He was soothed now. His pain must have been intense. A miracle he had survived at all. Better he hadn’t. He shook free his hand from hers, reached over to where his other hand would have been. Forgetting.
‘I still feel it there, Ellie, but sure it’s only the ghost of it … only the ghost of it! If only I could wrap it round a lady’s waist,’ he said wistfully.
She took his hand again. ‘Will you pray with me, Jeremiah?’ she asked, still in Irish.
‘Sure isn’t what we’re doin’ prayin’?’ he replied, the good eye darting wickedly at her.
And she supposed it was.
‘I can feel the Divil comin’ for me, even after you sprinklin’ the water on me,’ he said, gripping her hand more tightly. ‘He took the one half of me and now the wee bollix is comin’ for the other half!’
He raised up his head, as if to see. ‘G’way off to fuck, ye wee bollix ye!’ he roared, startling her and the whole ward into silence. They were all well used to death by now – in its many guises. The sudden rap, the last rattle of breath, the gentle going – and those who roared!
She said nothing, just gripped his hand.
He raised his head again. ‘Who made the world?’ he shouted at them all.
‘Gawd did,’ a Southern voice called back.
‘Who made America?’
‘Paddy did!’ the Irish roared back, as Jeremiah Finnegan handed in his ticket. Leaving both God’s world and Paddy’s America behind him.
She waited a few moments. Disengaged her hand, shuttered close the one mad eye on him.
‘He died roarin’, ma’am,’ a gangrened youth in the next cot said.
‘That he did, son! That he did!’ she said, to the frightened boy.
Mary watched Ellen move among the men. The transformation in her mother since first she and Louisa had found her was nothing short of miraculous. Ellen’s hair tied back from her face, accentuating her finely chiselled features, seemed to strip away the years. Modesty prevented Mary from ever using a looking glass but now, involuntarily, she put a hand to her face, fingering the high cheekbones, the generous span of mouth, the furrow between lips and nostrils. Upon her own face, Mary found replicated every feature of her mother’s. She smiled as she watched Ellen go about her duties with an enthusiasm that further belied her years. In her plain blue calico dress – its only adornment a neat white collar – Mary’s mother had a word for everybody.
‘God never closes one door but He opens another,’ Mary said to Louisa, marvelling how, after their banishment from the convent, the three of them had found such a fulfilment in their work here on the battlefields. Such an all-enveloping joy at being together again after all those years.
‘Her heart still longs for Patrick and Lavelle,’ Louisa answered. ‘She will not remain here forever, Mary.’
‘Oh, I know, Louisa …’ Mary answered, ‘but whatever the future holds, I will always hold dear these memories, these beautiful moments, of Mother bending to comfort a departing soul, writing out a letter to a loved one … of just being restored to us. I would happily depart this world with such images graven forever on my heart.’
Louisa, too, had witnessed the change in Ellen, the re-blooming; the coming of joy. All of which was a source of similar joy to Louisa herself!
She could not love Ellen more. Their time together here had been restorative for each of them in its own way. It was a privilege to serve those fallen in battle, to bind up their wounds – a rich and rewarding privilege. So, that when word had come down, from the Surgeon-General’s office, through Dr Sawyer, asking her to accept the role of matron, Louisa had wholeheartedly accepted.
She now spoke to her sister. ‘Well, before you take your leave of us, Mary, we have a St Patrick’s Day celebration to organise!’
Not that St Patrick’s Day was anywhere near in the offing. Nor that this mattered to those Irish currently under the care of the Sisters. Now, in the midsummer of 1862, the Irish had decided that ‘this little skirmish’ here in America should not prevent them from celebrating the national saint’s feast day … even if some three months after the declared date of March 17.
‘To show these foreigners, North and South, how to have fun,’ Hercules O’Brien put forward to Louisa. ‘We had a great St Pat’s … beggin’ your pardon, Sister, St Patrick’s Day, during winter camp when there was no fighting … but that was only among ourselves … and sure it’s now we need a diversion.’
After repeated ‘spontaneous’ entreaties from a number of the men – carefully orchestrated by O’Brien – Louisa had acquiesced. As matron, she warned that any celebration would have to be both ‘orderly and circumspect’. She received every assurance it would … ‘be as quiet as a dormouse dancing’. Somehow, Louisa felt remarkably unassured by this assurance, as Jared Prudhomme’s blue eyes beckoned her to him, for the third time that day.
Jared Prudhomme, proud to be from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was ‘the man side of seventeen’, he told Louisa, when three weeks prior, he first came to them. He was tall, possessed of piercing blue eyes and with a beauty of countenance not normally bestowed on mortals. That he was dishevelled from battle, his blond hair unkempt about his face, did not in any sense diminish from his striking appearance. It was, Louisa had decided, because of some inner light of character which shone from the boy, and which was unquenchable.
She went to him. As on the two previous occasions today, she would be polite, not overstay with him, as she had when first he fell under her care. Then, though his shoulder wound had not been serious, due to a delay in getting him to hospital, he had lost a copious amount of blood. She had nursed him back, dressed his shoulder. One day, while leaning over him, their faces close, he had said, ‘You have the scent of the South on you … it reminds me of so much!’ She hadn’t answered him and then he was apologetic. ‘Did I embarrass you – I know you are not as other ladies?’ She had raised her head, looked at him, smiled. He had no guile. ‘Thank you,’ she had said and left it at that.
Then, one morning, she had arisen, found herself rushing her prayers. At first, she couldn’t quite fathom it but something about it bothered her. When she had reached his bedside, he had greeted her with his usual smile and she felt bathed in the light of his company. Leaving him, she realised that her earlier undue haste at prayers was not just to do her rounds but to get to him. When next she tended him, she was conscious of this feeling, her fingers betraying her as she peeled back the dressing from his bare shoulder.
‘I am unsettling you,’ he said in his quiet, direct way, ‘and I would rather fall to the enemy than cause any such emotion in you.’
This had discomfited her further.
‘Yes!’ she said, continuing her work. ‘It is an uncommon feeling …’ She paused, her words landing soft against his skin, her breath moistening the broken tissue.
Now, today, as she went to him, a faint tremor of apprehension came over her.
‘I wanted to ask you before everybody else … and maybe I am already too late,’ he began. ‘Would you dance with me tonight – for St Patrick?’ he added in quickly, upon seeing the look come over her face. ‘It is my last night, before going out again … and I would go more lightly having danced with you,’ he pleaded.
She looked at him, mended now, his face aglow at her. She had intended giving him a further talk about how ‘All must be included in a Sister’s love’ or that ‘Sisters,