The Brightest Day, the Darkest Night, page 25
He had assumed Patrick would have long abandoned all notion of continuing to search for Ellen. The boy had not been as forgiving of her disappearance as he had.
Patrick must have changed his mind after he had gone South. But what had Ellen been doing in the Deep South?
He himself, at one stage, had declared he would join with the South.
Ellen had chided him for this. She had argued that ‘freedom’ was a principle which over-rode Lavelle’s arguments about the blacks who, when freed, would swarm northwards like locusts to take Irish jobs, in the process, making the Irish the ‘new blacks’.
She had been having none of it.
In time he’d had to admit that, as in many things, she was right. Ultimately he had declared for ‘freedom’ and the North.
Now, remorsefully, Lavelle thought, if he had not listened to her, and instead gone South, Patrick would be still alive.
But he had chosen to stay North for another, more pressing, reason. To find her, thinking she would stay in the burgeoning East Coast cities.
Yet again he had been thwarted. She had gone South. Now it was where he must go to reach her. Break her heart with the news of Patrick.
SEVENTY-NINE
Armed with a three-month furlough and a letter from General Meagher himself, Lavelle faced towards the ‘secesh’ State of Louisiana.
The letter would provide him with safe passage through Union lines. Then he would have to destroy it. Take his chances on the return journey. Emmeline’s letters to Patrick would gain him safe conduct through Confederate lines. He was on a mission of mercy, bringing news of a gallant sweetheart’s glorious death for the South. His three-month furlough should, he hoped, allow sufficient time to visit Emmeline … and find Ellen.
Once having found her, he would happily return to the battlefield until his term of duty expired. Safe at last, in the knowledge, that she would be waiting for him.
EIGHTY
Labiche Plantation, Louisiana
The hound with the ice-blue eyes surveyed Lavelle. The man on the end of the dog’s leash spoke in a voice used to asking questions, not answering them.
‘What’s your business, mister?’ it demanded thickly.
‘Is this the Labiche Plantation?’ Lavelle ignored the man’s question.
‘Who’s asking?’ the man returned. Then, for Lavelle’s benefit addressed the hound. ‘It’s all right, Beauty, Bayard Clinch got this boy covered.’
The dog pricked up its ears, causing a ripple of muscle across the grey-spotted, mahogany-coloured neck.
‘Lavelle is my name and I’m seeking Miss Emmeline. I have some solemn news.’ Lavelle decided to stop the game. ‘I am Patrick O’Malley’s stepfather!’
Bayard Clinch and the dog eyed him with equal suspicion. Eventually the man spoke.
‘Wait here!’ he ordered. ‘I’ll go see in the house,’ and with that turned on his heel.
‘House?’ Lavelle exclaimed to himself, surveying the unrestrained splendour of Le Petit Versailles. Here was a land and a world as different from anything he’d ever seen in his other travels. It was a foreign land, this Louisiana. People looked different, spoke different, even when in English, not French, which he observed was widely used. No wonder they regarded the North as usurpers and invaders. And the plantation houses? All were palaces, the like of which he’d only heard about in fables and fairytales. Little wonder the South would fight to hold what they had. He wondered what would happen to these gilded mansions when the North came South? Down along the Mississippi in iron-clad gunboats, bristling with plantation-pounding artillery? The slaves, too, once freed, would want to raze to the ground these fabulous and monstrous symbols of oppression. The wealth of which, stone upon stone, had been built on their backs.
Lavelle hoped the houses would be left to stand.
A reminder.
The man with the hound did not re-appear. To his surprise a well-fitted-out negro appeared in the man’s stead.
‘Mistress will see you now, suh!’ the man said, pleasantly.
Lavelle didn’t know why he was surprised. Some notion at the back of his head that they would all be in leg-irons and chains … with that cowed and hunted look. This man, Lavelle observed, was both, as to manner and bearing, the superior of many of the raggle-taggle band of soldiers now fighting to free him! Neither did the burly slave exhibit any sign of want or hunger.
‘Benevolent paternalism,’ he remembered Stephen Joyce once calling the South’s institution of slaveholding.
Lavelle had travelled weeks to get here. Weeks of avoiding both armies and the trials of an inhospitable climate and terrain. Now, as he awaited the mistress of the Labiche Plantation, he was filled with both hope and apprehension. Hope that, finally, he was on the verge of being reunited with his beloved Ellen. Apprehension, at the prospect of telling her – and the young Miss Labiche – the awful thing he had wrought upon their lives.
Lucretia Labiche arrived, decorous in black, but businesslike and with a capable set of mouth. The younger woman with her, Lavelle guessed, was Emmeline. Fair and fragrant and displaying a delicate reserve. Younger than her maturity implied, Lavelle thought.
He was welcomed in true Southern fashion, Madame Labiche not hearing of anything until the temporal needs of one who had travelled so far had been fully attended upon.
Lavelle wanted to get on with the burdensome news he bore.
‘I am afraid, Madame Labiche, Miss Emmeline, that I come laden with sorrowful news …’ he began. Emmeline gave a little start but the older woman’s immediate glance caused the girl to hold her reserve.
‘I … I am Patrick’s stepfather,’ Lavelle continued. Their eyes never left him, knowing what must come next. ‘He is, was … my son … and … he has fallen … gallantly fallen in battle.’ He heard the little thrum rise in Emmeline’s throat and he continued more quickly. ‘I was with him before he expired … and his last words were of you, Miss Emmeline. He put me under a promise to bring you this.’
Lavelle unwrapped the snow-white sweetheart glove and handed it to the girl.
‘He wanted you to have it … “before magnolia time”, he said.’
Emmeline solemnly took the glove from Lavelle, gazed on it a moment then placed it to her bosom, holding it there like a prayer.
She must be no more than sixteen, Lavelle thought. Yet, like some untouchable thing, inwardly riven with grief, outwardly displaying no emotion. It struck him that with their menfolk gone to war the women here were now forced to step into their shoes, and therefore display all the emotions of the missing gender. He broke the moment, addressing the girl.
‘Your letters, Miss Emmeline – he carried them on his person.’
Lavelle withdrew from his pocket the crimson-edged avowals of love. Madame Labiche made a slight motion of her head and the waiting young female slave presented a salver to Lavelle on which he placed Emmeline’s letters. Instead of bringing the letters to Emmeline, the slave girl placed the salver on a discreet corner table.
‘And what news of the gallant Mr Joyce?’ Lucretia Labiche enquired, passing on from the moment.
‘Mr Joyce …? Mr Stephen Joyce … here?’ Lavelle was taken by surprise.
‘Yes, Mr Lavelle, many times with your son,’ Madame Labiche explained patiently.
‘They went to fight the cause together – what news of him?’
Lavelle had not been prepared for this turn of events. In confusion, he replied, ‘Of Mr Joyce I know nothing … I …’ Lavelle began.
‘But you served together?’ – it was Emmeline.
‘Miss Emmeline … Madame Labiche … I have a confession to make,’ Lavelle began, wanting to put matters to right. ‘Although I am Patrick’s stepfather, I have not seen him for some years, nor Mr Joyce for even longer. I did not know Patrick had come South, or Mr Joyce for that matter. I had gone west …’
‘To search for Patrick’s mother?’ Emmeline Labiche interrupted.
‘Yes …?’ Lavelle answered quizzically. ‘Is she also here in the South?’
‘Of your wife, Mr Lavelle, I cannot enlighten you except as to Patrick’s disappointment at her … folly,’ the young woman said coldly.
Lavelle was perplexed. He thought Ellen to have been here in the South with Patrick. But if she were in the South, she had not been here. Nor did it seem clear from the girl’s answer that Patrick had seen her. But he must have. The book … how was the book to be explained?
‘This book, Miss Emmeline, have you seen it before?’ Lavelle asked, rising and going with the book to Emmeline, before Madame Labiche could motion the slave girl to intervene.
‘No, Mr Lavelle, I have not – and it is in such a disagreeable condition,’ Emmeline said, disdain in her voice. ‘But do go on with the main story,’ she instructed.
‘When I returned from the western States, I joined the Northern cause …’ Lavelle began.
‘Cause? Northern cause? There is no Northern cause, Mr Lavelle.’
It was Lucretia Labiche, anger streaming from her towards him. ‘Unless, you call the genocidal oppression of a flourishing society a cause.’
‘Please, let me finish, Madame Labiche!’ Lavelle interjected. ‘I am sorry if my looseness of speech has caused you offence.’ He paused momentarily, before correcting his earlier statement. ‘I joined the Union army and was dispatched to the front as a marksman.’
‘Oh … !’
Lavelle heard the intake of Emmeline’s breath. And then the moment he was dreading.
‘It was you … you killed him!’ she said, getting to her feet, the full horror of it dawning on her face, all reserve now unreserved. ‘You murdered your own son!’
EIGHTY-ONE
Lavelle had grown to hate the smell of sugar. It was everywhere around him: in the air … in his clothes and hair … in his nostrils … his eyes … his mouth. The whole surface of his skin felt as though a thin layer of suffocating molasses had been spread all over it.
‘Food, Yankee soldier.’ The girl who had come into the Sugar House put the plate of mush between his hands and feet, laughed and skipped away to a safe distance. ‘How you goin’ free us poor niggers now?
‘Massa gonna string you high as soon as he comes back.’
With this comforting thought the girl laughed even more.
At the door she turned smilingly to say, ‘Now don’t go nowhere, Yankee, you hear!’
Lavelle didn’t quite see the funny side to his predicament that the girl obviously saw. He had carried out Patrick’s dying wish. Now, here he was an enemy soldier, shackled hand and foot like a slave, in the sickly sweet Sugar House of a southern plantation.
The Labiche woman had called Clinch and the dog. Two of the blacks he and the rest of the North wanted to set free, had manacled him. If he wasn’t strung up by the ‘massa’ he faced another just as dire possibility – a desertion charge for breaking his furlough.
Three days now he had been held prisoner in the sugar house. Sugar and cotton – and the control of it – at the bottom of this whole sorry mess. Young men like Patrick … told to go and fight for it. A gun jammed into their hands. And the glory of America rammed down their throats.
Some, hardly old enough to dress themselves without a mother’s helping hand. Lavelle had seen them – nine, ten, twelve, thirteen years of age. Skin soft as a baby’s bottom, ripped open by shells big as themselves. Or, like unripened watermelon sliced into slivers before an enemy bayonet. Most of them only trying to get a few dollars to send to mothers who now would not want the use of it. Only their darlings to be back home again.
Mothers would struggle to tell themselves how important it was that their babies had fought and died, and to banish any thought of ripped-out stomachs or worms and flesh-picking birds. Nor the hot broiling sun, scorching and stenching their longing-to-be-held babes-in-arms.
Oh no, none of that! Only ‘defending the flag’, when they should be wiping their arses with it.
Flags, marching songs, countries – all bullshit!
Then would come the cold-comfort letters from Lincoln in Washington or Davis in Richmond … both in their grand White Houses. All worded the same. ‘The great sacrifice your son has made …’ and ‘freedom’. It would make a man puke.
The two Presidents didn’t know one piece of cannon fodder from the next and didn’t give a fuck either! Would stand up after fine dinners, and wipe away the crumbs from their lips with fine linen. Then, in the company of fine ladies, speak bravely and dreamily of Liberty and the Constitution. Dab away a crocodile tear or two for ‘our gallant boys at the front’ and light a foreign cigar with which to comfort themselves.
And then at the table around them, applauding the Presidents for keeping the war going, those men who made the rifles and the cannons and grew fat on war. Oh, they would be free all right … their money safely made.
Lavelle was reminded of other men, those little slieveens who, like carrion, arrived before the battle hour, pushing cards into the shitting-themselves hands of young men. So that, when cut down and cut in half, the self-same cards would be found on their young bodies. Commerce done.
O’Shea and Sons: Coffins, Undertakings, Professional Embalmers
Lavelle once had one pressed into his own hand before battle. He had flung it at the scavengers and cursed them – the Irish feeding off the dead of their own country.
War was such a business and a profitable one. The more killing, the better. The gout-ridden generals, who could scarce mount a horse, would bask in the reflected glory of the blood of their men. And ladies like Madame Labiche and Miss Emmeline – and all the vapid ladies of Richmond and Boston – would be fascinated and hearts-a-fluttering at stories of gallantry by generals at table. Some of whom had never led a charge, or strayed within range of a careless bullet.
Lavelle was angry. Angry at the waste of it all … the hypocrisy of it all. Angry at himself … angry at Ellen.
And that was not all. Some other great foreboding now hung over him, like that damnable sugar vapour.
His mind had begun to put together the puzzle regarding Ellen. Much as Lavelle wanted answers, so equally did he fear them.
He kicked away the plate the girl had brought. Cupid she had said her name was. Cupid! From where did they get such foolish names?
He went back over the events of Ellen’s leaving, the fact that out of all else she had taken the book. It must have been of great significance for her – these Love Elegies and Holy Sonnets. Somehow, then, her book had wound up with Patrick.
It was becoming increasingly clear from his visit here, that it was unlikely to have been Ellen who had given the book to Patrick: the girl, Emmeline, had seemed to say as much. If it had not been Ellen then the boy had received it from someone else … Stephen Joyce!
It had some meaning.
Was it Stephen’s own book? If so, why this of all books for Patrick?
Lavelle’s emotions fought against the unerring conclusion towards which his mind was leading him. If it were not Stephen’s own book, then it was Ellen’s … and she had given it to Stephen. And since the time she had deserted them in Boston!
The book was the connection between her, Stephen and Patrick. The truth at last was beginning to manifest itself. Ellen’s disappearance was linked with Stephen Joyce.
EIGHTY-TWO
The following day the slave girl returned. She came up close to Lavelle, but not too close. Threw the corn-slop or whatever it was, down in front of him.
‘You’s getting thin, Yankee – thin as a chicken’s shin! Be no good t’Lincoln now!’ she said coquettishly, hand on hip, baiting him.
‘Well, go tell your friends, Cupid, that Lincoln is coming,’ he said crossly to her. ‘But if I tell Massa Lincoln that you let one of his boys stay locked up here, the President of the United States is not going to be too friendly!’
The girl looked at him, working out the import of the message. He was trouble for sure, this Yankee, but he was one of Massa Lincoln’s soldiers, and they all hoped Lincoln was coming for them. She stopped her taunting and ran out. Lavelle knew that tonight, word would be passed along the cabins below the oak alley.
Clinch and the dog came to see him next. The overseer led the animal right up over him. Let the beast sniff his face, make that low purring sound like a great cat. But it was the Catahoula’s eyes that were the most frightening. So close now to Lavelle’s own. Large and at odds with the dog’s colouring. Like icebergs, with the sky and the sea inside them. Now, Lavelle recognised, at this nearness not the same. One, ice-blue, the other ice-green. Lavelle imagined them fired with fierce light, all seeing in the dark … capable of freezing their hapless prey.
‘Beauty sure likes you, Paddy Yank – likes you a lot!’ Bayard Clinch nodded, knowingly.
‘Got a good sniff of you too, in case those darkies get any ideas of giving you French Leave. Ha! Ha!’ he laughed. ‘French Leave! C’mon, Beauty, there’s a honey. Now you kiss your new Yankee friend goodnight!’
EIGHTY-THREE
After Clinch and the dog had left, Lavelle again turned over in his mind the question of the book. There was something he was still missing.
He tried to recall when first he had seen it. Slowly, it had come back to him – the piano, at No 29 Pleasant Street. Ellen had liked to hear Louisa and Mary play. Bach … Bach … and more Bach!
She had been so delighted, like a child, when the piano arrived, filling up the little room, even though she herself couldn’t play. She could have learned if she’d put her mind to it he knew. Could sing like a blackbird but she was happy to listen, to lose herself in the joy of what they could play.
That was it!
She had been listening to one of them play … put the book down … been distracted and left it there. He remembered the conversation with Stephen about it – the fact that a clergyman had written erotic love-poems. What had prompted the conversation was that, on some previous occasion, he had seen the self-same book with Stephen. When he had made an innocent enquiry about the book she, surprisingly, had said she found the book in Montreal. Not at her favourite Boston haunt, The Old Corner Bookstore.
