Delaney. Part IV
“On the ship yesterday,” Ash says. “From Liverpool. There were a group of people kept in steerage. I saw them as I poked about the ship before I was chased off. Then again as they were offloading.”
“Yes, I processed the whole lot of new arrivals when they came in yesterday. Eight of them.”
“Processed?” Asks Jackson.
“Determined their fitness for the various labors we have about the factory. If they are too old or unable to work, they are usually sent directly to the floor. Sometimes to the infirmary for testing. But most are assigned some kind of work straight away.”
“There was a young woman among them,” Ash says. “She was quite stunning to look at and held herself with a measure of dignity. I was surprised to see her with them until I noticed that she was thoroughly blind. Had to be led by the elbow from the ship and onto the wagon with the others.”
“That was Magdalene.” Says Shelly. “She was in good shape. I sent her to work the bike-pulleys in the garment factory.”
“The bike-pulleys?”
“Our garment factory has more than 100 sewing machines. They are powered by stationary bikes. The pulleys keep the machines running. Ten hours per day, seven days a week. Magdalene will power the pulleys on one of those bikes. She couldn’t operate the sewing machines given her blindness. Besides, children are chosen to run the sewing machines. The ones with at least a few working fingers.”
“Surely there are laws against such things.” Ash replies. But Shelly finds the ignorance of her relatives from London tiresome. She decides it’s not her job to educate them.
“There are open tables at the café,” she says, pulling Jackson by the arm. “Let’s grab one. Night shift is about to let out and there won’t be a spot to be had in a few minutes.”
****
Delaney wakes, but she keeps her eyes closed. It took so long to fall asleep, the searing pain of her forearm would not release her, and it is not yet morning. Perhaps if she keeps her eyes closed, she might be able to return. But it’s her arm again, throbbing and needling her awake.
With little hope of sleep, she finally opens her eyes. There is a man kneeling next to her bed. Delaney is startled, but too paralyzed by fright to cry out. He is terrifying to look at, and foul smelling – like the excrement of an animal. His eyes are deep set and he is utterly bald, even his eyebrows are missing. More striking still, there are four tattooed lines running from his lower lip down his neck and disappearing into a hemp shirt.
He looks up from the girl’s arm which he’s been studying and utters something she does not understand. She only knows it to be Gaelic. Then he says in English.
“We are with you.”
At this Sinead shoots up. She tears through her fright to let out a piercing yell which pulls most of the girls in the room from their slumber. In a moment Sister Julian, who is on night duty, rushes in with a lantern. The man stands up and the Sister opens her mouth to let out a cry. Nothing comes for a moment and then she sputters, “Out! Get out!”
But the man is already up and swinging himself out of the second story open window. How he manages to hit the ground and tear off into the woods without injury is the last thing on Sister Julian’s mind.
Soon other lamps are lit, flooding the room with light and spawning a din of noise. The girls surround Delaney, firing questions at her, “Who was he? Was he reading your tattoo? How long was he in here?” until Sister Mary Eunice arrives sending them back to their beds.
“No more talk of this!” She insists. “Delaney, you come with me.”
“Am I in trouble Sister?”
“No child, you’re not in trouble. But I thought perhaps you’d feel more comfortable tonight sleeping in my room.”
“I’ll be fine here.” She says, and Sinead grabs her hand.
“I’ll stay up all night and watch over her,” says her dorm mate.
“No, you will not, Sinead!” Mary Eunice tells her. “Now all you girls shut your gobs and get back to sleep.” Then the nun goes to the window, peers out for a moment, and shuts it, latching it securely.
Sister Mary Eunice is a gruff woman. Her own childhood had been near idyllic, leastwise, as ideal as might be possible being raised since the age of two in the home of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception. The people of Dunleer don’t think very decently of the orphans and treated them as they considered them – like cheap tools. And so, the Sister had always known the life of an outcast. But the girls at the orphanage are a tribe unto themselves, and there was always an abundance of peers with whom Mary Eunice could play or fight or to generally misbehave until ruler came crashing down upon knuckles.
As the years passed Mary Eunice was never adopted by one of the nearby farms around the age of fourteen like most, and a fragment of sweetness died each year another of her friends left the convent’s orphanage. Cynicism became a favorite companion as time went on and it contorted Mary Eunice’s spirit, showed up in her furrowed brow and slumped shoulders, so that those who came looking for a child to bring into their home were less and less drawn to the dour youth standing next to her sweet-faced orphanmates.
It was the voices of the sisters in their singing that gave Mary Eunice anything resembling joy, and she grew needful, addicted one might say, of the Divine Hours. They were a steadying force, like a metronome keeping her spirit moving forward in life’s watercourse, urging her to rise each morning at Lauds and retire each night at Matins, no matter the gravitational pull toward resignation.
At seventeen, after all her peers had been taken into adoptive households, Mary Eunice felt the only option left was to take orders herself, so she became one of the ruler-wielding nuns she had once despised. And she released her discontent on the children she managed. She was also the sister most often ordered to deliver the babies at the brothel above the tavern. Bedside manner was not considered a requirement there, and this chore of retrieving child after child from the wombs of sex workers added to the jaded spirit of Mary Eunice. She both hated the place and fed upon the self-righteous abhorrence she nursed delivering children of the brothel and taking girls into the orphanage. Boys were sent to the Brothers in Drogheda.
The morning after the strange incident with the man at Delaney’s bedside, Sister Mary Eunice takes counsel with two of the more seasoned nuns, Sisters Julian and Shannon.
“I should never have hired the girl out. Now the whole town’ll be gossiping about those markings. I knew something like this would happen.”
“But Sister, girls younger than Delaney have been sent out as chore maidens. You couldn’t keep the child here forever.” Sister Julian is a short, stout woman swallowed by her oversized tunic, the hem of which touches the ground and the sleeves cover to her palms. The shorter tunics will not fit around her waist, so better to swim in a tunic than to be choked by one – or so says Mary Eunice.
“What was it that Mother Imogen said when the girl first came to the orphanage?” Sister Shannon asks. She is a favorite among the children. The one they seek when hurt on account of her nurturing manner. She is the most motherly of the sisters, and while she respects Sister Mary Eunice, who stepped into the office of Mother Superior only this year, she had preferred Mother Imogen whose nature was more patient, and who was not so quick to dispense with the justice of a yardstick or ruler before hearing a child out.
“Oh, Mother Imogen had no more idea what to do with her than did I. You know, I delivered the child the night she entered the world. An odder thing I have never seen.”
Mary Eunice, who has until now been pacing dizzyingly, drops into a chair.
“Sometimes I wonder if I should have taken the child in at all.” And she is swept away by the recollection of that night.
It was the scraping of the vernix from the newborn that Sister Mary Eunice first saw it, but it was dark in the brothel, so she dismissed it as a birthmark. The white paste was abundant on the infant, and the sale of it on the black market for those who would package and sell it as facial cream for the well-to-do women of west London would likely bring enough scrip to pay for a month’s worth of paraffin for the convent.
“The child must nurse before I take her.” Sister told the girl’s mother who lay on a stained mattress in a corner of the room, drenched and exhausted. Mary Eunice brought the wailing baby to the woman and pushed her to breast with mechanical indifference. “Best for a newborn to suckle the breast straight out the womb. Give her the idea before she must take to a bottle.”
Mary Eunice had brought the baby back to the convent and placed her in a basket at the foot of her bed. She slept only an hour or two before the infant rang out in hunger, just before the Nocturn prayers. She readied a small bottle of goat’s milk before slipping into bed and groped for it even before coming out of her soporific stupor. Warm feet on cold floor, squirming child in tired arms, bottle against searching mouth, but still the baby cries out.
“Take the thing, child. For God’s sake it’s right here!”
But the infant only cries more loudly. Mary Eunice learned all the tricks to getting a newborn to latch on to a bottle, but this one is stubborn. Ten minutes goes by, but ten minutes holding a screaming child is bought with the price of an hour’s worth of sanity. Then the thought comes to her like a bizarre dream. She had heard stories of it, but that’s all they were. Stories. Myths of the saints. St. Brenden was said to have nursed at the teat of a doe. When one is tired and there is a child rupturing your sanity with her screams, desperation works a kind of hypnotism, driving onw to do strange things.
Lighting a lamp Sister Mary Eunice swaddles the child and carries her out of the house and into the convent barn. She sets the lamp upon the floor pulling a sleepy goat to the stool upon which she sits. The animal is obstinate at first, but then becomes placidly obedient. Mary Eunice lifts the cradled child and at once the baby starts to suckle the goat like it was the most natural thing in the world. She guzzles madly at the udder as though famished and the animal stands steady and noiseless until the baby has had her fill. The infant drifts into sleep, relaxing her mouth as the teat slips out, milk dribbling down the side of her cheek. The child lies still upon Sister Mary Eunice’s knees, content as a cat on a sunbathed chair.
It was in this state of magnificent lethargy that the baby’s arm dropped out from her blanket and into the lamplight. And Mary Eunice got her first good look at the markings. Bringing the lamp nearer she was befuddled at the fine blue lines, slightly raised and reddened, almost aglow on the infant’s forearm.