Open Secrets - Chapter 1

Open Secrets Chapter 2

Outside the small peat cottage built into the Wicklow  mountain side sat a father and his two sons.  All were gaunt with hunger and shivered in the keen wind that was blowing in off the sea.

“Can you get us on the boat then?”  Small Richard looked up hopefully to his father, his face pitiful, begrimed with the dirt of a lifetime (more or less), his eyes bloodshot and strained with hunger, the sides of his mouth cracked and disfigured by  sores.

“I think so, but whisht now, keep quiet or we’ll be having visitors we could well do without.”

Richard dropped his head and said no more, but couldn’t suppress a little skip as he made his way into the peat bothy.

John Owens stood looking around at the familiar landscape, the boreen, the stream running down to the sea, the cabin, the mountainside.  The mountainside and fields running down to the sea were a lush, verdant green.

“The Emerald Isle, bejasus,” John said to himself, shaking his head in disbelief.  What a joke that was.  The grass was as green as emeralds and as pitiless and useless to a starving family.  Starving people can’t eat grass nor emeralds however wonderful they look.

“No more, “ John muttered, looking away from all that mocking green mountainside and out to sea, where the westerly wind was making the surface of the water leap and dance at its bidding. “No more. We’ll be away by tomorrow night, I swear we will.”  He spat into the hedge and strode off towards the small settlement of a village they all called home.

He was a tall man, and should have been burly. Instead, the hunger and deprivation of the recent seasons of famine had made him raw boned.  His face was drawn and grey. He looked much older than his twenty nine years and there was an angry tension evident in both his face and body, in the intensity of his burning blue eyes and his ramrod straight carriage.  Neighbours and other village families might have been defeated by the Great Hunger, but not John Owens, “Nor not my family either,” he muttered half aloud, unaware that he was speaking his thoughts and full of furious passion.

The little path that led from John Owens’ bothy to the village started off pleasant and rural, but the closer it got to other houses, the more traces of  stricken humanity impinged upon it.  One or two skinny dogs sniffed at the puddles in the rutted track.  John could see their ribs sticking out through their dull, dusty coats but they seemed in better condition than most of the villagers.  They still had the energy to hunt for rabbits and squirrels in the woods, thought John bitterly.

The smell of rot and poverty was heavy in the air.  The door of Nolan’s cottage hung off its hinges, no smoke came from the chimney, no candle was lit at the window.  A chicken pecked disconsolately at a few dandelion leaves which had struggled up through the mud. Goodness knows where it had come from. There had been no livestock in the village for many a week, all the animals had been killed and eaten when the potato crop began to fail.

Peck, peck, peck went the chicken.  It was quite plump.  It must have fallen off the back of one of the carter’s loads, John thought to himself.

Without more ado, he moved swiftly across the path and scooped the chicken up under his coat, twisting its neck as he caught it.  The limp warm bundle would make a wonderful supper for their last days in Ireland.  There was wild garlic and a few wild leeks down by the stream.  Anne could stew it. The wind, the rain and the peat smoke would make sure that no one would smell their supper cooking and come asking awkward questions, or worse, hoping for a share of their meal.

But could he go and see the priest with a stolen chicken tucked away dead under his coat? John had thought to go and see Father Thomas for confession before leaving, but perhaps he had better not. Up by the church, he could see a little straggle of mourners. That decided him.  He had had enough of death and funerals and mourning. He was going to smuggle his family onto Padraig’s boat tomorrow night and get them away from the misery, death and disease. No coffin ship swindle for him and his family, no more bullying by the absentee landlord of their cottage, no enforcement of an authority he didn’t recognise or understand.  He had made his own arrangements and for better or worse, he and his family would be gone from Ireland forever.  He didn’t know where they’d end up (not at the bottom of the sea, he thought, mentally crossing himself  - he daren’t raise his arm to do it properly or the chicken would fall to the ground.)