could be in trouble.’

  Shevlin listened to the conversation without passing comment and took his food with a nod of thanks. Pulling a chair out at the long wooden table, he sat and ate in silence. He was concerned by what they had seen that day. How long would it be before the gangs began walking up the drive of Ballyford? If they were organized, they could descend on them in their hundreds. He made a note to speak to the sergeant who had called at the castle for Lord FitzDeane only yesterday. As the biggest home in the region, with well-stocked store-rooms and pantries, they were vulnerable and needed troops on the gate. He knew Lord Owen would struggle to agree. It would take someone other than Shevlin to make him see the potential danger. He made a note to contact the constabulary the following morning and ask for someone to visit the castle and speak to Lord FitzDeane.

  ‘You are eating quietly tonight, what’s on your mind?’ said cook.

  Shevlin took the tankard of ale she handed him and gulping it, washed down his food.

  ‘We need to be on our guard,’ Shevlin replied as he placed the tankard on the table and cast his eyes over to where Mary was covering the girl with a blanket. ‘These are bad days. Things we have no knowledge of are happening out there. Don’t go yourself into Belmullet and don’t let any of the staff leave, either, until I say so. We will have everything ordered in. No one is to go anywhere other than to our own farms and cottages. I am going to ride out to the cottages tomorrow and check everyone is well and that there are no problems and no unwelcome visitors either.’

  The wind howled through the large wooden shutters, carrying with it a chilling sound, which filled the kitchen air. It was far off, yet nearby. It was both outdoors and within the kitchen. It was human, but not.

  Cook and Mary stopped what they were doing, blessed themselves and Mary began to pray over her rosaries.

  Mrs Gibson turned to him with unease in her eyes. ‘That’s it,’ she said, ‘we are done for. ’Tis the banshee, someone will die.’ All three turned towards Eilinora who remained asleep.

  ‘The banshee?’ Shevlin had heard of it from his own mother, many times. But Shevlin had grown up in the mountains near Croaghaun and he used to tell his mother, they would never hear it up there. Like much else he had been told, he put it down to over exaggeration by people who had little to do on long dark nights, except sit around and amuse each other with stories of make believe.

  As he spoke, he heard it again and Mary began to shake.

  ‘Jesus Christ, it’s just the
wind, blowing in through the shutters,’ said Shevlin, alarmed himself, moving from the table to fasten the wooden shutters tighter.

  Mrs Gibson pulled Mary into her side. ‘There now. We are all good and well, are we not? There’s nothing going to happen to any of us. ’Tis the poor folk outside of the castle, with no food or crop she is calling for, not us.’ Mary was now crying and shivering.

  ‘’Tis a bad sign, to be sure,’ whispered Mrs Gibson. ‘I hope them boys are safe out on the road. The banshee doesn’t wail for no reason at all. There is always a death to follow.’

  ‘Aye, well, it won’t be none of us,’ said Shevlin more confidently than he felt. ‘But we have a responsibility to look out for others and I will wait up until the boys are back.’

  Neither he, Mrs Gibson, nor Mary noticed the blue eyes, which suddenly opened wide, or the glance, which darted like a flame towards them all.

  Upstairs in the library Lord Owen was sitting at his desk in front of a roaring fire and he also heard the banshee. He had grown up with the dread of the call and as a child, had been frightened more times than he cared to remember by the servants’ stories. Everyone who lived on the Atlantic coast lived in fear of one superstition or another and like Mrs Gibson, he had heard the eerie wailing more than once, most memorably on the night his father died. The old man had lain ill in his bedchamber for months, but when they heard the banshee, the castle staff knew that the end was coming and so did he, and it was the case; within the hour, his father had gone.

  *

  It was two o’clock in the morning when Lord Owen, dozing in his chair, heard the horses’ hooves and looked out of the window. He had waited up for the boys’ return. By the light of the moon, he saw the stable lads wend their way up the drive and his heart leapt at the sight.

  Shevlin was dozing, too, in front of the kitchen range as the boys carried Liam through the back door and into the kitchen, beaten, bruised and bleeding, but still alive. Another pallet was laid on the floor and Mrs Gibson, who would also not see her bed this night, reeled back in horror at the sight of his wasted body and beaten face. Liam was one of their own. She would tend to him herself. At first light, she would be off to consult with Mrs McAndrew before picking the healing herbs, which would help with Liam’s bruises and wounds, but for now, he needed her attention.