“The nearest church would be that grand-looking affair in Clonakilty. You’ll have passed it. Just as fancy as the ones those Anglicans build.”
“So you can’t think of an old priest around here—one who might have been around since the famine times?”
He shrugged. “I don’t go near the place myself. Already damned to hell, that's me, and not a thing any of them do-gooders can do about it. Off you go then. There's nothing more I can tell you. The Burkes are all long gone.”
He stumped back to his garden and I made my way back up the hill to those pine trees. I wanted to take a look at the graveyard for myself. I found Burkes buried there, but no Mary Ann, nobody from the time of the famine. If they’d added her body to a family grave, I had no way of knowing it. As I stood beside the old abbey ruins, listening to the sigh of the wind through those Scotch pines, I felt overwhelmed with the melancholy of the place. Great sorrow lingered here. I couldn’t wait to get away.
Fourteen
Ifound the Burke's old cottage, now just a pile of rubble overgrown with dying weeds. I stood staring down at it for a while, then I turned away and began the long trek back to Clonakilty and called on the priest at the grand-looking church. He was a young man, fresh faced and eager, but he could tell me nothing about older priests who might have been in the area at the time of the famine.
“I must have been the fourth or fifth priest to occupy this post since then,” he said.
His parish records only dated from the 1880s. “You’ll not find good records before then anywhere,” he said. “They didn’t care about recording the births or death of Catholics in Ireland. Took more trouble to note the birth of their cattle.”
“So there is nobody by the name of Mary Ann living around here these days?” I asked “She might have grown up and married.”
He considered this. “I can think of a couple of Mary Anns,” he said, “but they wouldn’t be the right age for the woman you are seeking. Have you tried the workhouse? That would have been the logical place to have taken in an abandoned child.”
“The workhouse,” I said. “In Clonakilty, you mean?” “Oh indeed, we’ve a small one still operating here, but there would also probably be one in Bandon and certainly one in Cork city,” he said. “Any one of them could have taken in the child, but I doubt most ofthem kept good records at a time like that. They must have been full to overflowing. And rampant with disease too. No, I think you’ll have to assume that it's likely a child left behind did not survive.”
I thanked him, and left in a cloud of gloom. Nobody seemed to believe that Mary Ann might still be alive. And if she didn’t survive there was not likely to be any record of her death. I went to the workhouse in Clonakilty and a sad, sorry place it was too: a grim brick building, with bars on the windows like a jail. Inside, it was dark and dank. Someone was coughing. And the news was equally depressing—there had been no proper records kept from that chaotic time. People arrived and died every day and were buried in mass graves.
I made a few more half-hearted inquiries around the town and then began my return journey. This time I could not take the train, which I could hear puffing merrily in the station. I had to follow the route the Burke family would have taken. There were a couple of older people who had seen the famine processions pass and pointed me in the right direction. By now it was past midday and I was hungry, tired, and dispirited. My legs, no longer used to walking five miles over rough terrain, were feeling the strain. I was on a hopeless quest, no way of finding if the little girl had lived or died. Most likely she was in one of those unmarked mass graves in a local cemetery, and Tommy Burke would never know what happened to her.
But I wasn’t about to give up yet. I hadn’t really expected to find Mary Ann on my first day of searching, had I? I was going to see it through to the end, one way or another. I bought a meat pie in a bakery and stared walking again, this time in the direction of Bandon, the nearest big town on the main highway. I managed another three miles before my legs refused to go on, so I was forced to spend the night at the Nag's Head Inn, part of a cluster of houses beside the road. And an uncomfortable night it was too—lumpy bed, wind whistling through the cracks around the window. I couldn’t wait to be up and out in the morning.
In Dublin's Fair City (Molly Murphy Mysteries, #6)
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