The journey from Dundrum took hours but Knox didn’t care. He would’ve walked to Dublin if he had to. It was still dark when he arrived in Clonoulty and he didn’t bother to knock when he got to Mackey’s house.
Despite the lateness of the hour, candlelight was visible in the front window. Opening the front door, Knox entered the hall. He found his wife sitting in the back room. She didn’t look up when he entered. He sat down next to her on the bed and sighed.
‘I’m sorry, Martha. I’m sorry I haven’t been here for you, that you’ve had to endure this on your own. I don’t have the words you need to hear, there are no words…’ Knox paused. ‘But James is going to get better. We can rebuild our lives. Isn’t that what counts?’
Martha didn’t move, didn’t even flinch. They sat next to one another, each contemplating their situation in silence.
‘There’s nothing left for us here, is there?’ Martha’s voice cracked as she spoke. ‘I’m so grateful that the Lord spared our son but there’s nothing left for us in this place, is there? Here, in this land, our country.’
Nothing left for us. Our country.
Knox reached out, put his hand on hers, and squeezed it. Martha didn’t take it but she didn’t spurn it either.
TWENTY-EIGHT
MONDAY, 4 JANUARY 1847
Dundrum, Co. Tipperary
Dundrum High Street was a collection of four or five buildings on either side of a mud track; the only place to stay was a ramshackle inn where the landlord rented him a simple room for a few shillings. Pyke didn’t intend staying any longer than necessary.
He had travelled from Merthyr to Newport and from there to Cork City by ship. The crossing had been quiet and the ship nearly deserted. No one wanted to travel to Ireland. On the ship, he heard stories of destitution and loss, heartbreaking stories, villages wiped out by starvation and disease. From Cork, he journeyed by mail-coach to Cashel and from there he walked the remaining ten miles to Dundrum. The journey had taken a week and then it had taken him another week to track down Johns to a cabin between Dundrum and Oughterleague. That night he had followed Johns to the village’s great house and watched from the stables as Johns slipped into the house via the servant’s entrance.
Pyke had found the travelling arduous but comforting; the notion of going somewhere at least gave his existence some purpose, time spent on trains, boats and stagecoaches affording him the opportunity to think about Felix, to grieve: not simply to berate himself, but to remember his son. Now he just wanted to find out how Felix had died — he owed his son that much. Johns was his last chance for enlightenment. Before coming to Dundrum, Pyke had also made the journey to Lisvarrinane to confront Smyth, but evidently Johns had beaten him to it. He had been told that a fire had ripped through the big house and that the master, who’d only recently returned from Wales, had perished in it.
At just ten years of age, Felix had taken one of Pyke’s pistols and used it to scare a boy who had been terrorising him, waved it in his face, finger poised on the trigger. The pistol had been loaded. Pyke tried, in vain, to reconcile this memory of his son with a more recent one, the Bible open in front of him, talking about forgiveness, contrition and God’s grace. Perhaps you quite simply couldn’t reconcile such things, Pyke decided. You just accepted that you couldn’t reduce people you loved to one thing or another, that they would always go ahead and surprise you.
At bottom, he couldn’t believe that Felix was dead. He would wake up each morning and, in those few seconds before consciousness seized him, he could still entertain the fantasy that Felix was alive, that he had his whole life in front of him. But as he opened his eyes, reality would invade the space of his dreams and the edifice he’d constructed in his mind — the hope, the yearning — would crumble. In those moments, he would experience a level of rage and self-loathing he’d never known, even after Emily’s death, and nothing, not gin nor laudanum, could alleviate the pain.
Pyke also thought about his own life, what he had left to live for. After the burial at Bunhill Fields, he’d gone home and told the housekeeper, Mrs Booth, that he no longer needed her services. Then he’d taken his pistol into the garden and finished off his two pigs, one at a time, and buried them next to their sty. That just left Copper but Pyke couldn’t consign his beloved mastiff to the same fate. Instead he had taken the three-legged dog to Jo, Felix’s former nursemaid, now married with children of her own, and persuaded her to take him.
As Pyke stared up at the windows of the mansion, the curtains drawn inside, he wondered about Johns’ connection to the man who lived there, a tyrant by all accounts.
The night was clear and bitterly cold. Since arriving in Cork, he’d seen death everywhere and he had found it hard not to think about how needless it was, how easily relief could have been provided, and therefore how deliberate it was too: a decision made somewhere by grey-haired men with full bellies and bulging purses to teach the poor a lesson. Free will and free trade. Let the market decide who lives and who dies. Pyke had passed putrefying bodies but he hadn’t stopped to bury them. No justice for them. Not in this land. Not in these times. What could one man do in the face of so much horror, so much death?
Half an hour after Johns had entered the house, he appeared through the same door. Pyke was waiting to the right of the driveway, closer to the river than the stables now, and he didn’t make his move until Johns was almost alongside him.
‘John.’
Startled, the man turned and peered into the darkness. Then, realising who it was, he started to run.
TWENTY-NINE
MONDAY, 8 FEBRUARY 1847
Passage West, Co. Cork
Every paddle-steamer and lighter leaving from Cork City for Passage West was full to capacity and the narrow roads from Raffeen and Monkstown were thronged with carts, cabs, drays and pedestrians, the poor and the destitute heading for the seafront in the hope of securing passage on one of the ships leaving for Canada or the United States. It seemed to Knox that the whole county had descended on this thin strip of land; everyone looking to leave, each with their own stories of pain and loss; the walking wounded and the nearly dead.
Initially Knox had wanted to stay; he had tried to convince Martha that Asenath Moore would be true to his word — that Knox would be reinstated in the constabulary and that everything would go back to how it had been before. But Martha had been adamant that men like Moore and Hastings would never give them what they wanted; the liberty to live their lives as they wished. They had argued for hours, for days, and in the end, he had come around to her way of thinking. Best to start a new life somewhere else. This was why he had travelled to Cork and why he planned to travel much farther afield; Knox would go ahead and find a job, a place to live, and when he was settled, he would send for Martha and James.
He had purchased his passage — in steerage, all he could afford — from a broker in Cork City the previous morning: on the Syria, sailing that afternoon for New York. It had cost him ten pounds, up from five a week ago, someone had told him. Traders always made money out of death. He could have gone to Quebec for half that amount but he preferred the sound of New York, and in any case the St Lawrence river might still be frozen by the time they’d crossed the Atlantic.
With the ticket in his pocket, and ten shillings to buy some salt meat for the crossing, Knox was carrying all he possessed: his wedding ring, a letter Martha had written to him, a lock of James’ hair. Martha would stay with Father Mackey until she heard from him and then she would make this same journey. Still, now he was at the seafront, staring out at the ocean, Knox couldn’t help but wonder whether he would ever see Martha again, whether she would, in fact, come when he sent for her, and indeed, whether she would survive the famine. They’d talked about whether they should leave together, for this had been Knox’s preferred option, but Martha had dug in her heels and told him that he should find a job first. Now, on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, Knox felt alone and scared, and wished that Martha had come with him, so that they could comfort and reassure each other.