Brendan Graham - The Brightest Day, The Darkest Night

And clothes? Clothes were the outer manifestation of the inner flaw – something with which to cover it up. Down all the centuries since paradise lost. Now, her paradise regained, she had no earthly need of them.

‘I am clothed …’ she sang in her song, ‘… the sun, the moon and the stars – finer raiment than ever fell from the hands of man.’

Then she prayed.

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I give you my heart and my soul;

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, assist me in my last agony;

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, may I breathe forth my soul in peace with you. Amen.’

She followed with the Our Father – in the old tongue Ár n-Athair atá ar Neamh . Then finally, she raised to heaven the long-remembered prayers of childhood.

Afterwards she sang again. The songs she had sung to her own children – nonsensical, infant-dandling songs: aislingi , the beautiful sung vision-poems; and the suantraí , the ‘sleep-songs’ with which she once lullabyed them. Sang to the sun and the teetering tenements of Half Moon Place.

Convent of St Mary Magdalen, Boston, 1861

‘Half Moon Place …’ Sister Lazarus warned, ‘… is reeking with perils.’ The two younger nuns in her presence looked at each other. Ready for whatever perils the outside world might bring. It was not their first such outing into one of Boston’s less fortunate neighbourhoods. Still, Sister Lazarus considered it her bounden duty, as on every previous occasion, to remind them of the ‘reeking perils’ awaiting them.

‘Now, Sister Mary and Sister Veronica …’ the older woman continued, ‘… you must remain together at all times. Inseparable. The fallen … those women whom you will find there … if they are truly repentant … wanting of God’s grace … wanting to leave …’ She paused. ‘… wanting to leave behind their … previous lives … then you must bring them here to be in His keeping.’

‘Here,’ was the Convent of St Mary Magdalen, patron saint of the fallen of their gender. ‘Here’ the Sisters would care for those women, the leftovers of Boston life. Care for their temporal needs but primarily their spiritual ones.

Sister Lazarus – ‘Rise-from-the-Dead’ as the two younger nuns referred to her – reminded them again that their sacred mission in life was to ‘reclaim the thoughtless and melt the hardened’.

The older nun took in her two charges, still in their early twenties. Sister Mary, tall, serene as the Mother of God for whom she had been named. Blessed with uncommon natural beauty. Most of it now hidden, along with her gold-red tresses, under the winged, white headdress of the Magdalens. And not a semblance of pride in her beauty, Sister Lazarus thought. Oh, what novenas Sister Lazarus would have offered to have been blessed with Sister Mary’s eyes – those sparkling, jade-coloured eyes, ever modestly cast downwards – instead of the slate-coloured ones the Lord had seen fit to bless her with. The older nun corrected her indecorousness of thought. Envy was a terrible sin. She turned her attention to the other young nun before her.

Sister Veronica’s eyes were entirely a different matter.

Sister Veronica did not at all keep her attractive, hazel-brown eyes averted from the world, or anybody in it – including Sister Lazarus. Nor was Sister Veronica at all as demure in her general carriage as Sister Lazarus would have liked. Instead, carried herself with a disconcerting sweep of her long white Magdalen habit. Which always to Sister Lazarus, seemed to be trying to catch up with the younger nun. Unsuccessfully at that!

‘Impetuosity, Sister Veronica,’ the older nun had frequently admonished, ‘will be your undoing. You must guard against it!’

She saw them out the door, a smile momentarily relieving her face. If the hardened were indeed to be melted, these two were, for all such ‘meltings’, abundantly graced. Though Sister Lazarus would never tell them so. Praise, even if deserved, should always be generously reserved.

Praise could lead to pride.

‘There are so many fallen from God’s grace, Louisa,’ Sister Mary said when once out of earshot of the convent. She used the other nun’s former name, the one she had known her adopted sister by for more than a dozen years. Since first they had come out of Ireland.

‘God takes care of His own,’ Louisa replied.

‘And Mother?’ Mary asked, the question always on her mind.

Louisa took her sister’s arm.

‘Yes … and Mother too,’ Louisa answered. ‘We would surely have heard. Somebody would have brought news if something had happened’.

But something had happened.

Life had been good once. Their mother had made their way well in America, educating both herself and them. She had re-married – Lavelle – built up a small if successful business with him. Then it had seemed to all go wrong, the business failing. When a move from their home at 29 Pleasant Street to more straitened accommodation had been imminent, Mary and Louisa had both secretly decided to unburden the family of themselves. To follow the nudging, niggling voice they had been hearing.

‘It almost broke poor Mother’s heart,’ Mary said.

‘Then, do you remember, Louisa, once in the convent, everything silent – just like you?’

Louisa nodded, remembering. As a child she had been cast to the roads of a famine-ridden Ireland, her parents desperate in the hope she would fall on common charity and survive the black years of the blight. Six months later Louisa had returned to find them, huddled together; their bodies half eaten by dogs, likewise famished. She had gone silent then. All sound, it seemed, trapped beneath the bones that formed her chest. Nor did she retain a memory of any name they had called her by – not even their own names.

A year later Ellen had found her, taken her in. Though some early semblance of speech had returned in the intervening year, her silence had helped Louisa survive. Drawn forth whatever crumbs of charity a famished people could grant. So she had remained silent. Kept her secret. Afraid, lest once revealed, all kindness be cut off and she condemned, like the rest to claw at each other for survival. She had remained ‘the silent girl’ until they reached America and Ellen had christened her. After the place in which they had found her – Louisburgh, County Mayo – and the place to which they were then bound for, Boston, with its other Louisburgh … Square.

Gradually the trapped place beneath Louisa’s breast had freed itself. Then, in the safe sanctum of the cathedral at Franklin Street she had whispered out halting prayers of thanksgiving.

At the edge of Boston Common, they stood back to let a group of blue-clad militia double-quick by them. The young men all a-gawk at the wide-winged headdresses of the two nuns.

‘Angels from Heaven!’ a saucy Irish voice shouted.

‘Devils from Hell!’ another one piped.

Then they were gone, shuffling in their out-of-time fashion to be mustered for some battlefield in Virginia.

‘I pray God that this war between the States will be quickly done with,’ Mary said quietly.

‘Do you remember anything, Mary – anything at all?’ Louisa asked, returning to the topic that, like her sister, always occupied her mind.

‘Nothing … only, like you, that Mother had once called to the convent, leaving no message … and then those messages left by Lavelle and dear brother Patrick that they had not found her. I cannot imagine what … unless some fatal misfortune has … and I cannot bear to think that.’

Louisa’s mind went back over the times she and her adoptive mother had been alone. That time in the cathedral at Holy Cross when Ellen had tried to get her to speak. How troubled her mother had seemed. And the book, the one which Ellen had left on the piano. Louisa had opened it. Love Elegies … the sinful poetry of a stained English cleric – John Donne. It had shocked Louisa that her mother could read such things – and well-read the book had been.