Life had been good once. Their mother had made their way well in America, educating both herself and them. She had re-married – Lavelle – built up a small if successful business with him. Then it had seemed to all go wrong, the business failing. When a move from their home at 29 Pleasant Street to more straitened accommodation had been imminent, Mary and Louisa had both secretly decided to unburden the family of themselves. To follow the nudging, niggling voice they had been hearing.
‘It almost broke poor Mother’s heart,’ Mary said.
‘Then, do you remember, Louisa, once in the convent, everything silent – just like you?’
Louisa nodded, remembering. As a child she had been cast to the roads of a famine-ridden Ireland, her parents desperate in the hope she would fall on common charity and survive the black years of the blight. Six months later Louisa had returned to find them, huddled together; their bodies half eaten by dogs, likewise famished. She had gone silent then. All sound, it seemed, trapped beneath the bones that formed her chest. Nor did she retain a memory of any name they had called her by – not even their own names.
A year later Ellen had found her, taken her in. Though some early semblance of speech had returned in the intervening year, her silence had helped Louisa survive. Drawn forth whatever crumbs of charity a famished people could grant. So she had remained silent. Kept her secret. Afraid, lest once revealed, all kindness be cut off and she condemned, like the rest to claw at each other for survival. She had remained ‘the silent girl’ until they reached America and Ellen had christened her. After the place in which they had found her – Louisburgh, County Mayo – and the place to which they were then bound for, Boston, with its other Louisburgh … Square.
Gradually the trapped place beneath Louisa’s breast had freed itself. Then, in the safe sanctum of the cathedral at Franklin Street she had whispered out halting prayers of thanksgiving.
At the edge of Boston Common, they stood back to let a group of blue-clad militia double-quick by them. The young men all a-gawk at the wide-winged headdresses of the two nuns.
‘Angels from Heaven!’ a saucy Irish voice shouted.
‘Devils from Hell!’ another one piped.
Then they were gone, shuffling in their out-of-time fashion to be mustered for some battlefield in Virginia.
‘I pray God that this war between the States will be quickly done with,’ Mary said quietly.
‘Do you remember anything, Mary – anything at all?’ Louisa asked, returning to the topic that, like her sister, always occupied her mind.
‘Nothing … only, like you, that Mother had once called to the convent, leaving no message … and then those messages left by Lavelle and dear brother Patrick that they had not found her. I cannot imagine what … unless some fatal misfortune has … and I cannot bear to think that.’
Louisa’s mind went back over the times she and her adoptive mother had been alone. That time in the cathedral at Holy Cross when Ellen had tried to get her to speak. How troubled her mother had seemed. And the book, the one which Ellen had left on the piano. Louisa had opened it. Love Elegies … the sinful poetry of a stained English cleric – John Donne. It had shocked Louisa that her mother could read such things – and well-read the book had been.
‘Did you ever see a particular book – Love Elegies – with Mother?’ she asked Mary.
Mary thought for a moment.
‘No, I cannot say so, but then Mother was always reading. Why …?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Mary, something … a nun’s intuition.’ Louisa laughed it off. Then, more brightly, gazing into her sister’s face, ‘You are so like her … so beautiful … her green-speckled eyes, her fiery hair …’
‘That’s if you could see it!’ Mary interjected.
‘Personally cropped by the stern shears of Sister Lazarus,’ she added. ‘That little furrow under Mother’s nose – you have it too!’
Louisa went to touch her sister’s face.
‘Oh, stop it, Louisa!’ Mary gently chided. ‘You are not behaving with the required decorum. If “Rise-from-the-Dead” could only see you!’
Louisa restrained herself. ‘I am sorry … you are right,’ she said, offering up a silent prayer for unbecoming conduct – and that the all-seeing eye of Sister Lazarus might not somehow be watching.
‘We are almost there,’ was all Mary answered with.
Half Moon Place held all the backwash of Boston life. As far removed from the counting houses of Hub City as was Heaven from Hell. It housed, in ramshackle rookeries, the furthest fringes of Boston society – indolent Irish, fly-by-nights and runaway slaves. None of which recoiled the two nuns. Nor the reeking stench that, long prior to entering them, announced such places. Since Sister Lazarus had first deemed them ‘morally sufficient’ for such undertakings, many the day had the older nun sent them forth on similar missions of rescue. Them returning always from places like this with some unfortunate in tow, to the Magdalen’s sheltering walls.
This was their work, their calling. To snatch from the jaws of iniquity young women who, by default or design, had strayed into them.
‘Reclaim the thoughtless and melt the hardened.’ Sister Lazarus’s words seemed to ring from the very portals of what lay facing them today. Half Moon Place indeed would be a fertile ground for redemption.
‘A Tower of Babel,’ Louisa said, stepping precariously under its archway into a rabble of tattered urchins who chased after some rotting evil.
‘Kick the Reb! Kill the Reb!’ they shouted, knocking into them with impunity.
A nodding woman, on her stoop, shook her stick after them.
‘I’ll scatter ye … ye little bastards! God blast ye! D’annoyin’ the head of a person, from sun-up to sundown!’
From a basement came the dull sound of a clanging pot colliding with a human skull. A screech of pain … a curse … it all just melting into the sounds that underlay the stench and woebegone sight of the place.
Further along, a woman singing. The snatches of sound attracted them. ‘The soul pining for God,’ Mary said, as the woman’s keening rose on the vapours of Half Moon Place … and was carried to meet them. They rounded the half-moon curve of the alleyway. The singing woman sat amidst a pile of rubbish as if, herself, discarded from life. The long tarnished hair draped over her shoulders her only modesty. But her face was raised to a place far above the teetering tenements, and her song transcended the wretchedness of her state.
‘If not in life we’ll be as one
Then, in death we’ll be,
And there will grow two hawthorn trees
Above my love and me,
And they will reach up to the sky –
Intertwined be …
And the hawthorn flower will bloom where lie
My fair-haired boy … and me.’
It was Louisa who reached her first, hemline abandoned, wildly careering the putrid corridor. Mary then, at her heels, the two of them scrabbling over the off-scourings and excrement. Then, in the miracle of Half Moon Place, breathless with hope, they reached her. As one, they clutched her to themselves.
Praising God. Cradling her nakedness. Wiping the grime and the lost years from her face.
‘Mother!’ they cried. ‘Oh, Mother!’