The Element of Fire. Brendan Graham

itself. There was always something happening, some new discovery. She followed the newspaper reports of how life was progressing in her adopted homeland as assiduously as ever.

      ‘See, Lavelle, all we need is a chance! A chance to prove ourselves. We can be as good as the rest!’ she said, reading of how the electric telegraph, developed by two County Monaghan brothers, had carried a message from President Polk throughout the United States. ‘They have five thousand Irish employed and are as well building a railroad across Panama to join the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans!’

      Lavelle was not so impressed. ‘And why wouldn’t they, at a dollar a day on the broken backs of their countrymen?’

      ‘Lavelle, why do you always down your own, those who have advanced in America?’ She was annoyed with him.

      ‘Because if we don’t say how America was built – at what cost – then it will all soon be forgotten,’ he answered. ‘Forgotten that Paddy’s shovel filled the coffers of this Commonwealth, the same way that Paddy’s green fields filled the granaries of the British Commonwealth. Everything has a price.’

      ‘At least the Paddies here have a chance, a chance to be part of this Commonwealth,’ she answered him.

      ‘Commonwealth me arse!’ he said, forgetting himself.

      She ignored his outburst. ‘You’re still caught up in the wrongs of Ireland, and all of that … all of what we’ve left behind us,’ she said, calmly.

      ‘But have we left it behind us, Ellen?’

      ‘Well, I have,’ she said, more firmly.

      Her assiduousness in gleaning every scrap of new information from the periodicals and magazines led her to a most unexpected bounty – Mr Horace Mann, an educator of high standing.

      She read how Mann, following travels in Europe, had published a report on a new departure in the education of deaf-mutes, a sort of ‘silent talking’, advocating it be introduced to the schools in America. Her hopes were raised for Louisa and she pursued this new avenue whereby in Germany ‘the deaf can now read on the lips, the words of those who address them, and in turn use vocal speech’.

      When, all of an excitement with this news, she sat them down and through Mary tried to explain it to Louisa, she was met with total indifference. Not the hazelnut eyes sparkling with hope as Ellen had expected. Not the joy such news must surely bring. Louisa, it seemed, did not want to be liberated from her affliction. Almost as if she wanted to remain locked away in her own silent world, Mary to be the sole key-holder.

      It perplexed Ellen. She tackled Mary on the matter.

      ‘I think she’s afraid of something,’ Mary told her.

      ‘But what, Mary? It can only be to her benefit.’

      ‘I don’t know, Mother. She wouldn’t tell. Maybe she likes being the way she is … not part of everything.’

      That night, she tucked Louisa into bed, prayed with her as always, whispering the prayers up close to the girl’s face, so that Louisa could at least see the shape of their sounds, feel them, if nothing else. The child, hands angelically clasped, lay there, eyes fixed on her adoptive mother’s lips, until the final breath of blessing. Then Ellen folded Louisa’s arms across her bosom in the shape of a diagonal cross, pulled the bedclothes up about her neck, and pressed her lips to Louisa’s forehead. She sat with her longer than usual, caressing the girl’s brow, soothing her to sleep, with touch and talk.

      ‘It’s all right, Louisa dear, you won’t have to do it any more. Sleep now, and don’t be fretting yourself. I only wanted what I thought was best, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe, after all, I was wrong.’ She put her face next to Louisa’s, fingered the hair back from her far temple. ‘My little fosterling.’

      She remained until Louisa had fallen away from the world and its noise.

      Despite the huge influx of paupers, these years were Boston’s golden years and the city continued to grow and prosper in every direction. At the Massachusetts General Hospital, an ether anaesthetic had been used on the operating table for the first time. It was the start of a new era in surgical medicine. Where previously brandy and even opium had been used, now ether – the ‘Death of Pain’, as Bostonians proudly proclaimed, had arrived.

      The ether of the Irish – alcohol – continued to provide the ‘death of pain’ of deprivation, disease and displacement, suffered by the city’s immigrant population. This, despite the fact that Ireland’s Temperance priest, Father Mathew, had visited the city to admonish the frequenters of Boston’s twelve hundred taverns about ‘the evils of the bewitching glass’. But nothing, it seemed, not even the ethered Irish, could hold back the city’s progress.

      Added to its horse-drawn streetcars, on which one could travel for a nickel, Boston now had eight railroads, bringing twenty thousand people daily into the city. She vowed that one day she would travel every single one of its new iron roads.

      The Cochituate Water System had already opened to meet the increasing demands of a swelling population and much to the delight of Boston’s children, the Frog Pond on the Common was now regularly filled with water from Lake Cochituate. She had taken the children there when first it opened and Mayor Josiah Quincy had ordered a column of water to rise eighty feet above the Pond – immortalizing himself in water with a sky-high statement that Boston’s citizens would never again be short of it.

      There was nothing, it seemed, Boston and its citizenry could not achieve. The city filled her with a breathlessness as much for herself as for what it opened up for her children. Regularly, she brought them to the Frog Pond, to skate and tumble and laugh on its winter ice, to wade in its cooling waters in the summer, often taking one of the horse-drawn trams to make it a special treat. The Long Path, which diagonally traversed Boston Common, was her favourite stroll, a walk long favoured by those in love. She explained its tradition to them.

      ‘A young man, too timid, perhaps, to directly propose to his Boston beauty, would ask, “Would you take the Long Path with me?” If she said “Yes” it meant she would marry him. They would never part. But,‘ Ellen paused, ‘if she stopped to rest – here perhaps, under this gingko tree, it meant she didn’t love him.’

      ‘Oh …’ said Mary, looking around for the ghosts of lost love, ‘that’s so sad – but at least she’d not said “No!”.’

      ‘That was it!’ Ellen explained. ‘The young man was spared that embarrassment. So ladies, if any young beau asks to walk the Long Path with you, consider carefully if you should rest along the way,’ adding, ‘I’m sure no young lady of Patrick’s choice would ever rest!’

      Patrick, however, was not impressed and though he regularly accompanied them to the Common, at fourteen was less interested in marriage-making than in watching the haymaking, a custom that still persisted. Unless, of course, she recounted stories of Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty, and the military history of the Common, long a mustering-ground for armies of every flag and allegiance.

      The Great Elm commanded attention from every element of the family, even boys. The giant tree, whose protective branches offered one hundred feet of shade, stretched heavenwards for seventy or eighty feet. But if Heaven was its aspiration, Hell was its application, for the Great Elm was once a place of executions. Witches, martyrs, adulterers alike, all swung from its gallowed limbs. United in fascination, all three would close in around her, fearing its embrace, wanting none the less to hear its dark history retold yet again. Tales of ‘the Puritans’, or of ‘the Reverend Cotton Mather’, who stalked the condemned, seeking to save their souls from a fate worse than death – eternal damnation!

      ‘Tell us Mary Dyer!’ Mary asked, though by now they knew the story well.

      The Quaker girl had left the early colony, protesting the banishment of another young woman dissenter. On her return she was imprisoned and saved only from the tree by her son. Instead of her life she was banished for ever from the Bay Colony.

      ‘Mary came back again,’ Ellen told