The Element of Fire. Brendan Graham

something her father – the Máistir – would have said. ‘Try, not to forget, but to remember less.’ It was good advice.

      She could never forget; that would be a betrayal. But she could remember less, without letting Ireland and its Famine gnaw at her insides, eat up her capacity for life.

      They sat for a while, exiles both. Trade had been good for Jacob and things had gone well between him and Lavelle – ‘her young helper’, as Peabody insisted on calling him. She didn’t correct him this time, just thanked him again, with the promise she would be back within the week to talk about ‘clarets for Christmas and champagnes for the New Year’.

      As she walked back from Peabody’s, Boston, with its busy streets, its banks and fine tall buildings, seemed indeed to be the hub of the universe. The buildings that, when first she came there with Lavelle, crowded in on top of her, taking patches out of the sky, now signified something else – progress, getting ahead. Looking upwards instead of downwards.

      She wanted to be part of all that now, instead of on her hands and knees clawing at lazy beds for the odd lumper missed by the harvesters, up to her eyes in muck. What good were grand mountains and sparkling lakes, when you had to crawl, belly to the ground, in order to fill it? An empty craw sees no beauty.

      Faneuil Hall, the spiralling Old South Meeting House, the Grecian pilasters of the State Street buildings, Beacon Hill – these would be her new mountains. The harbour with its wharves and docks, its busy commerce – her new lakes. It was all here. Everything Ireland wasn’t, this place was.

      ‘Try, not to forget, but to remember less,’ she repeated to herself.

       9

      In her efforts to ‘remember less’, Ellen in the following weeks threw herself with abandon into her new life in Boston. Lavelle had indeed done well while she was away. He had kept Jacob’s two stores fully stocked and the merchant reasonably happy, despite Peabody’s frequent mutterings about it not being the same ‘since Mrs O’Malley deserted me and sailed for Ireland’.

      Lavelle had also secured a new outlet for the New England Wine Company, in the developing suburb of West Roxbury, far enough away not to damage Peabody’s business.

      ‘What he doesn’t know won’t bother him!’ was Lavelle’s dictum. Ellen wasn’t so sure.

      ‘It’s a bit underhand – Jacob’s been a good friend to us and our business,’ she said to Lavelle, resolving to tell Peabody herself at the right moment.

      The children seemed to take up so much of her time, but she was happy ‘doing for them’, busying herself more with domestic matters than business. In this she was forced to rely, to a greater degree than she thought fair, on Lavelle. If during the daylight hours she did not manage to get to the warehouse, then at evening Lavelle would call on her to discuss matters of business, bringing various documentation of invoices and receipts. Because of the nature of their arrangement with Peabody, resources had to be prudently managed – something to which she had always applied herself vigorously. She looked forward to these evening visits, finding some time for titivating herself in advance of them – between household chores and the children. This total reliance on Lavelle would, she knew, be but a temporary measure, until she had settled them into suitable schools.

      Situated in the ‘Little Britain of Boston’ – the non-Irish end, of the North End – the Eliot School was one of Boston’s better public schools for boys. Nominally non-denominational, pupils nevertheless sang from the same hymn sheet – the Protestant one. Too, the official school bible was the King James version. However, Eliot School had the best spoken English in Boston, fashioned no doubt from that bible of the city’s non-chattering classes, Peter Piper’s Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation.

      Ellen wasn’t unduly worried about the Protestant ethos prevalent in Boston’s public schools – the ‘little red school houses’ as the Boston Irish called them. Patrick would receive a more liberal education at Eliot than in the narrow Catholic schools, the ‘little green school houses’. She, herself, would see to his spiritual needs outside of school. At first Patrick resisted her choice of schooling for him, but finding Eliot School populated with a good sprinkling of other Irish Catholic boys, his resistance diminished.

      Mary’s future, Ellen decided, would be best served by placing her with the nuns. She saw no contradiction in this, relative to her plans for Patrick. Boston, in terms of schooling for girls, particularly young Irish and Catholic girls, far surpassed that available to its young men, mainly due to the influence of the ‘Sisters of Service’. Mostly Irish or the American-born daughters of the Irish, the nuns were a group of free-spirited and independent-minded young women who had eschewed marriage in favour of the economic, social and intellectual independence the Sisterhood offered. What Ellen liked about them was that having liberated themselves, they had a more liberal view of other women’s roles in society. Orders like the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, where she would send Mary, sought not to prepare young immigrant women solely for marriage, but to lead lives of independence and dignity. This would provide the pathway to spirituality, rather than that followed by most young Irish women – the bridal path.

      The nuns would be good for Mary.

      With regard to Louisa, Ellen had much with which to occupy her mind. She had grown a great fondness for the girl but still wondered about her – where had she come from? Her family, if any?

      The Pilot ran regular columns of the ‘lost’ and ‘missing’ Irish – those who had become separated en route to the New World, or who had moved deeper into the American heartland before family had arrived from Ireland to join them.

      Each week Ellen read the ‘lost’ notices, relaxing only when nowhere among them could she find a description to match that of Louisa. She agonized for weeks as to whether she herself should put in a notice, seeking any family of the girl who might be in America. Reluctantly, she came to the conclusion that it was ‘the right and proper thing to do’, as she explained to Patrick and Mary, ‘and pray that we don’t find anybody!’ she added.

      For a month she had inserted the notice, hoping it would go unanswered.

      Female child – of about twelve or thirteen years, unspoken. Tall, with dark brown hair and hazelwood eyes – found among the famished near Louisburgh Co. Mayo 20th day of August 1848. Now living in Boston. Seeking to be reunited with any members of family who may have escaped the Calamity to the United States.

      To her despair, she had been flooded with respondents. With each one her heart sank lower, fearing that this would be the one to claim Louisa, lifting again with relief when it was not. In turn, she was filled with guilt at her own selfishness, then sorrow at the disappointment carved out on the faces of those who came with so much hope but left again, empty-handed. Faint-heartedly they would apologize with a ‘Sorry for troubling you, ma’am!’ or ‘I was hoping ’twould be her,’ some would say, awkward for having come in the wrong.

      One young woman from near Louisburgh arrived brimful of hope. She had, she said, been told that her young sister ‘had been taken pity on by a red-haired woman, rescued from the famished and brought over to Amerikay’. She had searched high and low, doggedly traipsing each mill town. At nights waiting outside until, disgorged in their thousands, the mill girls poured out into the streets. Ever afraid her sister had been among them and that she had missed her in the crowds.

      ‘Was it to Boston she came?’ Ellen enquired, wondering if the young woman’s task was fruitless from the start.

      ‘To Amerikay, anyway!’ she replied, as if ‘Amerikay’ were no vaster than the townland of her home village. ‘She has to be here somewhere, if it’s true what they say!’ she added, defiant with faith. The girl had no idea where her sister was, would spend a lifetime looking for her in ‘Amerikay’. Probably never to find her – in this life at least, Ellen knew.

      ‘You