A Christmas Grace

Susannah looked pale, her face even more haggard, but there was no indecision in her. She smiled. “Please go. I’m not afraid of dying, only of leaving this unsolved. The village has been good to me, they’ve allowed me to belong as if I were really one of them. They’re Hugo’s people, and I loved him more than I can ever explain. I’m quite ready to die, and to go wherever he is. That is really the only place I want to be. But I want to leave them something for all the love they’ve given me, and even more for the way he loved them. I want to see them begin to heal. Go, Emily, and whatever you find, bring it back. See that it is known, whether I’m here or not. And never feel guilty. You’ve given me the greatest gift you had, and I’m grateful to you.”

Emily leaned forward and kissed her white cheek, then walked out of the room, tears running swift and easy down her face.

It was a long and bitterly cold journey, but Jenny seemed to know it even without Emily’s guidance, or Father Tyndale’s instructions. The landscape had a desolate beauty, which now in a strange way comforted her. Even in the occasional drifting rain there was a depth that changed with the light, as if there were layer beneath layer in the grass. The stones shone bright where a shaft of sun caught them, and the mountains and the distance were full of shifting, ever-changing shadows.

When at last she reached Galway, with a little inquiry she found a hotel with stabling for the pony, and after a good meal and a change into dry clothes and boots, she set out to retrace Hugo’s steps of seven years ago.

During the long drive she had given much thought to where Hugo would have begun looking for Connor’s family. Father Tyndale had said Hugo possessed a quiet but deep faith, and that he went to church most Sundays. Surely he would begin by asking the churches in Galway if they knew of Connor Riordan’s family? Whether they attended or not, the local priest would at least know of them?

It was easy to find a church; any passerby could direct her. It took a little longer to reach the one where the Riordan family was known, and it was after dark when she finally sat in the parlor of the rectory opposite Father Malahide and looked at his thin, gentle face in the candlelight. The room was filled with the earthy odor of peat, and the richness of tobacco smoke.

“How can I help you, Mrs. Radley?” he said curiously. He did not ask what an Englishwoman was doing in Galway, having driven alone, in the middle of winter, all the way from the coast.

Briefly Emily told him about the storm and Daniel being the only survivor from the wreck. As her story progressed she saw in his face that he knew about Connor, with both pity and grief.

“Now Mrs. Ross is very ill indeed,” she went on. “I think she will not live much longer. There are things I need to resolve before then. Daniel’s arrival has stirred old ghosts that need to be laid to rest, whatever the truth may be.”

“I cannot tell you what Hugo Ross said to me, Mrs. Radley,” Father Malahide told her gently. “He came to see if he could find Connor’s family. The young man was too weak to come himself and all his shipmates were dead. Like your present young man, he seemed to be alone in the world, and to remember very little. I’m afraid many men are lost off the coast of Ireland, especially Connemara. The winter is very bad, and the weather sweeps in off the Atlantic with nothing to break it.”

“Did Hugo find any family for him?”

“Yes. His mother lived here in Galway. She worked in a foundling home run by the Church. She cared for the children who had no one else. She was not a nun, of course, but she had been there most of her adult life. I’m afraid there is nothing else I can tell you, Mrs. Radley. All else was in confidence. I’m sure you understand that. I’m sorry to say it, but Connor’s mother is dead now. Not that I imagine she could have helped you.”

“No,” Emily agreed gravely. “I don’t know if I will learn the truth of what happened to him, and it would be of little comfort to her to know. But someone else at the foundling home may be able to tell me what Hugo Ross was asking and perhaps what he was told.”

“Of course.” Father Malahide gave her the address and how to find the place, counseling her to go in the middle of the morning, when they would be best able to spare time to speak with her.

She thanked him, and walked as briskly as she could through the dark streets back to the inn where she was lodging.

In the morning she followed Father Malahide’s directions and had no difficulty in finding the foundling home. It was a large, gray stone building with many additional outhouses, looking as if they had been adapted to be further accommodation.

Emily walked up to the front door and lifted the knocker. It was several minutes before it was answered by a slender little girl with a freckled face. Emily told her what she wished, and she was admitted to wait in a small, rather chilly anteroom with carefully stitched samplers on the wall, warning the would-be sinner that God sees all. Opposite it was a very large crucifix with a Christlike figure in agony. It made Emily self-conscious and uncomfortable. She felt suddenly alien, and wondered at her wisdom in having come here at all.

She was conducted to see the matron in charge, a tired woman with a pale face, deeply lined, and the most beautiful brown hair in thick coils on her head.

Emily sat in her office and heard the busy tap of feet up and down the corridor and voices calling out cheerfully, hurrying people along, bidding a child be good, be quick, tie up her bootlaces, tuck his shirt in, stop chattering.

“I came to Connemara to stay with my aunt, Susannah Ross, who is very ill and will not live much longer,” she began frankly. “Seven years ago her husband, Hugo Ross, came here looking for Mrs. Riordan, because her son, Connor, was the only survivor of a shipwreck just off the coast where Mr. Ross lived.”

“I remember him,” the matron said, nodding her head. “He never returned, nor did the young man he spoke of. I’m afraid Mrs. Riordan is dead now, God rest her soul.”

“Yes, I know. So is Mr. Ross. And I’m afraid Connor was killed too,” Emily replied.

“Oh dear.” The matron’s face showed genuine grief. “I’m so sorry. Perhaps it’s as well his poor mother never knew. She was so happy when Mr. Ross told her Connor was saved from the wreck. So many men are drowned. The sea’s a hard mistress, but you make a living where you can. The land can be hard too. So what is it I can do to help Mrs. Ross now, poor creature?”

Emily had turned over and over in her mind what she would ask, and she was still uncertain, but now there was no more time for debate. She looked at this woman’s tired eyes and the gnarled hands on her lap in front of her. She must have seen more than her share of grief. What kind of woman leaves her child to a foundling home to raise? Emily thought of her own children at home, and suddenly she missed them so intensely it was as if they had been torn from her. She could smell their skin, hear their voices, see the bright trust in their eyes. There was only one answer, a desperate woman, driven beyond the end of her strength, a hunted woman or a dying one.

“Connor Riordan was murdered,” she said bluntly and saw the matron wince as if she were familiar with that pain as well. “We never found out who killed him, but I believe I know why. I have a deep fear that the same thing is going to happen again, this time to Daniel, if we do not prevent it. I think Hugo Ross may have learned something here that later told him who was responsible, and because he loved his people, he chose not to repeat it. He died shortly after Connor’s death himself. He did not know that the poison of that guilt and fear was going to cause the village itself to die slowly. But his widow knows, and she wants above all things, before she dies, to put that right, perhaps for the village, but more, I think, for Hugo himself.”

“A good woman.” The matron nodded her head and made the sign of the cross with profound solemnity. “I cannot tell you much myself, but I recall that he spoke for some time to Mrs. Riordan, and that he asked quite a bit about Mrs. Yorke. That seemed to distress him. I asked him if I could do anything to help him, and he said not. Mrs. Riordan seemed upset as well, but when I spoke to her, she seemed to know little, but would not tell me why.”

“Mrs. Yorke?” Emily said confused.

“Well, we called her Mrs.,” the matron answered with a slight gesture of her hand, as if dismissing something trivial. “But she was not actually married. She worked here for many years, then she too died. But it was her time. She was old, and ready to continue her journey towards God.”

“Old?” Emily was surprised. Was she Padraic Yorke’s sister? Then she had to be considerably older than he. Or perhaps she was no relative. It was not a common name, but not unique by any means. “Might she be a relation of Mr. Padraic Yorke, who lives in the same village as Mrs. Ross?”

“Yes, yes,” the matron said with a sigh. “That she was. Though it’s a long time now, poor soul.”

“A long time? But you said she was old!”

“So she was, not so far from eighty when she died. Must be fifteen years ago now, or maybe more.”

Suddenly Emily was far colder than the room explained. Ugly thoughts crowded her mind, still shapeless. “She wasn’t his sister then?”

“No, my dear, she was his mother,” the matron said in surprise. “She came here before he was born. At first she said she was a widow, with child, but later she was honest with us. She was never married. A respectable girl to begin with, in service to a family in Holyhead, in England. When the master of the house got her with child she took ship and came to Ireland. She started in Dublin, but when the child began to show she was thrown out, and came west to Galway, where we took her in. She was happy here, and stayed with us for the rest of her days. A good woman she was, and we gave her the courtesy of a married title.”

“So Padraic was born here?” Emily said incredulously. It was not that the shame of his early life appalled her, although it must have been hard enough, it was that in the eyes of the Irish he was an Englishman, by blood and breeding, if never at heart.

The matron nodded. “Of course he had to leave when he was fourteen, because we couldn’t keep him any longer. There are no funds for children once they are old enough to work, and there was nothing here for him. He was a good student. He went to Dublin for a while, then up to Sligo, and at last to the coast, where he stayed.”

“And Mrs. Riordan knew all this,” Emily said slowly, as the ugliness inside her head took its shape. Connor must have pieced it together, understanding exactly who Padraic Yorke was, not the Irish poet and patriot he said, but the illegitimate son of some rich Englishman and his cast-off maidservant. Would Connor have told anyone? Who dared take the chance that he would not?

“Thank you,” Emily said to the matron, standing up with sudden stiffness as if all her bones ached. “I shall go back tomorrow to tell Susannah what I have learned. Then at least she will know. What she chooses to do about it is up to her.”

She spent the rest of the day in Galway because she did not dare take the long road back when she would make the last of the journey in the dark. She paid her bill after breakfast and was on the road by nine, but it was with a heaviness inside her. She understood so easily why Hugo Ross had chosen to say nothing.

Padraic Yorke had killed Connor and it was probably murder. At the very best it was a fight that had gone disastrously wrong. But no one other than Yorke himself knew what had happened, the mockery, the laughter, the humiliation he might have suffered. It could have been a lashing out at unbearable jeering, perhaps even an obscene insult to his mother, surely a victim enough already. It could have been at least half an accident, never meant to end in death.

Or it could have been quite clearly a murder, even a blow from behind delivered the coward’s way against a man who had come by information by chance, and had never intended to use it.

Had Hugo Ross known? Had he spoken to Padraic Yorke? Or had he kept silence as well? Did he even know what he was concealing? She thought, from what Susannah had said of him, that probably he had known very well.

What he had not known was how the fear and the guilt would slowly poison the very fabric of the village until it was withering, day by day, a new suspicion here, a fear awakened there, another lie to cover an older one; Father Tyndale’s self-doubt, and ultimately his doubt even of God.

She was past the lake and heading towards Oughterard, the wind tearing blue holes in a ragged sky and the sun brilliant on the hills. The slopes were almost gold, black stone ruins gleaming wet and sharp, when she saw a man in the road ahead of her. He was walking steadily, as if he were pacing himself to go far. She wondered if he lived in Oughterard. There was no house or farm anywhere in sight to either side of the road.

Should she offer him a lift? It seemed unwise. And yet it was inhumane to pass him and let him make his own way, against the wind on this rough road.

It was not until she was level with him that she recognized Brendan Flaherty. She pulled up the pony.

“Can I offer you a ride, Mr. Flaherty?” she said. “I’m heading home.”

“Home, is it?” he said with a smile. “Sure, that’s very good of you, Mrs. Radley. And I’ll be happy to drive for you, if you like. Though Jenny knows her way as well as I do.”

She accepted because she was tired, and although she was a good rider, she was completely inexperienced at driving, and she was sure Jenny was aware of it.

They had gone well over a mile before Brendan spoke.

“I shouldn’t have run away,” he said quietly, facing forward, avoiding her eyes.

“You’re coming back,” she replied. Now that she knew the truth about Padraic Yorke she no longer had any fear of Brendan.

He gave a little grunt, wordless, but heavy with emotion.

She felt the weight of sadness in him, as if he were returning to an imprisonment.

“Why are you coming back?” she asked impulsively. “Are you afraid that if you stay in Galway that you’ll end up like your father, drinking too much, fighting, and in the end alone?”

“I’m not my father,” he said, keeping his eyes on the road.

She looked at him and saw that it was not anger but apology in his face, as if he had failed, and somehow he had betrayed the expectations of his heritage.

“What was he like?” she asked. “Honestly. Not your mother’s dreams, but in truth. How did you see him?”

“I loved him,” he replied, seeking the words one by one. “But I hated him too. He got away with being lazy, and cruel because he could make people laugh. He could sing like an angel. At least that’s how I remember it. He had one of those soft voices full of music that makes every note sound easy. And he told stories about Connemara, the land and the people, so real that listening to him seemed as if the past ran like wine in your blood, a little drunk maybe, but so alive. Actually I think now that most of them were Padraic’s stories anyhow, but he never seemed to mind my father telling them.”

“Did he know Padraic well?” she asked. There was a faint overcast coming across the sky, filling it with haze so the sun was no longer bright on the hills and some of the color faded from the grass. It was going to get colder. There was a veil of rain to the northeast over the Maum Hills.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. But it wouldn’t have made a difference. He’d have told the stories anyway. I asked Padraic one day if he minded, and he said my father only made them richer, and that was a good thing, for all of us, for Ireland.”

“He loves Ireland, doesn’t he.” It was an observation; she intended no question in it.

Brendan looked at her. “You didn’t come to Galway looking for me, did you? I thought at first you did. I thought you might have wondered if I killed Connor Riordan…over Maggie. I didn’t.” He said it vehemently, as if it were still somehow open to question.

Emily realized that that was what his mother was afraid of. She knew the violence in Seamus, perhaps she had even been a victim of it at times, and she imagined it in Brendan too, as if even Seamus’s faults, repeated, could somehow keep him alive for her. No wonder Brendan had fled to Galway, or anywhere, to be free of the imprisonment of her dreams.

“I know you didn’t,” she answered him.

He swung around to face her. “Do you? Do you know it, or are you afraid to let me think you suspect me, in case I hurt you?”

“I know you didn’t,” she told him. “Because I know who did, with a far better reason than you have.”

“Do you?” He searched her face, and must have seen some honesty in it, because he smiled, and his clenched hands on the reins eased.

“You should say good-bye to your mother properly, and then go back to Galway, or Sligo, or even Dublin. Anywhere you want to,” she said.

“What about the village?” he asked. “We’re deceived by our own dreams. Padraic has taken our myths and polished them until they look the way he thinks they should, and we’ve come to believe it’s the truth.”

“And it isn’t?” Although she knew the answer.

He smiled. “He makes it more glamorous than it was. He creates saints that never existed, and making ordinary men with faults that were ugly and selfish into heroes with flaws that you love as much as their virtues. Then we’ve looked at the delusion because no one dares break the reflection in the glass.”

“And Connor Riordan saw that?”

He looked at her, a flare of understanding in his eyes. “Yes. Connor saw everything. He saw that I love Maggie, and that Fergal doesn’t know how to laugh and cry, and win her. And that my mother can’t let my father lie in his grave as who he really was. And Father Tyndale thinks God has abandoned him because he can’t save us against our will. And other things. I daresay he knew Kathleen and Mary O’Donnell and little Bridie, and everyone else.”

He did not mention Padraic Yorke, and she did not either. They drove the rest of the way in companionable silence, or speaking of the land and its seasons, and the old tales of the Flahertys and the Conneelys.

Emily set Brendan down in the middle of the village, then took Jenny and the trap back to Father Tyndale. He did not ask her what she had learned, and she did not tell him. Daniel walked back home with her, carrying her bag. He looked at her curiously, but he did not ask. She thought perhaps that he already guessed.

She finally sat alone with Susannah in the evening, when Maggie and Fergal had left, and Daniel was in the study reading. Susannah had a little color back in her face, and she seemed briefly recovered again, though the faraway look in her eyes was still there, as if she were preparing to leave. Soon it would be Christmas Eve, and she was longing for the gift that Emily had for her.

“Hugo did know the truth,” Emily said gently, placing her hands over Susannah’s thin fingers on the coverlet. They were upstairs, where Daniel could not possibly overhear them. “Possibly more than we ever will. He did not tell it because he did not realize that the village’s own fear would poison it, eating away its heart. If he had understood, I believe he would have told Father Tyndale, and let him see justice done.”

Susannah smiled slowly and the tears filled her eyes. “Did you tell Father?”

“No. I will tell you, and you can do as you think best, whatever you think Hugo would have done, were he here,” Emily replied.

Then she recounted what she had learned in Galway, and added a little of her certainty about Brendan Flaherty also.

“I was afraid it could have been Brendan,” Susannah admitted. “Or Fergal. He thought Maggie was in love with Connor.”

“I think she was in love with Connor’s ideas, his imagination,” Emily said.

Susannah smiled. “I think we all were. And afraid of him. He could sing too, you know, even better than Seamus. Colleen Flaherty hated him for that. I think he knew what a bully Seamus was too.” She sighed. “Poor Padraic. Could it have been a fight, or an accident?”

“I don’t know. But even if it was, Padraic let the village be poisoned by it.”

“Yes…I know.” They sat in silence for several moments. “Father Tyndale has been to see me every day. He’ll come tomorrow, and I’ll tell him. Hugo would have.” Her fingers curled over Emily’s and tightened. “Thank you.”

The next day when Father Tyndale came in the morning, Emily left him with Susannah and she walked alone along the shore towards the place where Connor Riordan had died. The marker stone was higher up, beyond where the sea reached, but she wished to stand where he had been alive, and tell his spirit that the truth was known. It could hardly matter, except to the living. Even Hugo Ross would know without her telling him. It was simply a sense of completion.

The waves were strong, hissing up the sand, gouging it out, sucking it back in again, and burying it under with deceptive violence. She could see how easily a slip of the footing could be fatal. No one would walk close to the waves’ edge. Only emotion powerful enough to destroy all attention would lead anyone to be so careless. Had it been a fight?

She looked up across the dune and the tussock grass and saw Mrs. Flaherty striding towards her, head forward, arms swinging purposefully. Emily kept on walking. She did not want to speak to Colleen Flaherty now, especially if Brendan had told her he was going to leave the village, perhaps never live here again. It would be a relief for Fergal, in time even for Maggie.

She walked on towards the place where Connor Riordan had died. The sand was softer under her feet. The last wave hissed, white-tongued, up to within a yard of her.

Colleen Flaherty was gaining on her. Emily felt a sudden flicker of fear. She glanced landward and saw that the dune edge was too steep to climb here. The only way back was to retrace her steps. She was at the end of the open sand. She could see the grave marker. This was where Connor had died. The sea that was creeping upward, this wave wetting her feet, was the same undertow that had pulled him in, burying, drowning, giving him back only when the life had been battered out of him, as if rectifying what the storm had left undone. Now she was frozen, shivering, wet up to her knees, the heavy skirts dragging her down into the hungry sand.

Colleen Flaherty stopped in front of her, her face gleeful with a bitter triumph. “That’s right, Englishwoman. This is where he died, the young man from the sea who came here intruding into our lives. I don’t know who killed him, but it wasn’t my son. You should have left it alone and kept your prying to yourself.” She took another step forward.

Emily moved back, and the next wave caught her, almost taking her balance. She teetered wildly, waving her arms, and felt the sand suck her down.

“Dangerous seas here,” Mrs. Flaherty said. “Lots of people drown in them. You shouldn’t have told Brendan to go away. It isn’t any of your business. This is his land and his heritage. This is where he belongs.”

Emily tried to pull her feet unstuck and go towards her. “It’s time you let him go,” she said angrily. “You’re suffocating him. That isn’t love, it’s possession. He isn’t Seamus and he doesn’t want to be.”

“You don’t know what he wants!” Mrs. Flaherty shouted, taking a huge step towards Emily.

Emily struggled desperately and another wave washed in and raced up the sand, catching her well above the knees and sending her flying, drenched in ice-cold water, fighting for breath. This is how it must have been for Connor Riordan, like the shipwreck all over again.

She saw Colleen Flaherty looming over her, then felt arms pulling her, and she had barely the strength to fight. There was another wave, burying them both, robbing her of breath. Then suddenly she was free and Padraic Yorke was holding her up. Mrs. Flaherty was yards away. Emily gasped in the air. She was so cold it seemed to numb her entire body.

Another wave came and Padraic Yorke pushed her forward, towards the shore. She took another step. There were more people there but she was too battered to know who they were. Her lungs ached unbearably. Someone reached for her. Another wave came, but this time it did not take her. She was faint, stumbling, and then she pitched forward into darkness.

She awoke in her own bed in Susannah’s house, still fighting for breath, and deathly cold inside.

“It’s all right,” Father Tyndale said gently. “It’s all over. You’re safe.”

She blinked. “Over?”

“Yes. Colleen will be ashamed for the rest of her life, I think. And Padraic Yorke has made his restitution, may he rest in peace.” He made the sign of the cross.

She stared at him, understanding filling her slowly. “Is he alive?”

“No,” he said softly. “He gave his life to save you. It was what he wanted to do.”

She felt the tears prickle her eyes, but she did not argue.

“Thank you, Mrs. Radley,” he said softly, touching her hand. “You have ended a long grief for us. Perhaps in a way you have given us a second chance. This time we will not turn away a stranger who brings us truth about ourselves that we might prefer not to know.”

She shook her head. “It wasn’t I, Father, it was circumstances that brought Daniel to the village, and gave us all an opportunity to face ourselves, and do it better this time. For me also. Perhaps that is what Christmas is, another chance. But it won’t work if you don’t tell everyone who killed Connor Riordan, and why.”

His face pinched. “Can’t we allow Padraic to die with his secrets? The poor man has paid. It might have been an accident. Connor was not Daniel, you know. He had a cruel tongue, at times. It may have been the blind cruelty of youth, but it hurts. The words cut just as deep.”

“No, Father, if they don’t know who killed him, they will not lay their own suspicions away, and realize that it was the lies that hurt. No one needs to know what secret Padraic Yorke had, but we need to know our own.”

“Perhaps so,” he said reluctantly. “If I had been honest with myself maybe all these bitter years need not have been. I wanted to save pain, but I only added to it. It was Hugo’s debt too. I must thank Susannah for paying it.”

When, on Christmas Eve, the church bells began at midnight, Emily and Susannah sat before the fire listening to the wind in the eaves. Daniel had decided to walk to the service, and they were alone in the house.

Susannah smiled. “I’m glad I can hear them,” she said gently. “I wasn’t sure if I would. Tomorrow will be a good day. Thank you, Emily.”