Entry Island

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

This voyage is a nightmare beyond anything I might ever have imagined. And it has only just begun! God only knows what miseries lie ahead.

I have learned not to think about Ciorstaidh, for it brings only pain and increases my depression. Had she been aboard with me as planned, we would have been in one of the few passenger cabins above deck. She had our papers, and when it was discovered that I had none, and no proof that my passage had been paid for, I was told by the first mate that I would have to pay my way, and was assigned to the kitchen to cook for the passengers below deck, among whom I would have to find a place.

The kitchen is really just a crude preparation area, and the three of us designated as cooks find it almost impossible to work when the seas are rough, as they have been since we left.

The drinking water in the barrels provided is green. Almost undrinkable. And half the grain in the sacks is mouldy. There is precious little in the way of meat, and it won’t keep long anyway. I have no idea how we are going to eke out the potatoes and onions and turnips for the length of the journey.

I have learned that most of the 269 folk in steerage are from the Isle of Skye. Cleared from their land and sent to Glasgow by their landlord, who has paid their passage to Canada. Most of them possess no more than they stand up in. They have no money, and no idea what will happen to them when they arrive at their destination.

The Eliza was never intended as a passenger vessel. She is a cargo ship. She will return to the British Isles laden with goods from the New World, and the people in steerage on the way out are little more than paying ballast.

What they call steerage is a cargo hold crudely adapted to take people. Stalls have been constructed along each side of the hull, and down the centre of the ship. The stalls are on two levels, squeezed between the upper and lower decks. They provide little more room on filthy, stained planking than you can lie down on.

Families are squeezed in, eight or ten to a stall. There are no toilets. Just tin chanties that you have to carry, sloshing and spilling, up to the top deck to empty overboard. The air is thick with the stench of human waste and there is no water for washing.

Neither is there privacy when you perform your toilet. Which is embarrassing for everyone, but for the women in particular. Most use blankets held up by family members to screen them.

It is dark down here, and oppressive. In bad weather they batten down the hatches and we see no daylight for days on end. The only illumination comes from the oil lamps that swing overhead, releasing their fumes into already unbreathable air. There are times I cannot even see to write this account of my life, and when the boat yaws and pitches in a storm I am inclined to think that no one will ever get to read it. I have been fortunate to be taken under the wing of the captain’s wife, as almost the only passenger in steerage who speaks English. She has provided me with materials to write my journal and a place to keep it safe. The writing of it is the only thing that keeps my sanity intact during these interminable hours and days.

The seasickness is bad, and the music of human misery that I am now used to hearing day and night is almost constantly punctuated by the sound of vomiting. I often think of my mother and sisters aboard the Heather, and how it must be for them, too. It is a thought I can hardly bear.

There is another sickness as well. Not caused by the motion of the boat, but by some malady. There is one man, I have noticed, who seems sicker than the rest. A young man, fit and strong, maybe five or six years older than myself. His name is John Angus Macdonald, and he has two young children and a wife pregnant with a third. He has violent sickness and diarrhoea and has not eaten for two days now. And just tonight I noticed an eruption of red spots on his chest and abdomen.

We have been at sea for two weeks, and John Angus Macdonald is dead. He and his family were in the stall next to mine and I watched him wither in front of my eyes.

We held a brief funeral service for him this morning. Just a handful of us allowed up on deck for the ceremony. I cannot describe how wonderful it was to breathe fresh air, although in the end it only made it harder to return below deck.

John Angus was wrapped in the sheet he died in. Crudely sewn into it. I was only there because I am one of the few aboard who can read and write, and someone thrust the Gaelic bible in my hand and asked me to read from it. I remembered the passage old blind Calum had recited over my father’s coffin. Although it took some time, I found it eventually: John, chapter 11, verse 25. I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.

And they slid his body over the rail. I saw the tiny splash it made in heaving seas, and realised, possibly for the first time in my life, how utterly insignificant we all are.

I have no idea how many weeks his widow Catriona’s pregnancy has left to run, but her bulge is substantial, and it cannot be too long before she will give birth. A baby that will never know its father.

Somehow I feel a responsibility for her now that her man is gone. I am right there in the next stall, and the closest thing to a father her children have. Even as I write this by the feeble light down here, the little boy and girl are curled up at my legs, sharing my sheet now that their father’s is gone. All that I can really do for them is try to make sure they each get a little extra food.

The weather continues to be abominable. The hatches have been shut for days to keep the weather out, and I feel that I could cut the air into slices with my knife.

I spoke earlier today with a member of crew who told me the average sailing time is normally four to six weeks. But because of this weather we are already well behind schedule, and he thinks it could take up to two months. I took an immediate inventory of our larder, such as it is, and did a quick reckoning. It seems to me that we will run out of food and water long before we get to our destination.

John Angus Macdonald’s sickness has spread. Eleven people have now died and been dropped overboard. Many of my fellow passengers have relentless diarrhoea. It soils the boards we sleep on. It makes a porridge along with vomit to render the floorboards treacherous underfoot. We have no way of cleaning it up, and the stink is beyond unbearable.

I am acutely aware of the symptoms of the sickness that stalks us in steerage, and watch keenly for any sign of it in myself. Thus far I have been spared the malady, but not the misery.

Tonight has been one of the most distressing of my life.

Catrìona Macdonald finally went into labour. The ship was pitching violently, and shadows cast by the swinging oil lamps danced among us like demons. It was well nigh impossible to see or focus clearly.

The poor woman was in terrible distress, and the more experienced older women gathered round to help with the delivery. Catrìona’s screams rose above even the roar of the storm, and her terrified children clung to me in the stall next door.

It quickly became clear that there was a problem. I led the children to the stall across the way so that they couldn’t see, although they could still hear well enough. But even in the semi-dark I could read the body language of the women gathered around the young widow. And their silent panic took me back to that day many years before when Annag and I crouched by the chicken wire at the door to the fire room of our blackhouse when my mother gave birth.

I left the children in the care of a family in the neighbouring stall and went to see for myself. At first the older women pushed me away. This was no place for a man, they said. But I forced my way through, bracing myself against the upright to see poor Catrìona Macdonald lying on her back with her legs held apart. The baby was coming out the wrong way, just as Murdag had done.

There was no experienced midwife on board, and the woman trying to help release the baby was hopelessly out of her depth. I closed my eyes and saw clearly through the smoke of the fire room how the midwife in Baile Mhanais had turned the baby. And when I opened them again it was even clearer to me that if I did not do something this child was going to die.

I pushed the woman out of the way, and I heard the others gasp their surprise as I took her place. I braced my knees against the side of the stall to steady myself against the yaw of the ship so that I could take a hold of the baby. I had seen it done. I knew I could do it.

It was coming arse first, arms and legs still inside. A little girl. I pictured what I had seen the midwife do, freeing the baby’s legs one by one, then gently turning and twisting to release first one arm, then the other. The mother’s screams very nearly unnerved me. As with my own mother there was a terrible amount of blood, and my confidence started to desert me. The whole body was free now, but the head still trapped inside. Suffocating. The baby was drowning in blood and fluid.

I could feel the life of the child in my hands ebbing away, my own sweat almost blinding me. I tried to remember what it was the midwife had done to free the head, fighting hard to concentrate on what I had seen that day. I recalled how she had felt for the head through my mother’s belly. And then pushed down and forward with the palm of her hand.

The women were screaming at me to let go, but I was convinced now that I was the only one who could save the life of this little girl.

My hand slid over the blood on Catrìona’s belly, and I felt the head of the baby there, round and hard. I supported the child in the crook of my arm, and pushed down hard, yelling ‘Push!’ as I did. The head came out so unexpectedly that I staggered and almost fell. I felt the hands of many women grab and steady me. And I smacked that baby’s bottom so hard, just as I had seen the midwife do to Murdag.

For a moment, there was nothing. Then a cough and a cry, and I cut through the umbilical with my knife to release the baby into my hands. And there she was, this tiny creature covered in blood and mucus, held to my chest, eyes opening for the first time.

I was very nearly overwhelmed by the emotion of cradling this new life in my arms.

The women gathered around with sheets to try to stop Catrìona’s bleeding. But Catrìona was oblivious to whatever pain or peril she might be in. She looked up at me in the half-dark with shining eyes and held out trembling hands for her baby girl. Someone took her from me and wrapped her in a blanket, then handed the child to her mother. Catrìona held her to her breast as if she were the most precious thing on earth. And in that moment, to her mother, I suppose she was.

Catrìona looked from her baby to me, and in a voice barely audible above the storm and the creak of the ship, she whispered, ‘Thank you.’

We have been at sea for forty-five days now. One of my fellow cooks is dead, the other is sick, and I am doing what I can to feed the remaining passengers. There has been no meat for weeks, the grain is done, and all that remain are a few shrivelled vegetables with which I am doing my best to make a thin soup to go round. Our water, disgusting though it has been throughout, is all but exhausted, too. If we don’t succumb to the sickness we will die from starvation.

More and more passengers have come down with the malady that took John Angus Macdonald. And now Catrìona is showing symptoms of it, too.

She has not been well since the birth of her baby, and is deteriorating fast. I spend most evenings comforting her and keeping the children occupied. The baby would have died I am sure had a woman a few stalls away not still been nursing, so I do my best to see that the Macdonalds and the nursing woman get enough food to survive.

Ciorstaidh is a distant memory now. But I know that for the rest of my days I will always regret the moment that I lost her on the quay.

Tonight I had yet another burden of responsibility placed upon my shoulders. Catrìona knows she is going to die. How could she not? I had just wrapped up her children in a blanket and stroked their heads until they fell asleep. I turned to find her watching me with big, sad eyes. She reached out to grasp my wrist and whispered, ‘My grandmother always told me that if you save a life you are responsible for it.’ She coughed mucus and sputum into her sheet and took a moment to collect herself. ‘When I’m gone, my baby is yours to care for. My children, too. Do what you can, Sime. There’s no one else.’

I am only eighteen years old. But how could I say no?

Yesterday, we slid three more bodies over the rail. All formalities have been dispensed with by now, although I always whisper Calum’s farewell to my father. Even if no one else hears it, I am sure that God is listening.

The weather has improved these last days, and we have been making better speed. I lingered on deck for a while after the burials, and I heard someone shout ‘Land!’ With others, I ran to the rail on the port side and strained to see beyond the swell of the sea. And there in the distance I saw a small group of islands breaking the horizon. A crewman at my shoulder said, ‘Thank God for that. We’ll arrive tomorrow or the day after.’

I felt such a sense of relief I wanted to shout out loud and punch the air. I wanted to be there now. I just wanted all this to end. It is strange how it is possible to hold yourself together when you know there is still a distance to go. But as soon as the end is in sight, somehow all your resolve vanishes and you can barely stagger to the finish.

However, my happiness was short-lived. The crewman said, ‘Don’t get yourself all worked up, son. They’ll not let us through to Quebec City just yet. We’ll be stopped at Grosse Île first. And if you thought this was bad …’ His voice tailed away.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘What’s Grosse Île?’

‘It’s hell on earth, son. An island in the St Lawrence river, just a few miles downstream from the city. We’ll be held in quarantine there. The sick will be treated, and probably die. And the rest of us will be held until they’re sure we’re not sick. Only then will they let us go on.’

I could have wept.

It seemed extraordinary to see land on both horizons when we sailed into the mouth of the St Lawrence earlier today. But the opposing banks of it are so distant that they barely blur the line between water and sky. I had no idea a river could be this big.

Everyone who could, crowded on deck to watch our progress upriver, banks drawing in on either side. This was the great continent of North America.

But of the 269 passengers who left Glasgow in steerage, twenty-nine are dead and only 240 of us remain.

It was almost dusk when we sailed past a string of dark islands that loomed out of the stream of the river, to drop anchor finally at Grosse Île. There were eight or ten other tall ships anchored there in the bay, all flying the yellow jack of quarantine. It seems that we have brought all our diseases with us to this new world.

Onshore I could see a collection of long sheds, and woods rising up on the hill behind them. From the wooden pier a long boat set out towards us, water from its oars catching the dying light as it dropped, like liquid silver, back into the stream of the river.

A man came aboard in coat tails and boots and heavy trousers. He wore a hat above a gaunt face with sunken cheeks. One of the crew said to me, ‘That’s the doctor.’

‘Anyone speak English?’ the doctor said.

After a moment I raised my hand. ‘I do, sir.’

‘What language do these people speak?’

‘Gaelic.’

‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Our Gaelic translator died two days ago. You’ll have to do it.’ He took several strides towards me and gave me a good looking at. Then opened my shirt and examined my chest. ‘You look healthy enough for the moment.’ He spoke a strange, nasal drawling sort of English. ‘I’m going to have to examine these folk to see who’s sick and needs treatment. The rest of you will be kept in the Lazarettos at the top end of the island.’

‘Lazarettos?’

‘Just huts, son.’ He looked around. ‘I guess the sick are still below deck.’

They finally got us all ashore. Ferried on longboats and gathered together on the pier in the dark, lanterns held above us on poles. A collection of miserable souls, dressed in rags, filthy hair long and unkempt, beards tangling on cadaverous faces. Not a single person wore shoes. One man was dressed in a woman’s petticoat, given him by the captain’s wife to hide his modesty. His humiliation was acute.

Thirty-nine sick people, most of whom could not walk, were taken directly to the hospital sheds. The remainder of us had whatever goods we had brought with us removed by men wearing masks and gloves who moved among us like servants of death. Fortunately, the captain’s wife had possession of my diaries, so they were kept safe.

Catrìona Macdonald was taken with the rest of the sick to the hospital, and I was left in charge of her children, holding the baby in my arms. We were herded on to carts then, to make the short journey to the north-east end of the island.

The doctor sat up on the cart beside me and the children. I could almost feel his fatigue. ‘I’ve seen things,’ he said, ‘that no man should see. I’ve seen suffering that no human being should have to endure.’ He turned to look at me with empty eyes. ‘I used to be a religious man, son. But if there’s a God, then he abandoned us a long time ago.’

Our sorry convoy moved off through the night, a lantern on each cart. The track cut inland, the sea somewhere away to our right. On our left lay what the doctor described as a mosquito-infested lagoon. Cholera Bay, he called it. Where the Eliza had anchored, he said, was known as Hospital Bay.

Nearly a hundred thousand people had come through Grosse Île this year alone, he told me. Most of them off boats from Ireland. He said that people were dying there in their tens of thousands from the potato famine. And I knew just how that must be.

‘Five thousand poor souls have died from typhoid on Grosse Île in the last seven months,’ he said. ‘It’s what most of the sick on the Eliza have, too.’

‘Will they die?’ I asked.

‘Some of them. The strongest will survive. All things considered, we do not do that bad a job. But our ambulance doubles as a hearse. And it’s at work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.’ He shook his head. ‘We’ve lost two drivers to typhoid already this year, and half of our translators.’

I had no idea what to say to him. Five thousand dead? It was unimaginable. We passed through the only village on the island. Houses and a church set back along either side of the road. I said, ‘Who lives here?’

‘The quarantine workers and their families,’ he told me. ‘Doctors, nurses, translators, administrators, drivers. And the men of God, of course. Come to see first hand what hell Heaven has wrought on earth.’ His disillusion and lack of faith was almost painful, and I found it hard to meet his eye. And I wondered, too, what kind of people would come and work in a place like this, and bring their families to live here with them.

Beyond the village, the land levelled off, and we were closer again to the sea. Finally we saw the Lazarettos, long shadows in the dark, set in rows overlooking a rocky shore.

When we dismounted, the doctor told me they were sure to call on my services again, and he thanked me for my patience before heading off back to the village. But he is wrong, for I have no patience. I have no desire to be in this place, and will leave it just as soon as I can.

A quarantine worker led us to the last of the huts. It seemed endlessly long, partitioned along its length, open doorways leading from one section to the next. Walls and roof and beams were crudely whitewashed. Oil lamps hung from the ceilings, and shadows lurked and moved like ghosts among the hundreds of people lying side by side on long trestles set against either wall. A double-tier trestle runs down the centre of the hut, groaning with bodies, a single sheet covering eight or ten souls at a time.

This is to be our home for the next days or weeks, until we either come down with the typhoid and die, or survive and move on to the next phase of this hellish journey.

The children clung to my legs as we shuffled in to claim our space on wooden shelves scarred by the graffiti of all those desperate people who have gone before us, and stained by God knows what excretions.

The nursing woman took Catrìona Macdonald’s baby to feed her. We would eat shortly, they said. And for that I was grateful. But all I wanted was to be gone.

It is hard to say that I feel better, but after three square meals I am physically stronger.

The doctor who met the boat came looking for me this morning to tell me that the administrator wanted a word. I rode back through the island with him on his cart, and he pointed out the armed guards posted on the edge of the village nearest the Lazarettos. ‘There are shifts of them night and day,’ he said.

I looked at them in surprise. ‘Guards? What are they guarding?’

‘Against folk in quarantine straying into the village or trying to escape. It’s a dreadful thing, the typhoid, son. The authorities’ll do anything to keep it contained.’

There were children playing among the houses in the village as we went through it, and they stopped their games to watch us pass. Dark eyes filled with caution that made me feel like those lepers they speak of in the Bible.

The administration hut was close to the pier, a long shed with windows looking out over the bay. The administrator himself was a Scotsman from a place called Dumfries. He said he had been working here more than ten years. I asked him if he wasn’t afraid of catching the typhoid. He just smiled and said the fear never leaves you. But that if he’d been going to catch it he reckoned he’d have got it by now.

‘You speak the Gaelic, I’m told,’ he said, and I nodded. ‘We have translators for most languages here, but we recently lost our Gaelic speaker. Actually, he was Irish, but he seemed able to talk to the Scots well enough.’

The administrator turned to gaze out of the window at all of the boats anchored in the bay.

‘I wonder if you might be able to help us with a wee problem we have. An Irishman called Michaél O’Connor who arrived here on the fifth. He doesn’t appear to speak any English.’ He turned back to look at me. ‘The man’s demented. Even turned violent once or twice. He hitches a ride on the ambulance and comes here two or three times a day shouting and screaming. Maybe you could talk to him for us. Find out what the hell it is he wants.’

I found Michaél O’Connor in Lazaretto No. 3, and was surprised to discover that he was not much older than myself. He was sitting at a table on his own, staring into space. Most men, it seems, shave and get their hair cut after a day or two here, but Michaél had a thick black beard on him, and his hair was shoulder-length, matted and knotted. He looked at me with the palest of blue Celtic eyes, empty of any emotion.

Until I spoke the Gaelic to him, and his face lit up. ‘Man, I thought you were another of these bloody people come to jabber at me in English. There’s not one of them speaks God’s own language, and I can’t make myself understood at all.’ Then he glared at me suspiciously. ‘It’s a weird sort of Gaelic you speak, though.’

‘Not as weird as yours,’ I said.

‘Where are you from?’

‘Scotland.’

He roared and laughed then and slapped me on the back, and I think it is the first time I have heard human laughter in months. ‘Ach, you’re a Scotsman!’ he said. ‘Second-best to an Irishman, of course, but you’ll do. Did they send you?’

‘Aye,’ I said. ‘To find out what it is you want from them.’

His face clouded a little as his smile faded. ‘My brother Seamus left Cork on the Emily more than four months ago. He’d have been quarantined here, so there must be a record of him. They’re bloody meticulous about keeping their records. All I want is to confirm that he landed here safely and then passed on to Quebec City after his quarantine.’

‘Surely you could have found some way of asking them that?’ I said.

And then he shocked me by speaking English with a thick brogue and a foul mouth. ‘The fockers don’t speak the mother tongue, Scotsman. Just the fockin’ English.’

I was astonished. ‘But you speak it yourself.’ I raised my hands, at a loss to understand. ‘So where’s the problem?’

His eyes twinkled with mischief. ‘I’ve never given the English the pleasure of hearing me speak their bloody language yet. And I’m not about to start now.’

I laughed and shook my head. ‘But these people aren’t English, Michaél. They’re Canadian. And they only speak English or French.’

He guffawed again. A big, loud, infectious laugh. ‘In that case, it looks like I’m going to have to learn the fockin’ French, then.’

They gave me access to the arrival and departure records in the administration office this afternoon, and I sat at a table with a great big log that listed the arrival of every boat — where it was from, when it arrived, how many people were aboard, how many had died and were sick.

I looked for the Heather, sailing from Loch Glas in the Hebrides. But I couldn’t find any record of it. I asked the clerk if every boat that arrived stopped here at Grosse Île. He was a grey little man, with not much hair left, and sad green eyes. He said that every boat got stopped here, but because of pressure of numbers this year if the doctor found no disease aboard then the boat would be allowed to continue without quarantine.

And from that I took heart and hope that my mother and sisters had not faced disease aboard the Heather, and that they had passed on directly to Quebec City. I would find out when I got there.

I turned my attentions then to the passenger list for the Emily, whose arrival I found had been registered on July 2nd. The crossing had taken fifty-one days, with a hundred and fifty-seven passengers in steerage. Nine had died during the crossing and sixteen were sick on arrival. And there among the surviving passengers was one Seamus O’Connor. The grey clerk with the green eyes raised his head wearily when I troubled him for some further information. ‘Seamus O’Connor,’ I said. ‘Arrived on the Emily from Cork, Ireland, on July 2nd. Can you tell me when those passengers left for Quebec?’

He opened another huge ledger, and ran a bony finger with a dirty fingernail down columns of entries. ‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘The Emily was held in quarantine for just four days. Six of the sixteen that were put in hospital died.’ He ran his finger down another column, then looked up. ‘Seamus O’Connor was one of them. He’s buried in the mass graves.’

The mass graves are to be found in a flat, grassy area near the south-western tip of Grosse Île. The ground rises up on both sides, rocky and tree-covered. But through the trees beyond the graves, you can just see the sluggish swell of the river. Quebec City is somewhere there, not far upriver. So the dead were almost within sight of it.

Rows of crude white crosses pepper the grass that has grown freshly here over the recently disturbed earth. I found Michaél standing among the trees, sheltering from the drizzle and looking out over the crosses. He wore a blue woollen jacket and torn, baggy trousers held up by braces. The stitching in his boots was rotten and barely held them together. His hands were shoved deep in his pockets.

He nodded towards the graves. ‘That’s my countrymen buried out there,’ he said.

‘And mine.’

He looked at me. ‘Did you people have the famine, too?’

‘Yes.’

He turned away again. And I sensed anger in the way he clenched his jaw. ‘There’s not one of these poor bastards who would have chosen to leave. But if they’d stayed, they’d have starved to death.’ Anger flashed in his eyes now as he turned them on me. ‘With not a single landowner lifting a finger to help them.’ And then he blurted the question I knew he’d been afraid to ask. ‘So what did you learn about Seamus?’

I had been dreading the moment almost as much as he had. I was not at all sure how to tell someone that the person they love is dead. But I didn’t have to. He saw it in my face. And he turned away again quickly.

‘He’s out there, isn’t he?’ But I knew he didn’t expect an answer, and I saw big silent tears running down his cheeks to be lost among his whiskers. ‘Why couldn’t he have waited for me?’ He wiped away his tears with the back of his hands and I could see his embarrassment. ‘I pleaded for him to let me go with him. But, oh no. Too risky for his little brother. He wanted to go ahead on his own, establish himself here and make sure I had something worth coming to.’

He stood for a long time trying to contain himself. I had no idea what to say.

Finally he spoke again. ‘Looked out for me all our lives, did Seamus. Didn’t want to put me at risk. Mam starved to death, you see. And Da died of the cholera. So I was all he had left.’ He turned towards me. ‘I’d have starved to death too, if it hadn’t been for my brother. I never asked where the food came from that kept us alive, but he always came home with something.’

His face cracked open into a mirthless grin to disguise his grief.

‘Then he had this bright idea of coming over here. Great things he’d heard about the place. How you could have your own bit of land. Be a free man. Not in the pocket of some fockin’ landlord. Left me with an aunt and told me he’d send for me as soon as he’d found us something better. Only, I couldn’t wait, could I? Stole a bit of cash and bought my passage aboard the Highland Mary from Cork.’ His voice choked off, and he fought back his emotions again before gathering himself once more. ‘And now …’ He turned to look at me and I saw the pain in his eyes. ‘Now I’ve no idea what to do with my life.’ There was a long pause. ‘But I’ll tell you one thing.’ And suddenly the fire was back. ‘I’m not hanging around in this fockin’ place.’

I was sitting at the table in our Lazaretto when Michaél came looking for me this morning. I have spent the last few days teaching Catrìona’s children to count in English, as well as giving them some basic vocabulary. The Gaelic’s not going to take them very far in this land of English and French.

The boy’s eight, I think, and the girl about six, but not like children that age I remember from Baile Mhanais. There’s no play in them. No sparkle. Hunger and loss have taken their heart. So they sit docile and do what I say, eager simply for the attention. Anxious to please in the hope of some comfort in return. Like pet animals.

All the mischief was back in Michaél’s eyes and he could hardly contain his excitement. He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me outside, walking us briskly away from the Lazarettos towards the shore, anxious that no one should overhear us.

His voice was a hoarse whisper. ‘I’m getting off Grosse Île tonight.’

I was surprised. ‘How?’

He shook his head. ‘Don’t even ask. It’s costing an arm and a leg. And the guards’ll bloody shoot us if they see us. There’s a boat going to meet us on the north-east shore and take us over to the north bank of the St Lawrence. We can make our way west from there to Quebec City. Me and three others. All Irishmen.’ He paused. ‘But we might make room for a Scotsman if he wanted to come along.’

My heart was banging in my chest. A chance to escape. ‘I do,’ I said. ‘But I’ve got no money.’

‘You bloody Scots never do!’ he said. ‘But don’t worry about that. You can pay me back sometime. As long as you don’t mind travelling second class.’ And he grinned at me through his whiskers. ‘Are you in?’

I nodded.

Despite my desperation to get off this damned island, by late afternoon I was regretting my impulsive decision to go with Michaél and the Irish. I had promised Catrìona Macdonald that I would take care of her children. And although I told myself it was unfair of her to burden me with that responsibility I still felt guilty at abandoning them. So I decided to go to the hospital to speak to her myself.

It was my first visit to the hospital shed, and when I crossed the threshold I felt as if I had passed from one world to another, from hell on earth to hell below it.

It was long and dark, windows blanked to keep out the daylight. The smell was worse than on the boat. And having breathed God’s own clean air for three days it was all the harder to take. Beds were lined up side by side, with the narrowest of spaces between them. Just wooden frames with boards and filthy mattresses.

Nurses in dirty, stained and worn uniforms moved among the dying like angels of mercy, doing what they could to relieve pain and suffering. But they were little more than sanitation workers cleaning up in the wake of death. The strain was clear on pallid faces with deeply shadowed eyes. Even although the doctor had told me there was a reasonably high recovery rate, it seemed hard to believe that anyone could survive this place. The medical practitioners here wore long gowns and hats and face masks to protect them from the miasma of infection that permeated the very air they breathed.

I wanted to turn and go back out immediately. But I steeled myself. The very least I owed Catrìona Macdonald was an explanation. I stopped one of the nurses and asked which bed she was in. She lifted some charts hanging from the wall and riffled through several sheets, running her finger down the names. At length she stopped at one. ‘Ah, yes. Catrìona Macdonald. She died this morning.’

It was hot outside, the sun showing itself periodically through a broken sky. I stood gulping down fresh air and fighting mixed feelings. A part of me was relieved that I wouldn’t have to face her. Another part of me wanted to weep for the woman from whose loins I had torn life. And yet another part of me died a little bit for her children, and her baby who would never know her.

I found Michaél in Lazaretto No. 3, he and a little group of co-conspirators gathered around a table. My fellow escapees. ‘I need to talk to you,’ I said, and we went outside.

I suppose I must have had something of an aura of death around me, for he gave me an odd look. ‘What can I do for you, Scotsman?’

‘I need some money.’

He frowned. ‘What for?’

‘It’s a long story. I’ll pay you back when I can.’ I couldn’t tell him I needed it to buy off my conscience. But even in the short time that I have known him, I have realised that Michaél has a way of reading folk.

He looked at me for a long time. A gaze that penetrated my very soul, it seemed. Then he grinned and said, ‘What the hell. What we need we’ll fockin’ steal.’ And he dug into an inside jacket pocket and pulled out a small purse with its strings pulled tight and tied in a knot. He took my hand and pressed it into it. ‘Ten gold sovereigns in there. I hope they’re going to a good cause.’

I nodded open-mouthed, barely able to believe such generosity. ‘They are. But I don’t know that I can take this much.’

‘Take it!’ he bellowed. ‘And never ask where I got it. The bloody things are far too heavy anyway. And besides, they’ve got the head of the fockin’ English queen on them. No self-respecting Irishman would be found dead with those in his pocket.’

I went straight to the Mackinnon family who had been looking after Catrìona’s children when I wasn’t there. I was blunt with them. Told them that Catrìona was dead and that I was leaving tonight. I produced the coins and laid them out on the table, and said this was to pay for the children’s keep. They had three children of their own already, but the husband and wife both looked at the money with eyes like saucers. It was more than either of them had ever seen. Or me, for that matter. And for a moment I wondered how on earth I was ever going to pay Michaél back.

The children themselves took the news of their mother’s death in a strangely solemn silence. I wondered if perhaps they had just seen so much of it that death no longer registered They were more upset to learn that I was leaving. They clung to me, silent tears running down their cheeks, little hands clutching my jacket. And I held them both, fighting hard not to weep myself, and wondered how I could be so selfish.

I kissed them, then tore myself free to stand and take the baby in my arms, just as I had that night on the ship. She looked up at me, almost as if she knew that she would never see me again, and gripped my thumb with tiny fingers, such focus in those little eyes staring into mine. I kissed her forehead and whispered, ‘Stay safe, little one.’ And she smiled.

I can hardly write as I squat here in the dirt, shaking from the cold and wet, sitting as close to the flames as I dare, to warm my bones and light my pages. Michaél watches me with curiosity in his pale eyes. He has no understanding of this compunction I have to put my life on paper. Somehow in these last two months it has become the only thing that gives my existence any point.

I can see the slow movement of the river through the trees below us where we shelter from the rain and the cold beneath this overhang of rock. And somewhere across the water, unseen, lie the horrors of Grosse Île. It hardly seems possible that it is less than two hours since we left the Lazarettos under cover of darkness, and that only Michaél and I remain alive.

There were five of us altogether. Earlier the sky had been clear, but by the time we left after midnight it had clouded over and was threatening rain. The dark seemed impenetrable.

We moved within touching distance of each other, away from the huts, and across the wide, flat, boggy ground that lay between the Lazarettos and the village. It was just possible to see the darker shadow of the tree-covered escarpment that rose away through tangling briar towards the north side of the island. That part of it had never been settled and we knew it would be difficult terrain to negotiate.

We were almost there when God intervened, and a great hole opened up in the sky to let moonlight flood down across Grosse Île. For a moment it was like midday, and there we were, caught in the full glare of the light for anyone to see. And seen we were. By the guards on the edge of the village. A shout went up, voices were raised and a shot rang out in the dark.

We ran for our lives, seeking the cover of the trees, and once there went ploughing through briar and undergrowth that shredded our clothes and skin. Climbing. Up over rock and tree roots, stumbling and tripping, fuelled by panic.

We could hear the soldiers in pursuit, and as we reached the crest of the rise a volley of shots rang out, and one of the Irishmen went down. ‘Leave him!’ one of the others shouted, but Michaél stopped, crouching beside him to turn him over. I stopped, too, scared as hell and breathing hard. Michaél looked up grimly. ‘Dead,’ he said. ‘Nothing we can do for him.’ And he was on his feet in an instant, pulling on my sleeve to drag me running off through the trees.

It got easier as we scampered down the other side, helter-skelter between the tree trunks, almost out of control, until finally we saw moonlight glinting on water through the foliage. And it occurred to me for the first time that if the boat wasn’t there, we would be cornered, and either killed or captured.

But there it was, a dark silhouette bobbing up and down between the rocks, waiting for us as planned. We slithered over the rocks and through the water, to be pulled on board by two men whose urgency was clear in the pitch of their voices. ‘Quick, quick!’ they shouted. Because already we could hear the soldiers crashing down the slope behind us.

In that moment God stepped in again and the moonlight vanished, darkness settling over us like black dust to obscure us from view. We pushed off from the shore, and the boatmen plied their oars to propel us out into the swell and flow of the river. Shots rang out from the shoreline. We could see the rifles flashing in the dark, but their shots went harmlessly wide or fell short. And soon we were well beyond range. Free.

But not safe. Not yet. The river seemed to move slowly, and yet the current was powerful, and the oarsmen had to fight hard against the drag of it. We had little control, it seemed, over where the river would take us, and we crouched there breathing hard and filled with fear, completely at the mercy of our rescuers and this vast flow of deep, dark water.

It seemed like for ever before we finally saw the black line of the shore, and then suddenly we were there, navigating our way through the rocks to pitch up on a shingle beach. The land rose away steeply from here, trees growing almost down to the water’s edge.

The first I knew there was any trouble was the sound of a shot as I stepped out of the boat. I turned around to see one of the Irishmen collapse into the stern of it. One of the oarsmen held a pistol on the three of us remaining while his companion went through the pockets of the dead man then pitched him out into the river.

‘Okay, hand over your money.’ The gunman’s voice was shaking.

‘You’ve got all the fockin’ money you’ll get from us,’ Michaél said.

‘Well, the way I see it, you’ve got two choices. You can hand over the money now, or I can take it off your dead bodies.’

‘We’ll be dead as soon as we hand it over,’ the other Irishman said.

The man with the gun grinned in the dark. ‘That’s a chance you’ll have to take.’

The swiftness with which the Irishman lunged at him took him by surprise. But as the two men went down, the gun went off, and the Irishman went limp on top of him. The other oarsman spun around, drawing a second pistol, and I barely saw the flash of Michaél’s blade before it slid up between the man’s ribs and into his heart.

Michaél stooped immediately to pick up his pistol, and as the first oarsman dragged himself free of the Irishman he had killed, Michaél shot him point-blank in the chest.

It had all happened so quickly, I had barely moved from the spot where I stepped ashore. And I stood now, gaping in horror and disbelief.

‘Fockers!’ Michaél said. Then, ‘Come on, Scotsman, help me go through their pockets. Get all the money you can and let’s get out of here.’

We tipped all the bodies into the water when we were finished, and Michaél crossed himself as he said farewell to his friends. Then we pushed the boat out into the river, and started scrambling up the embankment as the rain began to fall.

We have six gold sovereigns and ten Canadian dollars between us, and are lucky still to be in possession of our lives. I have no idea what the future holds, but it seems that mine is now inextricably linked with Michaél’s. I glance across the fire to see the flicker of its flames on his bloodless, bearded face. If it wasn’t for him, I’d be a dead man now.