Free The Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor Page A

love would flower if watered with consideration and gentleness and I believe it did, at least for a time.
    There are so many kinds of love in the world. If we were more like sister and brother sometimes, that would have been more than sufficient for myself; for no man ever had a better friend and helper than you and it was all my happiness to care for you.
    But then a rat came into the wheatfield.
    The meaning seems to have gone out of it all lately. Even the face of our innocent child now only seems a mockery.
    I beg you pray mercy on my soul for all I have done and for the terrible thing I am about to do.
    Forgive me for failing you, when you deserved so much more.
    Perhaps after all you should have married that other creature of Satan who has brought me so low. Well now you are free.
    I am so cold and afraid.
    She will not suffer, Mary, I will do it quickly and be not long after her.
    Say a prayer for me sometimes, if you can bear to remember your loving husband.
    N
    patt, for the honour of our lord Jasus christ and his Blessed Mother hurry and take us out of this … [Your infant brother] longs and Sighs Both Night and morning untill he Sees his two little Neises and Nephews And … the poor child Says ‘I would not Be hungary if I was Near them.’
    Letter of Kilkenny woman to her son in America, pleading for help to emigrate

    1 Document written (in Irish) twenty-two months before commencement of voyage of the Star of the Sea . Found by New York Police Officer, in the cabin of the Merridiths’ maidservant, several days after the voyage’s end. The translation is by Mr John O’Daly, scholar of the Gaelic language and editor of Reliques of Irish Jacobite Poetry (1847) and The Poets and Poetry of Munster (1849). – GGD

CHAPTER VII
THE SUBJECT

    T HE FIRST OF A T RIPTYCH IN WHICH ARE DEPICTED CERTAIN IMPORTANT RECOLLECTIONS OF THE G IRLHOOD AND LATTER LIFE OF M ARY D UANE, MAIDSERVANT; AND IN PARTICULAR HER R EMEMBRANCES OF A PERSON TO WHOM SHE ONCE RETAINED A T ENDER ATTACHMENT . H ERE WE ENCOUNTER M ISS D UANE ON THE SEVENTH MORNING OF THE V OYAGE .

    24°52′ W ; 50°06′ N
— 7.55 A.M . —
    Spears, maybe. Muskets? Maybe. Grey as Dog’s Bay in the early morning. And the bullets must have been big to pierce his hide. And what did they use to hack him to pieces? A hatchet, maybe. A crosscut-saw. Trumpeting blaring bellying down. Trees all around as they went to work on his tusks. A scurf of blood flowing over the slick leaves. Black men, brown men with blood on their feet. Red men watching the black men cut.
    Mary Duane glanced out the porthole at the monotonous dawnscape of the heaving Atlantic. In six long days it hadn’t changed. She knew it wouldn’t for another three weeks. Never would she have dreamed, this fisherman’s daughter, that the sight of water could be so detestable: if you could even put the name of water on that colourless billowing desert.
    Grey the fish that skulked down there. Grey the dolphins; grey the sharks. How could anything live in its depths? Grey as a shroud. Grey as a deadman. Grey and crinkled like a fibrous, shrivelled skin; as the elephant’s foot she had often seen in the hallway at Kingscourt Manor. It was every bit as deathly and repulsive as that.
    ‘Would you wash your hands again, Mary. Before touching the children.’
    ‘Yes, Lady Merridith.’
    ‘Their skin is so sensitive, Jonathan’s especially.’
    ‘Lady.’
    ‘Make sure to change the sheets after breakfast, won’t you? The counterpanes and pillowcases also, of course. If Robert doesn’t get a comfortable sleep, we all know what happens.’
    ‘I don’t get your meaning, ma’am.’
    ‘His nightmares, of course. What else would I mean?’
    ‘Lady.’
    ‘And I hate to say it, Mary, but would you wash your armpits too. I notice you have a habit of putting your hands in there when you’re hot. It’s really most unhygienic.’
    Mary Duane wondered if she should tell her mistress that almost every night