Frightened, she bolted upright in the bed, Louisa at her side restraining her, soothing her anxiety.
‘There, Mother, there – it’s just a bad dream, I’m with you now,’ Louisa said tenderly.
Fearfully, Ellen embraced her, afraid her adopted daughter might disappear back into the frightening dreamworld.
Louisa held her mother, until sleep finally took Ellen.
Through the New England winter began the long, slow restoration. First the temporal needs of the body. Not a surfeit of food but ‘little and often’ as Sister Lazarus advised, ‘and a decent dollop of buttermilk daily, combined with fruit – and young carrots’, for the recovery of Ellen’s eyes. ‘Common luxuries, which no doubt have not passed this poor soul’s lips since Our Saviour was a boy,’ Sister Lazarus opined.
Mary trimmed the long mane of Ellen’s hair, removing the frayed ends and straightening the raggle-taggle of knots that had accumulated there. Gradually, the pallor evaporated from Ellen’s face, a hint of rose-pink returning to her lips. Under the Sisters’ care, the physical contours of Ellen’s body began somewhat to re-establish themselves. It was not long before Louisa and Mary could both begin to see their mother re-emerge, as they had once remembered her.
‘It is the buttermilk,’ Lazarus was convinced, thankfully still showing no signs of recognition.
With Mary and Louisa’s help Ellen could now go to the Oratory for prayer and reflection. There they would leave her a while, to ponder alone. Never once did they ask about her missing years. She was grateful for that … was not yet ready to tell them. But that day would come. Perhaps early in the New Year.
Before Christmas, when she was stronger, and at Sister Lazarus’s insistence that ‘God and Reverend Mother will provide,’ Mary and Louisa took Ellen to an oculist. Years of making the Singer machines sing for Boston’s shoe bosses, had taken its toll on their mother’s eyes.
Dr Thackeray, a kindly, intent man – a Quaker, Ellen had decided, without knowing why – held his hand up at a distance from her, asking her to identify how many digits he had raised. Depending on her answer, he moved either further away or closer to her. At the end of it all he disappeared, returning at length with a stout brown bottle which he declared to contain ‘a soothing concoction’.
‘This to be poulticed on both eyes for a month of days; to be changed daily – only in darkness,’ he instructed. ‘Even then both eyes must remain fully shuttered.’ She would, he said, ‘see no human form until mine, when you return.’
He gave no indication of what improvement, if any, he expected after all of this.
During her month of darkness, Ellen’s general state of health continued to incline. She grew steadily stronger, the tone of her skin regained some former suppleness, and from Mary’s constant brushing, the once-fine texture of her hair had at last begun to return.
‘It is as much the nourishing joy at your presence, as anything Sister Lazarus’s buttermilk and young carrots might do,’ she said with delight to Mary and Louisa.
Ellen was thankful of Dr Thackeray’s poultice. That she would not have to fully face them when, at last, she told her daughters the truth; not have to look into their eyes, they into hers.
Blindness she had long been smitten with, before ever she had put first stitch into leather.
Stephen Joyce, who had ignited such debasing passions in her, was not to blame. Nor Lavelle … least of all, her ever-constant Lavelle. The blindness was solely hers – her own corroding influence on herself.
She worried about her dream and its recurrence – that by now she should have exorcised all the old devils about Stephen. Why had he appeared so threatening – sword aloft? Why the black horse and Lavelle the pale one? Good and Evil – and had they at last met? And Patrick – she unable to reach him?
Stephen first had appeared in her life in 1847. There were troubled times in Ireland – blight, starvation, evictions. Like a wraith he had come out of the night to meet with her husband Michael.
She had not interfered as rebellious plots against landlords were hatched but she had sensed tragedy. This dark man who could excite the hearts of other men to follow him, would she knew, one day bring grief under her cabin roof. And so it was. Not a moon had waned before her husband Michael, her beautiful Michael, lay stretched in the receiving clay of Crucán na bPáiste – the burial place high above the Maamtrasna Valley.
Evicted then, during the worst of the famine, and in desperation to save her starving children, she had been forced to enter a devilish pact. Her allegiance to the Big House was bought, her children given shelter. The price – her forced emigration from Ireland – and separation from them. Patrick aged ten years, Mary a mere eight. It was Stephen Joyce, the peasant agitator, scourge of the landlord class, who had come to her to guarantee their safety. Whilst she had blamed him for Michael’s death, she had, for the sake of her children, no choice but to accept his offer. Eventually, she had returned to reclaim them.
Now years later, here in America, her children had reclaimed her.
‘Sit still, Mother!’ Mary chided, as she unfettered Ellen’s eyes.
‘Mary … I have something …’ Ellen began, wanting at last to tell her.
Mary, remembering the tone her mother adopted when she had something to say to them, knew it was pointless resisting. She put the used poultices on the small table, fixed her attention on Ellen’s closed eyelids … and waited.
‘I … I have … something to confess to you … a grave wrong,’ Ellen began, falteringly.
‘Have you confessed it to God?’ Mary asked, simply.
‘Yes, Mary … many times … but, in His wisdom, He has directed that you and Louisa should find me – so that I should also confess it to you.’
Mary took her mother’s hands, bringing Ellen close to her. ‘If God has forgiven you, Mother, then who am I not to?’
‘I still must tell you, Mary,’ Ellen said, more steadily.
Faces now inclined towards each other, mother and child, priest and penitent, Ellen began. ‘I committed … the sin of Mary Magdalen … with … Stephen Joyce,’ she said quietly, her long hair forward about her face, shrouding their hands.
Mary uttered no word. Remained waiting, still holding her mother’s hands. Ellen, before she continued, opened her eyes and peered into Mary’s. Into her own eyes, it seemed.
‘I betrayed you all: Lavelle, a good man and a good husband; you, my dear child; Patrick … Louisa.’ Then, remembering Mary’s father, Michael: ‘Even those who have gone before!’
Ellen knew how the words now struggling out of her mouth would be at odds with everything for which Mary had held her always in such loving regard. She trembled, awaiting her child’s response.
‘Mother, you must keep your eyes closed … until it is time,’ Mary said, without pause, putting a finger to her mother’s eyes, blessing her darkness, protecting her from the world.
Mary then fell to anointing the fresh coverlets for Ellen’s eyes. She said nothing more while completing the dressing. Then, Mary left the room.
When she returned she pressed a set of rosary beads into Ellen’s hands.
‘One