Ruby Flynn (3 page)

Susan looked into Ruby’s face as she spoke, hoping to find some sign that her words had sunk in, made sense. All she saw was fear, staring back at her.

‘It’s all too much for her to take in,’ said Con, gently. ‘Don’t upset yourself, it’s because you are so close to your time.’ Susan nodded and Ruby saw tears welling in her eyes.

She was confused by Susan’s words. Why should she make the most of it? She didn’t want to live here. When the snow melted, she would escape and return to her cottage. Who were these people deciding the rest of her life for her?

Susan, in her softly spoken way had also said, ‘The nuns will look after you and make you very welcome.’

If she had got that so profoundly wrong, what of everything else she had said? Ruby now felt more afraid than ever. The looks the reverend mother shot Ruby, when she thought Con wasn’t looking were far from welcoming.

Con continued to speak. ‘She is about twelve years old, the housekeeper reckons, despite being so small. The only words she has spoken since we found her are her name, Ruby Flynn. They are known not to have family locally. Flynn was an orphan, himself, by all accounts. I will make enquiries, but without knowing which parish the mother was originally from, I don’t hold out much hope… though I do know where she may have once worked.’

Con had finished his tea. His cup tapped the silver teaspoon and it rattled and rang against the saucer as he placed the cup down. She heard the noise of shuffling, the lightest of footsteps, moving along the corridor outside the door and turned her head slightly, to listen harder.

She could hear bells softly pealing, doors opening and closing and muffled voices. The convent, which had been silent until now, was slowly awakening. Her fingers were wound around the thin arm of the chair in which Con sat and they clenched tighter, as though she were reluctant to leave his side. A bolt of anxiety shot through her as he rose to sign the papers the reverend mother had laid out on her blotter. Along with Sister Francis, they huddled over the desk, talking. The heat from the fire burnt the side of her leg and her skin became mottled with ugly red weals. The chilblains on her feet stung, as the freshly warmed blood in her veins forced a way through the constricted and frozen vessels in her almost frostbitten toes.

Sister Francis looked directly at her and smiled again. ‘I’ll fetch Charlotte. She can look after her for a few days, until she settles down,’ she said.

The reverend mother interjected sharply. ‘She doesn’t require looking after, Sister Francis. You encourage the girls to be weak. She just needs someone to show her the ropes.’

The adults continued talking as they walked out of the office. It was as if they had forgotten about Ruby entirely.

Sister Francis turned back. ‘You wait there, Ruby,’ she said, leaving the door half open. They were gone and she was alone.

Ruby’s head banged with panic. Con had rescued her. She had thought that he and his wife had liked her. Susan had clothed her and fed her soup from a spoon. They had tried to remove the matted knots from her hair. They must feel the same way as she did. She must surely belong to them now, until they could find her mammy’s family. Con had spoken to her kindly, like her daddy. She thought he might want to take her back home with him. To his wife and the kitchen with the crib waiting in the corner and the soup pan on the range. To the bookcase against the wall with more books than she thought anyone could ever read and the big lamp and the soft towels. The patterned red rug in front of the crackling fire swam in front of her eyes. She wanted Con to take her back, to the smell of bread, tobacco and safety. Fear rose like bile in her throat and she began to breathe very fast indeed as she controlled the waves of terror, but she could not stop the shaking which began in her knees and now afflicted her hands.

Is he going to leave me? Will he walk away?
She felt a cold blast of air race through the room and catch at her legs, as the front door opened once again. She heard muffled voices and words she knew were about her.

‘Best not to visit.’ ‘Regards to your wife.’ ‘Don’t fuss to write.’

Her heart slipped. She tilted her head to one side to strain and hear more.

Will he really leave me here?

Receding, fading footsteps crunched in the snow. A car door clicked shut. An engine fired up.

Will he?

She heard the sound of tyres on compacted snow as the car slowly and carefully moved away and down the driveway.

Does he not want to take me back to his home?

She flinched as the front doors banged shut and she heard the sound of the nun’s footsteps moving back towards her; missing was the heavy solid tread of Con’s boots.

No, he does not.

The pain of his parting was like a new, fresh loss and yet she had known him for less than a day. She moved not a muscle as she stared at the window, the tears stinging her eyes threatening to erupt. The brass clock on the mantel chimed the hour and in response, the turf shifted in the grate and sent a shower of sparks to land on her feet. She took a deep breath and swallowed a gasp, holding down the panic, the hurt, and the pain, down and down, again. Someone called out the name Charlotte, and a second later the door opened wider.

‘Come here, girl.’ It was the reverend mother. ‘Come here.’

She turned her head, but the reverend mother was no longer looking at Ruby. Her attention was on Sister Francis and a young girl who stood under a dim halo of light. She had a pretty face and long dark hair tied with blue ribbon bows in two plaits which touched her shoulders.

The corridor was dimly lit and the tall shadows of the nuns towered and flickered on the rendered walls. Black effigies, whispering, conferring, long fingers pointing, plotting her fate. The nuns stooping to speak to the young girl who had stood between them were not of Ruby’s world. The events of the past weeks had set her apart. No other person could ever know or comprehend the depth of her pain and she could never fit into this world with these people. This place with its antiseptic smell, polished wood and light falling from the brocade fringed lamp.

Ruby fixed her gaze on the vase Con had admired. It glowed in the light from the fire, as if calling her towards the table, and its gold rim burned and flickered, mesmerizing her. The tiny patterns of figurines reflected from the perfect glaze danced mockingly in the flames. Like Ruby, the vase was on fire. She thought she heard her brother’s voice whispering in her ear,
We can do it, so we can Ruby, we can
.

‘Come here, girl.’ A further summons from the door. Not kindly or caring, but abrupt and impatient.

Ruby stroked the vase and ran her fingers over the luminous, powdery glaze, then with one flick of her hand and with all the force of the pain burning inside her, sent it flying from the table and onto the floor, where it smashed at her feet into a thousand pieces. She heard the fading screams of the reverend mother as she disappeared, deep inside her own broken heart.

*

Later that evening, Con met Thomas in the Doohoma Inn.

‘Why do you think they took themselves up there, Con?’ asked Thomas as he waited for his Guinness to be pulled.

‘God alone knows,’ Con replied. ‘Seems to me that they had an idea to go out and cut the turf for heat and couldn’t get back down again.’

The rescue of the Flynn children had been the talk of the day in the village. The landlord placed Con’s pewter mug on the bar and joined the conversation.

‘Flynn lost his curragh when the storm began weeks ago, but sure, the man was sick for weeks before that. There won’t have been any food in that house for a while, although I have sent up bread meself, and others sent ’tatoes and cabbage. ’Twas the weather that put a stop to it, but we was waiting for them to come down, so we were. I told the mammy meself, sit the storm out down here, I said. Mind, I had no idea then how long it would last and neither did she, but I’m thinking she may have guessed it would be bad and wanted them to stay in their own home with the animals. Did you find the dog? God, the kids loved that dog. Big grey thing, Max I think his name is. He followed them kids everywhere.’

‘I didn’t,’ Con said. ‘We saw no dog, did we, Thomas?’

Thomas shook his head as he took the first sip of his pint.

‘The mammy, she was a funny one,’ said the landlord. ‘Too proud they were to ask for help from anyone. People say that she went down a peg or two when she married Flynn. Some say she had something to do with a grand house. Maybe she was from one of the tenant farms on one of the estates. But there’s no doubting the nature between her and Flynn now. They was madly in love. Neither God nor man could have kept them apart and none tried, so they say.’

Con finished his Guinness and placed his pot on the bar.

‘Come on, Thomas,’ he said. ‘We have a job to finish.’

‘Eh, what job? Have we not done enough for one day, surely to God?’

Con had felt uneasy since returning from the convent.

‘Come on, Thomas,’ he said again, impatiently. ‘We have to go.’

And once again, Con stepped out into the blizzard. The child might be in the convent, but he could do this. She would probably never know, but if it was the last thing he did, he would find her dog.

*

Back at the convent, Ruby escaped unpunished for breaking the vase. What had saved her was the fact that she turned a ghastly shade of pale and fainted dead away.

‘If she stepped outdoors the wind would break her bones in two, she’s lighter than a feather,’ said Sister Francis, as she carried Ruby along the corridor to the dorm with Charlotte bobbing along in her wake. She said it loudly and ran fast, knowing that while Ruby was at the convent, she would have to watch over her, to save her from the wrath of the reverend mother, which would be fierce indeed after today.

She was awake. Ruby was always the first to wake. Often in the middle of the night. It wasn’t the bells of the chapel ringing or even the cock crowing, it was her own urgent thoughts, forcing her eyelids open, escaping the nightmare which had, night after night, haunted her sleep.

In the early days, she awoke screaming. Her punishment for disturbing the slumbering dorm had been severe and now, in the vacillating moments between sleep and wakefulness, she had learnt to control her distress. To lie with her arms rigid, her breathing slow and deep and wait, until her beating heart stilled to a steady rhythm.

‘God in heaven, are you awake again? What’s up with ye, Ruby?’ The dorm bed next to her own would always creak as Charlotte, or Lottie as she was known by everyone, leaned over. Lottie had slept in the bed next to Ruby since that first day at the convent and she had been the first person to hear Ruby speak after a whole year of silence. This from a child who had once talked so much, her father joked that she would drive the fish across the water, all the way to America, just for a bit of peace and quiet.

‘Try and get her to speak to you,’ kind Sister Francis had said to Lottie. ‘Go on, ask her about her family, God rest their souls, anything that will make her talk. Sister Joseph is very sure that when a child stops speaking at her age, she may forget altogether and remain dumb for life.’

Dutifully, Lottie had done as instructed, but received not so much as a whimper in response. After a few weeks of lying awake and staring through the skylight in the dorm, Ruby had studied and worked out the pattern of the constellations in the night sky. They became as familiar to her as the rose trellis paper on the dormitory wall.

Lottie would often wake when she knew Ruby had trouble sleeping. She never expected a reply to her words of comfort. She had learnt to compensate and to speak for Ruby.

‘What’s the problem? Do ye need the toilet?’

Lottie’s face blocked out the skylight as she leaned over Ruby’s bed.

Ruby’s unwavering green eyes looked back at her.

‘Sure, you have bold eyes,’ whispered Lottie. ‘Suck yer thumb like this, it helps you fall asleep.’

Ruby gave no response, silent, as always.

Each night as she extinguished the lamps, Sister Joseph would say, ‘Hands off your penny, girls. Let me see all hands on top of the blankets now, and that doesn’t mean suck yer thumb, lie straight.’ Then she would walk up and down the rows of beds, tucking the blankets in tightly at the sides and whispering to each girl, ‘Don’t touch yourself now, ’tis a sin.’

Gently, Lottie picked up Ruby’s hand and clumsily pushed her thumb into her mouth. ‘Go on now, suck, go on. Look, they all do it.’

To demonstrate what she meant, Lottie began sucking furiously on her own thumb.

‘See, that’s what you have to do for a bit of peace, ye suck the thumb. You can’t sleep ever, Ruby, because ye lie like the boards.’

Lottie was right. Every girl, whether she was aged five or fifteen, noisily sucked her thumb and from that night onwards, Ruby took her first comfort and did the same.

*

On what was to be their last morning at the convent, Maria, who slept in the bed on the other side of the dorm from Ruby and Lottie, woke to hear them chatting.

‘Will you two shut yer fecking gobs, it’s still night-time,’ she hissed.

Maria had arrived at the convent just a year ago. A refugee from poverty and an alcoholic father. She was not one of the storm orphans, as they had become known in Belmullet. She had been delivered to the door of the convent by a priest. He had declared her to be at severe risk of temptation and sin. In just the year since her arrival, Maria had provided Ruby and Lottie with more of an education than any of the nuns, and they were both in awe of her.

‘We need to be up and sharp today, anyway, Maria.’ Lottie yawned, stretching her arms up wide as the light from a weak and watery sun slipped into the dorm through the skylight. ‘When I was polishing the reverend mother’s study yesterday, I heard her say on the phone there are three housekeepers visiting today to interview girls, and I know we three are on the list, because I heard the reverend mother say so. One of the housekeepers is from a big castle, but Jesus, don’t ask me the name, I just heard the word castle.’