CATHERINE
SNOW
CATHERINE
SNOW
a novel
NELLIE P. STROWBRIDGE
FLANKER PRESS LIMITED
ST. JOHN’S
2009
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Strowbridge, Nellie P., 1947-
Catherine Snow : a novel / Nellie P. Strowbridge.
ISBN 978-1-897317-46-4
1. Snow, Catherine, ca. 1793-1834--Fiction.
I. Title.
PS8587.T7297C38 2009 C813'.54 C2009-904675-X
© 2009 by Nellie P. Strowbridge
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of the work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed to Access Copyright, The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, ON M5E 1E5. This applies to classroom use as well.
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We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities; the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada; the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation.
To the memory of
Catherine Mandeville Snow
the last woman hanged in Newfoundland
1793–1834
“. . . some satisfactory proof should be required that the persons supposed to have been murdered are actually dead; for although we may entertain the strongest personal impressions that these unfortunate people have been made away with, yet we can only arrive at a safe conclusion by adhering strictly to clear rules of evidence, and fixed principles of law, and we must not allow our indignation to get the better of our reason, and indict even the most strongly suspected upon mere conjecture. . . .”
Chief Justice Henry John Boulton
Newfoundland Patriot, January seventh, 1834
Contents
Prologue
Book I
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Book II
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Book III
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Epilogue
Author’s Note and Acknowledgements
Recommendations for Book Club Discussions
About the Author
Prologue
—ROSE—
Rose gazed out an upstairs window of a large, wooden house facing the St. John’s courthouse, her small elbows leaning on the wide sill. Sarah, an elderly servant, rubbed wet, gnarled hands down a white pinafore and came from behind the young girl. She took notice of a white bird chirping on the outside ledge. “Dear, oh dear, oh dear me,” she sighed. “A white bird this July evening! Oh ’tis trouble we’ll be having before this year of 1846 spends itself. Come away from the window before it happens soon and quick.”
Rose stared at the courthouse. She let out a deep breath and spoke in a faint voice. “The strangest feelings come when I look that way.” Her voice rose. “I feel as if I’ll choke on my own gizzard. At night I wake from my dreams startled. There’s someone in them crying in anguish, but she’s only a shadow.” The young girl looked down at the rosary of garnets scattered along the ledge. “I pray every day on those beads that my mind will settle peacefully. Once when I wore them around my neck I felt strangled.”
Sarah knew that, each morning, Rose held the rosary of garnets with its Celtic cross in her hand for prayers. Afterward, she kept them in her little cloth bag. Now the servant righted a white scolly on her head and turned with a scolding eye. “Don’t be tormenting yourself. Sure you’re only a child.”
Rose turned swiftly, her stormy, grey eyes blazing. “An orphan I am – someone who doesn’t know from what tree her forebears sprang, having the name Rose given to me by strangers, a name that doesn’t seem to be mine.”
Sarah answered, “Where did you get the notion that you should know everything? Sure I’ve no more knowledge of me mudder than if I never had one. ’Tis praising God I am that someone raised me.”
“In my dreams I’ve been troubled by strange voices,” Rose cried. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I’d like to put faces to the voices.”
Sarah’s eyes held a clouded look, her voice soft. “Sure ’tis staring you bees, girl, and facing Signal Hill. ’Tis it, you’re looking at. Tell me it is, and then thinking too much and feeling the tragedy of people shot, and all the bellies and throats slit between French and English soldiers on that hill.”
“’Tis not,” she answered. “My room window fixes right over the courthouse’s blackened window, meets it like one eye gazing into the other. This eye here is harmless; the other one holds evil. Sometimes I’ve fancied a woman in that square eye, that’s now been put out by fire, and only its socket left. But for that, I’d have a mind to – ” She stopped and shook her head. “Oh never mind.”
Sarah’s voice was sharp. “And end up in the gaol – then you would – if you commit an act against the law. Er, but it’s too much for you. You can’t be telling me all this from some dark place inside your mind.” She lowered her voice and widened her eyes. “The mistress’ll have you taken to that lunatic hole. You’ve heard rumours of it. I’m sure ’tis a true place – below ground and no windows, a place that’ll keep any one of us from ever espying you ag’in.”
Rose looked at her, puzzled. “Why would that be done to anyone?”
Sarah leaned close and said quietly, “I’ve been told on a good word that the law wakes women believed to be witches – wakes them while they’re living. A woman accused of being a witch is stood still. A bridle bit is wedged inside her mouth and fastened with chains to a wall. Then there’s women convicted of murder by tainted laws. . . . So silence yourself and bide alive. The past can’t be unwritten, and if the present is not bearable, sure you could ask the mistress for another room. Your future can bear your own mark.”
Rose turned as her mistress hurried into the room asking, “Who is handling my name in clutter and chatter?”
“’Tis me, ma’am,” Sarah answered meekly. “I’m trying to beat sense into the girl you brought into this place as your own helper. She hankers for her forked relatives. I’m sure you’d be telling her if ’twas fit for her to know.”
The mistress lifted her chin and tossed her words at the servant. “You’ll be going now – and darken the room behind your back.”
“Don’t mind if I do, ma’am,” Sarah replied. She added, aside to the mistress, “She stares so long, cocks her ear and seems to listen. You could swear she knows something, and ’tis the same day too, July twenty-first.” The servant hurried out.
The mistress turned back to the girl. “Now what’s this nonsense?”
Rose stood up, as if trying to pull herself together. “I’m unsettled, that’s it, ma’am. I don’t know why.”
“Well then,” the mistress said, shaking her head, “there’s some cause. What is it? The servants have been complaining about you long enough. ’Tis time to do something about it.”
“It all started with the sight of a man.” Rose, her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright, rushed on. “One day down by a fish stage at the harbour’s edge when I went to buy you seal flippers, ma’am, I sensed a presence that made my heart skitter under my bodice. I heard the name Judge Boulton, and the sound was like a strike against my ears. A man spoke to someone standing beside him and his voice slithered up and down my spine. I turned to see his face. Stone-cold eyes, hooded like a monk’s head, glanced my way and I saw that the man’s eyebrows were like a nest of spiders that the hair on his head was creeping away from.”
The mistress said, “It seems to be old Judge Boulton you’re talking about, but he’s long gone from this colony.”
Rose ignored her words. “My strange feelings began then and got worse after I was moved to this room. I fancied I saw a brown-garbed, hooded lady in the window of the courthouse.”
The mistress poked a long, thin finger in Rose’s face. “Now girl, no more talk of this, not to the servants or anyone in the roads. There are things better left to lie.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Rose answered in a defeated voice.
A FEW DAYS later, Sarah, who was up early to do dusting in the guest room for an expected visitor, stopped at the sounds of cries coming from Rose’s room. She hurried in. “Wake up!” she chided her. “Sure you’re going to be the death of this house with your screams, the death of yourself with your words of late. We must call the mistress and she’ll settle this.”
Rose lay in bed, her eyes wide open above the counterpane she had pulled to her chin and clutched tight, her knuckles white nubs. She whispered hoarsely, “No! No! I’m trying.”
Sarah, ignoring her protests, hurried to the doorway and beckoned to the mistress passing by. The mistress’s heavy footsteps were quick as she followed Sarah back into the room. She closed the door, stuck her hands on her hips and asked Sarah, in a firm, no-nonsense voice, “Whatever are you blathering about now?”
“’Tis the child ag’in, ma’am,” Sarah answered. “She’s fair terrified out of her sleep. Something in her dreams shocks her. You can tell it in her face.”
The mistress went to the girl’s bed and said in a grave voice, “The gentlewoman who raised you and brought you to me was not apprised of your background when Bishop Fleming sent you to her. Nor am I any the wiser, though there have been rumours which I have not seen fit to repeat. Now you’re old enough to be in service. I’ve been trying to ignore your condition, but there’s too much talk of your screams and I’ve asked Bishop Fleming for the name of a forked relative or an acquaintance who knows your beginnings. The bishop is not willing to discuss your situation, but he’s given me the name Anastasia Mandeville. ’Tis her right to tell or withhold whatever truth there is.”
Rose butted in. “Truth?” Her eyebrows lifted and her mouth dropped open. There came a timid knock on the door.
The mistress turned her head quickly, her voice sharp. “Open it, Sarah.”
Sarah rushed to open the door. She curtsied to a tall woman standing there. Then she stepped back quickly as the woman entered the room, her sweeping dark dress jostling a statue of the Virgin Mary on a low nightstand.
“Hello to you, Miss.” Sarah curtsied again. She looked into Irish blue eyes in a strong, fresh face.
The woman nodded. “Not a Miss or a widow. I am Anastasia, the wife of Richard Mandeville, Esquire, of Brigus, cousin to the poor orphan.” She looked toward the mistress. “Your maid let me in through the main entrance and sent me upstairs saying you were in the room on the right of the stairs. I hope I’m not being intrusive, but ’tis a short day for a long way when ’tis any kind of bad weath – ”
The mistress interrupted her. “It’s good you came, ma’am, for there is no holding back whatever secrets there be.” She nodded at Rose. “The girl must learn and rest from a mystery that plagues her. Tell her all, so that she can place herself in the events as they were and rest from the uncertainty that shadows her innocent mind.”
Anastasia pulled a handkerchief from a pocket in her sleeve, fanned herself and asked, “What if I am at your door with unspeakable secrets?”
“Then make them speakable for this child’s sake. Unless they be told, she will die for ’tis a white bird that’s been hanging around the square and all but pitched inside the window – and would have, had the window been open.”
Rose’s eyes were bright and fearful, her voice trembling. “I’ll take the truth so that I can bear it through my days. Now ’tis unsettled I am in dreams and daytime.”
Anastasia Mandeville looked toward Rose and spoke rapidly. “I’ll give the truth, child, as I believe it. Your mother was my aunt Kit through marriage. She was a Catholic immigrant taken into the bed of John Snow, a temperamental Protestant landowner who got on the pig’s back – prosperous, that is. From 1816 on, they were hand-fasted in the one house. Though Aunt Kit gave him a litter of youngsters, he wouldn’t make her his wife. Then, to everyone’s surprise, he married her. Sure ’tis in the church records to decipher. ‘Catherine Mandeville, an Irish Catholic, and the Protestant John Snow came together and were married in 1828 by Reverend N. Devereaux, the Catholic priest of Harbour Grace.’”
Rose’s eyes widened. She let the words linking her to the past roll off her tongue. “Catherine is my mother’s Christian name and Mandeville her maiden surname, and John Snow is my father.”
“A cup of tea for the company,” the mistress said, nodding toward Sarah whose face clouded in disappointment at having to leave before the story was finished.
“Yes, ma’am,” Sarah complied with a sigh, dragging herself toward the door. She looked back; then she hurried her step.
Anastasia stopped to look after her. Then she continued. “By 1833, when she was forty, Catherine had nine children. There was Bridget, Eliza, Johnny named for his father, then Katie named for her mother, and – ”
“I have sisters and a brother!” Rose exclaimed.
“Yes, more than one brother, but don’t stare as if your eyes are anchored by a killick. I don’t know where they be. There was a scattering.”
Rose’s eyes softened into a dreamy look. “They are my own flesh then, brothers and sisters who were in the same chummy warmth of my mother’s body.”
“Come on then,” Anastasia urged. “Get up and out of your nightclothes. Put on your warm duds and my oarsman will take us to the place where your family lived. Across the bay you’ll be going then, to Salmon Cove. Cover that yarn of hair you’ve got there, girl. ’Tis like the leavings of a knit garment that’s been unravelled. If it should happen that once we’re out in the bay, we get in the wind’s eye, it’ll turn your hair into hag knots – stirrups for witches.”
The mistress put her hand on Anastasia’s arm and steered her to the outside. She understood more of Rose’s station now that she’d heard the names Catherine and John Snow. She spoke in a low voice. “Perhaps I acted in haste. I can’t go having the girl hear the truth of what I supposed to be claptrap. ’Tis too much for the maid who’s been delicate. I took her as a favour and lately she finishes only a half-day’s work, and that on a noon to midnight shift.”
Anastasia looked at her evenly. “You forget that she was in the midst of this torment, though she was too young to know all that was happening around her. Some things I’ll not want to tell, but I’ll take her to someone who will.”
Rose slipped from her featherbed and hesitated before going to wash her face in a small basin. Then she gathered her clothes and dressed with determination. She hastened to grab her warm, red, hooded cloak hanging on a hook. Then she followed Anastasia downstairs. The mistress closed the bedroom door behind them.
They met the maid coming up the stairs with a tray. She stopped and asked, “Not tarrying fer a sup of tay, ma’am?”
Anastasia shook her head. “Thank you, but no. It’s not a whole day we’ve got to catch the wind and sail around the bay.” She took a cup and a swallow from it, then placed it back on the tray.
“You’m lucky then,” the maid said, “for you’ve got the wind to your backs, and ’tis only a stun breeze anyway.”
“That it is then,” Anastasia answered, nodding toward Rose. “Let’s hurry, Maria, before the wind changes its mind and sets the sea on us with a fury.”
Maria, thought Rose. She called me Maria. She followed Anastasia without a word.
Book I
The Birth of
Caitríona de Móinbhíol – Catherine Mandeville
“I’d as ‘lief take a bear by the tooth’ as attempt an Atlantic crossing.”
Durand of Dauphinè
A Huguenot Exile in Virginia
One
VILLAGERS were told by Celtina, the midwife, that inside the bedroom of her small cottage, Mairi de Móinbhíol turned white as a cut tatie when she took her first look at her new grand baby. No one – not even Edward, the baby’s father – could draw out of her what destiny she had seen for the child. It was enough that he witnessed his bed bled into, the soaked rags and the splashes of blood on the walls. The midwife had dragged the baby feet first into the world, leaving Edward’s wife, Bridget, to bleed in silence until she was empty . . . still . . . and turning icy cold in the summer warmth.
At first the child didn’t draw breath even under the might of a slap – a first slap that was destined not to be the last. Celtina was not one to tamper with God’s work and risk forfeiting her own life by giving her breath to the child. She waited for God to breathe the breath of life.
“Ochón – Alas!” sighed the grandmother, looking on. Then, as if nudged by her gran’s sad sigh, the child let out a mewl.
Celtina brought the tiny wretch to her mother’s breast to take of the beestings, still warm. The baby latched on until she was full and then, with the umbilical cord tied but not cut, she fell asleep, lying on the cooling surface of her mother’s body, still a part of it – death and life entwined in a new day.
Grandmother de Móinbhíol wept silently for her daughter-in- law. Then she laid her black shawl over the baby, her old scent mixing with the sweet scent of new life. She and the midwife locked sad eyes, as if they both had the same fears. They had seen milk ooze from the baby’s breasts. Some of the villagers would have tried to convince them that it was a witch’s milk and that Catherine was a changeling and should be let die. The white discharge disappeared after four weeks and the family kept the secret of it.
GRAN MAIRI AND Grandda Liam loved Catherine, a child with heavy, dark ringlets and blue eyes that turned stormy whenever her father’s new wife, Ada, ordered her about. Mairi often whispered prayers that her second sight in the instance of Catherine would be mislaid. She watched her grow into a happy little girl picking daffodils in the meadow in early spring, and skipping through daisies during long summers. But she wasn’t to see her grow up. Mairi was drawing a bucket of water from the well inside the hill when the bucket splashed back down. Twelve-year-old Catherine saw her gran’s hand go to her chest and grab the shawl, covering it, as if some horror was gathering under the breast that had fed a dozen children, some gone to bountiful places across the ocean to mix Irish and foreign blood. The old mam fell, expelling a moan, it fleeing like a ghost, leaving her a corpse. The shock of her grandmother’s silence reached Catherine. She ran through the grass, calling, “Gran!”
Catherine flopped down by the well beside the limp body. She lifted the old woman’s head and sat holding it in her lap. She stared at a sky over which clouds drifted as light as pearl millet. But behind her eyes a darkness was gathering that she couldn’t break through – a darkness as heavy as the silence of her gran.
During the wake, Catherine looked into the cold eyes of her stepma who believed that children should only be seen and heard doing a hard day’s work. She scolded her for crying after her grandmother. “Your gran’s gone and it’s today you have to think of – not yesterday or tomorrow.”
The woman’s words worsened Catherine’s feelings, and whenever her stepma was in a foul mood she tried not to think of yesterday – or today. She set her thoughts on tomorrow and the cheer it would bring if only she could wait.
Catherine lost her father and her brother a few months later.
A motley group of war beggars came to drag them off to war. She had seen them coming down the Boher slocht, a dirt road, past the stone dyke that separated the neighbour’s house from her grandfather’s field, the village graveyard to the side of it. They reined their horses to turn and trample the little corner lot of corn that Catherine had coaxed with digging and dunging into a climb. The intruders had boldly stamped through the field of potatoes until the potato stalks broke and their beautiful white blossoms fell to the dark earth like snowflakes.
Catherine had heard a frantic call. “Open the latch!”
The wooden gate leaned into the wall in front of the door. Just as she lifted the latch, the gate was pushed back against her head. Her brother Richard ran past, leaving her open to a stranger’s face. She slammed the gate so hard against the man’s nose, his blood smudged her face as he passed her to chase her brother into the house.
Catherine had wanted to run away and hide, but she knew the men would catch her. She slipped inside the open door and over to huddle against her grandfather. The intruders eyed her boldly. One of them pointed a flint musket at her; then he lowered the gun and moved on. The strangers laid a tight fist on her father’s jacket. He stood silently, as if surprise had overtaken his tongue. The intruders turned to Richard as he crouched beside the fire whimpering.
“You are called upon to fight a noble war against the bloody English,” a tall, bold-looking Irishman told him. Richard responded, in a stuttering voice, that fighting starvation was the noblest war.
The leader then made a straightforward motion with his finger across his own throat. Catherine knew what that meant and her shuddering cry sent her brother and father scravelling to appease the fighters. Their quaking voices came as one: “What is it you want?”
“Fetch us food,” the gun bearer shouted, his eyes boring into Catherine. Her heart sank as she looked toward the fulacht fiadh. Early in the afternoon, her grandfather had wrapped a joint of meat in straw and placed it into the stone trough and kept it cooking by adding heated stones. Now the lamb was ready to eat. Her grandfather could ill afford to spare the meat to strangers.
Catherine helped lift the leg to the table and ladle some juice over it. After the intruders had gluttoned on the lamb leg, they grabbed hold of the de Móinbhíol men and dragged them outdoors.
Catherine had tried to scream, “Poppa, don’t go!” but the words froze in her throat. She could feel them there, and then they thawed and echoed through her head months after she had watched the strangers take her brother and father up over the hill. The sight of the men like black shadows against the sky came to Catherine and her grandfather time and again. They would often glance up the hill, waiting for the men to come down over it – back to them. Sometimes as the sun’s shadows crept across the hills, Catherine feared that in the darkness ruffians would come and take her. Other times she felt a dread that the shadow of death would steal across her grandfather’s bed. He’d be taken in his sleep, leaving her with her stepmother.
It was bad enough that she had lost her brother and father, but the weather appeared to be in mourning. Mist settled in over the hills and held for days. It sopped leaves and grass with dampness. Many mornings later, the sun looked out like a tease – a stranger with a smile on its face as it called children to play.
Smoke, from the chimneys of stone houses and small sod huts dotting the landscape, rose above the hills into the sky as Carrick’s youngsters climbed out the half-doors of their homes and slid into muddy holes. They ran laughing and leaping down to dip their feet in the Suir River. Soon they would be slipping under its water as if it were a satin blanket, warm when they were wrapped in it, their bodies cold when they shed it. Catherine eyed the Fleming children. They were ronk Catholics, and well off. Their uncle Martin was the priest in Carrick. Young Michael Fleming, who was Catherine’s age, always passed her with a lofty look. She had heard a farmer say, “That quare-looking young fellar has a weak chin but he’d make a fine priest, if he gits the call. His younger brother, Edward, is on for fighting the English. He don’t mind the church a’tall.”
Grandda Liam’s mud-walled, thatched cottage with its beaten-down earth floor stayed dry even during rain. Dried rushes spread over the floor saved the dampness. Just off from the house was a bath place where water was sprinkled on a circle of heated stones to make steam to ease Grandda’s aches.
The sun broke through the mist like a friendly face one spring morning, and Catherine slipped the catch on the door, hoping to get the spread of sunshine on her face. She ran out, her feet slipping in muck. She lifted her skirts and ran toward a greening meadow no longer hidden in mist. Her coarse cotton dress was already the worse for wear. But it was Saturday and due for a wash anyway. She turned to a stir, just in time to close her eyes before Daniel Kennedy, her second cousin, let a mud ball fly into her face. It rolled down over her dress in a brown smear. She picked it up, rolled it in the mud again, and ran after Daniel, her baggy white petticoats spotting as her bare feet splattered mud into the air. Daniel was far ahead, but she lifted her hand into the air and flung the ball with all her strength.
Ada was coming from behind the house along a tract of green. She opened her mouth in astonishment at seeing Catherine in such a mess with her arm flung out. The mud ball took the woman fair in the mouth. Ada rushed toward her stepdaughter. She raised a pudgy hand and brought it hard against Catherine’s lips, making them bleed and swell.
The sudden glance of the sun on the grass before it was smothered by a hand of cloud was what Catherine tried to think of as she leaned to scrub her stepma’s dress on an old furrowed washboard. Her knuckles burned like something scalded as she strained to rub out all the stains. The outside air was too damp for drying clothes so she hung the dress by the fire in the hearth, hoping the woman would not blame her for old stains too set to wash out.
The rick of turf gathered and laid up against the winter had been burned. Grandda went off with his wheelbarrow, his old knees almost knocking together with the twisted malady that had overtaken his limbs these last few years. When he returned and dumped the turf, Catherine helped him pile it by the sweat house. He came inside, muttering that spring grass should be erect and lively instead of in a dull swoon, heavy with mist. He sat in the corner and picked up his dúidín. He reached the tongs into the fire, hoisted a cinder to the pipe and lit it, his lips smacking down again and again on the short-stemmed, blackened clay pipe. He settled in the comfort of his pipe smoke and the warmth of the coal and peat fire meeting cool May air. The sun would shine, but not today. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not for a hundred morrows.
Two
“CATHERINE, you’re a petulant young girl, that you be then, but the apple of your grandfardher’s eye. I’ll tell you that,” Liam rasped with a fond look. “There’s news you’ll be wanting to hear. Your stepma’s gone off to Waterford with some tinker, left Carrick-on-Suir while you were off gathering curr amilly.”
The sweetness of the honey root Catherine had picked from the grassy fields over the hilly reach minutes before tasted even sweeter now. She passed her grandfather a piece of the herb and the two sat by the hearth, enjoying the peace a hag’s absence could bring to a place. Ada had been threatening to leave since Edward was carried off.
Catherine and her grandfather, who was all of sixty, were left alone, he to rage at the loss of his son and grandson and to worry about the damage to his crops. There were fewer vegetables to be harvested in the fall, but the man and his granddaughter were kept busy. Two lambs were killed, the meat cured. Their wool was yanked and saved to be added to spring wool already yarned and made ready to be knitted into stockings and sweaters and cotton-lined woollen underwear. Stools of osiers were cut in November and December and piled against a garden wall. Once spring came, the rods were boiled, allowing the skin to slip off in one peeling like a stocking off a leg. The skins were used for making very strong ropes to trade with other villagers.
Whenever Liam sat by the fire, his eyes seemed to float in tears, as if thoughts of the capture of Edward and Richard were like eyelashes stuck in the whites of his eyes, leaving a constant watering. Catherine sat beside him while he told her that she wasn’t just an Irish maid. She was of Anglo-Norman descent. Her Mandeville ancestors had come from England with William the Conqueror. They had taken the lands of Balleydine on the river Suir, and survived through countless wars and feuds. “’Tis all one flesh and one blood we be – all of us on this earth – and those who fight inflict their oewn brothers,” he said in a grave voice.
The fall turned to winter. Catherine scrubbed threadbare clothes against the wooden washboard as she gazed out the window to the cold landscape. She remembered how in springtime Daniel would slow to a walk on his way up the hill to plough his father’s ground. In summer, he passed their house, going out to fodder the outliners. Hay had been tied with a rope and bunged on his back to a dry spot to feed cattle not stabled for the night. He slaved in bog and meadows, carrying stud baskets of water and milk. His gaze would pitch on Catherine, his eyes like brown butterflies. She had her sight on him too, but only when his back was turned. She had listened to the sounds of his feadóg penetrating the mist. Now she imagined his strong fingers playing the whistle.
She told Grandda about Daniel and he asked, “What kind of giggery pockery is that? Sure he’s Church of Ireland. His destiny might not be a good one for you to have to follow after.”
Destiny! she thought. Whatever that is, I’ll be having nothing to do with it.
CATHERINE AND LIAM had good luck with them. They survived many winters alone. This one passed with only a shadow of snow. Spring came early, with a gentle laugh of wind under the bright smile of the sun. The grandfather, despite his malady, and the young girl scampered out the door and kicked up their heels on the green like dancing elves. The growth of new life was all around them.
In a short time, wild Alexander and mushrooms grew large enough to be ready for the pot. “The strength of any land lies in how well she can nourish her people like a mudder nurses her children,” Catherine’s grandfather told her. Sometimes Catherine lay on the grass as if the land was her mother, she, her child. She loved her little spot of Ireland. It held all that was familiar. The potato stalks grew green and sturdy and promising, while Liam sat working hazel rods to make himself a cylinder basket. He had done the weaving and was finishing up the binding when he looked across at Catherine with a clouded look. “You’ll be going away come late spring.”
She was leaning on the half-door and eyeing the early spring sky, deep blue and cut into by dark limbs of trees motionless against the silent stealth of night. An owl, like a white cloud, feathers light and ghostly, flittered to the eave of the barn. In its mouth was a small mouse, a kiss of food for its baby.
“And where will I be going then?” she answered in a strong, even voice.
“To a new land where some of your kin already are. They live by the ocean and fish from the sea.”
“And you, Grandda?” She gave him an intense look as she waited for his answer.
“An old Irishman likes to keep his legs on his oewn land and his feet under his oewn table, girl,” her grandfather told her. “Besides, new experiences bide well with the young. I won’t be leavin’ here.” Her grandfather knew something was coming to dispossess them, to take their place and their peace, and he, in ill health, knew he had not the years nor the will to start over.
Catherine looked at her grandfather, the last knot keeping the fabric of her life in Ireland from unravelling. That knot could only hold so long. She did not want to leave Carrick-on-Suir. She loved the place nestled in a lush valley against gentle mountains. Though she knew Ireland to be surrounded by water, she had never been to a seaport. It was hard to imagine the new-found land her grandfather told her about – land rising out of an ocean almost as deep as the sky.
Catherine had heard idle men, as they sat around a keg of poitín in her grandfather’s house far into the night, talking about the island across the pond. Daytime, they often gathered at “The Tell” and squatted on a rock wall just out the road. They lit their dúidíns and squinted against the smoke in their eyes as they yakked over the day’s doings and the morrow’s worries. They could get passage to Talamh an Éisc by promising two or three years’ labour to a plantation owner. There were places in the new land that had not had the print of a human foot. People who left Ireland could have land all to themselves.
Catherine was watching for Daniel as she had been doing for days without seeing him when her grandfather’s voice cut into her thoughts. “You’re best to be setting your mind in gear for leavin’ this place, girl. Don’t be pitching your sights on Daniel.” Liam’s voice was stronger than it had been for some time, though there was a thickening black spot on his face that was drawing the skin tight. It seemed to pain him when he smiled. He sat beside the small fire in the grate, holding coins in his trembling hand. They still held traces of the ground from which he had dug them. It was money he had laid aside for his coffin and to buy seed for next year’s planting. Now it would pay for Catherine’s voyage to the land of fish.
He no longer wanted a grave box. For all he cared, he could be wrapped in rags and slung down into the earth. He had seen a foreshadowing of Catherine’s destiny in the midwife’s eyes as she left the house when Catherine was born almost twenty-three years ago. He had said nothing, not wanting to know his granddaughter’s fate. He knew that before his son and grandson returned he would be in the earth with no one to protect Catherine from the wild dogs that some of the young men in the place were. Even now there were glances toward her, and familiar looks like ones he once had toward young women when his body was on the surge. He wanted Catherine away from here before she got rooted to the place with a young Irishman. She was going to a new land where war had not the chance to take a foothold as it had in Ireland. He wanted new beginnings for his darling, grand girl. He hoped that the evil eye would not be able to follow her across the sea.
“You best go on the boat,” her grandfather said in a haggard voice. “I’ve no life left to speak of and the warmth of this house will soon follow the smoke. I don’t want me granddaughter caught up in the Irish rebellion. There’s to be a lot more unrest in this place. You’d best be away to a new land where prejudices won’t have deep roots. Your cousins from Kilkenny are already in the island country. Mind you don’t get yourself in with the English. Keep the Cartlic faith, and find an Irishman who will keep a warm house with plenty. I’ll give you a bag of potato eyes to set. God rest them and make them grow.”
Catherine looked toward the greening land; then she eyed the tarry clouds. She could already feel the cold stealing in like a monster to swallow the warmth of the house, the warmth of her grandfather’s body. It was as if winter, instead of summer, was coming.
“But Daniel?”
“Gone,” her grandfather said abruptly. “I’m not sure what’s to become of him. Maybe he’s gone with one of them secret societies trying to oust the English. I’ve laid by enough money for your passenger ticket,” he added, his voice choking, his eyes misty. She stared at the coins in his hands. Then she looked toward the River Suir cutting through Carrick like a silver scar. The 114-mile river, alive with brown trout and salmon, flowed from Devil Bit Mountain, passed like a traveller through Cahir, then Clonmel, through Carrick-on-Suir and on down to the mouth of Waterford into the Atlantic Ocean. Sometimes the hills and sky were painted on its calm waters. Boats moving down the river scrubbed away the scene. A blow of wind brushed the river grey.
Catherine had one last time on the hills. She picked some tiny, white bog flowers for the grave of the mother she could only imagine. Afterward, she lay across the grassy knobs above the meadow, tightened her arms against her body and let herself roll, as if she were in a barrel going faster and faster down the hill, just as she and other children had done when they were younger. A large rock wall brought her to a jolting halt. She lay still, wondering about that other land. Will the grass be green and will I find the same flowers? She got up and hurried to pick the root of the shamrock.
“The fairies have wanted you, Caitríona,” her grandfather said as she came inside, her breasts heaving from her romp over the land. “Once, when you were little, I felt their breath mingling with the sweetness of yours as I stooped to kiss you good night. I have heard the whisper of their wings against the walls after you’ve settled in sleep. Don’t even take the belief of them, dear heart.”
He remembered his wife having bad dreams. One of them surfaced before he could slam his mind against it. Mairi’s recurring dream had frightened her to tears. She had seen Catherine as a moon cut into pieces, turned to blood, and a dark night descending forever. Liam had brushed her dreams aside by exclaiming, “Pure augury. Pay no mind to it.”
On a muddy, spring morning, they left home, the old fellow with Catherine’s hand in his. The boat keeper was impatient to be off the north banks of the River Suir for the seventeen miles down to Waterford. Catherine pressed her lips on her grandfather’s furrowed cheek wet with the brine of his tears. She pulled in her lips unconsciously and tasted salt – her tongue taking inside her the last bit of her grandfather she would ever have. Her own tears stayed sealed inside her, inside a body that was coming alive to a sense of intrigue, even while she shivered with thoughts of her dark journey. She could not even imagine the rise and size of the new island that would bear her footprints.
Liam had pulled a soft, woollen shawl from a place in the wall before they left. “Your mudder’s shawl to be in your keeping. The hag was making off with it, but I yanked it off her. ’Tis yours now to wear. Your mam’s scent is still in it, for ’tis never seen water since she laid it aside. She wore it over her belly while she carried you for ’tis not proper to show oneself with child.”
Catherine took the varicoloured shawl without a word and buried her face in it. Then she pulled it over her heavy dress, dyed red from boiled sraith na gcloch – the hard moss she picked off dry fences and in stony places.
CATHERINE THANKED THE oarsmen as they helped her down from the pier to the passenger boat. She nodded a greeting to the few people seated on the thwart and then called to her grandfather standing on the banks. “Send word, Grandda, if me fardher and Richard show for the land.” She pressed her arms to her side, feeling the shamrock and a wild Irish flower trailing wispy brown roots in pockets she had sewn in her coat sleeves.
Liam’s face brightened. “The promise is there, Caitríona, to be given as soon as the lads break over the green. I’ll send word by someone passing to that land.” His face darkened. “But I’ll be fearing the land grabbers. Sure they’re in the works everywhere.” He wiped his eyes and then waved his large, brown handkerchief. “Slán leat – goodbye,” he said softly. “I’ll place you under me wishes and prayers.”
He called after her, “Glac bog an saol agus glacfaidh an saol bog tú – Take the world foine and aisy and the world will take you the same.”
Struck dumb with grief, Catherine felt her eyes plim with tears. They overran her lids and plopped down her nose like large raindrops. Tears were her only way to say goodbye to her grandfather.
The Suir River’s currents pulled the boat down – on down between dark hills shadowed by lively clouds – taking Catherine away from familiar ground and everyone who had ever loved her. She would soon be sailing to another island – Talamh an Éisc.
Three
OARSMEN rowed the boat down to Waterford to its river sucking the feet of the hills on one side and the beach on the other. Residents trudged down from high in the hills through paths flanked by Irish ivy and morning glories, to pick sea kelp from rocks on the beach, and to buy fish from fishermen on the wharf. They watched relatives give up on their homeland for a land far beyond their gaze. Irishmen, many with wives and children, left for North America, hoping for betterment. Young single males looked to make money. Some of them would return to the Emerald Isle and to waiting sweethearts.
Only now could Catherine imagine Ireland as a massive rock anchored in an ocean, surging waters stretching beyond her vision to touch the shores of another gargantuan rock. She had no time to think on it, for she was hurried along toward a long wharf by a rush of passengers and relatives seeing them off. Out from it, several large schooners lay anchored. Not far from them, fishermen stood in coracles, jigging fish from the river. Birds, meandering through the sky, pitched on the hills of Waterford as a young woman hurried down a narrow lane. Looking frightened, she rushed to the arms of a waiting lover.
Catherine tripped over the girl’s ragged skirt as she rushed away from her coosie and back up the lane, sobbing. The girl’s companion fingered his fare with one hand and ate a potato scallop with the other, his blue eyes clouded as his gaze followed the girl.
Catherine looked down at her rough hands, well-worn clothes and buttoned boots, a button missing from one boot, and thought, I’ll do good over there in a new land ripe for the likes of me.
Bobs of conversation drifted across her ears as she shifted her bag over her shoulder and waited with other passengers to board the ship.
“The Irish Sea, the Celtic Sea, and the North Atlantic ring Ireland,” a man with a white beard was telling a little boy standing solemnly beside him.
“’Tis not like going to Belfast then, or England. We don’t know what we’re doing – going off on that wild sea,” a woman complained.
“That ’tis not then. There’s land waiting for us to set the first hoe in it. We’ll claim the land, sure. No one can take it from us. If they try, we’ll split their arses.”
A young woman, leaning on the arm of a man looking twice her age, whined, “I never wanted to leave Ireland. I should have had an inheritance of hand and thigh.”
The man grunted. “You mean there were no brothers and you come in for everything. Why didn’t you have it then, instead of going off with the likes of me only because I’d pay your passage?”
“I’ve told you before. When me fardher died, me uncles claimed everything.”
The man scowled. “What’s gone is gone; don’t prate to the world.” The man pinched his disgruntled companion and she let out a yelp.
Catherine heard a rough-looking man mutter, “I didna want to sell ya, maid – you bein’ me sister – but ’twas how I got me passage and yours in advance. Do this or the two of us’ll starve. You’ll be gotten a good price for, so you will, and a little of it will go back in yer own pocket. If you don’t get yourself fertilized by a hot-blooded Englishman, you might get away to do your oewn will.”
A man lumbered toward Catherine, scuffing dirt under his gaitered boots. “No time for daydreams, girl. ’Tis to a new land you’ll be going. See that speck of ship coming in. Her name is Cambroila and to the land of Talamh an Éisc she’ll be setting course, once she’s off-loaded the supplies she’s brought back.”
Catherine nodded and got in line for the custom house inspection. She felt a stir against her skirts as she stood waiting. She tried to move but the crowd pressed against her. She didn’t know until she got to the wicket that someone had stolen her money. The officer at the open window dismissed her and she was pushed aside by passengers reaching with ready money. She moved to a side of the wharf, her heart pounding in fear. She would be left at Waterford without means to find her way home. The savings her grandfather had worked so hard to garner were gone. She stood motionless, tears dripping down her face.
THE CAMBROILA HAD let off supplies and was now ready for its passengers. Captain Murrey straightened up from checking a rope in the fairlead. His rough face hardened into a scowl he was likely to keep through the voyage as he eyed his passengers keenly. He spied Catherine, not a slip of a girl, but a sturdy, full-hipped, full-bosomed female. “’Tis a pleasure this one’ll be,” he muttered, barking an order to one of his men to hold the rope. He stepped ashore and tipped his cap. His voice was gruff. “So you’ll be wanting to be aboard me ship, will yer?”
She met the captain’s sea-bleared eyes, and dropped her gaze, not wanting to be part of the look he gave her. “My grandda said so, sir,” she hiccuped, “but ruffians stole me sovereigns.” Her words tumbled out. “They must’ve been watching me before I came on the wharf. I checked me skirt to make sure the money was safe.”
Captain Murrey’s look shifted from Catherine’s bright, tear-soaked eyes to the cut hem of her skirt where the money had been sewn. She’s been well-fed, he mused. The juice of life is in this one. He turned from eyeing her body. He nodded toward the boat. “In you go then, squat yourself among the passengers and we’ll see what’s to become of ya.”
Catherine scrambled to get to the gangplank, relieved to be getting away. Hope rose in her, tingled with an excitement that made her glad, though her legs felt weak as she walked the gangway. Someone called, “Don’t look down as you cross to the ship.”
A man’s voice murmured against the ear of a young girl he had his arm slung around. “Sure over there in the new land silver grows on trees.”
“Money?”
“No, silver.”
Another young fellow raised eyebrows that had thick scars above them. “I’ve been there. It’s nothing but freezing rain coating trees on a cold day with a bright sun. That’s all. It’s a silver thaw.”
“It wasn’t easy on the boat the last time I crossed the sea, I can tell yer that,” another passenger said. “The ship was on mad water. Passengers were stowed three to a bunk and given a rat’s ration of food once a day, pea soup and the kind. There were sixty hands on board, including a dozen girls to be sold. One had a fever on her and died. A storm broke the hoops of the last salt pork barrel. Mildewy biscuit was left to eat with water that was rationed. I hope ’tis better this time.”
Catherine stepped down the rope ladder into the hold of the ship. She got herself settled in a dim, lantern-lit underbelly with strangers. A mixture of excitement and apprehension slipped inside her as the ship moved out into the ocean away from the steady flow of water lapping the shores of Ireland.
“We should look for a shelf to stow ourselves,” one young girl said, dragging on the hand of a red-headed fellow.
The heaving of the ship as it sailed into deep water upset Catherine’s stomach and a tide of fluid came up her throat. She pitched forward into the lap of a scowling man. Vomit went down between his open legs. He pushed a keg in front of her and she spewed into it, her blue eyes, defiant and unashamed. “I tell yer now, maid,” he threatened, “you had better keep that slop in your own mout’ or else.”
Catherine thought she had spied Daniel on the ship as she came aboard, his thatch of blond, shoulder-length hair tied back against the high collar of a thick, blue jacket. Now she looked up to see familiar long legs coming down the ladder. “Daniel,” she whispered, “what a surprise on me!”
He ducked his head and, smiling, said, “Catherine,” and she knew she was no longer alone. She had a friend and he was going on the same journey to the same place. A familiar sight, he would be – she hoped – for all her live-long life.