The potatoes were all gone. There was not a single one left. Kitty climbed down from the storage area set into the rafters of her tiny cottage and sighed. She’d crawled right into the corners, hoping against hope that there might be a few stray potatoes that had rolled right to the back. Anything to allow her to cook a meal of some sort for the children and herself tonight. Anything to hold off starvation for one more day.
She dropped to her knees on the cold stone floor. ‘Please God let there be something today for the children. I’ll be all right going without, sure I will, but young Michael needs to eat if he’s to work, and little Gracie is fading away, Lord bless her soul.’ The prayer was said in a whisper, for fear of waking her daughter who was curled up in a corner of the room. She was thankful Gracie slept, for all the time the child was sleeping she was not feeling the clawing pangs of hunger.
Kitty hauled herself upright again and crossed herself, feeling slightly dizzy. She had not eaten anything that day. The little family was reduced to a single meal each day now. She shook her head sadly, wondering what, if anything, she’d be able to give them this evening. Perhaps if Michael was paid what he was owed today, she could walk to Ballymor with his wages and buy some cornmeal. Or could she knock on doors and see if anyone could spare a potato or two? It was rumoured that Martin O’Shaughnessy still had a good stock. Probably blighted, like those she and the children had been living off these last months, but nevertheless they were just about edible and better than nothing. Could she bring herself to ask him for help? Old Martin wasn’t the friendliest of neighbours. His children had grown and left – two sons to America, a daughter wed in Limerick and another in Dublin. His wife had died of the consumption a couple of years ago, and he’d become a bit of a hermit since then. Kitty had helped nurse Niamh O’Shaughnessy at the end of her life, despite Martin telling her he could cope and she wasn’t needed. Now Martin was fast becoming Kitty’s only neighbour. The village was almost deserted. As the famine entered its third year, people had moved away in search of work and food. Or gone to be with God, like Kitty’s other children. She felt a wave of sadness wash over her as she remembered Little Pat and the three babies she’d lost. For a moment she could barely move or breathe, paralysed by grief, but she pulled herself together. She still had two children living, and they needed her to be strong.
She crossed the floor of her single-room cottage, to the rough straw mattress and pile of blankets that served as a bed for herself and Grace. She sat down and laid a hand on her daughter’s forehead.
‘Well now, Gracie. Have you slept well? Will I get you a sip of water?’
Grace’s huge dark eyes stared up at her, and a sweet smile came to her lips.
‘Bless you, child. Your smile lights up the cottage, so it does.’ Kitty scooped some water from a bucket into a pottery mug, and held it to Grace’s lips. The girl managed a few sips before lying back down on the blankets.
‘Mammy, will Michael catch a rabbit today?’ she asked.
Kitty closed her eyes as she remembered that glorious day, three weeks ago now, when Michael had come home with a rabbit he’d caught in a trap. They’d still had some potatoes then, from the meagre summer crop, and the stew she’d made that night with the rabbit meat had been a feast. There’d been some for the day after as well. But Michael wasn’t the only one in the community setting traps for rabbits, and he’d had no luck since that day. ‘Ah, sure rabbit stew would be lovely, wouldn’t it?’ she said to Grace, who nodded and feebly licked her lips.
It was another hour or more before Michael would be home. He was working in the fields for Mr Waterman today. Digging, hoeing, planting, weeding, tending, reaping and harvesting – all food that they’d see none of. Mr Waterman’s fields were planted with wheat and barley, all destined for export to England. Thomas Waterman, an Englishman, owned most of the land around here, and the villagers rented their cottages and small, private patches for growing potatoes from him, as well as working for him.
At the thought of Waterman, Kitty stopped stroking Grace’s hair and sat still, staring at nothing. There was another avenue, if she could bring herself to ask for charity. Thomas Waterman did not have a reputation for kindness. On the contrary, he was like his father before him – aloof and arrogant, seemingly immune to the poverty and suffering of those who worked for him. As with so many other English landowners in Ireland, he was often absent, and if he was on his Irish estates he’d keep to his big house and close his eyes to the effects of the famine. But he might make an exception for Kitty, if she asked him in the right way. They had history, a shared past. But could she do it? She silently shook her head. No. Not Thomas Waterman. She despised him with every breath of her body. She hadn’t run to him last winter when the famine carried off her three youngest. Neither had she when her boy Pat had succumbed of a fever, made worse she was sure by the hunger, the previous autumn. And she wouldn’t go to him now.
She would try Martin O’Shaughnessy. In her experience, the poor were more generous than the rich.
With a burst of resolve, she stood up from the bed, took her shawl down from its hook and knotted it around her shoulders. ‘Gracie, I’ll be going out for a little while, now. Have yourself another little sleep,’ she said softly, and Grace murmured something in reply.
She pushed open the wooden door of the cottage and went out, remembering the long-gone days when the lean-to pigpen beside the cottage had always housed a pig nursing her piglets, and with a goat tied up beside it providing them with milk each day. When the potato crops first failed in the autumn of 1845, she’d had to sell the goat. She’d had to sell the pig the year before, after her husband Patrick had died in the terrible mining accident. In Thomas Waterman’s copper mine, she thought, pressing her lips together hard.
It was a fine day. Cold, but with no rain or drizzle. If you had the time to stand and stare, there was a grand view from the village across the heather moorlands towards the coast. On a good day you could see a ribbon of silver that was the sea. Kitty had been there once, when she was courting Patrick and old Mother Heaney had looked after Michael, then aged just three, for the day. She had gazed in awe at the vastness of the ocean. ‘Somewhere over there’s America,’ Patrick had said. ‘We’ll go, when I’ve made enough money working in the mines. You, me and Michael. We’ll make our fortune there.’
She’d kissed him deeply then, loving his optimism for the future, loving that he was taking on her child that was not his own and not judging her for it, loving his strong arms and broad shoulders which she’d thought would protect her and her children for ever.
But that was not how things had turned out. She cast aside the memory. There were more important things to think about today – such as how she was going to feed her remaining children.
Martin O’Shaughnessy’s house was at the top end of the village, past a dozen empty cottages, some of which were already falling into ruin. She remembered when the village had been vibrant, buzzing with life, children running up and down in front of the cottages, goats and pigs tied up outside most homes, women hanging washing out to dry, men repairing thatch or hauling sacks of healthy potatoes inside to store in their roof-spaces. Strange to think that was only a couple of years ago, before the blight came, before the repeated failures of the potato crop.
She passed the Brennans’ cottage. When Seamus Brennan had died Mary Brennan and her five young children had gone into the workhouse, there being no one left in the family able to work. Kitty had been luckier, having Michael old enough to earn while she looked after the children. But it was a hard life for a young lad to have to provide for his mother and siblings. Sibling, she corrected herself. Only Gracie left now, of all of them. Her beautiful babies, all gone, buried in a single plot in the Ballymor churchyard. Beyond the Brennans’ cottage was the Delaneys’ old place. Two dead, one gone to Dublin in