Free Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl by Kate McCafferty Page B

girl threw back the door to her shed and stepped out to fetch a bucket from the pump. Over a little fire before her place she boiled water for their breakfast gruel in a broken pot her man had mended. Sometimes she sang. ‘That Ardiss is a right hoor,’ grumbled Dora. ‘She takes to it like rats to corn.’ When the first gang passed on their way to the fields, the Scots girl joined them. The carpenter did not, if there was a job awaiting in the yard. But it was whispered that when he too went to the fields, they took their midday rest together in the grass, his head upon her lap while she stroked his hair. At night we heard them laughing.
    “So it was with surprise that folk began to mark, in spite of all the signs of love, that the Scots girl’s belly was flatter after six months than it had been before. Then the master came for the third sale of crops.
    “On the afternoon when the merchants lumbered off down the road, their wagons laden for the London ships, we slaves were sent to clean out the tobacco sheds of mildew, rats’ nests, snakes, the like. As we carried out the trash to burn, we saw Jenks and the master seated underneath the trade awning, deep in conversation.
    “After some time they called Ardiss to them; and Dora also, to question her. Next the Scots carpenter was summoned. The story was brought back: never in all those months had they lain together but as a sister with her brother. The carpenter said he would not force her. ‘Master Plackler, I would marry Ardiss when I am free,’ Dora mimicked, as if this were something cunning and posh to say. But Jenks had answered with a guffaw: ‘Yer willy will not function better when you’ve put a ring upon her finger.’
    “Dora said the master spoke with impatience. ‘You have wasted almost the entire time of parturition for one child,’ he cried in disgust. ‘We could have had two off this lass by the time she now bears one.’
    “We in the shed did the best we could to catch the tale unfolding in the yard. The Scotsman was sent down to their little shed. We watched him trudge, shamefast, up the track to the cabin he had left six months before. The black coat was underneath his arm. Bad sprites hung in the air like mist. You can take a green reed and make a ring of it. If you look through it, you can see what those who bring the ill luck look like. But it will blind you in the eye you see them with, and seldom is it worth that much to know. Yet to foretell what brought Ardiss and the Scot, and Paudi Iasc (he notes that she says iasc means “fish” in the Irish tongue) so much bad luck, they might have gladly paid an eye to know.” The Irishwoman jerks her head, as if she has been nodding off with her eyes open.
    “Suddenly Jenks moved toward the barn. We hustled inside and made busy. I can see them on the rafters, Paudi nOg and Paudi Iasc, standing with their legs balanced akimbo, dirty toes curled around the beams as they bent to haul the bales of fodder we were hoisting to them on the forks. That fodder was for the dry season, after which, by the grace of God, two sows would litter. These would be gorged before and after, and the bonhams soon weaned for sale.
    “Paudi nOg and Paudi Iasc were strapping men—twenty-one? twenty-four? at the time. They had been gaoled for poaching fowl—Paudi nOg because the hunger came on him as he walked the land, looking for a spailpin ’s place. Paudi Iasc went a-poaching, though, because he’d married his sweetheart, got her with child, and had been trying to keep her fed. But he was a fisherman. And the mackerel had not swum up the bay that year. He had no land to sow. No stock to breed. Yet all around his cottage ran rabbits, the streams were choked with salmon, the boherin shone speckled in the morning with the spoor of roe deer. And gobbling and pecking through his cabin yard waddled the sleek flock of His Lordship’s geese …”
    Before he hears Lucy turning from the cook shed into the corridor,