The Ballymara Road (30 page)

Sister Perpetua looked puzzled and frowned.

‘What is it, Sister Perpetua? For goodness’ sake, what is the problem now?’

Sister Theresa had never really liked Sister Perpetua. Putting her to work in the orphanage had been the ideal way to keep her out of sight. Or so she had thought. Sister Perpetua was methodical, pedantic and downright humourless. Not that Sister Theresa was in need of a laughing nun, but she did like to see them smiling every now and then. God knew, with the nature of the work they had to undertake and the amount of death they had to deal with, the odd smile was like a tonic to them all. But not Sister Perpetua. It was three years since she had taken her vows and, with each year, she had soured a little bit more than the last. Sister Theresa had never witnessed Sister Perpetua smile. She had also never known her to be wrong, which was why all of this was so depressing.

‘Nothing, Sister, it just occurred to me that I haven’t seen the new kitchen girl at mass for a little while now.’

Sister Theresa frowned. ‘She has been sick, but she surely must be improved. I’m about to check on the meal for tonight, so I shall see her for myself. I have known her since she was a baby. We reared her. She was never a shirker, just a bit simple.’

Changing the subject quickly, she asked, ‘Did you burn all the papers from the orphanage as I ordered?’

Sister Theresa closed the pages of the journal as she spoke and handed it across the desk to Sister Perpetua, who took it with her outstretched hand. Sister Theresa rose from her chair.

This was Sister Perpetua’s cue to follow likewise.

‘I did. Sister Clare helped me. We kept only the contracts the girls have signed at the mother and baby home, agreeing to never make contact with their babies, and we burnt all the death certificates from the orphanage. We lit a bonfire by the compost heap at the end of the potato patch and the furthest away from the house.’

Sister Theresa was now feeling better disposed towards Sister Perpetua. Her manner was tedious but her efficiency very useful.

‘Very good. Sister Assumpta has done likewise at the Abbey. There is a midwife in Dublin who will not stop giving out to the authorities, which is making life very difficult indeed for us all. If we have nothing for them to see, if we don’t keep any records, they can’t look for anything, can they? If we are asked, it will be no sin if we do not have to lie. A simple explanation that the papers were lost in a fire will be all that is needed. That will be no word of a lie. Well done, Sister Perpetua. We should have a little talk when the bishops have left tomorrow about whether it is time you moved back down into the convent. But not yet. Now we have to prepare for our visitors.’

Maggie well knew the determined footsteps of Sister Theresa as they thumped down the stairs into the kitchen. Her inbuilt antennae were programmed to pick up the first step as soon as the top door was opened. By the sound of their tread alone, Maggie could tell even before she had reached the second step which sister was paying the kitchen a visit.

‘As dainty as a bleeding elephant,’ she muttered under her breath as the familiar black shoes and skirt came into view. She quickly slipped her smouldering pipe back into her apron pocket.

‘Maggie.’ Sister Theresa was already speaking while still on the stairs. ‘Is all in order for our visitors tonight? Did we have a good side of beef delivered from the village? The bishop’s teeth aren’t that good, so we don’t want tough meat now.’

‘Have I ever served ye tough meat, Reverend Mother, visitors or not?’ Maggie asked her question without impertinence, but her meaning was implicit.

She could feel the heat of her pipe burning in her pocket. It was rare for Sister Theresa to visit the kitchen in the middle of the morning, which was when Maggie always had a cuppa and a ‘pull of me pipe’. It was also when she gave the girls from the orphanage or the mother and baby home a cuppa and a slice of bread and butter, telling them to rest their legs for a minute or two.

Maggie had learnt how to make the flour stretch by making slightly smaller loaves for the nuns, so that she could keep an extra one back for the helpers.

The girls had shoved their mugs and bread under the bench and were scrubbing the pots, just as they had been moments before.

Sister Theresa studied them. Maggie sweated.

‘Where’s the girl? Is she still sick?’

Daisy had supposedly been sick for the best part of a week. Maggie had known this moment would arrive.

Maggie was many things – kind, hurt, wise and damaged – but she was not stupid.

‘She is off to the village to collect me baccy, Reverend Mother. She is the only one I can trust. Frank is busy digging up cabbage and I have run out. Did ye want me to send her to ye when she gets back?’

‘Maggie, you don’t send the girls to the village on your errands. For goodness’ sake, not today of all days, and not on any day.’

‘No, Sister, well, I can only say that with me baccy, you will likely have a better-tasting dinner and more tender beef, as it is a fact that if I am in a bad mood when I cook, the food never tastes as good and the milk often curdles.’

Sister Theresa stared at Maggie. She played an important role in the convent. Supplying three meals a day to the sisters and any visitors. This left the nuns free to run the mother and baby home, the nursery, the laundry, the orphanage and the retreat. Making money was the order of the day.

Using nuns to run the gardens and the kitchen would have been a waste of resources. The sisters had to be self-sufficient and, in the last few years, they had been successful in that. They were almost as successful as the Abbey, Sister Theresa guessed.

The bishops were visiting tonight and had asked to look over the bank books.

‘They can do that gladly,’ Sister Theresa had said to Sister Celia. ‘We can hand them the books with pleasure. What we do not do is tell them about the biscuit tins with the money in the press. We have upwards of nineteen thousand pounds in there now, so we have, and it will be gone in a flash if the bishop knew we had it. If we ran into trouble, sure, we would have to beg on our knees for a handout. The money in the tins is ours and it stays that way.’

Her nuns were working long hours, for the benefit of the community, and she dreaded the disruption that losing Maggie and Frank would bring. As she stood in the kitchen, she knew she would have to be reconciled to that loss if Sister Perpetua’s record-keeping was correct.

Right now, she was too busy to tackle the problem of Maggie or, for that matter, the errand-running kitchen girl. She needed to visit the orphanage to let them know the bishops were arriving and to ensure the sick children were in the isolation rooms. Every one of them would need a bath today and that would be a massive effort in itself.

Frank returned to the lodge, knowing that Maggie would be late back.

The nuns had been all of a flutter all day, preparing for the simultaneous visit of two bishops. Nothing but wailing and crying had been heard through the orphanage windows and, as Frank well knew, the rumpus was being caused by much more than the mere fact that all the children were being bathed in cold water. Tempers were flying.

It made his heart crunch when he saw a nun dragging a child by her hair from the washroom back to the orphanage and it was all he could manage not to say or do something.

‘Heavenly Father, my blood boils, so it does, I have to calm me temper. Jaysus, I want to grab the nun by her fecking habit and drag
her
into a cold bath and then across the yard.’

It broke his heart to see the cruelty inflicted upon the children and every day he brought Maggie a different story.

Frank was often quiet when he arrived back at the lodge after work, and Maggie knew it was because he had seen things that upset him. Frank wasn’t a great talker. Maggie would have to leave him be to eat his food, smoke his pipe and drink his poteen. Only then would he occasionally make a comment and, when he did, it was frequently shocking.

‘Ye know the little one, the lad I told ye about who was only just walking, and so thin I could see the bones of his arse through his fecking trousers? Well, today I saw them putting him in the ground, so I did. They didn’t even lay him down with a prayer or a blessing. They just rolled him off the edge, into that pit. Not a coffin in sight.’

Frank would finish speaking with a long drink from his mug of poteen and Maggie would not comment, merely sit in silence, knowing that Frank and she were both doing exactly the same thing: thinking of their own little lad. Frank threw a stick onto the range and then blew on the peat to make it glow red. The oven was still hot from earlier in the afternoon, when Maggie had run back to the lodge from the kitchen to set his dinner over a pan of hot water, with a lid on top to keep it warm.

Today he sat on the rocking chair by the fire with his dinner on his lap, his pot and pipe lying by his side, and he began to eat.

The food was delicious but the sights of the day made it stick in his gullet. He scraped most of it into the grate so that she wouldn’t see. It was not to be. Maggie opened the door to the smell of burning beef.

‘For feck’s sake, ye eat as good as a nun and then throw it on the fire. Are ye crazy, Frank?’

Frank noticed that she looked exhausted.

Throwing her shawl over the back of one of the pair of chairs at the kitchen table, she made her tea, chatting away to Frank who remained sitting by the fire, still, staring into the flames.

‘I suppose ye let the bishops and the band of followers in through the gates, did ye? Holy Mary, what a commotion today has been, but I tell ye what, Frank, Sister Theresa came into the kitchen, looking for Daisy, she did. She made a pretence at first, but I know that is what she was after. I know that woman like the back of my hand, I can see right though her, I can. Wanting to know if the beef was tough, my fecking arse. She was checking up. If I didn’t know better, I would say someone was on to us.

‘Daisy has been gone nearly a week now and do you know what else, Frank? I was shocked to see that bishop tonight. He’s the same one, ye know, the one Daisy was on about, the dirty fecking bastard. That has worried me because if Daisy did what we told her, surely to God he would not be a free man by now.’

‘Don’t believe it, Maggie, the bishops are as powerful as the Lord God himself. No man would dare arrest a bishop. They look after one another and poor girls like Daisy, they are just left to suffer.’

Maggie looked at Frank with disbelieving eyes. ‘I cannot believe that. Not everyone in Liverpool is a Catholic. She would have no luck here in Ireland and, God knows, she would be put in the asylum for the rest of her days if she ever claimed such a thing. But in Liverpool, surely to God, they are more civilized altogether? Surely someone there will believe her?’

‘What do you think about this then?’ said Frank, as he removed what appeared to be bits of charred paper from his pocket. Smoothing the larger pieces out carefully, he said, ‘Well, go on then, you are the reader, what do they say?’

‘What are they?’ asked Maggie, peering at the blackened, burnt papers.

‘I don’t know, but Sister Perpetua and Sister Clare spent three hours burning them at the back of the tatties. ’Tis something they was desperate to be rid of. They ran up and down from the orphanage and the mother and baby home with boxes flying everywhere, so they was, and Sister Perpetua, she was shouting to Sister Clare to get a move on before the rain came and, sure, I have never seen Sister Perpetua so much as speak above a whisper, never mind shout. ’Twas all very odd indeed.’

Maggie sat down in the chair, pulling towards her the largest and most complete document.

‘It’s a letter signed by a priest,’ she said. ‘Her family can no longer manage to contain the girl’s nature for flirtation. No man is safe from her advances. She must seek penance and be punished for forcing her neighbour to commit a shameful sin. She is pregnant. Her father never wants to see her face again and they have committed her to your care.

‘Here ye go, some of the letters have gone, but there’s enough to make it out.’

‘Jesus, who would that be?’ asked Frank.

‘It says here,’ Maggie replied, ‘her name was Julie, Julie Dempsey.’

Frank rubbed his bearded chin thoughtfully. ‘Aye, Julie, that one died in childbirth, as did the child. She is one of the few to have a wooden cross with her name on. She was one of the first. The nun who asked me for a mallet to put the cross in told me. Not one of them has a cross now.’

As Maggie studied the remaining burnt pieces of document, the dog began barking; someone was ringing at the gate. They both moved to the window to see a Gardai car, waiting to be admitted.

‘Well, what do you know?’ said Frank, when he was back indoors. ‘They asked, was the bishop here and I told him we have two tonight, and which one did he want? He has told me to leave the gate open as he won’t be staying long.’

A smile leapt across Maggie’s face. ‘Do you think it could be to do with Daisy?’

‘I have no idea, but ye may be right.’

Minutes later, as they stood at the door with their pipes, Frank waiting to lock the gate, the Gardai car drove past with a very white-faced bishop sitting in the back.

‘Right,’ said Maggie. ‘We have two things to do. I want a drink with me pipe and I want to read through all those bits of paper and then keep them somewhere safe. They could be our insurance for the future, Frank. Things are happening but I tell ye what: those nuns, they need to run a little faster to keep up.’

HARRIET TAPPED POLITELY
on Maura’s back door. She had yet to become comfortable with the habit of walking uninvited into the houses on the four streets.

She spotted Maura’s face at her back kitchen window, in the midst of a steam cloud, and waved as Maura beckoned her inside.

Harriet put her head round the back door, still feeling the need to ask. ‘Hello, do you mind me popping in?’

‘Not at all. Ye don’t have to stand on ceremony with us, Harriet,’ said Maura, who stood at the sink, drying her hands on her apron.