“It should. Do you know how many people we are feeding, at present, in County Clare? A hundred thousand. Do you know how many workhouse places there are in the county? Three thousand. What is to become of the remaining ninety-seven percent? No one can tell me. Here in Ennis,” he went on bitterly, “I can feed thirtyfive thousand—many of them able-bodied, by the way. The workhouse is being enlarged. Its new capacity will be just over one thousand.” He made a gesture of despair with his hands.
The Quaker looked at him with quiet amusement.
“I see you have changed since I first met you, Mr. Smith,” he remarked. “You were very much a political man, then.”
“Can the Quakers help?” Stephen asked. “It was Quakers, I believe, who first introduced the very idea of soup kitchens.”
“We can help,” Tidy said, “but we are cautious. There is always the fear, you know, that we would be perceived at trying to proselytise— which, I can assure you, we never do.”
“Ah,” said Charles O’Connell, “you mean ‘soup conversions.’”
Stephen had heard of these: Protestant clergymen or ministers offering food to the starving if they would abandon their Catholic faith.
“I can’t say that I’ve ever seen such a thing myself,” he stated. “Does it really happen?”
“It is rare,” replied the Quaker. “But I have seen it.”
“So what might you do?” Stephen wanted to know.
“We shall probably try to work with the local parishes. Send them supplies—food, clothing, and so forth—and let them make the distributions as they see best. We have facilities down in Limerick. The shipments would come from there.”
“I pray to God that you will,” Stephen told him. “By the autumn, the scale of the problem will be huge.”
They discussed further the various ways in which the Quakers might be able to send aid, and how far it would be possible to reach other parts of Clare. Whatever the Quakers could do, it was certainly not going to combat more than a part of the problem ahead.
After they had talked of this for some time, and knowing their host’s interest in the subject, Tidy asked O’Connell about the coming election.
“It’ll be a lively business, for sure,” he told them. “The borough election comes first, and that’s already sewn up. O’Gorman Mahon, that acted as proposer for my cousin back in ’28, is standing, and the local tradesmen love him. He’s mad as a hatter, actually. God knows what he’ll do in London. But his opponent is so crushed already, he’s about to withdraw. Then comes the county election. One seat is already spoken for, but the second will be interesting. For we have no less a personage than Sir Lucius O’Brien contesting it.” He grinned. “And I’m acting as his agent.”
Sir Lucius O’Brien was certainly no ordinary candidate. The most important of all that mighty clan, direct descendant of King Brian Boru himself, and the owner of the huge Dromoland Castle estate down towards Limerick, Sir Lucius was one of the greatest of the old princes of Ireland remaining in the west. There was only one problem.
He was a Tory. Unlike his younger brother, who supported the Young Ireland men, he had concluded that the Union with England was more to his advantage than otherwise. He supported England, therefore.
“His beliefs, I admit, present a problem,” said Charles O’Connell, “running, as they do, counter to everything that my cousin Daniel stood for and that the local electors want—for they want a Repealer, you may be certain, and not a Union man. But I am nonetheless confident of success.”
“How will you do it?” asked Stephen.
“He’s a very affable man,” said O’Connell. “And he has never been one to press his beliefs in public—at least not in any definite way. There is, you could say, a stately ambiguity about him. And that very ambiguity may help us. Mr. Knox, you know, despite the fact that he never ceases to campaign against the government on behalf of the people, dislikes the idea of Repeal. So the Clare Journal will support my man because Knox believes, correctly as it happens, that he’s a Tory. I have also convinced the local Temperance Society that Sir Lucius is for them. I can’t remember why. The Catholic clergy are mostly against him, and it will be difficult to fool them. But we are preparing some speeches that will give the impression that he might be more of a Repealer than you’d have thought. And because they know that his brother is an avid Repealer, I’m hoping to leave the idea in our electors’ minds that he might be closer to his brother than supposed. With luck, they will come to believe that there is no actual reason why they shouldn’t vote for him. Or better yet, they can believe he’s a bit of a Repealer if they want to—which by election day they will surely wish to do.”
“But why,” asked the Quaker, “will they want to believe this?”
“Sir Lucius O’Brien is a very rich man. There’ll be plenty of money around. He knows what’s expected of him.”
“He’ll pay them for their votes?”
“I don’t know how it is in your parish, Mr. Tidy,” said Charles O’Connell genially, “but if you want a man’s vote in Ennis, he’ll expect to be paid for it. It’s the same as in England. And America, too, for all I know,” he added.
“I am sorry to hear it,” said the Quaker.
“You must consider the effect of the Famine also,” O’Connell pointed out. “Our tradesmen have all been badly hit. You can hardly blame them for taking the chance to make a little money if they can. I’m negotiating with the trades body now.”
Tidy remained another two days in the area. He and Stephen had another conversation together, and agreed that they would correspond with each other about what might be done for the poor of Ennis after the election.
There was a monotony about most of Stephen’s days, but he didn’t mind. The faces at the soup kitchens grew familiar; without even thinking about it, he noticed who had grown sick or disappeared. During those summer months, fever, diarrhoea, dysentery—the bloody flux, as they called it—took their steady toll, especially on the children; he knew what deaths occurred in the hospitals and had some idea of the losses in the town, but who knew how many were dying out in the remoter regions? His only consolation, he supposed, was that if it were not for the soup kitchens, this mortality would be immeasurably higher.
He had been sorry to learn, in April, of the death of Eamonn Madden. Two months later, he saw Maureen looking very downcast. He had learned that it was better not to become too involved with those using the soup kitchens. It made things too difficult. But he went up to her on this occasion and asked what was wrong.
“My sisters Mary and Caitlin both died last week, Sir,” she said. “It was the bloody flux.” She sighed. “I knew they would.”
“You still have your little brother?”
“I do, thanks be to God, little Daniel. And my sister Nuala.”
“She works?”
“She has a little occasional work with a laundress, that is all.”
He would see her each day, often with the little boy holding her hand; and though they did not know it, they became for him a little symbol of hope that, in all this misery, the good were still surviving and his work was all worthwhile.
The election, when it came, was everything that Charles O’Connell had promised. It was astounding to him, but in the midst of the waiting lines for the soup kitchens and the daily dying all around, the town assumed an almost carnival atmosphere. Cartloads of rowdy men, calling out their support for their candidates, rolled through the streets, ignoring the poor folk they passed entirely. Indeed, the people in the lines seemed to enjoy the distraction of watching and listening to the curious show. The pubs were full of people, for Sir Lucius had given out free drink tokens to all and sundry.
Sir Lucius was a popular candidate. Charles O’Connell had done an excellent job, but he had good material to work with. Not only did Sir Lucius prove to be easy in every company, but to his genuine credit, he had given his own tenants every possible help through the Famine. No one on the vast Dromoland estate
had gone hungry, and everyone knew it. The people of Ennis hung green boughs on their houses to welcome him.
His speech, it had to be said, was a masterpiece.
“Was I not born in Ireland?” the aristocrat cried. “Were not my ancestors? Did they not fight for Ireland to be a single kingdom and to be free?”
They did. They did. You had only to look at him to see. For wasn’t he the heir of the greatest patriot of them all, who had driven the Vikings back eight hundred years ago? Brian, Son of Kennedy, Brian Boru.
“My roots are in Irish soil. My blood is Irish blood. Where else could my interests lie, if not in Ireland? What land could I possibly love, if not Ireland? For what country could I lay down my life, if not Ireland? Send me to Parliament and I will speak for Ireland.”
Stephen noted, with professional appreciation, that he hadn’t actually said that he was a Repealer. But you could easily think it.
As for the business of the election, it was no better and no worse, he supposed, than other elections had been in the past or would be in the future. The body of tradesmen were paid two hundred and fifty pounds for their votes, though they had asked for a hundred more. Other individual electors had negotiated various payments for their vote: one cheeky fellow had demanded fifty pounds. Charles O’Connell, as agent, received one hundred and eighteen pounds. “Though I should,” he said, “have had more.”
I could only wish, thought Stephen, that my poor people in the soup lines had a vote to sell. But some of the poorer townsfolk were able to make a bit when they were employed to kidnap some of the opposition voters and lock them up until the polls closed. One or two of these voters suffered some physical injury, but that was by mistake.
And when it was all over, Sir Lucius O’Brien was triumphantly elected as one of the two members for County Clare, and went to the London Parliament—though whether the good people who elected him would ever hear a word from him on the subject of Repeal was, Stephen considered, highly doubtful.
“Doesn’t it make you want to get back into politics, Stephen?” asked Charles O’Connell. “Can’t we persuade you?”
“Not really,” said Stephen.
Nor, in the weeks that followed, did he think of anything much beyond the immediate task in hand—which was to keep the soup kitchen open for as long as possible.
During the harvest season, there was some casual work in the fields on the larger farms; but many of the smaller tenants, who might have employed a few men for the harvest in normal years, were too pressed for money themselves and were trying to do all the work with family members. The harvest was a good one. But what use was that to the poor, who could not buy food at all? For them, he was sure, to see carts of grain go by must be like standing beside a riverbank when you are dying of thirst and being told you must not drink. It would be small wonder, then, if before long some of those carts would be robbed.
He managed to keep the soup kitchen going until early September. Then it was closed. He had been asked by Charles O’Connell whether he was interested in becoming one of the new relief officers who would be employed by the workhouse under the new arrangements. “It carries quite a good little salary,” O’Connell told him. But he had also received a letter from Tidy asking if he would care to go to Limerick to help organise the distribution of food from there. “I think,” he told O’Connell, “that I can do more good in Limerick now than I can in Clare.” Besides, he had been too long in Ennis. He was getting run-down himself. He needed to get out.
Before he left, he did go to say goodbye to the Madden children. Nuala was not there when he came by their house, but he found Maureen and the little boy.
“It is wonderful how you look after your brother,” he said to her. But she only smiled.
“Oh no, Sir, it’s Daniel that looks after me.” And the little fellow swelled with pride, obviously believing that this was really so.
Stephen hoped, more than he cared to let them see, that they would survive what he feared would be a bitter season ahead.
And yet, Maureen reflected, there was truth in it. For more than once now, little Daniel had stolen a cabbage. The farms were well guarded. “But I am small, and they do not see me,” he told her proudly. That a Madden should be proud to steal: what had things come to that her little boy should learn such things? But what else could he do to help his sister?
And who knew what other things might be in the child’s mind in this new and terrible world they were living in?
When Mary and Caitlin had fallen sick within a day of each other, she had known that they would not live. She couldn’t say why. Perhaps it was just that she had seen so many other children die the same way, for the dysentery was so widespread now, and the children’s bodies were so weakened that few of them could put up much of a fight against it. She had done her best for them, prayed for Daniel, and hardened her heart. And indeed, she had not suffered so much anguish at their deaths as she should, because something inside her had closed, refusing to accept any more pain. As for Daniel, he had been rather quiet, asking her, wide-eyed, one day: “Are Mary and Caitlin going to die?” In answer to which, she could only tell him: “It’s in God’s hands.” After they had gone, he had said nothing for a day or two; but then, looking thoughtful, he had asked her: “Are they gone to be with God?”
“Yes. Yes they are. And to our father and mother. They are all together with God now.”
“Where is God?”
“He is in heaven, Daniel.”
He had nodded slowly, as if this explained something.
“I did not think He could be here.”
And she knew she should have told him that He was, but she had not the strength just then.
When Mr. Smith came by to say that he was going, she had been very calm and polite. And after he had gone, she had looked after him for a long time, wondering what was to become of them now that the soup kitchens were closing. And as his figure receded along the road, she had felt a terrible sense of loss, and a longing for him to return, or even look back, as if, in him, their hopes themselves were departing.
So she had been startled by Daniel’s voice at her side.
“I wish you could marry Mr. Smith, Maureen.”
“Oh.” She had given a little laugh. “Don’t be foolish, Daniel,” she said.
She had not foreseen what Nuala would do.
In the days after the soup kitchens closed, they had waited anxiously to see what would happen. They were able to buy a little food in the market, because Nuala had some small savings. Nobody was sure how the new regime would work. But one day she had noticed that her sister was looking thoughtful.
Since her sister had started her present occupation, Maureen had always had one fear. It was only natural. What if she caught something from one of her men? She knew that girls in the town had suffered this fate, and the hospital would usually refuse to help them. Some girls had committed petty crimes and got themselves caught deliberately, just so they could get sent to jail. Once you were in jail, if they found you had any sort of venereal infection, they put you in the prison sanitarium until you were cured. It was the best way, if you were poor, of getting treatment. Had this happened to Nuala now? Was she thinking of getting herself put in jail? And if so, apart from the shame of it, where would they be then? A day passed, and she was summoning the courage to ask her right out, when Nuala opened the conversation that evening. It wasn’t what she’d expected at all.
“We’ve got to get out of here, Maureen.”
“I don’t see how.”
“If we don’t get out, we’re all going to die. I know it.”
“What are you saying?”
“I can get us all out.”
“How?”
“I’ve a man who’ll take me. He says he doesn’t mind if you and Daniel come, too.”
“But your merchant lives here.”
“It’s not him. Another fellow. He’s going back to Wexford. He says it’s not so bad there. At least you could get
fed.”
“He’s going to marry you?”
“I didn’t say that. It doesn’t matter, Maureen. If he’ll just look after me for a while . . .”
“How long have you known him?”
“A few days.”
“Oh, Nuala. What would we be getting ourselves into? I can’t take little Daniel away on such a promise as that. We’d be better off here.”
“No, you wouldn’t. You won’t be fed. You won’t even have a roof over your head. It’s the chance we have, Maureen. We have to take it.”
“Let me think, Nuala. I’m sure I can’t. But let me think at least until the morning.”
“I’m leaving in the morning, Maureen. I’m sorry, but I have to. I’m not going to die here.”
In the morning, they spoke again, alone.
“I can’t, Nuala. Perhaps I haven’t the courage, but it doesn’t feel right.”
“That’s what he said you’d say.”
“I wish you wouldn’t go.”
But a hard look had come into Nuala’s face.
“Here’s ten shillings, Maureen. It’ll see you through for a little while. It’s all I can spare.”
“Shall I get Daniel, for you to say goodbye?”
“No. You can tell him what you want. Goodbye, Maureen.” And she was gone.
Later in the morning, Maureen told Daniel with a smile, “Nuala has a job. They will keep her away for a while.”
“But we’ll see her again?”
“Of course we will.”
“Is she in jail?”
“She is not,” she cried indignantly.
“That’s good,” said little Daniel.
In the days that followed, she wondered if she had done the right thing. Without Nuala, there would be no money coming in. That meant that unless she tried to follow the same path as her sister, she wouldn’t be able to pay the rent on the cottage for much longer. And in any case, she’d rather conserve what tiny money they had. The place filled her with dread, but she went to the workhouse to find out what help she might get there. Despite the three hundred new places added, there was not space for a single person more inside. She could come again tomorrow, and there might be a little food, they told her; but there was no guarantee.