Brendan Graham - The Element of Fire

And the girl – the one who said nothing, only taking you in with those big brown eyes. Where had she appeared from? Maybe she was a neighbour’s child, orphaned by famine. Nearly more orphanages than groggeries in Boston too, so fast were they springing up. She’d probably put the girl into one of those – run by the Sisters. He ‘gee’d’ the horse, threading it gingerly after them, glad that he’d painted the sign. It would be a surprise for her. She was standing in front of it, her finger outstretched, reading aloud the strange-sounding words to the children. She turned, hearing the clip-clop of the horse.

‘Mr Lavelle’s been busy painting, I can see,’ she said to them. But it was meant for him, he knew. ‘“The New England Wine Company”,’ she read out the larger letters again, then the smaller ones underneath, ‘“Importers of fine wines, ports and liqueurs”. That’s us!’ she said to them with a little laugh. Even Patrick seemed impressed, looking at her, then at the sign over the warehouse, then back at Lavelle, trying to piece it all together.

‘You’re a merchant, Mother!’ Mary said, flushed with pride in her, yet seeming not in the least bit surprised.

‘I … I suppose I am,’ Ellen replied, never having thought of herself in that way.

They went inside, Louisa remaining close by her, Mary and Patrick going from rack to rack examining the cradled bottles and the labels with the unusual writing wrapped round them.

‘Fron-teen-nyac, pair ay fees’ – Frontignac, Père et Fils – she tried to explain, ‘the people we get the wine from in Canada. Frontignac, Father and Son,’ she went on, watching them watch her as if she was some stranger. And in truth she was. Their memories of her were as far removed from the woman now before them, explaining French wines, as Massachusetts was from the Maamtrasna valley. An ocean in the heart’s geography. It would take time.

‘Bore-dough,’ she pointed to a ruby rich red, ‘the place the wine comes from in France.’

It was a strange thing, Patrick thought, for her to know about, her and the ‘fancy man’ that kept watching him and kept smiling at his mother.

Ellen was well pleased at what she saw. Lavelle had kept the warehouse solidly stocked against the coming season and the winter closing of the St Lawrence river. Furthermore, he had secured her new accommodation.

‘In Washington Street between Milk and Water Streets, near the Old Corner Bookstore,’ he told her. ‘I know you like to be at the centre of things, and it’s bigger, more suitable now with the children.’ She had surrendered her old lodgings, not knowing how long she would be away. Her belongings Lavelle had stored in the warehouse, and more recently moved to the new address, paying the rent to secure it against her return. He himself continued to live where he previously had, in the North End, though it was ‘now being over-run with the poorest of our own’.

The Long Wharf led them into State Street, New England’s financial heart, its temples of commerce close to the city’s importing and exporting lifeline – the wharves. Lavelle took them left at the Old State House, down along Washington Street, its patchwork of buildings, filled with apothecaries, engravers, instrument-makers and ‘Newspaper Row’. Signs and hoardings jutted everywhere, higgledy-piggledy, while canvas awnings over the footwalks provided shelter from the rain, shade from the sun, for those with dollars to spend.

Four flights of stairs they climbed of the high-shouldered building, which itself stretched upwards above the world of commerce below. The effort was repaid in full when arriving in their rooms she saw, across from them on the corner of Milk Street, the nestled campaniles of the Old South Meeting House; how they ascended like a pinnacled prayer to the steepled sky.

She knew she would love it here ‘on top of the world’, as she said to Lavelle. They had three rooms. One large, with two windows, for living in, and above that, two smaller rooms, each lighted by dormers, for sleeping. The larger one for herself and the girls, the smaller for Patrick. She had considered giving the three children the larger one, her taking the lesser room. But Patrick was of an age now.

It was close to everywhere. The Wharf and their warehouse, the Common, shops, churches, schools. The Old Corner Bookstore – which she had commenced frequenting before she left – now only a hen’s footstep away. Beneath their roost, on the next floor down, were commercial offices. Below that again, suppliers of mathematical instruments, while a sewing shop for ladies’ garments and a dye house occupied the street level of the premises.

She was grateful to Lavelle. He had gone to some trouble to find this place, knowing how much she preferred the rattle and hum of city life above the quiet of some numbing suburb. The frantic commercial life of ‘Hub City’, as Bostonians liked to call it, was rapidly devouring all available space here at its centre. She wondered how long it would be before trade and commerce would drive further out the dwindling number of inhabitants, like themselves. Where they now stood would soon enough fall into use as an instrument-maker’s den, or a sewing sweatshop. But while ever they could remain here, she knew she would be happy.

When she had thanked him again, Lavelle left and she began to settle them into their new home, high above the world of clarion calls and the street noise of Boston, far from the hushed valleys they had known.

Jacob Peabody made an exaggerated fuss of her when, the following week, she came to visit him at his premises on South Market Street across from Faneuil Hall. On top of the Hall’s domed cupola, its weathervane – a copper grasshopper – spun from side to side, busily welcoming her back.

Now Peabody, white-domed and wrinkle-faced, grass-hopped from behind his counter to welcome her, rubbing his hands on the white apron he kept on a peg, but which she had never seen him wear. ‘Ellen! Ellen Rua!’ he exclaimed, both arms outstretched, a bleak shaft of October sun diagonally lighting one eye and a flop of his white hair, vesting him with a kind of manic enthusiasm. He clasped her to him. He not being quite the match of her in height, her head ended up over the shoulder of his well-seasoned cardigan. In its wool the smell of salted hams, spices from the East, tobacco from the Deep South, all indiscriminately buried there.

‘Jacob, I’m going to reek of pork and spices just like you,’ she laughed. ‘Let go of me! Anyway, I thought it forbidden by your beliefs to sell certain things,’ she added, unable to resist poking fun at him. He laughed with her, held her back from him, the snow-white eyebrows arched, the canny eyes taking her in.

‘Ah, Ellen, you are as beautiful as ever. Weary from your travels, I can tell …?’ He paused. ‘And beyond that a certain sorrow …’ He had never changed, could tell everything and then never hesitated in its saying. ‘But underneath,’ he went on, ‘your spirit has not changed. Look at you, the first minute you are here flinging the beliefs of an old man in his face. It’s good to have you back – back home in Boston,’ he beamed. And he clasped her to him again in his pork and spice way.

It felt good to her to be back. And Boston was home. The sounds, the smells, the bustle of Quincy Market, the air spiced with possibility instead of the pall of oppression which hung over Ireland. And good old reliable but mischievous Jacob. He had been a tower of strength before she had left on her journey to Ireland.

He made her tea, Indian, from the Assam Valley, closed his door against the world and bade her sit. ‘I want to hear every word, Ellen,’ he emphasized. ‘I’ve missed the music of your voice – the Boston drawl has little music to it – as flat and as cold as the Quincy marble that built the place!’